Appendix 2

The Section Chairman has asked me to draw attention to Appendix 2 of the "Precis minutes of a meeting of the directors of the VMCC Ltd held on Wednesday 25th October 2017 at Allen House, Burton on Trent, Staffordshire, at 11.00 am."

Chairman Mick writes: Following an email from Matt Swindlehurst our area rep can you draw members attention to these minutes in particular appendix 2 on the VMCC web site members area if they have not already seen this.
  Regards, Mick

Appendix 2:

To move or Not?

Should we move from Allen House?  This has been a great debate in our club this last year and I am writing to tell you the reasons why your committee feel the need is now right to perhaps move on.

 

History: Firstly Allen House was possibly bought for the wrong reasons. At the time we were offered the chance to buy Cadwell Park race track for £ 250,000 and we turned it down. The committee at the time wanted to build something "specific to our needs" apparently. The person offering us Cadwell Park was a friend of the club and was offering it us at a cut price. When we refused it, he sold it for double. The last time it changed hands it was in the millions. We subsequently spent £250,000 building Allen House and a recent valuation pitched its value at £230,000....£20,000 less than it actually cost us to build in 1981.The place has 2,400 sq ft in total. It was soon realised that we were out of space and so we decided to rent the building next door which we call the annexe. That is 1,200 sq ft so exactly half the size. The rent was £ 10,000 per annum. The building was in a poor condition so we invested around £70,000 into improving someone else's property, massively boosting its value, and then later decided to spend £140,000 buying it. With the rent we have handed over, those 1,200 sq ft have cost this club a cool quarter of a million pounds and no one has batted an eyelid!

The Present: So we are where we are but what have we ended up with? Well Allen House is basically an office block which is poorly located on a busy main road that passes through an industrial estate in Burton Upon Trent. It has double yellow lines outside and extremely limited parking, meaning that when we have deliveries, the drivers are usually half on the pavement and half on a busy main road. Not ideal. In terms of parking, when all the staff and volunteers are in, there is not sufficient parking spaces for them alone, leaving zero for visitors. There is no sign that passing motorists can read and no indication that we are open to the public what so ever. The 3,600 sq ft might sound like a lot, but take out the dead or non-working space...that's partition walls, reception area, male and female toilets, corridors, two stair wells, the kitchen, the door swing spaces, the fire exits that must be kept clear, arguably the garage and you are left with sub 3,000 sq ft and probably more like 2,500 sq ft of workable space. That space is also not very well planned because the floors were not strengthened at the design phase and the annexe was an afterthought, an add on....so you cannot stand up in the top floor of the annexe if you are six foot as you are hitting your head on the ceiling, and the upper floors must have the middle of the rooms kept clear of weight as they cannot take the strain. When we had a lot of magazines in the loft, the roof was bowing in, and the middle floor has all the weight against the walls, reducing the working space further. Add to that the fact that we have been putting stuff in the place since 1981, and you start to realise that the place is packed. Indeed, we are at a tipping point. If someone were to roll up now with either a van load of bikes or spares or even books to donate, then I am afraid that regardless of value, we might be turning them away because we physically could not take them in. The reason we have bikes in long term ownership with members is that we don't have the space for them. If we had to recall all our bikes for an audit, some of them would be stood outside in the yard? In real terms....if you live in a fair size detached house....then you have probably got the equivalent space that we have. Now try to imagine up to ten staff and as many volunteers working in that space, plus having thirty six years of stuff crammed into it...then you start to get the picture here.

Business: From a business perspective, it has long being recognised that the building is now the limiting factor. A recent library report from an expert designed to tell us the latest techniques and plan our future, spent some time quoting health and safety because he was so concerned at what he found. Isles blocked by box's, shelves bowing under weight, heavy box's on top of filing cabinets etc. As a result we have had to attend to those issues first and we have piles of box's of un-sorted materials because the librarians have simply nowhere to spread the stuff out to sort it. Previous committees have debated the issue, going back the last twenty years at least. Report after report by people who have been close to the business have come to the same conclusion and advised moving on, including recently myself, Brian Southam, your current president, the last Chairman and so on. For the business to proceed and expand we need more space. A site that would allow the library to expand would help and also would allow better access to it. It would allow us to hold better stock, and to showcase what we already own. Basically the place is packed with bikes and memorabilia but unless we take it somewhere it is never seen. Yet when we do take stuff out, like at our training days for example, these are the best recruitment tools we have. We should have a more welcoming place that would allow the business to expand. One example might be to have an in house Insurance broker to handle our enquiries. Perhaps that is something our existing insurer could supply, and they could then really expand our offering, but at present where would we put that person? We have ideas about helping members sell their bikes.....but how could we do that where we are? We want to alter retail......but most do not realise that retail is only in its present format because of the constraints of the present building.

 

New Property: We have had two attempts this year at viewing new places. Whilst neither were ideal, they both had things to offer. Shobnall Street was 12,000 sq ft sat on an acre and a quarter. That had decent parking, loading / storage facilities and its own canteen. Furthermore it was located in the area where the town seems to have concentrated its leisure facilities, so it was opposite a marina that had a cafe / restaurant and at the top of the road was the towns sports hall and playing fields, which are often hired out for events. Both of these neighbouring facilities might have been useful to us in the longer term.

 

Gibson House is 7000 sq ft with 60+ car parking spaces but was more of an investment opportunity. It is the key building on the biggest antique centre in Western Europe and had space enough left over which would have allowed us to have a small retail outlet in the back of the place and to move all our long term storage stuff up there. That would have appealed to an already enthusiastic set of buyers all year long and raised our profile whilst paying us rent at the same time, plus by a twist of fate it's potential for future capital value growth looks good due to the local authority planning to invest heavily in the area. We could have then re-configured Allen House to try to make it more user friendly. Neither was perfect, but then we don't have the budget for perfection.

Both of these attempts have provided us with strong learning curves, and we continue to watch the market carefully. Some say that we should actually specify what we want before looking and that you should provide a costed business case for what new facilities you will offer. Both of the above showed us that they offered us outside opportunities that we cannot plan for simply because they had other businesses and facilities close at hand. At Gibson House for example, there would have been no point us offering any sort of refreshments to visitors because that was already well catered for by the fact that it is surrounded by cafes quite literally? At Shobnall Street, we could see potential for the leisure facilities that it butted up to. Not stuff that you would necessarily put in a business plan because we have nocontrol over what our future potential neighbours might be doing but your immediate surroundings can have an effect on the services you then choose to offer.  

Timing: The concept of a move is not new. Committees have discussed it for twenty years, but no one has grasped the nettle and done it. The annexe was an attempt to solve the problem, but I am afraid that it has only helped for a while. In December 2015 Peter Miller and Tim Penn visited Bicester Heritage centre to look at the feasibility of moving there. This is an old airfield which now has classic cars, planes, steam engines and so forth all together in one venue. This was only rejected as they would not sell us anything and the rents were excessive, yet had we jumped in earlier, the result would have been much different. I believe this made the minutes, but I think it is fair to say that the majority of members are completely unaware of this earlier attempt. Never the less, attempts or shall we say "investigatory field trips" like this have been going on for quite some time.

 

Alternatives: Previously you might argue that we did not have the funds to move. We have now been left a legacy with the instruction to invest it wisely for the long term future of the club. Bricks and mortar seem to be the obvious solution. We have had other suggestions put forward, like the recent one to buy every section two motorcycles. Lovely idea, but practically useless. The insurance, ownership and maintenance considerations alone are a nightmare. Who would pay all the inevitable speeding and parking fines ? The cost of supplying one hundred and seventy plus bikes at an average of the suggested £ 2,000 a piece is a £ 350,000 suggestion, and you don't get much in classic terms for £ 2,000 so who is going to fix them up ? Also, when the inevitable accident happens...in this litigious society we live in today, then who would the victim be looking to take to court ? You guessed it....the club of course. Also how does that actually benefit the 80% of our members who don't engage with the club? It can only benefit the small minority who attend local groups, so how is that fair to the far wider majority? No, I am afraid that is a lovely suggestion, well meant, but near on practically useless.

 

When you concentrate on the concept of investing for the long term for the benefit of the club as a whole in general, then the number of practical choices you are left with is extremely limited, and when we have such an obvious business need, then it does not take too long to work out the preferred solution.

 

Previous warnings: Anybody reading the online chairman's chats from the last few years from Pat Rowbotham and from Peter Miller will pick up a constant and similar thread. Both warn about the need to spread our wings and find other streams of income pretty consistently. This is perfectly true and a theme that goes back a lot longer than the last few years. This can be picked up in the minutes of committee meetings for the better part of the last twenty years. So how can that be wrong? For so many intelligent people to reach the same conclusion constantly........makes you think. Indeed, it was these same thoughts that saw the club employing James Hewing with the brief of expanding our operation. In the circumstances one might argue that he did a remarkable job. The message is there for anybody to read, loud and clear.

 

Consultation: Should we consult the members: yes and no.

Yes: Everybody has a right to have their say, the forum allows that, the magazine allows that, the questionnaire in the magazine is aimed at that, Rod Hann asked everybody he met for the last two years and toured around extensively to ask just that, John Bottomley's report asked what everybody thought and so on.

No: Peter Miller in his Chairman's chat hit a point when he said that we have an aging membership that is resistant to change. Therefore if we ask the membership for permission to change anything then 90 % of the time we are going to get a negative answer back regardless of how good that change might feasibly be. The very recent Magazine switch this year is a prime example of that since I had people telling me quite forcefully to leave the magazine alone. I had dire warnings that we would be flooded with complaints and that the members would revolt and leave in droves. Guess what ? We have not received a single formal complaint to date and no one has left and said they are leaving because of the magazine change. In fact we see it as our greatest success this year and the best potential recruiting tool we have. Yet if it had been put to a vote, the chances are that we would have received a negative back as people are naturally resistant to change.

 

There is also the fact that approximately 80% of our members never engage with the club or tell us what they want. This is therefore like a massive proxy vote. They have voted us in to make those decisions for them and most of them do not care enough to either vote otherwise or even voice their opinion. That is why you have a managing committee, to get on and make decisions for you. Otherwise what is the point in having a committee?

There is also cost and timing issues. To have a national vote, organise the voting slips, pay for the return postage etc....would take upwards of three months and could cost up to £ 10,000 a time. Why would we as a small business wish to voluntarily burden ourselves with that ?

 

Finally, there is no way we can ask the members about individual premises decisions. The way certain members acted towards Shobnall Street demonstrates that, and a vendor is hardly likely to want to wait for a national bike club to debate their premises. In terms of Gibson House there was confidentiality issues as that was a live business with sitting tenants. Plus we have the forum. Some of our members are negative about everything we say or do. Should we announce that we are looking at a certain premises some of those negative members go into overdrive and criticise the place regardless of its merits, colouring the debate negatively. Indeed, one only has to think of the club being homeless or back to working out of volunteers houses, and think what the reaction would be if I was now to propose spending around half a million pounds buying Allen house.....because that is what we have actually done. I wonder what the critics would make of that as a suggestion ?

 

Vision: The staff at Allen House have come to accept the idea of a move is a good one, so have the committee and the majority of volunteers. Many members can see it is time to move on, and in simple terms, we have outgrown the place. It has being a great place as an admin centre for the last thirty six years, but we wish to do more and offer more and grow to survive. We now have the capital to do so, and we now have the membership and business that can support such an expansion. The market in classic motorcycles and their underlying value has changed exponentially in the last thirty six years and this is now a major leisure pursuit with serious players galore. The club can position itself as the premier club and the first port of call in future for all sorts of information. We could perhaps work with solicitors to value estates that contain vintage machines, and perhaps offer our own rally site as examples. We should encourage visitors and be more open to the public, so that we can take more money off non-members and convert them into being members. The time is right now for us to move on.

 

At the last committee meeting on the 25th of October, it was agreed that I would try to write something to explain the situation better for the members. Given that this is far too long and in depth for the journal, I shall release this as an appendix to the minutes, put it on the forum as a discussion document and send it to all section secretaries for release. It will not reach every single member, but the message will get out. In the December issue a questionnaire is available seeking your opinions. I am putting this out by way of explanation regarding the property debate. Some of you will be aware of this information but many of you will not. Many will not be aware for example that a vote to move was actually taken by the Directors last June and is on the first page of the minutes, or that exactly one year later a second vote was taken by the committee, again in the June minutes about the concept of a move, which was again carried by a majority. The only difference this time was that it was subject to informing the members more about the reasons why we would want to move. Both votes were carried by strong majorities because those people who are close to the centre of the debate can see the logic involved.

 

Some might question if you even care about a move since you do not visit Allen House personally. Well Allen House or the business centre is crucial to the club for many reasons, and allowing that to grow, to offer more services and to improve our outlook to none members is one of the keys to this clubs future survival. Therefore I encourage you to respond positively to that question because the issue is not going away and next year will come up again and again and again, until such times as the problem is solved.

 

Conclusions: We must learn lessons from our own historical experiences. It would be a great shame to waste the Cobbing legacy like some previous legacies perhaps have been. It would be a shame to throw away golden opportunities like the ones we have been offered in the past such as the race track. By being in business you are constantly offered opportunities, and you have no idea what they might be or when they will come, but in future, we must be alive to the possibilities. The building we have is now too small for our needs, and we wish to grow positively forward and to engage more with non-members to take more money from non-members and to convert them over to being members. Our club has the greatest assets of any club, it has size, history, depth, great resources and a supportive membership so let us move on and grow that positively for the future. I am advised that Allen House is worth around £ 350,000 commercially, which includes the annexe of course. With our current budget, and perhaps the value of Allen House included, then we do have the resources now to move on. We should grasp the nettle and make it happen. That is my key aim for next season and that is where I intend to take the club with your kind permission of course.

 

This will be released as an appendix to the next minutes along with John Donaldson's concept paper which examines our needs perhaps a little more scientifically than I have done here. This paper represents a brief summary of our situation and my thoughts, but is backed by numerous historical reports as mentioned above. Any member wishing to discuss or debate the paper above is welcome to do so on the forum, at the committee, at the AGM or by ringing me personally should they wish, or of course by speaking to any director of this esteemed club. This is a live debate and a very crucial one. My number is 01246 411977. I am happy to talk to any member personally and any member is very welcome at Allen House at any time to look into the situation for themselves.

Rob Reaney.

VMCC Chairman. 15.11.2017