In this post, we share our business updates from February 2025, a month when we started sharing more openly about how the business is doing behind-the-scenes (financially, emotionally, etc.). These updates were originally posted on our Facebook page.
February 1st
Business Update #1:
Hi all you bowlers!
Many people assume The Bowling Club is a charity, that the people who work here are volunteers, or the food is only for people ‘less fortunate’ than them.
In reality, The Bowling Club is a for-profit business. Our vision is to show that you can provide a genuine service to the community, whilst still being able to turn a profit. We believe that businesses should be a part of the community and raise people up with it, rather than being a way to make money off people for the benefit of shareholders.
It is easy to see The Bowling Club as a charity and not as a business. So, we thought it would be a good idea to communicate how the business is doing in a financial way, and if there is anything that we need help with.
First thing first, The Bowling Club as a business thrives on lots of people coming over for dinner. Our profit margins (as a proportion) are not so different from other restaurants, but rather than making $10+ on each plate that we serve, we make more like $1-2 per portion of food. So, for The Bowling Club to thrive, we really need lots of people to come over and buy our food! Please do not feel that you will be taking away from others by eating with us. When you buy food from The Bowling Club, we make money, which gives us the financial stability to serve others. By buying food from us, you help to feed others less fortunate, so really it’s the other way around!
In other posts we would like to show you how much money comes in, and how it is spent. However, at the moment we are in a position where we would like to be feeding about 200 more people per night. Currently, we’re sharing about 600-800 meals / night, but ideally we can share about 900-1000 each night. If there are ways we can improve our service to feed more of you, we would love to know.
We look forward to communicating more about the money side of the business with you. We know it is not normal to talk about money openly, but we feel it is important so you can walk with us in our mission of bringing us all together over food, no matter where we come from.
With love,
Liam and Jackie
February 8th
Business Update #2:
G’day to all our bowling friends! 🍅
It’s time for another installment of business bowling Saturdays! 🍅
Thank you for your support this week. We have done better this week, feeding another 200 people compared to last week (about 3000 of you!) . We have also shared about 1000 free meals, so we are stoked to feed all of you. We still would like to increase our numbers a little, so once again we want to always welcome you to come over and have a feed with us. 🍅
Today I have decided to focus on how we source our food. 🍅
We value making food from natural, raw ingredients. Not only because it’s high quality kai, but also because it is the cheapest. 🍅
Over the years, we have found that the cheapest and tastiest food comes from local sources that make basic agricultural products. So, probably over 80% of the actual food that you eat at the bowling club comes from farms based in the south island. 🍅
We buy all of our veges from the local vegetable market, which is a cooperative that sources veges from local growers. Vegetables are always cheaper when they are grown closer to Dunedin because of the freight charges. So, many of our veges come from Southland, Oamaru and Canterbury due to the distance. 🍅
We buy about 500kg-1000kg of vegetables a week, and we also use about ½ tonne of spuds per week. This vegetable base is what most of the food from the bowling club is made from. Where we can, we also buy split & marked fruit from orchards, which saves waste and makes great desserts. 🍅
We use many legumes from Canterbury, oats from Southland, flour from Timaru, and we are currently in the process of sourcing locally grown vegetable oil rather than the imported stuff. 🍅
We have found that there is a natural synergy between eating whole foods/eating local, and providing food that is cheap. By eating local, and locally processed foods (by your friendly bowling club team!) you help reduce the impact on the environment. We hope there can be more businesses with this kind of philosophy, so there can be a natural overlap between eating sustainable food and eating food that is easy on the wallet. 🍅
The biggest challenge is turning these local whole foods into food that is tasty and appealing, and not using too much labour in the process. So, in the last two years we have spent a great amount of time, energy and monetary resources making an industrial kitchen to handle this volume of raw materials (more on that later!) 🍅
We hope you are having a lovely weekend, and we will see you next week 🙂🍅
Love,
Liam
February 23rd
Business Update #3:
We missed sharing a ‘business update’ with you all last weekend because we were feeling so drained. We had no energy to share reflections. We’re a bit more refreshed now, so here’s a wee weekend business update~
The Bowling Club is steady at the moment (in a business sense), but we still need to be making more revenue in the long-term future so that The Bowling Club can live a long life.
We’re currently struggling to cover all our bills. It’s hard to have any money leftover from the week to invest in the business for the long-run. We’re really having to count every dollar to keep the business afloat. Something Liam has been saying a lot recently is, “I’m just tired of having to think about money all the time.”
I personally have surrendered to thinking about money so much, which is ironic because I’m the one who keeps our books, but we found that there’s no point in both of us worrying about it regularly. So Liam’s taken that worry-load, which is a heavy load to carry.
We’re slowly moving The Bowling Club forward, but we aren’t able to invest in it as much as we’d like simply because the business isn’t thriving enough in a financial way.
Our oven problems are a good example of how money is limiting us & the services we provide. Every week, something seems to go wrong with one of our two ovens. This makes our business incredibly vulnerable because all of our bulk-cooking relies on these two ovens.
This week, the fan motor on our large oven blew. The spare part for that motor has a $4,000 price tag. Fixing it quickly is $3,000. Fixing it by the end of this week is $2,000. Since we don’t have lots of money, we opted for the cheaper $2,000 option even though this disrupts our business a lot.
It means that Liam had to stay at work until 10:30pm on Friday, steaming loads of peaches, which we’d usually do during our regular working hours. It also means that we have to rely on our one small oven to make it to Thursday (if all goes to plan). If the small oven breaks down, then we simply can’t really make kai.
This morning, we saw our prep chef Rosie, and when saying goodbye, Liam said, “see you tomorrow for special-one-oven-week!” It’s fun to joke about, but underneath it all, we’re all pretty nervous for the week ahead.
We hope to continue to be able to grow the business so we can invest in the right tools that don’t break down all the time. We hope that running The Bowling Club can one day feel relatively easy and fun… rather than the weight of how it feels right now. Currently, we often go into work wondering, ‘what’s going to go wrong today?’’ It’s not that we’re pessimistic people, it’s just the reality of our business right now.
We’re considering ways to grow so that our The Bowling Club can be more financially supported. One thing we’re finding hopeful at the moment is our delivery meals, which you can learn more about on our website: https://thebowlingclub.co.nz/collections/delivery-orders
With the help of our 6 volunteer drivers who drop meals off at community collection points in Mosgiel, Port Chalmers & on the peninsula, we delivered about 300 meals this week. In the near future, we plan to add some areas in North Dunedin, including The Valley Project & OUSA - Otago University Students' Association.
We’re also considering providing a pre-order lunch service where people can order lunch on our website and pick-up at the eatery. We’d love to hear your feedback on this idea.
We realise that our business can’t be sustainable if we only rely on HEAPS of people coming over for dinner each night we’re open. It’s hard to attract 1,000+ people to come to the eatery every night. We’d like to diversify our sources of revenue in ways that are achievable and also feel good to us. We have many ideas, and we’ll slowly share them with you so we can hear what you all think too.
For now, we’d love your feedback on expanding our hot kai deliveries. And also, our idea of providing an affordable lunch option (where people can simply order on our website & pick up a container of hot kai at a scheduled time).
Thank you for your care, thoughtfulness and support, bowlers! We appreciate you!
Peace, LOVE & bowls,
Jackie & Liam