Is digging out a pond worthwhile for small clubs?”
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MY BACKGROUND
In 1996 I found myself as secretary (when the previous occupant died suddenly) of a local club with eight venues at that time. With the job came bank and building society accounts worth around £4,500 and unpaid bills worth £5,500. In effect, the club was bankrupt! Over the previous eight years they had lost something in the region of £30,000 because they happily allowed things to go unchecked and no one ever produced budgets or properly 'audited' accounts or found out what the members really wanted. Each year a loss at the AGM was met with the remark “Well, we'll make it up again next year.” or “The membership's bound to pick up again sometime.” It never did and the organisers did no marketing whatsoever other than to leave permits with the local tackle shops on which the owner got a 50p commission (wow!). We also had a president who was too closely connected with one of the landowners and who, by coincidence, also charged one of the largest rents. All in all, a crazy mess.
Over the first three months I explained to the creditors (those to whom we owed money) to accept half now and promised that we would be solvent again soon. One good thing that my predecessor did at my insistence, along with the then chairman, was to see the aforementioned landowner and explain to him our difficulties and the fact that his waters no longer fished well. The outcome of that meeting is that he granted the club a full year rent free. This shows that if you explain your difficulties to people they will usually help out, but if you keep them secret no one knows or understands why you can no longer pay your bills.
That first year was difficult, but we ended up clearing the debts and making a profit (an excess of income over expenditure) even after buying £4,000 of extra fish! Over the next three and a half years, until the time I resigned, we accumulated £11,000+ in the bank. There were no debts whatsoever, and we had also acquired three further waters, including a pond we had to dig out - but more of that later. Without wishing to sound conceited I reckon I can run a fishing club in my sleep, but the knowledge to do this comes from years of running my own business. Not all my ventures have been successful and even now I am not a Richard Branson Mk II (how I wish!), but I have a comfortable life and the experience I have gained is there to help others if they can heed the advice I offer.
FISHING IS TOO CHEAP?
This is what Mark said in his article, 'Modern Angling Clubs - Success or Failure?' and in general I would agree with that comment except that there's little you can do about it now. It is, and always was, a 'working man's sport' and the average working man will not pay golf club prices to fish the local cut. There are ways and means, though, of extracting a little more loot from most members, especially those who will go the 'extra mile' and it is these new thinking people who will make the club rich for everyone. The first lesson you must learn is that you can sell shit so long as you market it as 'high grade fertiliser' and you do that with bullshit, basically. Sorry to be crude at this juncture, but it is the best way to illustrate my point.
Only one area of Mark's excellent article did I have a problem with and that was his assertion that the 'close season' was better for club membership as it made anglers yearn for the new season to start. I can tell you that when I took over I made damned sure that as many waters were opened up for the full 12 months as possible. I didn't want to let anglers forget that the club was OPEN all year round, not for one minute, but we respected those anglers who felt that they had to maintain the close season themselves. We moved the start of our year to April 1st (in line with the new EA Rod Licence) and as many anglers joined in those first few weeks as would join at or around June 16th. I am a member of another club that maintains the close season and each year it manages to lose a little more money and a few more members and they continue to ignore my best advice on many topics. Trickle-trickle, drip-drip; that's the way the money goes - Pop goes the weasel (or your savings in this case)!
So the first thing you have to do is make sure that every angler in your catchment area is aware of your presence and what you are offering and don't just tell them “Here's a venue, there's a venue..” Mix it up with lots of superlatives, “Here's a fantastic fishery, there's monsters galore in this lake...” Make them WANT to join your club and that they'll really be missing something brilliant if they don't join you. Then what do you charge?
Some of you got it about right in your responses to Mark's article. In some cases £30 is about right, but others will be willing to pay £100+ if the potential to catch big fish is there, all you need is rumours of a 50lb carp! As this series continues I will show you a way of assessing how much to charge by preparing a budget, but much depends on what you are offering. A club with just one small stretch of river might only be able to charge £15 a year, unless there is something special about it like one I fish that charges £50 per year, but it includes secure parking, good fish, no rules, and the best view in the area. Just as a rule of thumb, you might say that £10 per venue per year would be about right, but I know of clubs that offer loads of venues for just £60 or so. It's impossible to say what is right; market forces will dictate to some extent, but what you don't do is stick it up by £5 per year without knowing why.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON
Who is the most important person in your club? There's a question to get your mind working. Is it the chairman, secretary, treasurer, head bailiff, fisheries officer, president, or a benefactor whose been elected as the main trustee? Each of these people have a part to play and providing they all do the work allocated to them, the club will run fairly sweetly, but I guess the one who carries most weight, by dent of the fact that he does most work, is usually the secretary. I have always said that even when I ran a successful sea angling club in the 70's and served in that same position on a local Sports Council dishing out grants to all manner of sporting clubs.
It is important for the club to see one person as the linchpin who everyone gets to know and everyone feels they can approach with moans and complaints without being castigated as being a trouble-monger. His (or her, as I do know one lady secretary of an angling club) life will be hell and phone calls come in at all hours of the day and night, but the secretary has to take this on board when he accepts the job. It's a thankless task too, as I found out when I resigned; everything the others were to moan about was all my fault include things that had yet to happen. As the French say, “The one who is absent is always at fault.”
However, if you have a good secretary you will, normally, enjoy having a good club. For me, I am not a good committee-man for I believe that committees are bodies that “Keep minutes and waste hours” and for that reason I too believe that “A committee should comprise of three people providing two are always absent”. Sounds conceited? Perhaps, but then ”Everyone I know with my level of charm, education, and good looks is conceited”.
I ran that last lot past you to use some famous sayings. Okay, joking apart, even the secretary is not the most important person in the club - so who is? THE ORDINARY MEMBER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN YOUR CLUB, that's who and you had better remember it! The guy that joins every year, you hardly ever see him at a meeting, if at all, and he doesn't fish matches, isn't part of a syndicate, and most of the time he has nothing but praise for the hard-working committee. He's your ordinary, every-day, pleasure angler whose only demand is that you provide him with some half decent fishing with reasonably secure parking in clean un-littered surroundings and because he pays his full membership each year on demand he is worth his weight in gold. These are the guys that you can rely on in good times and most bad times to keep the club going, just never go out of your way to upset them!
WHAT ELSE CAN YOU LEARN?
In the following article in this series on running a fishing club you'll learn about budgets, writing newsletters, cost-savings, job allocation and role definition, market research, organising meetings, sending renewal notices, and SWOT analysis. What's SWOT analysis? It'SWOT all businesses should do if they want to stay ahead of the game!
I like collecting sayings, as you can probably tell, so here's yet another, this time from Andy Warhol: 'Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art of all.' Remember, when you are running a club, you are effectively running a business. So do it well!
Join in the forum thread started by Graham below. The more comments there are the better, and the more I will divulge later in the series. In the meantime answer this - what is the colour of a polar bear's skin?
Graham Marsden
