Skate School

Adding value is a way to increase revenue and provide for a need in the community.  Often times parents want their kids to be safe and have fun.  Providing a structured program of lessons and "camps" is one way to implement a program of skate school.  Taking a weekday and having lessons in the evenings, providing for younger kids to skate in the weekend mornings with instructors, scheduling a sign up for specific skill sessions like kick flips and ollies.  Designing a program that works for your population needs to be planned based off of conversations with customers.  Without their input on what works for them, you could make a lot of work for little reward.  These lessons and sessions are a good way to sell camps too.  Remember to add the little things that make these special like prizes and certificates and stickers.

Multi-use room?

They say that if you have space, something always fills it.  My garage is a good example of that, as I can't put the car in there anymore.  But what about the space you have that isn'g getting used in the skatepark.  If you have or can carve out some space with a temporary wall the space will be used and often it will generate revenue.  Many of the bounce houses and other kid friendly places around use party rooms to generate income.  These party rooms often are rented above and beyond the price of skating (or bouncing in the above scenario) and come with a food requirement too.  If you have a space that you can make comfortable with tables and chairs, this would be a perfect way of getting weekend and weekday traffic with groups.  Birthdays, meetings, specialty classes, card games, private areas during events, whatever you can think of, this space could serve many needs that you can also put a price on.  While some might be worth more (parties) others like card games and meetings can fill times during the days you don't have many customers.  So don't fill your room with junk and clutter, use it to make money and provide a good service for your clients.

Skatepark things parents want

Most for-profit skateparks understand that a significant part of their money comes from younger kids.  These kids are brought to the park by the parents or the neighbor and these adults need to be pleased in order to get them back.  Finding out what parents looking for in a skatepark isn't rocket science, and if you really want to know, ask them.  Here are a few things that parents expressed to me wanting for their children.

1. Safe and clean-  I talked with one park owner who said he never swept the course.  Parents want a safe clean environment for their kids.  When they come into the park they want to be able to watch their kid, understand that someone else is looking out for their safety, and not sit in a trashed place.  True, kids are tough on things, but this has to be part of what you are offering to the parents, a clean environment.  If you go to kid friendly places like those inflatable bounce houses or Chuck-E-Cheese's you see that the place is clean, orderly, not so comfy (easy to clean is often not comfortable), with people around to offer service.  This is a big cost of their business, keeping the place clean and staffed, but this is why parents go.  The bathrooms are clean too, and when a person comes in to your park, expect the bathrooms to be a selling point too especially if you are selling lots of soda and the people are there for several hours.  Don't cheap-out on maintenance of your bathrooms. Having a chart of cleaning can be a good way of looking at this (freeing up someone on weekends and busy vacation time is a good idea).  Safe and clean also refers to the way the place looks.  With bikes and boards bumping things, you might need to paint more frequently.  Putting plastic lumber up could be a way to keep the wooded areas from fraying.  You can also get sheets of plastic from farmtek.com  that are used to keep horses from destroying their stalls.  If a horse has a hard time kicking through this stuff, a deck or bike will too.  Small strips of this attached to key parts of waiting areas and ramp railings can keep your park looking good.  Sometimes older skaters smoke too.  If they do, don't let them hang in front of your door, designate a place to smoke that isn't the first thing that parents see when they come in.  In addition make sure that you inspect the parking lot frequently.  Sometimes people litter, and your lot can look really crappy quick.  Again, with older skaters, alcohol bottles sometimes are left in your lot as these skaters don't feel like driving around with empties in their car.  Clearly stating "no alcohol" is one deterrent, but in the end, you have to make sure that your lot is clean.
     Safe is also a matter of controlling flow.  If your park is too packed, value for the customer suffers.  Consider limits per session.  Make sure too that if you have people together, big people aren't bulling their way through.  Code of conduct is printed on the back of lift tickets to deal with aggressive skiing and address the idea that maybe everyone isn't as considerate of others as they need to be to prevent injury.  So posting a "code" can help remind people that you care and help you have conversations with some of the riders.  Keeping little kids safe can also mean having a "grom" or little kid session so that parents know that these kids have only little kids around them.  Public parks don't offer this, and it could be a real selling point for you.

2.  Affordable.  Not all parents are pinching pennies, but with multiple kids in a family, it becomes expensive quick to bring the family to the park.  Family membership rates is a start, loyalty punch cards, sibling discounts, car-load discounts on slower days, packages (lesson plus...), etc can help.  Don't give away the park by any means, but look at your pricing compared to other things the people can do.  Baby sitters (sometimes we feel like them don't we), go for $6-10 per hour, movies are $12+ now-a-days, lift tickets for skiing are $50+, entrance to bounce houses are $8+ depending on location.  Given this, ask yourself, how often do you need to get families in, how do you get the most from the kids that come too?  I have written about other ways of generating income other than entrances, so refer to those posts as you look at affordability.  Don't forget that you are looking at about 3% of the population, unlike movies and bounce houses, not every kid will be able or want to come to your park.  But you still are competing for the attention of these kids and their parents with the other things they could be doing.

3. Service.  Parents want the special things that a private park offers like supervision, answering questions via the phone and email, having people there for parties and lessons, having med kits, food, equipment, rental helmets, and the like.  Having a phone protocol is important, this is first face of the business.  Rude, impatient phone or in-person behavior will turn off some parents.  Make a clear effort to answer every email in a timely manner, as well as updating any websites, flyers, and other means of communication.  Having your staff off their own phones is necessary too.  Since you are paying them, they need to be working, not chatting.  Quick responses to things like spills, injuries, calling to follow up with rentals, sending membership letters every month, making the place clean, making things easy for the parents is key to your service.

In the end though why not ask people to fill out a survey?  See what you are doing well and where you need to improve.  Survey Monkey and poll everywhere are free and paper surveys are a fine way of getting feedback from parents as they sit looking for something to do while their kids are playing.

More Business Models for Skateparks

Some skateparks try to work like Golds Gym but they often don't go all the way.  Patrons pay a monthly fee, a membership, and skate when they want.  Unfortunately this model is not very successful for skateparks because of the high cost often asked for up front.  With a 12$ session fee versus a $50 monthly fee (I've seen more), kids, teens, adults and their parents are wary about how much they will use this service.  Unlike Golds Gym where anyone with a pulse can sign up, skateparks are in a smaller market to attract people to their service.  Because Golds Gym can get so many people in, and the industry has accepted their 25$ or so cost, they are able to make money with lower monthly premiums.  But in many ways, skateparks can operate like this too, it just takes someone to start.  First a park would have to eliminate sessions, and thus also eliminate $12 fees.  The only way you can get in the gym is pay the monthly fee, with a credit card.  If the market can support this idea, then the skatepark can run like a gym.  But since no parks are doing this now, an owner would take some risk to pull it off. Why?  Basically gym style pricing schemes would offer the skatepark more financial security because it collects money on a monthly recurring basis.  These memberships are tied to credit cards that are automatically charged each month.  So say that 500 members all pay $50 a month to skate for as much as they want, the skatepark is looking at a $25,000 revenue stream per month.  This revenue can be taxed differently too as it is not "entrance" fees which often are taxed like concert tickets.  Within this scenerio, planning becomes easier because revenues are relatively constant.  Added emphasis and efforts are given to keeping the membership going and happy.  I am sure a few parks out there would like to know that this sort of money was coming in monthly.  Even without food or other sales, revenue of $300k per year would be welcome in many parks.  So Golds Gym is not the worst way of looking at your business structure, but you should see what your market can take before you change your current park's finances.