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Where are we going as a bowls club?

Gathering the information to get a clear idea of how your club us doing now is the first step in this process and we looked at that yesterday.

Now that you are armed with that snapshot, how do you develop a vision for the future that everyone can contribute to and be happy with?

Again it comes down to taking the club apart on paper and defining how each piece will look when the new vision is realised. So for example you might want to focus on the game itself and decide that there needs to be a greater effort to move towards a performance bowling green; you might want to increase membership or widen your club’s customer base to boost the club’s finances and long term success prospects.

Whatever your long term goals and vision for the club, the final part of the puzzle is to create a plan to help you achieve your goals and I look at that in more detail here.

Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround
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
Price: £9.97

What are the long term benefits of your club becoming a focal point for the local community?

Quite simply, the benefits are wide and far reaching. Just being the focus of community activities will bring your club an extraordinary amount of exposure from within and out-with your local area which all leads to free advertising for the facilities, products and services you sell to not just bowling members but a wide range of other people and groups.

Generous gestures such as offering free use of your clubhouse for a multitude of uses in the winter months bring financial and publicity benefits.

Imagine if every other week your club appeared in or was mentioned in an article in the local paper detailing a local event or group’s activities and every time it happens it ends with “and thank you to the bowling club for providing their facilities and support to our event”.

The FREE bowling club success Manifesto is still available here.

Bowling Club Membership retention and growth
Bowling Club Membership retention and growth
How do you increase club membership numbers in a time of economic turmoil? How do you retain members when there is a natural decline in bowling participation? This eBook sets out a plan for transforming any bowls club into the central hub of its community. FREE download for Academy Members more details
Price: £9.97

What can your club do for free for the local community?

This week I will again be looking at some club turnaround focussed issues.

I’m going to kick off with a look at what your club can do for the local community without charging!

The readers and members of this site represent the tip of a large pyramid of bowlers. By this I mean that if you are reading this you are among a minority of bowlers and parties interested in the health of the game of bowls that actively engages with others in the online environment and also that you are among the small number of people within the game that are actively looking for solutions to the difficulties the game is experiencing.

As an internet and world wide web user, you can’t have failed to notice the impact the technology has had on Read more

Understanding your target audience

Today I would like to introduce the concept of “a target audience”

I deal with this comprehensively in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and it takes a view that the successful bowling clubs of the future will look quite a bit different to the ones we are familiar with today.

The essence of this is that not all of your club’s revenue will come from bowlers and that you will need to set your sights on a much wider range of “customers” within your local community if your club is to thrive.

This is why I have repeatedly used the terms Member, Customer and User; to try to differentiate between the traditional bowling club member and the future mix of customers a club (the word “customer” of course emphasising the need for clubs to think like businesses) will require to focus on if it is to attract and sustain sufficient foot-fall to thrive in the future.

Of course, people won’t be conveniently Read more

Bowling Club Turnaround- the 5 Actions you MUST Take now! FREE REPORT

Bowls TurnaroundFirst it was a double dip and now it seems that the UK is on for a Triple Dip recession! With all this doom and gloom around, its no wonder that many bowling clubs are like rabbits caught in the headlights.

It seems like there is nothing we can do to ensure the survival  of our bowling clubs never mind actually increasing revenue and building a successful, thriving club for the future.

Well, its easy to get caught up in the misery of it all, especially when you look out of the window and see grey skies and rain. Then the news comes on and its all flood warnings and danger triangles! Long summer evenings on the green seem like a universe away!

However, this is exactly the time when you have time on your hands to get your bowling club set up for a bright future.

Ignore the news and just take these 5 easy steps to turning your club around for the long term. I’ve written a new report detailing the 5 most important steps you Must take now to make sure your club is one of the lucky ones. There’s actually no luck involved, its just a matter of employing the right actions at the right time to set your club up for future success that many dismiss as impossible.

Download your FREE report NOW!

Overcoming Resistance in Bowls Club Turnaround

“Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow”

This is the common mantra of the serial procrastinator.

In bowling club turnaround terms, putting off taking action until tomorrow could be critical or even terminal for your club.

So why do so many clubs avoid taking action on such obvious problems as:

  1. falling membership numbers
  2. falling income levels
  3. increasing costs
  4. poorly performing greens
  5. crumbling buildings

The list goes on and on.

Well, the easy answer is “we don’t have enough money to improve the facilities”

But this is a self fulfilling prophecy in many respects as the lack of action on the smallest details leads to an increasing feeling of helplessness and the club slips into a downward spiral of failure.

What can be done?

The simple answer is Anything!

Doing nothing will guarantee failure.

Even if you get it wrong, you will have made a mistake you can learn from.

So in a typical club what needs to be done?

  1. Reduce Costs
  2. Maximise Income
  3. Create a business Strategy that includes a strategies for Marketing your speciality to potential users/members; users/new member sources, Delivering an outstanding experience to all of your members/users and to guarantee a consistent service delivery. To do this you will need to develop strategies for Staff and volunteer management; Financial Management and Innovation -to help you stay ahead you need to continually develop new ideas to improve what you offer (products and services) and how you deliver them to customers (processes)
  4. Eradicate Wasteful expenditure
  5. Create a system for Continuous Improvement

Finally for today your club must have a group that is dedicated to pushing this plan through, regardless of the level of resistance from internal and external sources.

This group must learn to distinguish the key differences between Projects and Actions and make sure that each project is broken down into key actions that can be taken every day to move the club’s turnaround process along on a steady path.

Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround
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
Price: £9.97

 

 

Bowls Club Membership – retention and growth released!

Membership CoverJohn’s new eBook Bowling Club Membership – retention and growth is now available for purchase here.

In this ground-breaking ebook John focusses solely on membership issues, detailing a comprehensive plan for growing your club’s membership and retaining a healthy membership level for the long term.

In this eBook John looks more closely at the subject that he first raised in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and this book can be regarded as a partner volume to the previous eBook, as it digs deeper into the vital area of getting people through the door of your club and keeping them coming back for more, over the long term.

Right now, this is the definitive guide on re-building your club’s membership base and building a successful club for the future.

Inside your copy of Bowling Club Membership – retention and growth, you’ll discover:

  1. How to build member loyalty and how to install systems to perpetuate this.
  2. How to re-think the role your club plays in the local community and a new way to think about what constitutes a “member”.
  3. A remarkable chapter detailing a powerful method of finding new members for your club that uses tools you have at your fingertips  (and it isn’t the internet or anything computerised!)
  4. An amazingly simple but powerful formula that will ensure your club stands head and shoulders above all of your competition when it comes to excellent service.
  5.  How to build an automatic club improvement system.

So as you can see, Bowling Club Membership – retention and growth, is set to be a very important resource for Bowling Clubs everywhere, but what we’ve told you so far really is just scratching the surface. The book is also packed with actual tools you can use to achieve the remarkable changes previously outlined.

 

Using FREE to attract new members

In your exploration of methods to attract new members to your club it can be tempting to avoid free offers and deals. After all the common assumption is that if people want to come along they will just come along anyway. However, it’s entirely possible that people just don’t know enough about your club yet and removing the barriers to trying it out can make a big impact on your ability to attract new members.

A while back we discussed the impact that the rise of the internet has had on the cost of everything. In that article I finished up with a look at why things have become cheap or even free, and we discovered how very clever people are using this perception of free to promote their businesses, products and services, in the process exposing their work to a vast audience for virtually no cost.

Today I want to expand on that by asking 3 simple questions about your bowling club:

  1. How many new people (and their circle of friends, family, workmates, personal and business networks) would be made positively aware of, and have a positive opinion of your club if you offered free hire of your clubhouse for kids’ birthday parties, weddings, funerals, music nights, exhibitions, group meetings, coffee mornings, weight watchers, meditation classes, gardening groups etc etc?
  2. How popular and well thought of (and recommended to others) would your club become if it was the central focus for the village or town’s Christmas and new year celebrations, a local arts festival, a beer festival, Christmas, Spring and Autumn markets, scout meetings or even a temporary soup kitchen for the homeless in the coldest months of the year?
  3. How respected would your club become if it became a centre of excellence for everything to do with bowling?: creating and managing performance bowling greens; coaching and developing excellence in junior, county and national bowling sides; training and developing world class umpires; promoting and exhibiting cutting edge bowling club management techniques and training.

Free is the new “paid for” when it comes to promoting your club or business…but instead of giving stuff away for free you are actually gaining a huge amount of value that no amount of money could buy, so it isn’t free at all!

In that earlier article I used the example of a software seller in Australia. In the past to sell enough software to make a living she would have needed to spend a lot of money on fancy packaging, distribution, retailer profits, marketing and advertising; none of which is needed any more as the word about their excellent software spreads around the world, virally for virtually nothing as they give it away for free. If you like it and want to continue using a fully featured version then you pay for that.

This is a very honest and quality focussed way to do business. Only by filling the exact needs of the customer and responding to customer requirements will they be able to guarantee keeping that customer for the long term.

This is actually not very difficult to do if you just assume everyone you encounter is a valuable customer, either directly or indirectly; maybe now or sometime in the future. Every positive interaction that occurs between your club and anyone else is a stored up positive.

Your club can employ exactly the same techniques by thinking differently about FREE as a means of introducing people to your club.

Fulfilling your audience’s expectations.

The process of bowling club turnaround is divided into 7 key steps, one of which is to identify your club’s Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA), as explained and illustrated in detail in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.

Once you have a clearly defined SCA it is this that informs all of your publicity and marketing to the user groups and individuals you hope to attract as the loyal members and customers of the future.

This Marketing activity, which should be perpetual and which needn’t cost the club much in the way of hard cash, can be thought of as “promises” being made to prospective club users.

As an aside, if you are throwing real money at advertising, promotion and publicity…please stop unless you can produce documented evidence that proves that it pays for itself in new revenue every time. Please see Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround for help with this.

So, back to promises…

If you consider your marketing as promises made, then you’d better make sure you can live up to these, because nothing disappoints more than an experience that under-delivers on your expectations.

Being good at marketing is one thing, but being good at delivering, at shipping, at getting things done well and on time every time is where you can excel at fulfilling the expectations of your newly identified audience.

This comes down to your Business Strategy and although that sounds boring and maybe even unnecessary for a bowling club you can only skip this if you are already doing very well and don’t actually need help in turning your club around, or getting more members through the door or making more revenue per visitor, in which case you probably won’t have read down this far anyway!

Business strategy at first glance looks like one of those crazy, mixed up subjects that is never ending and impossible to get your head around completely…but it comes down to just one Read more

Club Turnaround Success Story

I recently received this inspiring message from one of our Bowls Mastermind Network Members that I know will be of great interest to many of you:

Dear John

I am chairman of a Bowling Club that has risen from the ashes and I thought your other readers might like to hear how we did it!

 Four years ago we reached the dreaded October with no money (not a penny) and 30 members.

The club opened every Friday evening for a ‘social evening’……but this was frequented by half a dozen regulars for a drink and a chat ie. not very useful!

I took over as Chairman, because nobody else would, since then I have had carte blanche over club affairs.

Next to our club is the local Leisure Centre with two indoor rinks.

We started evening roll ups indoors followed by quizzes/ bingo in our club during the winter.

In the summer we have roll ups outdoors every Friday tied to a competition with the best 8 scores counting followed by the inevitable quizzes and other entertainments.

This format has lifted our turnover to some £15,000 over the last two years.

As an aside we had all our machinery stolen in that dreaded October 4 years ago due to a very insecure and neglected Machine Building.

With the insurance claim and our new found turnover we have spent some £25,000 over the last 3 years on everything the club needs.

Without warning the indoor rinks have been closed this year which threatens attendance during our winter period.

Our answer to this is to supplement our winter entertainment with professional acts every 3 weeks or so. (Single singers/comedians/magicians etc at an average cost of £150).

The extra cost of this will be offset with an entry fee of £2 or £3 per member….we expect between 40 and 50 members each Friday. We can only accommodate this number comfortably.

Currently the membership is well over 70 and still rising.

We have a much higher local profile and make use of all the local organisations to our own ends.

Finally, honest!, due to all the above our success on the green has seen 2 unprecedented years.

I feel as though I have taken your advice without knowing it which is a little spooky!!

Good Luck with the website, I will certainly stick around for the foreseeable future.

Cheers

 Name withheld by request

If anyone else has a story to share please get in touch.

Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround
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
Price: £9.97