Home » Club Turnaround » Page 2

Tag: Club Turnaround

Club Turnaround Basics No.1-Wife Swapping

As leader or representative of your club this weekend why not make it your duty to track down and speak to the leader of another society or club in your town/village/vicinity; say the president of the Ramblers Club for example and follow this 5 step plan:

  1. Invite the group/club to hold their next meeting at your clubhouse.
  2. Present the President/Leader with a “Try Bowls Free” voucher (home made or even virtual) for every member.
  3. Ask if they will reciprocate with a “Try Rambling Free” voucher for your members.
  4. Ask if they would like to take advantage of the great atmosphere and hospitality at your club for their next event/end of walk refreshment as your special guests.
  5. Ask if they would like to do a reciprocal wife/husband swap: don’t worry, there’s no car keys involved; I just mean next time they are on a Ramble, why don’t all of the Ladies from your club go on the ramble with their ladies whilst your men play bowls with theirs? Next time ladies bowl while men ramble?

At your next club meeting; report the outcome of this meeting and suggest that someone else does the same with another local group asap.

This is the kind of very simple strategy that can really start to make a big difference to your club and community.

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

Teamwork

This week we have been looking at growing club membership and retaining current members.

One of the most important requirements for a project of this nature to be successful is a cohesive team where every member is aware of the goals and is committed to achieving success.

To work effectively and for one common goal within the club it is very important for all involved to share the same vision. This vision should be clearly defined so that all involved understand the direction in which the club is heading.

The key to achieving this level of commitment is Read more

Delivering exceptional service

Yesterday we looked at how your club might be organised in order to fulfil the expectations of its target audience and we boiled that down to a very distinct goal that any club would do well to work towards:

Deliver a little bit more than you promised!

We then went on to look at how this might be achieved consistently. We discussed how the seemingly endless task of business strategy development could be boiled down to its essence, making it a lot more tangible and do-able in the process.

Business strategy for me is about three things; three mini strategies if you like and these are people, finance and innovation.

Today, I wanted to briefly fill out these 3 bullet points to give you a clearer picture of how you can use them to your advantage and guarantee that your club members, user groups, customers or what have you, will always Read more