Author Archives: Damian Lord

Know Your Customer

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As I’ve said before, sailing clubs are not businesses – certainly not in the normal sense. But we can learn quite a lot from business. One such lesson is knowing who our “customer” is, and who we want our customers to be.

There’s been a fair amount of comment about how sailing has an ageing demographic, which would suggest that our current customer is in the 40+ age range. These are great members to have – they’re experienced, have decided that sailing is their core interest, and, of course, they tend to have disposable income. We’re lucky to have strong membership in this age range.

However, most of the talk around this subject focuses on kids, and particularly on how to keep kids in sailing. The drop off at around the mid-teens is dramatic, and if we can stem the flow then our demographic would look a lot more balanced.

And so a lot of the discussion is around how we can make sailing more fun for kids (I’ve written a little about this in a previous post).

But are these our real “customer”? Continue reading →

Stopwatch Nationals

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I recently updated my page on sailing watches, and it reminded me of something we used to do on those long drives to Optimist open meetings and regattas.

You would think that these long drives were a lot of fun.

Especially for the adult or adults driving us.

Two or three hours in a car (each way) with bored teenagers is a barrel of laughs for all concerned, and I’m sure, if you were asked to guess, you’d predict that my parents (or my friend’s parents) looked forward to these journeys with great anticipation.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t the case. Arguments over music, elbow room, noisy breathing, whether Craig Johnson was better than Paul Walsh, who got the biggest banana, and so on, seemed to annoy them.

And even though we very regularly interspersed these arguments with queries about how much longer the journey was going to last, the adults in the car still did not seem to be enjoying themselves.

Then, one magical day, all this changed. Continue reading →

Why We Sail

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Why do we sail?

I do wonder about this sometimes.

Every so often, on meeting someone new, or maybe chatting to someone I don’t know very well, the topic of sailing comes up. And when I mention that I sail I am often met with a comment like:

“Oh, sailing. I’d love to try that sometime. It looks so relaxing.”

And I try (I really, really try) to say nothing. To just agree and move on.

But I can’t. Continue reading →

Club Boats, and the Unused Boats in Your Club

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Club Boats help new members to get on the water quickly and easily

The other day I posted a piece on how giving away free membership could help retain young sailors, and Tillerman wrote a comment that raised a number of questions that run alongside that idea. One of the questions he asked was:

Are you in favor of yacht clubs providing a fleet of club-owned dinghies to attract new young members who know how to sail but can’t afford to buy a boat? Continue reading →

How to Fix Anything on your Boat in Just 23 Steps.

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There are three types of dinghy sailor in the world:

  1. those that can do boat maintenance, and are very good at it
  2. those that can’t do boat maintenance, and should be banned from even attempting it
  3. and those that can’t do boat maintenance, but think they can do boat maintenance

People from category number one are relatively rare. If you know one, you should treasure them. Feed them their favourite type of alcohol. Laugh at their jokes. Tell them the colour of their wetsuit really brings out their eyes. Whatever it takes, look after them because sooner or later you are going to need them. Continue reading →