More Perks with BG Membership
2023 is here and we wish everyone a happy new year! We are extremely grateful for each and everyone of you who have supported us during the difficult past two years!
In this post, we are extremely excited to share with you our achievements in 2022, our broad plans moving forward, and our pricing updates.
Achievements
First up, let us take a moment to appreciate the BG team (I call them my BG Family sometimes!) behind the scenes for working tirelessly, often going overtime and taking tons of initiatives to help ensure a smooth reopening in 2022! I could not be prouder of what they have done!
In June, we reopened our very first group class after a 2 year break. By the end of the year, we had over 10 weekly group classes, serving more than 100 students weekly!
Here are some of the other amazing feats the team has done
✓ Ran over 2000 sessions
✓ Redesigned our logo and branding brief
✓ Successful onboarding of 500 members on our MVP app
And we are only getting quicker with our updates! In fact, the team wants to take BG to the next level!
Upcoming Milestones/Plans
Our goal is to be the most flexible and a science-backed place to effectively learn and safely enjoy badminton. Here are some of the milestones we hope to strive towards this year.
✯ Publish our own app on the app store
✯ Redefining learning – through the use of e-learning & progression metrics
✢ Allows Students to see their progress & development roadmap
✢ Enables students to set SMART goals and self learning effectively
✢ Creating a sense of community with our academy branded products, started with our shirts
✢ Quality training equipment – guides & quality training tools to minimize injuries and maximize training effectiveness
✯ Playing groups – part of BG for life
✯ In the distant future, we hope to have our very own badminton hall – by badminton players for badminton players. Hopefully we can afford a hall that’s not rushed and made to squeeze every dollar by cramping courts side by side unsafely, or has terrible customer service.
In order to make this work, we need your support! And we want to make it a win-win for both you and us. We want to rework the pricing system – reducing our prices & introduce a compulsory membership system and use that to fund our projects.
Membership Perks & Costs
BG membership costs
✓ All class types will be reduced by $20! (Group and Private!)
✓ Free shirts & progression booklet with video guides
✓ 12 free playing group credits to encourage students to not just learn, but to play and
✓ Get access to our spare courts for the community! No more rushing to book courts on the dot, now with spare courts, you can organize your own games and training sessions with us!
Early Bird Special
★ Allow first year members to redeem our membership (pro-rated) to group class credits at $20 per hour
★ Free 2 group class credits (Worth $40)
Existing Students
Non-member Price Revision
We will be increasing our non-members pricing to $25 per hour for group classes, and an additional $20 across all private class packages.
All prices will be reflected on ‘Our Services’ section to reflect the changes.
Why Launch a Membership?
We hope to be transparent in our reasons for creating student membership to build your trust in us. As our team wants to bring BG to the next level through many bigger and first-of-a-kind projects, it has been a dilemma to lower costs while trying to pursuing expense heavy projects. We have been working closely with many esteemed mentors and potential investors on ways we can manage growth sustainably.
After multiple brainstorming sessions and testing, we found membership to be a win-win-win for students, our coaches and the business.
1) Putting a price on Flexibility
By putting a price on flexibility, we can provide cheaper classes to our regular students, and yet still make classes very attractive for ad-hoc, impromptu students.The biggest unpredictable costs to us has been providing flexibility for our students. Our small group classes loses money whenever only 1 or 2 students signs up, even after including our single sign up policy.
This is often the case during season work peak for adults (e.g Big 4 employees), seasonal festivities like CNY or exams period for kids. There has been multiple instances where our class had 6 sign ups for 1 week, then having 1 sign up the week after.
With membership, we can discount our regular students, and use the membership fee to support lower attendance classes and open more new classes for ad hoc students to choose from.
2) Creating an Inclusive Badminton Community
Ever since the Covid-19 reopening, the winning of the world title by Kean Yew, badminton courts have become even harder to book than ever before. We can no longer have a single parent or coach successfully booking courts regularly during peak hours. Instead, we now need multiple people trying to book for a single court in order to ensure regular sessions.
This leads to the problem of often getting multiple courts for the same class, and frantically trying to let go of these valuable courts. In the last quarter of 2022, we wasted approximately $4000 worth of badminton courts, courts that was not used by anyone.
So we decided to run playing groups to recycle these courts, and wanted a scheme to encourage all students to join these sessions.
With membership providing free credits, this encourages students to not only train, but use the knowledge learnt to play. By providing access to these courts, we also hope to incentivize our students to organize more badminton games with the given spare courts for everyone (Even those not in BG!) to join. Games by our students for everyone to join!
3) Operational Certainty
Badminton training is a seasonal business, this means that there are months of extremely lows, such as the months nearing examination period, major sporting events that would close majority of the badminton halls such as the World Cup in 2022. This meant that in anticipation of these projects, we often have to pause/cut projects funding and support for a month or two per year in order to focus on preserving cash during these low seasons. By having memberships, we now have a better ability to support coaches during this tough times and push important projects to completion.
This means quicker updates and benefits for students, and a more stable income for our coaches!
4) Funding Big Projects
We needed a means of raising capital to fund big projects, projects such as building a badminton hall. Big projects take months and hundreds of thousands in investment to support. By having every student contribute a small portion makes a massive difference in bringing forward our timeline for big projects. This would mean more value for you sooner!
If you know of any landlords that is keen in building a badminton hall, let us know! (We’re always interested!)
5) Giving value back
Value always wins! One of our option was to ask for a donation, but we coaches felt that by providing value and explaining ourselves clearer, a value for money service would likely get a better support, be more sustainable in raising capital, and a win-win-win for everyone!
I hope that this update is exciting to everyone of you! And if you have any questions, please feel free to our BG team and we would gladly assist you in getting started!
This is Gerald signing off to a smashing 2023!
