Ski Club of Great Britain Chief Exec resigns

A snowHead

What amazes me is why you need 32 full time employees to run a club of 30,000. What on earth do they all do ? Yes a couple of bods to run the website maybe, but the rest of them ? Anyone working for the Freshtacks side should be paid out of the Freshtracks income stream, and if that's not possible, don't subsidise, ditch it.

It's not as though SCGB actually does much for skiers any more. £50 + is a lot to pay for a few discounts and some uncompetitive insurance offerings, but I suppose that's whats needed to pay all those salaries. No wonder it's in such trouble, rather than smell the coffee and slim down drastically, it's 'sell the buildings and keep this gravy train running'.

A snowHead

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

The problem with these juicy "blood on the carpet" cases is that only the people on the inside can actually have any sort of fact-based view of what has happened, and even then they typically don't agree on what happened and why. When someone is ejected from an organisation, it can be for many reasons including being an obstreperous grumpy old man or for asking awkward questions. When a director disagrees with the rest of the board, it can be because the board are all heading in an undesirable direction and only one person can see it and speaks out, or it could be that the board is almost unanimously in agreement and the one hold-out just refuses to have any of it. There are two sides to all coins (unless of course it is a Ningi), and none of us can really know the truth at this point.

Over time there will come to be a perceived truth, and that will be agreed by the majority. There will probably be some who disagree, and continue to do so until their dying breath, and only time will tell whether they had a valid point or not. As the SCGB has discovered to its cost, member organisations don't necessarily get the right people volunteering to be part of its management, and most of them come with their own personal agendas and preconceptions which they then struggle to put aside for the benefit of the organisation as a whole.

Question: why does a membership organisation with an uncertain number (probably less than 20000) of members need a CEO, Finance Director, management accountant, 7 people in marketing & communications, 4 people in Operations, 6 people in "Product and Sales", and only 2 people responsible for Membership?
Answer: because it is a commercial business masquerading as a membership organisation

Question: why does it have an elected chairman, elected Treasurer (despite 2 finance staff), and elected council members then? What power do they have?
Answer: to maintain the fiction that it is a membership organisation, and to hire and fire CEOs on an annual basis

Having said all that, the whole thing is a most unedifying mess, and were I still a member (03-05) I would be very concerned by everything that has happened and everything that is happening now, and I'd be demanding to know what was going on and when it could all be opened up to member scrutiny.

And therein lies the rub - the SCGB has access to the mailing lists (however inaccurate they appear to be) and can send out their version of the story, while those in the wilderness can do nothing except take to social media and hope that those interested will find their version. If this forum didn't exist, there'd be nowhere for @pisteoff to make their point, unless of course SCGB had a functioning member forum which all members, including those whose director's position was terminated, had access to - and that in itself says much about the problems that the organisation faces.

Oh, and a £450K website that still lists the previous chair, CEO and treasurer at https://www.skiclub.co.uk/about-the-ski-club/ski-club-council-and-staff surely has to ring some alarm bells about how it is managed - yes, I know it is not linked from any of the menus, but Google still has it indexed and the server still serves up that link and something should have been done about it long before now with either a page edit or a redirect to the current page. While Gerry is busy kicking some bottom to get that resolved, he might also ask why a search for "ian holt" on the site gives me a link to the Council page where neither "Ian" nor "Holt" appears anywhere on the page. Does anyone in the Communications & Social Media team actually understand how to manage the site, and how the search index is updated?

Finally, in appearing in public and saying "I am a council member of the SCGB", those in that position should be aware that they are very much the public face of the organisation. I have not met any of the protagonists in this case, but from their forum persona on here to date one appears to be aggrieved but prepared to state their case and provide their version of events in what appears to be a calm and rational way. For that, I'm prepared to listen and take it at face value until shown otherwise.

The other comes across as the sort of person you see waving their arms about at the other end of the bar, hear unwillingly for a few excruciating minutes, and then avoid by retiring to the back room for the rest of the evening. If anyone remembers those days...

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@ousekjarr, Sounds about right.

What's required is a third party candidate to work for the long term interests of the organisation, without favour to insiders.

David Goldsmith, your time has come. You are their final hope.

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F*ck hope

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@ousekjarr, the website is badly broken. This has been explained on here many times. Its value has even been written off in the accounts.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

After all it is free

To @pisteoff 's credit, he did something that strikes me as rare for the SCGB - he asked on here, of both members and non-members, what they wanted from the club.

@Gerry - what do you think the members and potential members want, and how have you and the committee come to that conclusion?

(and, since you highlighted that @pisteoff refused to change his mind when a decision had already been made, is repping/leading now off the table, or is it ok to keep arguing over that decision?)

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@Gerry, if the website is badly broken, just how urgent is it to fix it? What progress has been made on that, who is doing it, and when will it be fixed?

I note you didn't challenge the membership figure I suggested - how many members are there really, and how many of those are just too senile to have cancelled their direct debit?

The "deals" which the scgb has leveraged for its members include:

1. Insurance which is more expensive than competitors and which seems less useful to the primary target demographic of ageing people with underlying health conditions which I believe still accounts for much of your membership (62% are over 45, 38% over 55 and 13% over 65 according to your 2018 annual report - couldn't find the 2019 annual report for comparison, has that fallen down a black hole?)

2. Discounts on products which are of limited use, and which I can typically get from signing up to their mailing list or after buying a single item from them, or which reflect the published price when the reality is anyone who asks immediately gets a 10% discount because no-one pays list

3. Ski holidays which are 25% more expensive than the equivalents from other providers, many of whom get much better reviews than yours. Why exactly did you run heliski trips for a total of 42 people in 2018? What was the profit on those trips? Or were they heavily subsidised for the insiders in the know when 99% of your membership aren't interested?

None of this is a problem for me, as I'm not a member. It's a problem for you, because you are and have become a council member, and more importantly, because I am not - by all rights, I should be your perfect member. I'm over 50, ski 3+ weeks per year, I can afford the membership and the ski holidays you are selling, and I'm in your magic quadrant where most (52.5% - 2018 figure again) of your membership comes from (home counties and East Anglia apparently, though your map has no regional boundaries and so it looks like the London-centred figure could represent everything south of Birmingham and east of Exeter).

I'm not suggesting that SCGB makes all its employees redundant and operates purely on voluntary effort. But I am suggesting that it either needs to become a business with shareholders and no council, or a membership organisation with a very slim staff managing membership and services, and not both. If there is demand for holidays, contract it out to the experts who do it already. Negotiate a discount for members and then sell those places to members at cost (SCGB cost, not TO cost) and if that's still cheaper than going direct then it is commercially viable. If not, give up on trying to become a cross between Crystal and Saga.

The whole organisation probably needs no more than 8 staff in total, with IT, HR and finance contracted out at a day per week to keep everything ticking over, and an IT-literate and finance-literate MD paid £80K per year to run what's left on the basis that they spend at least 30 days over a 3 month period per season touring the Alps in budget or resort-subsidised accommodation, pressing the flesh and talking to and skiing with members and reps and I'd take that job in seconds. £200K package? What is this, a company with a £5m profit on £25m turnover? I think your entire organisation needs to look at https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Chief_Executive_Officer_(CEO)/Salary (including the 40% uplift for London) and then decide whether a membership organisation with a niche requirement which really shouldn't be all that challenging really needs to be paying anything like that. This is an organisation with a £6m turnover which gets around £1m in membership fees every year for minimal effort - on that basis, you really have to try hard to lose money, and yet the recent regime succeeded spectacularly.

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@ousekjarr,

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Many thanks, ousekjarr, for all your suggestions and perfectly valid questions. I wish I as a very worried member of SCGB had thought of them.

@Gerry, when you stop listening to feedback, you reinforce your preconceptions and you fail to learn why it is that the membership figures are dropping. Read it all - reject what you can disprove, and disprove it in public if you can. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

This is an organisation that I really don't care about, and don't miss - but you've dragged it into the daylight and are then objecting that people are looking at it.

Let me rephrase my question - what percentage of your members aged 65+ have taken you up on any service (insurance, ILG, rep service outside of France, or discounts) in the last year? More than 10%, or less?

You know it makes sense.

As for the tantrums, I hope someone had a quiet word of warning about unacceptable behaviour before pisteoff was ejected in such an extraordinary fashion.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

A snowHead

@ousekjarr, +1 for your summary above. My thoughts (also as a non-member who ought to be a prime SCGB target) are similar.

The one thing I would add is that it really shouldn't be necessary for a membership organisation to still be based in London. Much cheaper, for both wage and office costs, to be based elsewhere.

A snowHead

@ecureuil, not so good for invitation drinks and nibbles with the core membership if they're inside the M25 or spread down the M2 when the office is in Sheffield

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

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To me it seems that one of the main aims of the Council is to preserve and promote the Reps’ gigs, most if not all of the Council being Reps. Now that the raison d'être of the Reps as was, ie to lead groups of skiers on and off piste has all but disappeared the whole model falls apart. You can’t justify the need for a two-week training course plus refreshers in order to be a back marker to a qualified guide on Freshtracks holidays. I believe the Freshtracks package works well but it now seems to be supporting the club rather than the other way round. The club needs to recognise this change and adapt in order to survive

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They don’t own any infrastructure do they ? If they had a ski chalet on the slopes, or operated some ski lifts Or even had a successful ski forum (!) they would have a product to sell. What are they offering?

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

They do lease chalets in Flaine and Chamonix, but purely for Freshtracks

After all it is free

@ousekjarr many good points there.

Perhaps DG had the best interests of the organisation and members at heart when he spent years banging on about "Gravy Trains".

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@Gerry, so rather than coming across as a reactionary troll or pub loudmouth why not let your grown up human side out?

You're clearly jealous that sHs has built such a community without the infrastructure and resources of the SCGB, but I'm sure you can move past that. The last couple of pages have seen a number of people saying they are fallinto the SCGB's core over 50s demographic with money in their pocket and a love of skiing.

Yet no one can see a compelling reason to join the SCGB. What realistically is going to happen as your older members age out or just cancel DDs? How are you personally stopping the rot?

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...and where's the SCGB plan to engage with the non-member community in order to sell them on the benefits of membership? All we ever see here are people bickering over leaders, or in Gerry's case, resolutely playing the man instead of the ball when there's an open goal in front of him. On here, the SCGB has a captive audience that it would love to convert into members (presumably - there's still some sense that we may not be the "right sort" of people), and yet there is no engagement, and those who appear here are either telling us how chaotic it is and how unfair it was that they were elected and then booted out, or they're spending their time alienating the very people they should be courting.

What Gerry has totally failed to grasp is that Snowheads is a priceless resource for the SCGB. Yes, we can be cynical, distrusting, blind to what the SCGB can offer us, and argumentative - but that makes us exactly like many of the existing SCGB members, and yet we've either consciously decided not to join, or have never actually given it any thought as it seems irrelevant. This forum should tell SCGB what a hundred expensive and consultant-led focus groups cannot - where some (not all, by any means) of the problems lie in terms of membership recruitment, and what the SCGB should be doing about it. The SCGB has had an image problem for 20 years, has had declining membership for most of that time, and yet it continues to deny that either problem exists. To fix a problem, first admit that you made a mistake.

But you provide feedback, and you get insults in return. That's a great way to treat the people that you _need_ (not want, but need for survival)... rolling eyes

If I was on the council of the SCGB, the first thing I'd be pushing is a code of conduct for council members, which would include the concept of bringing the SCGB into disrepute by ill-considered contributions to social media and other Internet sites. Then once Gerry was gone, the more pressing issues could maybe be outlined and addressed rather than all of the energy going into personal feuds.

No wonder there has been a revolving door of CEOs if this is what they have to cope with on a daily basis.

You know it makes sense.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

@Alastair Pink, Couldn't agree more, I'm also a former member who sees no reason to still be a member.

A snowHead

This whole thread covered the what would make you join SCGB logic - perhaps summed up most aptly by @sproggski in his post. Now that's 7 months ago and SCGB now seems intent on making itself less attractive/transparent/open to all....

https://snowheads.com/ski-forum/viewtopic.php?t=149345&start=120

A snowHead

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

@davidof, not censorship as such - but making it clear to people that if they identify themselves as representing the SCGB on a public forum, they behave appropriately. With authority comes responsibility - if I claimed to be employed as a governor by the BBC (I'm not wink

) and then proceeded to tell the world that Boris Johnson is a true folk hero and all of the lefty snowflakes really need to wind their necks in and get a life rather than listening to all of the fake news on Facebook, I would expect to be censured and told in no uncertain terms that this was unacceptable behaviour.

On a forum which doesn't require real names, it is easy to run two profiles - one for personal views which is not identifiable as being for the same person who posts from a second profile as an elected council member of the SCGB.

If I was a director in a public relations company with you, and I spent all of my time insulting potential customers and complaining about your performance while wearing the company uniform, would you fire me?

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You can tell a lot about an organisation with how they present themselves publicly.

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Folks, love it or hate it, its finished. No ski leading equates to no core activity!
Ps I've found the Swiss Alpine Club to be extremely welcoming...another thread another time

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to be clear - coming on here and saying "I'm a SCGB council member and I'm concerned about the governance of the club - here are the details" is probably ill-advised unless there is no alternative (whistleblower level rather than normal whinging), but in extremis I see no problem with it. Doing so on the SCGB forum to members only is different, and should always be possible.

Coming on here and saying "I'm a SCGB council member and I'm tired of all the lefty Remoaner bedwetters and now it's my turn to kick some arse" would be a firing offence in a company.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

For some reason I always imagine Gerry in this Murdoch cartoon

https://i.redd.it/qciec4iuep841.jpg

After all it is free

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Clearly, skiing is dog eat dog, just like so many other hobbies.

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Ski Club of Great Britain Chief Exec resigns

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