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Don’t get in the way at Feeding Time!

2 things in bowling green maintenance annoy me more than anything else. One is the feeding frenzy stirred up and enjoyed by many bowling green maintenance contractors in the autumn, usually driven by an unsolicited sales letter offering “Autumn Programs” sent by someone who has never seen your green!

Many clubs across the country will succumb to this sales gimmick year after year  without ever realising that it isn’t necessarily the best thing to do. You see Autumn has traditionally been Read more

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

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.

 

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.

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