Can We Capitalize?

Our board took this momentum and officially kick-started the dream.  We would put together a plan to have a 4-sheet dedicated club using the warehouse conversion model.

For those of you not familiar with this process, it is where you rent an industrial warehouse, and inside of that building you build your club.  You build a “temporary ice rink” like how they put a skating rink at Rockefeller Square in Manhattan.  This technique was developed originally by Stu Cohen and the Columbus Curling Club.  The advantage of this, is that by leasing the building, you can build your club for maybe $500K versus $1M+ for a ground up build.  Your structure is also portable, so if you outgrow the warehouse, you can uninstall the chiller, and move to a different location.

Anyway, we put together a plan to build our 4-sheet warehouse club and figured that we needed $300K-$400K to get started.  We might need some more to complete the project, but this was the “hurdle” that we needed to get over to get going.

At our Annual General Meeting, on June 2, 2018 in the spring of 2018, we officially started our first membership fundraising, asking our members to donate or loan money to the club to get over our $300K hurdle. The deadline to make a pledge was set for July 1, 2018, so it was a long month of fingers crossed waiting.