Dear CYC Member,

We are coming into the new year with a lot of momentum. Our members are connecting with sailing and each other, and we have returned to our origins of just being a bunch of people who love sailing and racing. In a healthy development, we have moved from a mode of concern about saving the club to a more promising mission of sharing the sailing community.

Along the way, we’ve realized that having a club makes about as much business sense as owning a boat, which is to say that as a traditional business it’s not particularly viable. Instead, we’re here to do more together than we can on our own, just like owning a boat allows you to take friends sailing.

With our club, we welcome and connect people who love sailing and we create a platform for members to do things for each other and our community. That’s important because people want to be part of something and sharing our lifestyle can mean a lot to new members and their families.

As a result we’ve welcomed over 150 Adult/Family members in the last two years, themselves a source of much of our new-found life. Already in 2014, we’ve added twenty more families and recently passed the 500 member mark.

Our task now is to continue to grow our membership to the size required to support our programs and vision. That means we need to generate cash flow to afford another full time staff member, be ready to take action at Leschi, restore and maintain our assets, and support the larger membership base. We now have the track record to prove that we can grow. We need to continue that growth of 5 to 10 new members per month for the next few years, which is a sizable and achievable goal.

Our strategy has just a few key elements:

Know what we’re all about. We share a love of sailing – that is our bond. Beyond that, everything we do is to enhance people’s lives by bringing them together on and off the water. Though the club is a business that we need to run, just being in business is not why we’re here. We do what we do because we want to. We have a club because we want to live in a world with Corinthian Yacht Club in it. We are more than a service provider: we are a chosen community, a small town in a big city, an extended family.

Rebuild approachable foundations. While we might think of ourselves as friendly and approachable, it doesn’t feel that way from the outside. Our focus on racing almost killed racing. Plus, there is so much more to us. While racing must remain our marquee, we have added a multi-faceted youth sailing program, extensive cruising activities, an array of training and seminars, and a thriving social program (we’re now open for dinner and drinks over 100 evenings a year). We can be proud of our members’ accomplishments at the pinnacle of our sport, and we also need these more accessible entry points and less daunting landing points to support an entire ecosystem. It also happens to be useful to racing fleets to have the club be that bright beacon to attract new people – future sailors and racers – into our broader world.

Welcome families and crew. Young families are the most viable way of populating the club with young adults because parents are looking for the best environments to raise their kids. That in turn will attract other families and young adults. Crew are also a long sought-after community. Our prior membership program for crew was underutilized and that was an issue because we can no longer be sustained primarily by skippers. Crew, or people who don’t own boats, must “take over” and be our typical members. This is why it was so important to merge our senior and associate levels into one membership (which passed by an over 2:1 margin) because the Adult/Family membership is more effective at attracting crew and providing financial support. People who don’t happen to own a boat can now own a yacht club – our club – and claim their equal stake and influence in supporting our sailing way of life through our club. Crew and young families are exactly the people to whom we have the most to offer. Our membership of $35/month and dinner for $5 is a reasonable offer and attractive gesture that brings people in and brings them together.

Invite your friends to join our sailing family because of what it can mean for them.

You may notice that none of this is about selling. What works is welcoming people to join us in our mission. There is so much that is awesome about our sport, our people, our lifestyle, and our club – we have a lot to offer each other. And we have the most to offer new people who want to connect in the sailing community, because the greatest value the club can offer its members is each other.

Please consider that you are what we have to offer. This is different than how some of us may have viewed our relationship with the club in the past, it’s not about what we get in exchange. Even when it’s in our interest to save the club, the way that happens is by sharing our club and sharing ourselves, and in the process we achieve something more rewarding and that resonates more meaningfully with younger generations. And sharing is easy. You just show up, see friends and make new ones, help where you want, and be your sailing-loving self!

See you on the water and around the club.

Brian Watkins

Commodore