Earlier I posted my thoughts on why the club needs to increase its benefits
http://www.thechipboard.com/index.cgi/page/1/md/read/id/1781860/sbj/chip-guide-membership-observations
and concluded with “Would it be nice to give everything away for free? Of course. But that’s not reality.”

This got a response of “But shouldn’t we be giving it away if we are a non-profit club?”

This is a great question, and the exact same question I had when I was approached to work for a large non-profit organization years ago. Why on Earth would a non-profit need a corporate guy to come in to handle their finances? After all, what does a non-profit care about money?

The answer I got from the CEO was simple and to the point:

“Non-profit” is a tax designation, NOT A BUSINESS STRATEGY.

The reality is, organizations like ours need to make money to pay for the services we provide. There is the cost of printing the magazine (whether once a year or four times), postage, storage, convention costs, website expenses, promotions, advertising, and on and on. Most of these costs have increased significantly in the past few years and unfortunately a majority of them are “fixed”. Regardless of the decrease in membership (dues), these costs remain the same.

If you want to maintain these services (or add more), you have figure out how to make the numbers work.

We aren’t an organization that relies on donations and endowments. That is another branch of non-profits called “charities”. We are definitely NOT a charity.

So that brings us to that dirty word “Profit”. Should we be looking to bank more money than we need? Personally, I am NOT in favor of building a large war chest of funds unless we have plans for it. The club should ALWAYS have a rainy-day fund (cash balance) for emergencies, but if the CCA is banking more than we have plans for, that is saying we either aren’t providing enough services to the membership or charging too much.

So the bottom line…
- Should the CCA care about finances? Absolutely! It must.
- Should profit be the ultimate pursuit? Not if we don’t have plans for it.

We keep talking about doing all these great things – building museums, printing magazines, expanding shows across the country/world. That all takes resources (money, time, man-power). Currently, the CCA is in no position what-so-ever to expand on these goals.

First we need to right the ship we’re on, then we can concentrate on building a fleet.

Thanks for your time.