Our club is on a rapid evolutionary path

Things were going fine for us at the gym we had moved into earlier in the year. The location was acceptable to our members, the mat area was big and the mats were thick enough to absorb the impact of throws. And the gym was able to accommodate our time slot needs. Things seemed ideal and we were counting on this to last for a long, long time.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end. I've always knew that to be true. I just didn't expect our stint at that gym to end so quickly. It turns out when their lease ended the gym management decided to move to a new place. The new premises didn't work out for us. So, now we are looking at moving into a new place.

Finding another gym to house the club is not an easy thing because of the four key criteria that we had: central location, decent size mat area, suitably thick mats, available time slots.

Realizing that it's close to impossible to find a place that can fulfill all four criteria, I decided to bite the bullet, buy our own mats and rent an empty space somewhere to hold our judo practice. I even considered renting a shop lot but that would be quite wasteful because we only need to use the place for a few hours per week. It made much more sense to rent some slots at a yoga or dance studio. Unlike gyms whose peak period is 7 to 10pm, some studios have empty slots in the evenings.

There are a lot of challenges involved with this new approach. Renting time in a studio and supplying our own mats will require some up-front capital. Plus, whenever you move location, there are bound to be a few drop-outs among your members.

But every move is a new beginning and a chance to make the club even better than it was before. We'd prefer not to have to move but this might prove to be a blessing in disguise. All of us were happy with the old place but perhaps we'll all be even happier in a new place where we could implement new and exciting things we never considered before.

One thing's for sure, this will quicken the evolution of our club. And that's probably a good thing.