Poor (pub) Performance Forces Pies To Adopt A New Gameplan
The Age
Tuesday April 22, 2008
UNABLE to attract an adequate offer to offload its loss-making hotel The Beach, Collingwood yesterday hired external management consultants to handle its pubs business.
It had been suggested the Magpies were confronting a financial loss this year on the basis of the poor-performing hotel, but club chief executive Gary Pert said that, on the contrary, they remained in the strongest financial health in their history, except for one loss-making pub.The club had received offers from five different consortiums to buy The Beach, in Albert Park, in a package with the profitable Diamond Creek Hotel but Pert said the offers were insufficient. Collingwood paid $7 million for The Beach and $7.5 million for the Diamond Creek Hotel.Pert said the club had only been interested in selling at an appropriate price, so the decision was made to remove the venues from sale, retain ownership and outsource management of the pubs to specialists.AFL figures released last month revealed that for its significant turnover, Collingwood showed a poor return."We have put a new external management team in to manage The Beach, the Diamond Creek Hotel and The Club. That contract was formally signed today with Seachange, so we think it best the club focus on its core business of football and let the external consultants focus on managing the pubs for us," Pert said."In essence, there are five venues in our portfolio and four of them are doing quite well but The Beach Hotel (is) dragging the profitability of the portfolio down."Operationally, Collingwood Football Club is in the best financial position it has ever been in if you look at the variables of cash in the bank, assets, membership . . . So we believe we are in a very healthy position." -- MICHAEL GLEESON
© 2008 The Age
