Raise the Hammer

Developing a Sports & Leisure Strategy for Hamilton:

While the Velodrome does appear to be a downloading of a facility, we can easily turn PanAM to our advantage by some creative re-structuring of existing city wide assets to develop a new organization around this downloaded event.

Hamilton can quickly turn this downloading into a strategic opportunity by creating a new city-owned company similar to: "Manchester Sport and Leisure Trust" to own, operate and manage --all-- of Hamilton's Community Sports & Leisure Centres city wide.

Such a Trust would be able to rapidly capitalize into a $100 Million+ company, backed by its multimillion dollar asset-base. This new Trust can then be used to leverage structured institutional & private development capital to streamline and professionalize not just the HECFI facilities, but also all presently city owned & operated sports & leisure centres. Further, this Trust would act as the development & management partner (with its ability to provide second-tier funding), for all current and future projects - such as the Velodrome.

With innovative programing the user-experience of this sector would get highly dynamic and engaging for all age groups -- and new tools like a: 'system-wide, electronic usage pass' for members and guests - which is tied in with the Health and Education systems, would lead to some fascinating cross pollination between these different sectors - and could also be tied in with the travel industry affinity programs, to induce healthy living with holiday promotions for frequent system users.

Much like the OHIP card, this new sports & leisure card could fast become a standard for this industry -- to access and manage personal health and leisure outcomes.

This trust, however, --has-- to be run by new top level management team that is solely selected from a worldwide search of best-of-breed managers in the Sports & Leisure industry -(and not internally hired, as has been past practice). This would have to be the only -caveat- in forming this Trust.

This Trust's management team would be mandated to develop a state-of-art city-wide Sports & Leisure strategy - and would be directly responsible for self-financing a full-spectrum sports & leisure experience for all of Hamilton's residents & visitors -- and developing the most innovative development & operational financing, and events programing in the industry.

This new Trust will be able to move financial & human resources and capital as required to projects and events and bring about a --holistic, sustainable approach-- to this very important sector in our city.

In the case of the current Velodrome funding gap, this Trust would easily propose and develop on its own (or via a joint-venture with a hotelier), a small foot-print 100 room hotel w/ banquet facilities -- which would generate $1.5 Mil in annual revenues at 50% occupancy on a room rate of $85/day. This ancillary valuation on completion coupled with its revenues, by itself, would be able to offset any development & annual operational funding gaps for the Velodrome -- while providing strong synergies for visitors and users during events at the Velodrome.

A healthy body leads to a healthy mind, and healthy minds are a key ingredient for a thriving city.

Let us commit to approaching our city-wide problems more -holistically- and shed the narrow focus of our parochial turf interests. Legacies are born from such thinking.

A similar holistic approach in our Transportation sector can quickly generate astounding results -- with much higher profits for everyone in the food chain -- but first we must be willing to give up the narrow bandwidth in which we operate presently, and embrace diversity in thinking.

I am willing to give a free half-day consultation to the City of Hamilton to detail this into a reality - if it is ready for some real innovation in these sectors.

Mahesh P. Butani

Comment edited by Mahesh_P_Butani on 2011-09-07 23:51:34