October 2018

Minutes of the Unit 503 Board of Directors meeting of Oct. 11 2018 

Meeting was called to order at 3:50 PM. Those attending were Dan Thatte, Dave Puryear, John Schwartz, Kip Kado, Anne Keyser, Gerry MacDonald, Alan Polish, Susan Zhang (on the phone).  Leslie Altick was unable to attend due to travel.

Minutes of the Sept, 6 board meeting were approved.

Susan presented the financial reports. Revenues are below budget due to less than budgeted table fees and Firecracker revenue, but by reducing spending, operating income is better than budget. 2019 preliminary budget was presented. We will continue to refine it during October and early November.

The NLM sectional on November 3rd and 4th is tracking well below expected signups especially for the Swiss event.  Also, the NLM players seemed to shy away from team games. After our NLM was scheduled, the NAP game was scheduled in San Jose on Nov. 3.  The competition from regular sectional tournaments, other NLM sectionals, NAP games is making it harder to draw players.  It was decided to step up the marketing effort. On Oct. 30 Frank Smoot is presenting a lecture on Team Game Strategy followed by practice hands.

High School Bridge Championship finals are scheduled for Sunday April 28, 2019 at the bridge center.

Valerie Baldwin presented the financial and logistics plan for the Robert Todd Seminar for April 27, 2019.  It was approved by the board.

Dan Claassen has volunteered to run the unit elections in November.

Paul Davis made an excellent presentation about the need to relook at the Unit and Bridge Club financial models.  Here is a recap of the discussion. The major goals of our unit are – Enhance player experience and provide for the long term financial viability.  The unit has continued to build a good reserve over the last few years. But, there is a general trend of decreasing number of players at the club regular games, unit games, our NLM sectionals and the Firecracker.

This requires maintaining healthy financial reserves to fund for needed infrastructure updates and upcoming large rent increase. The club owners bring in the players and provide rental income to the club which allows the unit to maintain the bridge center facilities. With the right kind of player experience and happy clientele, the unit gets the volunteer support and can host unit games, NLM sectionals, Firecracker tournament, and celebrity speakers providing surplus income.  The ambiance of the club, player experience and goodwill created by club owners and directors promotes charitable contribution to the foundation providing educational programs, bridge library, etc. So this symbiotic relationship between the unit and club owners is making our club successful and unique.  But we need to keep this going by developing more directors and helping club owners be successful.

After looking at the data and considering several alternatives a proposal was made to increase the director fee for the unit games to a minimum of $175 and for the club games, increase the second director fee from $75 to $100. The board will vote on this proposal at the next meeting.

Meeting was adjourned at 5:30 PM.  The next board meeting will be on Thursday Nov. 8 2018 at 3:30 PM.