Parks & Recreation
Parks & Recreation
Know what a member actually costs you, and what you can defend charging.
Know what a member actually costs you, and what you can defend charging.
“We haven’t touched our membership rates in six years and we know we’re underwater.”
“We can’t tell you what one member costs us once you load in staff, facility, and overhead.”
“Council is going to ask for the analysis, and right now the answer is a spreadsheet nobody wants to defend in public.”
“We’re not sure if we should raise the rate or restructure the tiers.”
Fully loaded cost per member and per program: direct staffing, facility allocation, utilities, maintenance reserve, and administrative overhead, set against what each currently brings in.
Every program and membership tier sorted by who benefits, from community-wide benefit at the base to individual benefit at the top, with a target recovery percentage for each band. The framework your board already recognizes, built on your numbers.
Three to five pricing scenarios, each with its breakeven attrition: how many members you could lose at that price and still come out ahead. Plus the structural alternatives to a flat increase, including resident and non-resident differentials, peak and off-peak, family tiers, and annual versus monthly.
Monthly close, program-level P&L, and budget support for agencies and facilities without a finance department of their own.
We tell you exactly what we need: three years of membership counts and revenue by tier, monthly churn, the current fee schedule, the facility or program budget, and utilization data by hour. If some of it does not exist, we tell you that in week one rather than week five.
We construct the fully loaded cost per member and per program and show you the allocation logic, so the method holds up when someone asks how you got there.
Rates at comparable agencies and at the private alternatives your members would switch to, then the pricing scenarios with breakeven attrition for each.
A written report your team can put in front of a board or council, and, if you want it, we present it.
One thing worth saying plainly: raising a fee at a public agency isn’t only an analysis problem. Arizona municipalities work under advance notice requirements before a governing body can vote on a new or increased fee, and the schedule ties to your fiscal year. We build the calendar backward from your adoption date so the analysis lands with time to spare rather than two weeks late. We’re not your attorney, and we’ll tell you when a question is one, but you shouldn’t be finding out about the timeline from us in month three.
Bring us the fee schedule you have been meaning to revisit. We will tell you what a member really costs and what you can defend charging.