A man asks for ideas, and all he gets is negativity. Shame on you all!!! What happened to creativity? When a person does NOTHING to search for a solution, chances are, a solution is NOT going to bite that person in the arse!
Reality Check, please do not give up on trying to find new ways to grow your bowling business. Here are some ideas to get you started. You may message me anytime and I would be more than happy to discuss more with you. I am assuming you are from Europe, so I can obviously not promise that these ideas will work as they do in fact work here in the states (for centers that are clean, bright, modern, and friendly).
Recreational leagues are always easier to start than competitive leagues. You may have to hire somebody to go out and meet people in your community to make this work for you. Restaurant and Bar leagues always work well. Here in the U.S., Sunday nights and Monday nights are usually slow in the bar and restaurant world, so those are great nights to run these types of leagues. To get the bars and restaurants to help out, you can offer them some sort of in center advertisement either on the auto scorer monitors, on the sweeps, or just signs anywhere else in the center. Offer them this advertisement for each team they recruit for the league. Maybe the winning team gets to have the banquet in their bar/restaurant. This is their night to party, so turn up the music, turn down the rights, and rock and roll!
The same environment works for a Battle of the Sexes league. These leagues are just always appealing to young people as they like to meet other young people.
I found that mailing lists and emailing lists work really well. Keep a database of every league bowler in your center. In that database include which leagues they bowl in. Send mini-league info to them every 3 months or so. It's also good to advertise your birthday parties and corporate parties this way.
Speaking of corporate parties, the same person going out and recruiting people from the bars and restaurants can also book parties with those people. Christmas parties are big in centers that do this the right way. Keep the lineage down as they will undoubtedly drink like fish!
Go to non-profit organizations and try to get them to come in either on a weekly basis or monthly basis, or even just one time. Alocholics Anonymous, Drug Addiction groups, Handicapped groups (assuming your center has accomodations for them), day cares, and any other non-profit organization could be a target here.
Every time somebody asked me if there was a league starting up on a certain night, even if we weren't starting one, I told them that we were. If we didn't really have one starting, I would start one for that person! That way they feel like they are a part of something and will help you promote it, usually free of charge.
To go along with that idea, start up a league bowler recruiting program. Give people free games, free bowling equipment, free lineage in leagues, or whatever makes sense to get them to recruit others to either start leagues or join existing leagues. If somebody could start up a 10-team trio league that bowls for 10 weeks, and you charge $9 for lineage for that league, that means you would be getting $270/week from that new league. So give the recruiter that started the league free lineage and 1 free game/month for every person that he/she recruited into the league. So that person would get 30 free games/month and you are making over $1000 off of that league for the month! Not to mention the money those people spend in the lounge or restaurant/snack bar.
Always try adult/child leagues. If they don't go this time, they might go in 2 months if you try it again on a different day. There seems to be no set rule as to when these leagues actually work. Same goes for junior leagues.
These are just a few ideas that have worked in the past and will still work today. To all of you that say there is nothing that can be done, I just wish I could afford to move out to Reality Check's country and help him with these ideas and show you how many more bowlers they would get in the process.
Bones, you are right that the hula hoop salesman would move onto another product at the end of the month. But then, what has changed in hula hoops over the last 20 years? It's a stale, boring product. Bowling centers that are stale and boring are having the same problem, but centers that are not simply need to make a little effort to make bowling exciting again. I've seen it too many times to ever believe that bowling cannot be saved. The negativity of this site continues to disgust me.
Best of luck to you Reality Check, and please never hesitate to contact me if you want more ideas.
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Brian
MichiganBowling.com
http://www.MichiganBowling.comFamous Last Words of a Pot Bowler--"Ok, but this is my last game!"
