None of the new policies that have been put into place have been done to make money. On the business side of things NESBA is not about making money, it's simply about paying the bills. That's become harder to do for economic reasons that should be obvious.
No matter what any of you might believe this club is non profit. WE have one paid employee and that’s Bob Ornduff. Not one other person From Bob B., to DJ, myself, and all of the other directors are getting paid one cent. The core philosophy of this club has always been to try and provide more for our members than other for profit businesses do. This philosophy led to all of the policies that made it successful…namely the way the events are run. This includes not only the director system, CR system, the bump system, and all of the rules, but also the policies for crash/mechanical credits, rain credits, etc. Over time more and more member friendly perks were added as the club expanded and became more successful. The system worked really well when events were full because the national economy allowed for huge numbers of people to be spending a lot of money playing at track days. When the economy turned rough and revenues came way down (and not just for us but across the board for everybody) we have had to do three things. I stress the words had to because none of us wanted to do any of this. These three things are to look for ways to bring in more members to fill the events, cut back on the number of events and strategically plan the ones we commit to ensure their success, and three tighten our belts with all expenses.
Since the topic of this thread is credit transfers let me clue you guys in on how it works. Anytime a member wants to transfer their credits to someone we (me, Bob O, or DJ) go in a look up the source of those credits to verify they are eligible for transfer and to see how they originated. We have to see where they came from either through tracking down the original invoice, or crash/mechanical reason that they came into someone’s account. We do this to ensure the credits are legit and that neither the member or the club is getting screwed. Believe it or not the possibility exists that somebody might be up to no good. It’s possible that someone could hack into the system and create credits that they might try to sell, hack into another member account and try to sell their credits, or any number of other possibilities. There are thousands and thousands of member accounts and you can't just assume anything. Before anything gets transferred we verify the credits.
Credits that are for sale are rarely just one credit but rather the sum total of several credits. We have to go and look every one of them up and follow the trail all the way back to the original source. This can be very difficult and time consuming under the best of circumstances because often the credits are the balance (what's left after someone has used only part of the total amount of a credit) of the original credit. If a credit/credits have been transferred more than one time it becomes a nightmare. There have been several times when I’ve spent an hour trying to figure out one transfer and it’s a total PITA in the biggest way. We also have lots of requests from potential buyers asking for us to check out the seller for them before they send any money, it's just way too much trouble. The number of transfers has gotten to be ridiculous and it's getting to the point that it's just not worth it. All you have to do is just look at the listings in this forum see that.
Like Fitz said this surcharge is a minor deal in the grand scheme of things; after all nobody is forcing anyone to buy credits. If the new policy doesn't work for you you still have the option of just signing up for each track day one by one like most of us have always done (and which is the way you do it with other organizations). Let me just say that before the complaining about transferring crash credits or cancellation credits start, that offering these credits in the first place started with NESBA, we sill give them to our members, and we will still let you transfer them after the surcharge. How may other organizations even offer them, and if they do they won't let you sell them.
