Hey Everyone!!! I know everyone has to have some response to this…
The USCF is moving to Tennessee soon and I see the financal problem to become worse!!! I think the problem here is that the USCF needs to be ran by more than just chess players. (or at least the people making the desicions) I think the problem is none of the people on the USCF Executive Board are business people and they are making the decision to move some people they don't know down to Tennessee!!! There was another proposal on the table that looked like it would work but the turn it down because they are mindset to move down there!!! :exclamation: :exclamation: :exclamation: To me it seems like they will become bankrupt in just a short while after they move down there :exclamation: :question: :smiley: :frowning: By the way, the USCF server for the web site is not in the USCF office? (No wonder it takes so long) :frowning: :frowning:
What are your thoughts? ( I know I am just a teenager, but I am also a very analytic chess player and I have that gift and I see disastor coming after the move! I know this is a controversal topic nolan but plez dont take this post down!!! )
If we’re going to discuss the move to TN here, lets try to do so without it becoming a political discussion. There will be plenty of that available elsewhere between now and July/August, and each side is likely to present only those facts or arguments that enhance their own position, and may tend to mischaracterize or misrepresent what the other side is saying.
As with many things in life, I believe the success or failure of the move to TN will depend mostly upon the USCF’s resolve to make it work. Whether I favored the move to TN or not is now moot as far as I’m concerned, my job (as one of the USCF’s technical consultants) is to assist in a sucessful transition.
BTW, having the USCF’s web server at our ISP rather than at the USCF office not only saves us a lot of money but also makes for better response time for our members, because the USCF cannot afford the kind of connectivity to the Internet (ie, bandwidth) that even a small ISP has. We spend perhaps around $100/month on the ISP. A T-1 line would cost us $1000 or more per month, and we would need several T-1’s to come close to matching the bandwidth Internet Nebraska has.
The one area in which having the web server offsite slows things down is updating the web database from the USCF’s internal records.
We only update the data a few times a day. There are thousands of queries made against that data at the USCF web site every hour.
We don’t need a topic on this in every forum, so I’ve closed two of them down and if I can I’ll get the messages that were posted to the other one into this one.
This really doesn’t belong on any of these forums, unless you want to create one on “politics.” Briefly, however:
I also have reservations about moving the office to Tennessee, but the time to bring this up was two or three years ago, not after the building has been sold and much of the staff eliminated.
The physical location of the office is irrelevant to most USCF services: membership, ratings, Chess Life. The USCF staff does not travel around organizing tournaments or reporting on them for the magazine.
The location of the office is certainly relevant to the people working there, and this is the main reason I was against the move before it became unavoidable. But uncertainty the worst of alternatives. How can you ask staff members to relocate when the move itself keeps being called into question? The EB members were elected to make such decisions. I didn’t vote for most of them, but the currently popular idea of waging guerrilla war to make the USCF ungovernable is not acceptable.
As Mike Nolan already pointed out, a web server requires expensive and specialized hardware. Also maintenance. Only the largest businesses do this; almost everyone rents space from a hosting company, which specializes in this and knows what it’s doing. The physical distance means little; I can upload a file to a server in Siberia in about the time it would take to put it on a floppy and carry it across the room.
Have mixed feelings with the office moving to Tennessee. The office will need to work on day to day operations. The office staff (shift to a smaller labor force), only needs someone in membership and the rating department – for the day to day operations . As it has become a online company, most of the people that work with the federation (as a agent or not) have been working away from the main office for a number of years.
I always thought the server was actually on site considering I have been in the USCF office a few times… It was just a question and the location of the server was not at all the focus of my post LOL To tell you the truth I was just wondering!!! The loction of the server is irrelevent but my mind wonders irrelevant things somethimes!
I honestly believe most USCF members have little knowledge as to what the USCF office actually does.
Even after the move (and considerable downsizing) it will still take a staff of over 20 people to handle memberships and ratings, put out a magazine, organize national events, handle governanace issues, deal with FIDE, work with the media, coordinate advertising (including TLAs), deposit funds, write checks, prepare financial reports, interface with all the various chess communities (of which scholastics is certainly the largest), etc.
IMO the move to TN will be a boon financially, but the elimination of the books and equipment business was a mistake. That’s where any financial disaster will come from.
TN is a cheaper place to operate from, so we should see a drop in expenses for running the office, and I can’t see where any additional expenses will come from to offset this, hence it will be a financial plus. But the B&E business could have been operated at a profit, gathering more income.
Still, with the disintermediation factor of the 'net looming, I guess I can see why someone would want to get out.
If the partnership with Hanon Russell works out, I think the bottom line impact of outsourcing the B&E business will be similar to what the USCF could expect to do with a reasonably well run in-house B&E operation.
We eliminated a lot of staff costs (sales and warehouse personnel), Hanon is paying to have the catalog designed and printed, and we’ve got a flat rate commission fee with an guaranteed annual minimum payment of $350,000.
There are some other costs associated with that which will reduce the net somewhat, but in the USCF’s best years with B&E over a decade ago it is unlikely that it was netting much more than $250,000/year by the time you threw in all the associated personnel, overhead and catalog/magazine costs.
The B&E business was never run well, it seems, and we admitted as much when we outsourced it. By your numbers, we are expecting both to equal our best performance with room left for enough profit for another party to find it worthwhile to run it; obviously that means if we knew what we were doing we would have been able to make two companies’ worth of profit and keep it all for ourselves.
It’s not surprising. For most of the last 2-3 decades USCF was running the business you could buy chess books cheaper from the chains (all gave you a 10% discount card for less money than the USCF annual dues and the USCF standard discount was only 5%. The USCF never did match the discount prices of the specialists like Chess Digest and Chessco.
Still, like I said, with the disintermediation of the Internet looming, I can understand wanting to get out while the getting is good. Soon enough everyone will learn they can buy directly from the producer.
I don’t really know Hanon’s profit expectations. It could be that what he expects to make is similar to what the USCF would have had to pay a top-flight marketing person these days to run the USCF’s B&E business for us.
Personally, I think had the USCF not shot itself in the foot repeatedly for most of the last decade, B&E was still viable, but by 2003 the USCF was so cash-poor that it didn’t have the capital to do the job even badly. It also had nearly unmanageable office procedures, antiquated order processing software, and the burden most not-for-profits have of having to motivate employees without any real profit incentives.
Most non-proofits I’ve worked with didn’t have motivation problems. The employees believed in what they were doing (in a couple, the employees were expected to raise 25% or more of their salaries in donations, even).
I suspect the motivation problems stem from other things than NFP. I have to admit, given the behavior of the Executive Board over the past couple of decades, I’d have to think real hard before I bet my entire income on their stability. There’s been an abundance of attempts to run it “like a business” by people with little to no knowledge of what that actually means, and that’s probably the root cause of the motivation problems.
It’s easy to say “run it like a business”; it’s hard to actually make it work. Most businesses fail, after all. OTOH, if it’s a cause, not a business, then motivation is far easier. Money isn’t the only, or even the best, motivator, after all. I remember Elo calculating the FIDE rating lists manually on a calculator for years, for example. He wasn’t doing it for the money.
That’s a widespread belief, but the evidence is doesn’t support it. We took a look at this for The Chess Journalist in 2001, and for a random selection of chess books, Amazon’s prices were slightly higher than the USCF’s. (This did not, however, include consideration of used-book sellers.) It may be true that you could get a better deal shopping in-store at one of the chains, but that’s not a fair comparison, since no general-interest bookstore is going to carry a wide selection of chess books. The article doesn’t seem to be on the web, so I stuck a down-and-dirty version of it at westernchess.com/comparison.html
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