TOC/G7 Related Discussion

[danielray]

A wrestling match maybe doesn't pit a 90 lb. weakling against a 180 lb. HS senior, but they all wrestle at the same match.

Unless they are college compared to varsity compared to jr. varsity... or unless the school is 5A vs 4A vs 3A vs....

The entire natural universe is divided into various competitive strata.

[garfield]

They are warranted. Just as you should not have 12 year olds marching with 21 year olds, you should not have 14 or even 16 year olds marching with those much older. I find no scenario in which this is appropriate.

Youth should be forced to stop marching in drum corps in the same way they should be forced out of their parent's house.

There is a very clear reason why there is an age out policy... it is to encourage youth who have gained some incredible life skills through participation in drum corps to go out an apply them to the real world.

While some do dig all-age drum corps, and that is certainly their right, it is not something to combine with a youth activity. It greatly dilutes the focus and value from a sponsor perspective.

For the record.... if you are in college marching band and not being forced/bribed to do so, regardless of if you are 18 or 22 or god forbid any older.... something is genuinely wrong. Some cultures would consider college marching band a form of torture. :-)

Not sure I agree with the age issue as you define it. IMO, it's a parenting thing and a legal thing.

However I fully agree with your age out logic. Get out and get on with it.

And your idea about college marching band is only to force those 18 to 21 year-olds who do want to march into marching in drum corps. Pretty sneaky. Hey, there's a plan! Let's lobby to eliminate college marching bands to increase participation in drum corps!

:tongue:/>

[Jeff Ream]

DCI pitches a league called "World Class", but a few of those "World Class" corps get their butts handed to them regularly by other corps who are supposed to be DCI's minor leaguers.

The point made by me and several others is that a more realistic alignment that breaks the organizations into more realistic divisions/leagues would be a good move. Your comments don't change the reality that guides that otherwise common practice in other competitive leagues: if the "best" teams can be easily beaten by other teams that are not supposed to be that good, than those "best" teams are probably playing in the wrong league for them, and having them in the wrong division/league clouds your overall marketing message, making it less than accurate or honest.

DCI can "mission" all they want, but their function is to sell tickets and recordings and get the money back into the hands of the corps. Is there a percentage of overall revenues that they hold (or should hold) as the target for distribution? Would 50% of gross revenues be fair? After all, they really only have the one purpose, so if overhead of operations is such that they can't afford to get back to the corps at least $50 out of every $100 of the corps' products they sell, then maybe the problem really is that the efficiency issues are with the home office more than the drum corps.

Form. Follows. Function. DCI's "function" was and is to be a central clearing house for the business of selling drum corps, and to use that power of scale to be able to efficiently get the corps back as much money as they can.

I know some here want to believe the org has all these other great things they're supposed to be doing, but since a look at the numbers shows that they raise almost nothing in charitable support (certainly not compared to the corps themselves), and have no major national brands/corporations on board to help underwrite the costs of their marketing ("major" is $100k a year or more), all of those other great things are being paid for by money that the fans give to them to watch shows. That money, less the costs of production, was originally supposed to be delivered back to the corps whose work they're selling.

Classic case of mission creep without having the necessary framework in place to support the additional costs of the creep. You want to say that the corps are spending too much; a look at the 990s thread indicates that the costs of doing drum corps on a national touring basis are what they are, and are pretty consistent across the top 16 or 18 organizations. When something is that consistent - when the 18th place unit isn't really spending significantly more or less than the 4th place unit, it's a sign that there is a level that would indicate that the expenses are consistent enough across the board to indicate "right."

I have a couple friends who work in management with Groupon, and before the Board took action last week to remove Andrew Mason (the CEO), they were marveling at the fact that the guy still had people within the company who swore up and down that he was the right man for the job, despite all performance evidence to the contrary. Anyone who thinks that DCI is hitting it out of the park right now seems to me to be in a similar state of denial. DCI, as an organization, is surviving, but not necessarily growing. Treading water isn't the same thing as winning a gold medal in the 100 metre freestyle.

(Lest anyone misread that as a call for a change in staffing at DCI, it's not; it's simply a call for the DCI Board to have their own come to Jesus moment and figure out a plan that boosts overall revenues and clarifies their message. There MAY end up being some changes in staffing, but like Sullivan's dictate, the 'form' of those changes would follow function too.)

quite honestly, having people that compete against each other part of the year is the stupidest thing DCI does. For an organziation set up to be a collective of sorts, there's way too much personal agendas that go into the votes.

You want to see DCI turn some serious corners....keep corps directors at a minimum on the BOD and bring in outsiders with real business world knowledge and leadership abilities.

[Jeff Ream]

How much does DCI make from "providing venue service support", and who is that phrase when he's at home?

From a business standpoint, DCI was set up as a central clearing house for major drum corps events, to standardize rules, and provide a single voice for the major corps of the day (the founders really weren't thinking about anyone else when they got it off the ground; they figured everyone would figure things out as they needed).

If anything, the problem right now is that there is no clear voice, no central message, and, it appears, no set of basic business principles that guide their decision making. A business that can't succinctly boil their purpose and position down to a single, actionable sentence, is a business that's lost its way. I don't know how you actualize "providing venue service support", since I don't know where the price tag is for doing that, whatever it is.

But we could figure out to a fine degree how much it costs to rent a stadium, market an event, sell tickets, pay judges, and write checks to the partners who performed that night. One is a business action, the other is a gobbledegook.

right. see the above post

[Jeff Ream]

Both.

I believe the 2 organizations merging would cut down on duplicative costs, AND such a larger entity would have a bigger potential to both keeps current Corps afloat AND potentially grow an audience base. When both organizations are at so historically low numbers now, BIG is better. As I said, its not a panacea, but it would be a start. imo.

I believe that creating a third division within DCI might make for competitive equality, but it simply cuts the available pie into more sections and does little to increase the growth of the fan base which is presumably what you are driving at and wanting to see happen. ( or I think anyway )

I can pretty much guarantee you it won't happen. The DCA corps now have a say in things. In DCI, it's all about World Class. You think the G7 will want to slice the pie further? No. Think DCA corps wanted to be treated like Open Class? No way in hell

[Jeff Ream]

Friends of DCI is basically a ticket scheme to get ticket advance revenues instead of being 100% locked into the timeline of the ticketing provider.

The size of the company is irrelevant, it is their actual level of engagement that matters.

Who cares of a company is a multi-billion dollar company if they pony up less than $50,000?

as a former friend, you pay a lot more than just tickets. just saying

[Jeff Ream]

Again, most of the contributions to DCI were connected with ticket sales and are not actually contributions in a true sense.

But, with YEA, what do you actually tangibly get out of the contribution? A month or two reprieve from solicitation emails? :)

there is no reprieve. you get more

[cixelsyd]

Crown's 2011 990 shows $980k on drum corps expenses. That's about the same amount of program expense as the 18th place corps this year, and the 3rd place corps in 2012.

And if PC had the same split on their reports, their numbers would be lower too. We can only compare apples to apples.

(The funny thing is, even if we accepted your premise, Crown would still be spending $300,000 more than Crest.)

I am sorry, but the numbers do not lie. Top corps spend more.

Once you're at a certain level, placement isn't purely determined by budgets.

No, but there is a strong correlation, and plenty of logic to suggest that money well spent makes a difference.

I keep waiting for ONE positive suggestion from you, however. All I'm getting is how much you despise everyone at the top of the field, but nothing about how to make DCI bigger and stronger.

What is this - National Twist-My-Words Day? Show me where in my posts it says that I "despise everyone at the top of the field".

I have given plenty of positive suggestions on this board. If you were sincerely interested, you would look them up. But I doubt that you are sincerely interested. From your first post, your mind has been made up. You did not come here to discuss with an open mind, and perhaps learn something in the process - you came here to present your point of view, which is remarkably similar to that of the G7. I see no point in repeating my suggestions just for you, so that you can poke holes in them. (Of course, if you hang around long enough, you will get your chance.)

Anyway, I am still interested in hearing what DCI does that you call "mission creep". For that matter, I would like to know a few other things:

- How is the DCI marketing message blurred? Open classs gets one 2-minute video from the Janual, and some news from the tour two weeks out of the year. The rest of the DCI marketing message is world class. Are major corporate sponsors really balking at that sixth decimal place because of that?

- What is different about your 18-corps premier league and 22-corps minor league vs. the current 22-corps WC and 18-corps OC? To me, it still seems that the only difference is the numbers. Dividing the pie into fewer slices, so that each slice is a little bigger. Am I missing something?

- Or is it that all these extraneous stereotypes about small corps/young corps/community corps are attempted justification for the above? Since those stereotypes are inaccurate, they only really serve to distract from your actual idea to set the top division based on competitive placement. But again, if I am confused on that, set me straight.

[cixelsyd]

I'd suggest that it's not always necessary to identify "a problem" so much as to ask some basic questions the same way every healthy business does.

• Are we as successful as we could be? Is there a saturation point that we've hit, or surpassed?
• Are we offering the best products that we can?
• Is our product mix relevant to what the consumers want?
• Do we have a unique position in the market?
• Has everyone who might be interested in the product been approached?

The answer to a lot of those questions is almost always either "nope" or "not as much as it could be", which is reason enough to be looking for better ways to do what you do.

Not necessary to identify a problem?

You suggest hiring a high-priced manager to take control of DCI away from the corps and fundamentally transform it, without even identifying a problem that justifies such a radical move?

And these questions - give me a break. "Are we as successful as we can be?" Anyone who answers "yes" to that talks himself out of a job. You want someone on your team who presumes they cannot improve? Neither do I.

[cixelsyd]

Somewhere in my files I have the DCI 990 from 2000 (geek that I am). I'm willing to bet (while I try to find it) that payout to corps increased as gross revenue did. But, again, if that increase didn't keep up with corps costs, is that DCI's problem?

No, it is not. This is one of the things I have learned from discussions with supporters of top corps.

The voting members of DCI, historically 13-25 of the top corps in the activity, decide on rule and policy changes. Some of these changes affect corps operating costs. These voting directors, as I am told, would not be voting in favor of changes that increase costs if they are not prepared to cover those costs. Either they think the change will cause a proportional rise in revenue, or they are willing and able to increase their own funding to cover the cost.

Either way, it is not incumbent upon DCI to do anything different. I have yet to see a rule change proposal where the "financial impact" section mandates DCI raise unrelated revenue to cover the cost of the proposed change.