Post by Reverend Rook on Jul 8, 2011 8:31:23 GMT -1
Some of you may have received an email from the club this morning. If not, read on...
ONE YEAR STATEMENT FROM THE BOARD OF LEWES COMMUNITY FOOTBALL CLUB LIMITED: JULY 8TH 2011
Lewes Community Football Club Limited (LCFC) bought Lewes FC one year ago today. The Board of LCFC will write commentary on the year ended 31st May, 2011 as part of the annual accounts to be published in September.
Meanwhile, we wanted to give a summary of how we think things have gone in our first year.
The Club has three priorities and we consider them to be of equal importance:
- On-field success of our three teams; First team, Ladies, U18’s
- Financial stability
- Community engagement
We review our performance on these priorities in our first year as follows:
On-field Success
First Team
The First Team had a very poor start to the season. With 12 league games played they had accumulated a mere 5 points and were bottom of the league. They had a reasonable FA Cup run reaching the 4th Qualifying Round where they were defeated away at Cambridge United.
The management team of Steve Ibbitson and Jason Hopkinson stepped aside in late October. The Board appointed Tim O’Shea and Neil Smith to replace them.
After an encouraging start momentum was stalled by the weather-driven hiatus in December. After that the team rarely hit its stride for more than a game or two. It proved difficult to field a settled side: due to the team’s precarious league position the management felt that they could not give underperforming players much time to turn their game around. We also gained a keen appreciation of the primary pitfall of signing players on loan; if the player shines for you then the parent club wants him back.
Despite this, O’Shea and Smith gave the Club a chance of staying up right to the end of the season. With the post-season Conference reorganization it transpired that had we won the last game we would have stayed up at Thurrock’s expense. The team’s lacklustre performance in the last two games was a terrible disappointment.
There were some on-field highs during the season: Weston away, Braintree at home and our three-wins-in-a-row in February. But for the most part it was a third consecutive season of grind and defeat for Lewes FC fans. Our first team league record for the last three seasons:
Played: 130
Won: 24 (18.5%)
Drawn: 30 (23.0%)
Lost: 76 (58.5%)
Points per game: 0.78
Goals for: 111 (0.85/game)
Goals against: 222 (1.71/game)
Given those numbers it’s no surprise that we were relegated in two of those three seasons and avoided the drop on the last day of the season in the other.
We are extremely grateful to all Lewes FC fans for continuing to come to our games in such numbers throughout these lean times.
On-field success is one of our three priorities and we have failed to deliver on that with the first team. Therefore, we have tried to increase the likelihood of on-field success next season by recruiting Steve King and Justin Skinner who have a demonstrated track record of consistent success at levels higher and lower than the division we will be in next season.
Ladies Team
The Ladies Team had a successful season; they finished third in the South East Combination (the third tier of English ladies football) behind Tottenham Hotspur and Norwich City and they won the Sussex County Cup. The Community Board is delighted that Jacquie Agnew has decided to stay on as Manager despite attractive offers from other clubs. Jacquie has recruited Dave Cole as Head of Football Development to further strengthen the Ladies push for promotion to the Premier League next season.
Under 18’s
The Under 18s also had a good season; they were runners-up in the Ryman Youth League South East - just two points behind champions Burgess Hill and with the best goal difference in the division. A strong youth side is very important to the overall success of Lewes FC and Chris Rivers’ efforts managing the team last season were much appreciated. Following his decision to stand down at the end of the season, the Community Board are very pleased to welcome former first team favourite Sin my opinionn Wormull as the new Under 18’s manager. We intend to integrate the Youth Team even more closely into the Club over the coming years.
Financial Stability
While our detailed discussion of the financials will have to wait until the publication of the accounts in September, we wanted to give a general sense now of how things went last season money-wise.
The Club made an operating loss for the season, as it has done for years. This loss was funded by some of the money raised from new Lewes FC shareholders. Much of the rest of the money raised from new shareholders went to cleaning up the balance sheet we inherited; in particular by paying off old trade creditor balances, many of which were Lewes businesses, and repaying some of the “soft” loan balances owing to friends of the club from previous seasons. We incurred no new debts during the season, had cash in the bank and no overdraft throughout.
We had some success in increasing attendances which went from an average of 433/game in the 2009-10 season to an average of 679/game last season, an increase of 57%. We had the seventh-highest average attendance in Blue Square South. This was particularly pleasing given the first team’s poor results throughout the campaign. This brought in welcome additional revenue although at a lower increment than is generally assumed. While it’s tempting to do the simple maths: £10 a ticket x 246 extra people x 25 games = around £60k, the reality is that for each additional person through the gate the Club nets somewhere between £4 and £5. This is after deducting VAT and adjusting for the blend of full-price, concessions and under 16’s (free). We will continue to push hard to drive the gate up further next season.
In the last month the Club has already sold more season tickets for 2011-12 than it did in total for 2010-11. Season tickets continue to be available at a reduced price until next Saturday, July 16th. If you’d like to take advantage of this offer before it closes please download the application form at www.lewesfc.com/owners or contact David Arnold on 07845 954805 or at david@lewesfc.com.
Sponsorship and commercial revenues, while well ahead of 2009-10, were below our expectations and in our opinion did not reflect the potential of the Club. While we could blame the recession, the amount of time we have available and other general factors the truth of the matter is that despite our best endeavours we didn’t deliver on commercial revenue. We have recognized that we need help and last month hired Steve Duly as Business Development Director. Steve has a proven track record in driving significant sponsorship revenue for football clubs at our level and we hope that he can do the same for Lewes.
If you own a local business and want to support the Rooks then please give Steve a call on 07922 666621 or email him at steve.duly@lewesfc.com.
Thanks to the efforts of Johnny Marshall, The Southover Bonfire Society plus sterling support from Harvey’s brewery, the Club had its most profitable season ever at the bar. We aim to do even better next season.
The food side of our catering was mixed: the quality went way up but the Club didn’t make much money from it. We will try to maintain the former and improve on the latter.
On the cost side our largest single item is our playing staff. We began the season with a playing budget of £120k which we increased to £150k early in the season in response to a crippling injury crisis. Both management teams were meticulous in sticking to this budget. We incurred greater spending on management than we had anticipated as a result of hiring paid management in October rather than at the season’s end as we had originally expected.
The Club cannot make an operating loss forever and we view it as critically important to move closer to operational break-even each season. While one could argue that we should slash the playing budget to reach this goal immediately, we do not want to create a self-reinforcing downward spiral in which the Club plummets down through the divisions watched by fewer-and-fewer fans, supported by less and less advertising but ends up breaking even at almost-zero cost and almost-zero revenue.
Clubs can stabilize at different levels of success. Lewes FC has demonstrated in the last decade that it can generate crowds and sponsorship commensurate (in our view) with break-even operations in the Blue Square South and certainly the Ryman Premier. The club just didn’t match its costs to those revenues in those years. Our challenge is to drive revenues up while not going crazy on the playing budget. We aim to lose less money on our operations next season than we did last season and lose less again the season after that. We want operational break-even over a 2-3 year time horizon without sacrificing on-field success. The cumulative losses over that period will be met by the money that we receive from our shareholders – and many of them have been very generous indeed. When the Club is at operational breakeven then annual shareholder contributions will be used to increase the playing budget and develop our facilities.
Community Engagement
We made significant progress throughout the season in engaging with the community in a distinctive way. A year ago the Club was owned by two people, now it is owned by more than two hundred. We spent a lot of time with our Lewes based design team Proworx producing quality match day posters. We enlisted volunteers to put posters up around town so that each home game felt like an event. The club achieved a gate well over 1300 for our 125th Anniversary game in September. We adopted Lewes Victoria Hospital as our home shirt sponsor, increased the age threshold for Kids Go Free from 14 to 16, had Bonfire Society drummers and bands at games, hosted local scout troupes and staged the inaugural Bonfire Cup. We instituted Artists United, The Big Kickabout (on FA Cup Final day) and an annual Gala Dinner. In October we will be holding the first ever elections to the Board of Lewes FC. Details of how to stand and electoral procedure are being worked on and will be released in the next month or so. We want to increase our Community engagement all the time, we want to do more and on a larger scale next season and beyond. The limit on what the Club can do and achieve is prescribed by the number of volunteers we have available.
We were thrilled by the overwhelmingly positive response to our Founder Shares initiative which raised well over £100k. This was the beginning of the Club being owned by its local community. We’re now pleased to have opened up share ownership more widely at an annual cost of £30 minimum. This has been co-ordinated and managed by our volunteer Membership Team of Sam Knowles, Stuart Fuller, Rob Read and Tim Ward.
It’s never too late to buy or gift a share. Please go to www.lewesfc/owners for details or write to The Membership Team, Lewes FC, The Dripping Pan, Mountfield Road, Lewes, BN7 2XD.
If you’re a shareholder already please encourage others to join up. Building our membership over the next few years will be essential to the success of the club.
Sam, Stuart, Rob and Tim are just four of the dozens of volunteers who give many thousands of hours collectively throughout the year to support Lewes FC. The Club simply can’t exist without its many volunteers. But we need more. Every volunteer takes the Club a further step forward and we need them in all areas of the operation to reach our full potential. This cannot be stressed strongly enough. Our success as a club will increase with each new volunteer who comes on board. Even a few hours a week will make a difference.
If you’re interested in helping to build Lewes’ Community Club please contact director Ben Ward on 07976 256989 or at ben@lewesfc.com.
Finally, thank you all for your support throughout the last year. It has been a more eventful year than we had anticipated. At times it has been deeply disappointing. But in general it has been an uplifting and exciting time for us and, we hope, for you too.
Come On You Rooks.
Board of Directors
Lewes Community Football Club Ltd.
ONE YEAR STATEMENT FROM THE BOARD OF LEWES COMMUNITY FOOTBALL CLUB LIMITED: JULY 8TH 2011
Lewes Community Football Club Limited (LCFC) bought Lewes FC one year ago today. The Board of LCFC will write commentary on the year ended 31st May, 2011 as part of the annual accounts to be published in September.
Meanwhile, we wanted to give a summary of how we think things have gone in our first year.
The Club has three priorities and we consider them to be of equal importance:
- On-field success of our three teams; First team, Ladies, U18’s
- Financial stability
- Community engagement
We review our performance on these priorities in our first year as follows:
On-field Success
First Team
The First Team had a very poor start to the season. With 12 league games played they had accumulated a mere 5 points and were bottom of the league. They had a reasonable FA Cup run reaching the 4th Qualifying Round where they were defeated away at Cambridge United.
The management team of Steve Ibbitson and Jason Hopkinson stepped aside in late October. The Board appointed Tim O’Shea and Neil Smith to replace them.
After an encouraging start momentum was stalled by the weather-driven hiatus in December. After that the team rarely hit its stride for more than a game or two. It proved difficult to field a settled side: due to the team’s precarious league position the management felt that they could not give underperforming players much time to turn their game around. We also gained a keen appreciation of the primary pitfall of signing players on loan; if the player shines for you then the parent club wants him back.
Despite this, O’Shea and Smith gave the Club a chance of staying up right to the end of the season. With the post-season Conference reorganization it transpired that had we won the last game we would have stayed up at Thurrock’s expense. The team’s lacklustre performance in the last two games was a terrible disappointment.
There were some on-field highs during the season: Weston away, Braintree at home and our three-wins-in-a-row in February. But for the most part it was a third consecutive season of grind and defeat for Lewes FC fans. Our first team league record for the last three seasons:
Played: 130
Won: 24 (18.5%)
Drawn: 30 (23.0%)
Lost: 76 (58.5%)
Points per game: 0.78
Goals for: 111 (0.85/game)
Goals against: 222 (1.71/game)
Given those numbers it’s no surprise that we were relegated in two of those three seasons and avoided the drop on the last day of the season in the other.
We are extremely grateful to all Lewes FC fans for continuing to come to our games in such numbers throughout these lean times.
On-field success is one of our three priorities and we have failed to deliver on that with the first team. Therefore, we have tried to increase the likelihood of on-field success next season by recruiting Steve King and Justin Skinner who have a demonstrated track record of consistent success at levels higher and lower than the division we will be in next season.
Ladies Team
The Ladies Team had a successful season; they finished third in the South East Combination (the third tier of English ladies football) behind Tottenham Hotspur and Norwich City and they won the Sussex County Cup. The Community Board is delighted that Jacquie Agnew has decided to stay on as Manager despite attractive offers from other clubs. Jacquie has recruited Dave Cole as Head of Football Development to further strengthen the Ladies push for promotion to the Premier League next season.
Under 18’s
The Under 18s also had a good season; they were runners-up in the Ryman Youth League South East - just two points behind champions Burgess Hill and with the best goal difference in the division. A strong youth side is very important to the overall success of Lewes FC and Chris Rivers’ efforts managing the team last season were much appreciated. Following his decision to stand down at the end of the season, the Community Board are very pleased to welcome former first team favourite Sin my opinionn Wormull as the new Under 18’s manager. We intend to integrate the Youth Team even more closely into the Club over the coming years.
Financial Stability
While our detailed discussion of the financials will have to wait until the publication of the accounts in September, we wanted to give a general sense now of how things went last season money-wise.
The Club made an operating loss for the season, as it has done for years. This loss was funded by some of the money raised from new Lewes FC shareholders. Much of the rest of the money raised from new shareholders went to cleaning up the balance sheet we inherited; in particular by paying off old trade creditor balances, many of which were Lewes businesses, and repaying some of the “soft” loan balances owing to friends of the club from previous seasons. We incurred no new debts during the season, had cash in the bank and no overdraft throughout.
We had some success in increasing attendances which went from an average of 433/game in the 2009-10 season to an average of 679/game last season, an increase of 57%. We had the seventh-highest average attendance in Blue Square South. This was particularly pleasing given the first team’s poor results throughout the campaign. This brought in welcome additional revenue although at a lower increment than is generally assumed. While it’s tempting to do the simple maths: £10 a ticket x 246 extra people x 25 games = around £60k, the reality is that for each additional person through the gate the Club nets somewhere between £4 and £5. This is after deducting VAT and adjusting for the blend of full-price, concessions and under 16’s (free). We will continue to push hard to drive the gate up further next season.
In the last month the Club has already sold more season tickets for 2011-12 than it did in total for 2010-11. Season tickets continue to be available at a reduced price until next Saturday, July 16th. If you’d like to take advantage of this offer before it closes please download the application form at www.lewesfc.com/owners or contact David Arnold on 07845 954805 or at david@lewesfc.com.
Sponsorship and commercial revenues, while well ahead of 2009-10, were below our expectations and in our opinion did not reflect the potential of the Club. While we could blame the recession, the amount of time we have available and other general factors the truth of the matter is that despite our best endeavours we didn’t deliver on commercial revenue. We have recognized that we need help and last month hired Steve Duly as Business Development Director. Steve has a proven track record in driving significant sponsorship revenue for football clubs at our level and we hope that he can do the same for Lewes.
If you own a local business and want to support the Rooks then please give Steve a call on 07922 666621 or email him at steve.duly@lewesfc.com.
Thanks to the efforts of Johnny Marshall, The Southover Bonfire Society plus sterling support from Harvey’s brewery, the Club had its most profitable season ever at the bar. We aim to do even better next season.
The food side of our catering was mixed: the quality went way up but the Club didn’t make much money from it. We will try to maintain the former and improve on the latter.
On the cost side our largest single item is our playing staff. We began the season with a playing budget of £120k which we increased to £150k early in the season in response to a crippling injury crisis. Both management teams were meticulous in sticking to this budget. We incurred greater spending on management than we had anticipated as a result of hiring paid management in October rather than at the season’s end as we had originally expected.
The Club cannot make an operating loss forever and we view it as critically important to move closer to operational break-even each season. While one could argue that we should slash the playing budget to reach this goal immediately, we do not want to create a self-reinforcing downward spiral in which the Club plummets down through the divisions watched by fewer-and-fewer fans, supported by less and less advertising but ends up breaking even at almost-zero cost and almost-zero revenue.
Clubs can stabilize at different levels of success. Lewes FC has demonstrated in the last decade that it can generate crowds and sponsorship commensurate (in our view) with break-even operations in the Blue Square South and certainly the Ryman Premier. The club just didn’t match its costs to those revenues in those years. Our challenge is to drive revenues up while not going crazy on the playing budget. We aim to lose less money on our operations next season than we did last season and lose less again the season after that. We want operational break-even over a 2-3 year time horizon without sacrificing on-field success. The cumulative losses over that period will be met by the money that we receive from our shareholders – and many of them have been very generous indeed. When the Club is at operational breakeven then annual shareholder contributions will be used to increase the playing budget and develop our facilities.
Community Engagement
We made significant progress throughout the season in engaging with the community in a distinctive way. A year ago the Club was owned by two people, now it is owned by more than two hundred. We spent a lot of time with our Lewes based design team Proworx producing quality match day posters. We enlisted volunteers to put posters up around town so that each home game felt like an event. The club achieved a gate well over 1300 for our 125th Anniversary game in September. We adopted Lewes Victoria Hospital as our home shirt sponsor, increased the age threshold for Kids Go Free from 14 to 16, had Bonfire Society drummers and bands at games, hosted local scout troupes and staged the inaugural Bonfire Cup. We instituted Artists United, The Big Kickabout (on FA Cup Final day) and an annual Gala Dinner. In October we will be holding the first ever elections to the Board of Lewes FC. Details of how to stand and electoral procedure are being worked on and will be released in the next month or so. We want to increase our Community engagement all the time, we want to do more and on a larger scale next season and beyond. The limit on what the Club can do and achieve is prescribed by the number of volunteers we have available.
We were thrilled by the overwhelmingly positive response to our Founder Shares initiative which raised well over £100k. This was the beginning of the Club being owned by its local community. We’re now pleased to have opened up share ownership more widely at an annual cost of £30 minimum. This has been co-ordinated and managed by our volunteer Membership Team of Sam Knowles, Stuart Fuller, Rob Read and Tim Ward.
It’s never too late to buy or gift a share. Please go to www.lewesfc/owners for details or write to The Membership Team, Lewes FC, The Dripping Pan, Mountfield Road, Lewes, BN7 2XD.
If you’re a shareholder already please encourage others to join up. Building our membership over the next few years will be essential to the success of the club.
Sam, Stuart, Rob and Tim are just four of the dozens of volunteers who give many thousands of hours collectively throughout the year to support Lewes FC. The Club simply can’t exist without its many volunteers. But we need more. Every volunteer takes the Club a further step forward and we need them in all areas of the operation to reach our full potential. This cannot be stressed strongly enough. Our success as a club will increase with each new volunteer who comes on board. Even a few hours a week will make a difference.
If you’re interested in helping to build Lewes’ Community Club please contact director Ben Ward on 07976 256989 or at ben@lewesfc.com.
Finally, thank you all for your support throughout the last year. It has been a more eventful year than we had anticipated. At times it has been deeply disappointing. But in general it has been an uplifting and exciting time for us and, we hope, for you too.
Come On You Rooks.
Board of Directors
Lewes Community Football Club Ltd.