Toastmasters Hsinchu: from ashes to phoenix part V

The move
My term as the president finally came to an end in June of 2002. Even though I was able to hand over the club to Paul Chang, he accepted the post of the presidency reluctantly. Fortunately, the reluctance was short lived. Paul’s first decision was to move the club out of the Science Park. We found a small conference room in the Empire Building with capacity of 14 and with a little push, we could cramp 20. The move put us in deficit of $3,000 a month. If nothing improved, we would run out money in less than 2 years.

The venue was clean and well lit. It had a big U shaped table where members could see each other during the meeting. The new location attracted a variety of people from all works of life. We started to see participation from students, teachers, insurance agents, business people, salespersons, and homemakers. Before we knew it, we started to run into space problem. We quickly moved to a bigger place on the 6th floor with a meeting capacity of 60. But the venue cost us $5,000 a month. This time, if nothing improved, we would run out of money in about 14 months

The breakeven analysis
The formula was simple; we needed 36 members to break even, which meant any extra cost would have to come out of the club treasury; we needed extra source of income. After a heated debate, we came up with the following ideas
1. Increase the annual membership fees from $1800 to $2400 paid in full and none refundable
2. Charge a fee at $100 per guest
3. Sign a longer lease and bargain for a discount
The fee increase cost us 8 members, but the newer members didn’t seem to mind. Guests were happy to pay the fees. We got a 10% discount by committing our club on an annual lease. The combined effects reduced our breakeven point down to 30.

The Business News Weekly
The president of ChungLi Chinese Toastmasters club which I helped to sponsor was a personal friend of the formal vice president Annette Lu. It was through her connection, the district office was able to invite Ms. Lu as a guest speaker in the Spring Convention 2002. As a result, Toastmaster was written as a featured article in the Business News Weekly along with interviews on several prominent Toastmasters.

eMarketing finally paid off
If you were to use “Toastmasters” as a keyword to search for the district website in Google or Yahoo! at that time, Toastmasters Hsinchu would come up at the top 3 listings. Needless to say, we were flooded with inquiries and from that day on we never had a meeting without guests. Membership stood at steady 35+. Monetary problem was no longer a treat but the thing of the past.

If you were to attend a Hsinchu club meeting today, you never would have guessed that the club had gone through so much hardship in the past. But much of its success came from all the successive presidents, each brought with them a brand of leadership that made what it is today. After all, Toastmasters is where leaders are made.