No quick fix for rebuilding Elks fan base
Turnaround will be `a two-year journey,' new president and CEO tells Terry Jones.
Normally the annual general meeting of the community owned Edmonton Elks football club is held in the dressing room. Not this year.
The reality of the day with new CEO Victor Cui was that the AGM held in the directors room with a tour of the locker-room where head coach Chris Jones was gathering new recruits for the opening of training camp when he last led a team in that room and built Edmonton's most recent Grey Cup in 2015 was striking.
For a community owned team, the AGM is an important day. And it will shock most fans who stopped going to games in a sorry shortened season in which the last-place Elks didn't win a home game that the team announced a loss of only $1.1 million.
That, you should know, left $15.7 million in their heritage fund (or rainy day fund, as the original Nervous Nine board of directors referred to it).
The club, said Cui, managed to mitigate the reduced revenue though massive operation staffing cuts and $2.6 million in Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy, rent subsidy and stabilization grants totalling $2.6 million.
“The government COVID support in funding really helped and from an operational staff they went down to a skeleton staff with everybody wearing four different hats for four different roles,” said Cui of what transpired before his arrival.
“But the biggest thing that helped was that we had this phenomenal season-ticket holder fan base that bought tickets and stuck through it.
“Renewal for this year is a whole different thing. We are only at about a 70-per-cent renewal. That's not good.”
With a rebirth of organizational transparency, Cui is intending to be extraordinarily revealing of where they're at, a total reversal of philosophy from previous management.
He believes community ownership has been the base of what has made the organization an example to all CFL teams in the past. He wants Edmonton fans to feel that connection again.
With that in mind, Cui revealed the exact up-to-the-minute season ticket total as of the AGM.
“The season tickets sold are 14,723. But this does not include our suite sales, which are almost all sold out,” he said of the 458 seats that includes.
“Our sponsorship is significantly behind. I think a lot of companies are in a wait and see what's going to happen with the Edmonton Elks before they decide to back us again. We need to show some results on the field and show some results in the product we're delivering,” added Cui, who welcomed new board member Zahra Somani.
The arrival of the born-andraised Cui in Edmonton with a wealth of global experience has been trumpeted as a triumph. Cui was co-founder and CEO of ONE Championship, the Singapore-based MMA entity that after a decade had a total valuation of more than US$1 billion as of January.
Cui, who still holds a significant number of shares in the organization, decided it was time to return home to be with his parents and family members and sat in the stands and suffered through the season of the hometown team he grew up cheering for. He was inspired to make himself available for the job that he didn't need because of his roots and the challenge involved.
He spent his first months on the job doing more listening than acting. He made himself available to a remarkable number of fans and came to the AGM with a very clear picture.
“The relationship with our fan base is strained, if not severed,” he said Thursday.
“This will be a two-year journey, I think. There is some positive momentum within the community and with season-ticket holders that finally feel they're being heard. It is not something that three years of decline can be cured in one season.”
That starts now, on and off the field.
“I think the message is that we're coming out of a very difficult few years and we made a lot of mistakes and had a lot of problems. This is not a turnaround that is going to happen in one season. We're going to do them as fast as we can, but it's going to take us some time.
“I'm optimistic. I have to stick that word in there somewhere. But the proof will be in the pudding and we'll need excellence on the field married with excellence off the field and all that lined up and obvious to everybody to make a significant turnaround here.
“We're going to be under the microscope here this year. That's an understatement. It's not twofor-one hotdogs that's going to bring fans back to the stadium.”
He knows he's on the clock now.