I'm sorry if I don't sugar coat my statements to make them more palatable to those who can’t stomach the truth but that’s just the way I am. I also grow tied of people reading something into my words and then trying to argue with me about what I wrote.

Case in point: how someone automatically correlated that in my statement of “Anyone who thinks the entry fees and dues are too high should find another sport” I automatically correlated that people are thinking regions are making large sums of money is read something into my words that I simply do not see and simply is not true.

It’s like this…

Racing is expensive. Either live with it or get involved with your region and try to find a way to make it cheaper. Actually, I defy you to do so. I know I have and the whole time thinking there has to be some gross mistakes being made by a motley crew of volunteers. This should be easy, right? Guess what? I was wrong! After sitting down and analyzing an annual budget that some small businesses would love to have I could not find anything worth changing. Nothing.

It's easy to sit behind a keyboard and make suggestions. Try stepping up and doing it yourself. Or at least make your suggestions useful with ideas on how to pay the bills.

Jim has a pretty good handle on what presents itself to racing regions. Some other suggestions have merit at first glance but lose much of it when you dig deeper.
  • If you reduce the number of events you reduce revenue and increase risk to maintaining solvency since race dates usually never come back.
  • Trying to negotiate better contracts with tracks sounds great but in reality there are so many other organizations that produce more revenue and can outspend you so you end up with what you have.
  • Better marketing might work but unless you have a lot of extra cash it ends up being a waste of that precious resource because the cost of it is exponentially proportional to its effectiveness.
  • I don’t know about other regions but we send our RE and one other person to the convention. Being a jumbo region I think we should at least do that.
And finally, from my experience in most cases, saying that a bunch of paid employees doing something as efficiently as possible while at work is um......."not accurate."

With a bunch of volunteers you actually get infinitely much more than you paid them for.