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Tradition and Dissatisfaction.

“Traditional” Mowing Schedules are damaging a lot of clubs

Last week’s post on green-speed has raised a few questions, a lot of them along the lines of

“How can we afford to cut the green 7 days a week?”

In the introduction to my book Performance Bowling Greens I speak about the danger of traditions.

Traditions are funny things, because they don’t actually seem to need to be very old, or for that matter very sensible for them to take hold; they only need a bit of support from a few people and Bingo! They are “new” traditions.

One of the quirkiest? Cutting the green on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, usually early in the morning. Why has this become a tradition at many clubs?

Well it probably boils down to cost mainly and perhaps convenience and possibly a little bit of misunderstanding of the growth pattern of greens.

Following this cutting plan those playing on Monday evening, Tuesday, Wednesday evening, Thursday, Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday are not seeing or playing the green at anything near its best!

That leaves a lot of potentially dissatisfied customers!

So in answer to the question at the beginning, another question:

How can you afford not to?

However, in Bowling Club Turnaround terms remember dissatisfaction can actually be a good thing as it gives you a huge opportunity to move things to a better state and make an overall positive gain from an otherwise negative situation.

 

 

 

Bowls Club Survival and Turnaround

eBook details: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.

The book is split into 7 sections as follows

  1. How to stem the flow of cash out of your club starting today and how to prime a pump that will see more cash flowing into your club effortlessly.
  2. The remarkable 10 Minute MBA or how to build a business model that works for your club.
  3. An amazingly simple but powerful formula that will ensure your club stands head and shoulders above all of your competition.
  4. In a revolutionary take on the Marketing of your rejuvenated club we turn the commonly accepted view and perceived “wisdom” about Marketing firmly on its head! In this remarkable section we demonstrate  “paint by numbers” instructions for achieving all of the members you want with a vastly reduced Marketing budget.
  5. Step 5 provides what can only be described as ABC style instructions and guidance to turn your club into a smooth, efficient and profitable machine.
  6. In step 6 you’ll discover a remarkable system for adding 20-30% of your current income straight onto your bottom line profit!…by dealing with waste in your club.
  7. “Step 7 is essentially a method for bringing all of the previous steps together into an automatic club improvement system. Even after you’ve applied the first 6 steps and have a thriving, profitable club; this step pretty much guarantees that even a very efficient club will improve bottom line performance by at least 10% every 3 months”.

Cut Costs and Improve Performance in Bowls Green Maintenance

Sounds unlikely doesn’t it?

The fact is that many clubs could save between £750 and £1000 in the coming month and would actively be improving their green. You know by now what I am talking about if you are regular reader.

Incidentally, welcome to all of our new readers this month!

On most greens the addition of any more sand based top-dressing is actually harmful. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all greens, just most of them.

Leaving this out of the program will result in big savings in the region of those mentioned above.

Next, a prevalent practice used in our industry Read more

Doing Nothing vs Trojan Horses

With the end of the bowling season in clear sight, many clubs will have acquired a familiar temporary feature over by the roadside hedge somewhere. If you look closely there will probably be a pallet or five of bagged top-dressing, ready to go on the green as part of the autumn renovation program.

The bags might be plain or they might be covered in text and graphics proclaiming all of the benefits for your turf that are held within.

They are essentially Trojan Horses, in that they appear to be bearing good news and gifts, but they are actually full of sand (up to 90%) and represent the continued insistence of many clubs and consultants to pursue a program of desertification of bowling greens in the UK.

When your green was first constructed, it probably had an 8-10” (200-250mm) deep layer of topsoil (rootzone). An average bulk density for topsoil would be around 1.6 tonnes/m3. If we say that the average green is 36m X 36m we get an area of 1296m2. The volume of soil required to fill this is calculated thus:

 1296 X 0.25 = 324m3

Using our bulk density average of 1.6 we can calculate weight of soil required as follows:

324 X 1.6 = 518 Tonnes. So our average green was built using approximately 518 tonnes of topsoil.

Most hollow tining operations can penetrate the soil to 4 inches (100mm) and this is usually used in conjunction with top-dressing. This then means that top-dressing operations have been concentrated on about 40% of the actual soil used to build the green (the top 4 inches). 40% of 518 tonnes is 207 tonnes.

30 years of top-dressing with 5 tonnes of material each time is equal to applying 150 tonnes of highly sandy material and this disregards the soil being removed by the hollow tiner! This also assumes that your club only jumped on the train to la la land in the 1980’s; many have been at it for at least a decade before that. I also know of some greens where they are routinely throwing 10 tonnes of straight sand on every year, so these figures are only averages and are probably leaning towards the less crazy end of the spectrum.

Is it any wonder then that greens suffer from localised dry patch, excessive thatch build up, powder dry inert soil, compaction, disease, low microbe populations etc, when almost all of the top 4 inches of the green has been replaced by sand?

If this is the plan for your club this autumn it would be better for your green, if you just do nothing. Yes, even neglecting the green and failing to undertake any autumn renovation would be much less harmful to the long term health and performance of the green than following this program.

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!

Who would you meet at your club in the good old days?

Funny question you might be thinking.

However, I believe that the answer to that question lies at the heart of the current decline of bowling and bowling clubs.

If you can answer it thoroughly and properly you have one piece of a two piece puzzle.

Now you just have to find (or create) the other piece.

In my travels I hear a lot of bad news about bowling clubs and I hear the same reasons for this decline; smoking ban has reduced sales over the bar; can’t get any juniors in; everyone is getting older; green maintenance is too expensive; supermarkets selling cheap booze; people aren’t taking up the game etc etc.

These are largely assumptions with no hard evidence behind them.

What I never hear is: the club projects a gloomy, unwelcoming image; we don’t allow or encourage the general public to come along; we are really only interested in people who want to bowl; we have the best red tape in the county; we don’t take any notice of what’s going on elsewhere in our local community.

Conversely, whether you like it or not there is hard, measurable evidence for this at many clubs.

The Successful Bowling Club Manifesto lays out a plan for taking your club back to the good old days and creating something you can really be proud of and that your local community will support and enjoy. You can get it Free here

Instant income for your bowls club

If you had to find instant income for your bowls club, hard cash to keep your club alive this week, where could you look?

Probably not right in front of your nose but that would be a mistake.

The successful bowling club of the future will be about a lot more than just bowling; it will be a centre for community involvement and readers of my eBook Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround will know that there are hundreds of ideas that can be applied to clubs to start the process of turning them into vibrant and thriving institutions.

Anyway, back to today’s quest: where can you look for immediate cash?

Pick up your local paper and turn to the clubs and organisations news section.

In my local paper this week, 20 different clubs and organisations had a report published and they included; Rotary, Probus, Horticultural Society, Speakers Club, various medical support groups, Inner Link, BNi, Ramblers, Wildlife Trust, Parent and Toddlers. Events were also publicised such as Whist, Bingo, Films, Quiz Nights, etc etc.

Have a look in your own local paper and invite the leader of each group along to get a free viewing of your facilities, coffee, meet the members. If one or two of these groups could change their meeting venue to your club this month, that is instant income.

Ok so you will (this is not a maybe) need to make changes to accommodate this, but view it as the start of something that will grow and the justification for the changes is much easier.

Club Turnaround Basics-Member Retention

With the continued contraction of overall membership of bowling clubs, it is clear that the clubs most likely to survive and turnaround their fortunes are the ones that have a clear strategy for membership growth and retention.

Growing bowling club membership is a big topic because it doesn’t just include getting more people in to bowl at your club as we might always have imagined. It is now vital that we not only have a clear picture of what a “member” looks like but also that we are very open minded as to what this could or should include. In Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround, I have clearly defined what I think the bowling club of the near future will look like and I go on to define what a member might be.

Anyway, back to retaining the members you already have and first a look at new members and the skill of engendering a feeling of belonging to your club. If a new member doesn’t feel that they belong to your club they will quickly leave and another subscription is lost. Building that feeling is, like it or not, the job of Read more

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

A Bright Future for Bowls Clubs

Not an often heard statement I think you will agree.

However, I truly believe that there is such a future for bowling clubs if they take action quickly and positively to create such a future for themselves.

To do this, I think clubs will have to take a series of bold, yet very achievable steps to turn their fortunes around and then quickly build on that success to create a long term strategy that looks quite a bit different from the way things are today.

In my Free Manifesto for a Successful Bowling Club I have laid out some of my thoughts on how this can be approached.

Of course every club is different (thank goodness) and some of what I advise will be easier for some than it is for others to implement.

Anyway, the Manifesto is there for free if you’d like to see what I think on this subject.

If you agree, then please look out for my  eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround as in there I detail a concise and logical strategy that can be adapted for any club to:

  1. Stop the rot and save your club
  2. Design and Implement a solid strategy for achieving a vibrant, popular club in the days and years to come.

As usual, if you have any questions, suggestions, tips or comments please feel free to contribute here.