Pies Adopt New Game Plan After Another Loss
The Age
Tuesday April 22, 2008
UNABLE to attract an adequate offer to off-load its loss-making hotel The Beach, Collingwood yesterday hired external management consultants to handle its pubs business.
The Magpies had been touted to be 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, Collingwood remained in the strongest financial health in its history, except for one loss-making pub.The club had received offers from five different consortiums to buy The Beach 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."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," Pert said. -- MICHAEL GLEESON
© 2008 The Age
