Autumn Fun Fest sinks Broncos’ bottom line

The Swift Current Broncos Hockey Club reported a cash loss of $13,535 at their Annual Shareholders meeting on Tuesday.

The loss was compounded by an increased education fund liability of just over $127,000, moving the paper loss to $135,000 for the fiscal year. This fund factors in the potential future education costs based on signed players and the likelihood of those players attending postsecondary institutions at the conclusion of their junior hockey careers.

“I think hidden within that loss are a lot of really positive aspects,” said Chairman of the Board, Liam Choo-Foo. “Our big goal was that we asked our fans to be patient and join us in a renewal of the Broncos organization. As such, we have seen that commitment. We have seen tickets sales increased. Our revenues have increased on game day. Our concessions are up, our liquor sales, our 50-50’s, they are all up and we are seeing that are de- mographic is getting younger. We are really feeling that energy from our fan-base.”

The franchise reported a $57,000 increase in hockey operations revenues, with $46,000 coming from gate revenues. The organization also increased its corporate sponsorship by $45,000.

Attendance remained steady from the previous season but the club announced increases in revenues of $13,000 in both alcohol and 50-50 sales.

The Broncos had a huge fundraising shortfall this past year due to the Autumn Fun Fest, held September 14, 2012, featuring country music star Dwight Yoakam.

“Unfortunately we moved forward in trying to start the year off with a bang with a world-class, fun opportunity to unite with Southwest Saskatchewan in a big celebration with the Broncos. It was all of that, it was just that not enough people came to join with us. So that has put us behind the eight-ball. There are lessons that we have learned from that and so going forward we believe that we can turn this around,” said Choo-Foo.

“Well you are never happy with a loss by any means,” said Broncos Assistant General Manager, Business Operations, Dianne Sletten. “That certainly wasn’t something I wanted in my first year on the business side of things. Considering where we started, it was a huge loss on the Autumn Fun Fest, so how the team pulled together in the office to generate new ways to make that money up, yeah I am very pleased with where it ended up and very proud of the staff to try and make that money up.”

Choo-Foo said that the Broncos must learn from the costly mistake of Autumn Fun Fest.

“I think certainly risk mitigation is a bigger piece. We would never take something of that size on again unless we had significant sponsorship to mitigate the risk.”

“I think what happened last year was that we really thought maybe we can have this one big event and make a bunch of money and that would help us not have to do a whole bunch of smaller things,” Sletten explained.

Sletten agreed that the misstep will impact their fundraising efforts in the future.

“Yeah it does. It was calculated risk. We thought it would be successful for us. But we learned a lot from that [experience]. We know how to manage events better. We maybe learned more about marketing. Will it change? Yeah we won’t put anything on that puts us in that kind of risk again, anything that big.”

“Having said that, we need events, we need them to be sustainable,” added Sletten. “But they will be smaller ones. We have our bus trip that we are doing. We will do some things after games, the PBR of course, and we are looking at one other thing that would be of a slightly bigger nature but not the extent of Autumn Fun Fest.”

“I think what it also has done is it has reminded us that our core business is hockey,” added Choo-Foo. “We need to sell out the rink. If we could just get 200 more fans on average to our building it would really set us up well. So you have noticed our big promotion this year has been the Saturday Night Sellouts.”

“That is the direction we are heading and we are feeling pretty good about that plan right now.”

On-ice performance remains the focus of the Broncos going forward.

“We are really excited about the team, certainly the long range plan,” said Choo- Foo. “Last year we were probably ahead of where we thought we would be. This year we brought some younger players in, our drafts that we have had for the 96’s, 97’s, and 98’s have been outstanding. We really believe that we have reloaded while getting competitive. I think for the next few years we can have an exciting product on the ice and it is going be a lot of fun to watch and a lot of fun at the rink through the game day experience.”

“That is not the way we need to go,” added Sletten. “We need to focus on the hockey side. The events have to supplement that and we can do some smaller things and we will always need that. But we need to focus on the hockey side, that’s our number one priority, that’s what our business is. We have to fill those seats, that’s our number one goal for sure.”

Attendance remained stable last season said Sletten.

“Our average last year was just under 2,200 and that was very similar to the previous year. But I would say that we had close to that number of people in the seats [ last year]. If you were there over both years you wouldn’t think there were 2,200 people the previous year, whereas this year you would. All of our increased sales I think support that.

“If we had 200- 300 more on average, that would be all the difference in the word to us to being financially stable and not having to worry about so many events and other things.”

On-ice performance remains the key factor in attendance said Sletten.

“The play of the team of course is number one. It is an exciting team. Mark has built a very exciting team and one that is going to be exciting well into the future with these draft picks.”

She said the team is trying to do other things to make it valuable for fans to come top Broncos games.

“We hope our Saturday Night Sellouts promotion works and that it creates some excitement in the building and maybe some residuals, people will come to more games because they had so much fun at the game and they had the opportunity to win a great prize.

“I think we will try and do some auction things at games and try and get them there. It is just the whole experience, and marketing, and word of mouth. We are working on some good partnerships too, with the college for one, trying to bring in more of that younger crowd, so I think that will help as well.”

Sletten is now into her second full season with the Broncos.

“I am definitely more comfortable. I have learned more than I could ever tell you in a short interview,” she laughed. “Probably the biggest thing is how much work it takes to put on these games. When you think about it, it is 36 events in a six- month period and you need close to 50 volunteers and people to put on that event. You need to make it exciting and you need to balance what you need to make with affordability.”

She said she has now learned the cost of doing business in the Western Hockey League for a small market team.

“That might be the biggest thing that I have learned. What I need to charge for things is what I need to make and pay all the bills. I am not trying to make a ton of extra money, we are a nonprofit, we don’t do that. But there are a lot of expenses to pay so I don’t apologize for what we are charging any more. We are not gouging anybody or anything like that.”

Sletten hopes that some other changes can help the franchise move forward.

“Organizationally there are a lot of processes that have been in place for a lot of years that we can streamline. That is going to help in our time management. A lot of things were done on paper so we are having a custom made database system and new accounting system built this year and a point of sale system for in the store. That is going to save a huge amount of time, which allows us then to concentrate on ways to get more people in the stands and those things that are important to us.”

One of the encouraging signs for the hockey club was 10 new members after the Broncos began to push to renew their membership after last season’s Meeting.

“One of the key pieces that we have identified if we are going to be viable is that we need to have a membership for the team and so the processes were put in place last year,” explained Choo- Foo. “It is $2,000 to have a membership of the Swift Current Broncos and 10 people came forward and bought those memberships. They will continue to be sold and we will likely be putting another push on for a membership drive later in the year.”

Choo-Foo said the majority of the new members are individuals rather than businesses. “That is really encouraging because those individuals obviously care about the

Shareholders team and probably support the team in many other ways.”

The meeting also marked the end of a long run for Ben Wiebe with the Board of Directors.

“I need to acknowledge that this marks the end of a very distinguished board member’s career as Ben Wiebe steps away from the organization,” said Choo-Foo.

“Ben will be a huge loss. But with that, the Board has been planning for succession in bringing on some newer members. As a result, the Board is generating more direction for the team and providing that oversight to our staff as we go forward on our strategic framework.”