Starting off your club’s recovery process with too ambitious a plan can backfire on you early.
Making big plans is also a sure way to waste a lot of time; because the plan will just never be ready to roll out to the members, public, prospective customers etc.
The pursuit of perfection in this case would be a major hurdle to progress.
At its simplest the planning process can be a short meeting to decide what the 3 biggest issues facing the club look like, followed by a session on deciding the following:
What Actions do we need to take?
When will we have them completed by?
Who will be responsible for each Action?
When those 3 issues are dealt with, then you simply repeat the process.
For a step by step process you can follow to turn your club around go here.
Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround
In this ebook we take you through a groundbreaking, step by step blueprint to save your struggling bowling club and reveal the 7 key steps that you can start taking immediately to start making a serious go of your club. more details
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things” Niccolo Machiavelli.
Well, the last days of the season are upon us again and it’s a good time to take stock and get a feeling for where the club is now.
Many of you are in the thick of it with Club Survival and Turnaround projects on-going and this will be a worrying time for you as the obvious income diminishes now that the green is closing for winter and the members are heading off to their indoor clubs or other winter activities.
Trying to turn a club around isn’t easy, but it can be made a whole lot easier if you understand what is going on behind the scenes.
I know it can seem a bit like herding cats at times trying to get support and consensus, but there are distinct and identifiable components to the process of organisational change and if you know what they are and how they work together, life becomes a whole lot easier.
The implementation of change in well established organisations and clubs, even “at risk” clubs is a seemingly impossible task. Well meaning members might start a project only to be shot down in flames at every step along the way. Who can blame someone for giving up when faced with this kind of inactivity?
However, if you arm yourself with a bit of insider knowledge about the change process, it’s amazing what can be achieved. Simply by understanding a little more about what’s going on beneath the surface you can adapt your project to suit the requirements of your own situation.
There are 3 main factors at play in my experience and I have Read more
I had an interesting conversation with a bowling club official last night that focussed mainly, not on the green for a change, but the club turnaround process that she hopes to take her club through starting soon. Yesterdays post of course, emphasised the urgency of getting started on any project of this nature in the middle of the bowling season; so it was quite fortuitous that this was fresh in my mind, because she asked me a direct question which went some thing like this:
“John. If you were to lead the turnaround of my club, what would you do first and then how would the project pan out after that?”
She was looking for a step by step plan of course that she could apply to her situation.
My answer was emphatic, clear…and mercenary:
Step 1: buy my eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround; its under a tenner if you are a member of the Bowls Club Mastermind Network and it spells out in 7 easy steps what to do and exactly how to do it.
I was then slightly embarrassed when she said she already had the eBook and that she had read it cover to cover, several times and had made copious notes and was absolutely 100% convinced that it contained the answer to her club’s problems.
The trouble is that she is still having trouble getting what she called “buy in” from the rest of the committee of the club.
“They just can’t accept that decades of slippage, accompanied by the most unpredictable recession in a century, the smoking ban, the cost of living, the general reduction in interest in bowling etc etc could possibly be turned around, let alone by some eBook or other!”
BINGO! I said, that’s it! They are absolutely correct; it can’t be!
Confused looks ensued!
You see my eBook is a series of thoughts, of ideas, of recommendations of which I am convinced, but an eBook alone cannot possibly help your club to get out of its current mess and secure a bright future.
So Step 3 is to implement what you have read in the eBook and that means ACTION!
Step 2 by the way, in case you are wondering, is NOT to tell anyone that you have a new eBook by some geezer on the internet that is going to work miracles for the club!
And that is because it is the enthusiasm of a leader like you; a leader who steps up in a time of crisis, a leader armed with the correct plan and convinced that success is only a bit of blood, sweat and tears away that turns clubs around.
Those of you who are working through my Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround eBook will know that I am a stickler for working to a plan and within that “ALWAYS” working on the top 3 issues that will move us closer to our goals.
Some readers have had a bit of difficulty getting traction with their turnaround plans through one problem or another; almost exclusively linked to apathy or inertia within the club or committee, a reluctance to get moving on big change.
For those of you in this category, who feel like they are trying to push water uphill, here is a little system you can use to organise your thoughts and maybe encourage those around you to engage with the plan a little more readily. Its really just about asking 4 simple questions:
What went well last year?
You can easily apply this question to your club situation and come up with
Last year John Woodcock, MP for Barrow-in-Furness has raised a Bill in Parliament to try to prevent bowling greens from being too easily sold off to developers.
The current planning laws say that amenity areas like bowling greens should not be zoned for building development if they are being used by a significantly sized group of people.
However, John Woodcock’s Bill aims to provide the facility to tighten these laws to make sure that all reasonable steps are taken to preserve the green; only allowing sale to developers as a last resort. This would include provision to offer greens to user groups first at market rates.
In a radio discussion about the bill there was also an interview with Read more
