Blaize & Barrel – the new temporary home of the MBYBC!
The past 2 years have been times of building foundations for a long term successful club. To build strong foundations we had to break ground that has been there for a long time which we did and now I believe the foundation is laid and at the 2013 AGM of the MBYBC we made some very big decisions on the clubs future. For those members who were not able to attend I will just summarise some of the important decisions made and the motivations for those decisions.
The one that is going to have the highest impact on you as a member is an increase of R 700 to the basic annual fee this equates to R 58.33 increase per month. So our basic fee is now R 2000 per year or R 166.67 per month WHY? For the past 5 years our club has been making a loss of between R 80 000 and R 190 000 and we have been using our reserves to survive and we only have reserves to last us a maximum of another 5 years. We had a couple of options to solve this problem and they can be summarised into 2 groups either opening the club to the public and letting the public subsidise the members in the bar or to create a members only club that we pay for. The decision that was voted in at the AGM WAS TO keep our club exclusive to the members but to ensure it is exclusive by employing a security guard at the gate to stop people who are abusing the facility from coming in. This model will also enable the club to give the member more privileges and the first of these is that we will be giving the member a minimum of 20% lower prices in the bar and there will be more benefits as we get ahead financially.
There are a couple of important points for the implementation of this plan. The first is that we are going to have a phase in of the benefits, members take a while to pay their membership fee and the club is not in a position to give 20% of bar turnover back to the members before they have paid. We will give the discount to the members as soon as we can and we are working on practical systems to do this so please be patient and if you feel we are taking too long please speak to us about it rather than complaining in the bar. We are really trying to implement this as soon as possible and the quicker the members pay the quicker we will be able to feed this back to you.
To make the payment of subs easier for the members we have also brought in the option to pay your account by debit order on a monthly payment system. Please note that there are bank fees involved in a debit order system and these fees will be covered by the members who take advantage of the debit order system so the fee is R 166.67 per month but a person paying by debit order may pay R 5- R 10 more depending on the bank costs involved.
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