The build-out of Think Bigger
How to set up your club
Clubs that run well got there the same way. First the parts a member touches. Then the parts that survive turnover. Then the parts that decide where the club goes.
Eight steps, three stages, in the order that makes each one easier than the last — and who helps you at each.
Find your step Catch up on the seriesPart one — Dominic Pardini, 57 min
Find where you’re stuck
You only need the earliest step you’re failing — the rest get easier once it’s fixed. Not sure which? Run the free audit and it’ll tell you.
Stage one
Get running
The parts a member touches. Until these three work, nothing else you fix will show.
STEP 1
One front doorYour website
STEP 2
One systemRoster, calendar, comms
STEP 3
Money inRegistration and payments
Stage two
Get solid
The parts that survive turnover. Boring, and the reason clubs don’t reboot every three years.
STEP 4
Money makes senseBooks and reconciliation
STEP 5
The club owns its accountsEmail and documents
STEP 6
CoveredEntity, insurance, waivers
Stage three
Get ambitious
The parts that decide where the club goes. This is where Think Bigger picks up.
Stage by stage
What good looks like at each step, how you know you’re not there, and who’ll do it with you.
Stage one Steps 1–3
Get running
The parts a member touches. Until these three work, nothing else you fix will show.
One front door
What good looks like
One site a parent can find, read on a phone, and register from in a single sitting. Registration lands in the system that runs your club, not in somebody’s inbox.
How you know you’re not there
Nobody can update it without calling the volunteer who built it. Or the register button opens a PDF.
The one requirement
Registration has to hand off cleanly to the system running your club. A beautiful site that dead-ends in an email is a brochure.
Pick a platform
Easiest to keep tidy yourself.
Best for: one person maintaining itMost flexible. More to maintain.
Best for: sponsors, several squads, a brandFastest and cheapest to run. Nothing to log into.
Best for: nobody wants a CMSWho’ll build it
Rebuilds your existing site and handles content changes for you.
What’s includedGround-up design so your staff can update it themselves.
What’s included
One system
What good looks like
Roster, calendar, attendance and messaging in one place. Every message involving a minor is parent-visible by default, without anyone having to remember to CC someone.
How you know you’re not there
You’re spending energy on things that shouldn’t need it: whether the roster is current, which spreadsheet is the real one, whether a SafeSport problem is brewing.
Don’t spend your energy on whether a SafeSport violation is about to happen. Design your club so that it doesn’t happen.
Dominic Pardini, Think BiggerOutlaw these, starting today
Who’ll set it up
This one’s us. Free to start and built SafeSport-compliant — the honest reason we recommend it over a group chat for any club with athletes under 18.
Start your team
Money in
What good looks like
Families pay online, on a schedule, without a treasurer chasing anyone. What someone signed up for is attached to what they paid.
How you know you’re not there
Somebody maintains a spreadsheet of who still owes. That spreadsheet is your accounts receivable, and it’s wrong. Or an athlete slipped in without paying and nobody caught it.
Outlaw paper checks
Every survey we run turns up the same thing: a volunteer whose whole job is processing them, and a pile that goes missing the year the boathouse floods.
Who’ll set it up
The processing fee can sit with the club or with the member — your call, and it can differ by program.
How payments workStage two Steps 4–6
Get solid
The parts that survive turnover. Boring, and the reason clubs don’t reboot every three years.
Money makes sense
What good looks like
Payments arrive in your books already categorized by program, rather than as a lump deposit someone unpicks each month. Your treasurer can produce a clean picture without a week’s notice.
How you know you’re not there
Month-end takes an evening. “How did learn-to-row do this season?” gets answered in a few days rather than a few clicks.
Doing it yourself?
Our step-by-step Stripe and QuickBooks guide walks the whole setup. One treasurer arrived at her call with it already three-quarters done.
Pick a ledger
What most US clubs land on.
Best for: your accountant already knows itSame job, often nicer to use.
Best for: clubs starting freshWho’ll set it up
Chart of accounts a treasurer can read, program-by-program revenue mapping, fee tracking, and a live walkthrough until they’re confident running it.
What’s includedNeed someone to keep the books rather than set them up? Tell us. We’d rather match you deliberately than hand you a name.
The club owns its accounts
What good looks like
Club email addresses and a club drive. When someone steps down their access ends, and nothing walks out of the door with them.
How you know you’re not there
Your treasurer uses a personal Gmail. Nobody’s sure who can see the finance folder. The last board’s documents are in a former volunteer’s Drive.
The one everybody misses
Two-factor codes for the bank, Stripe and the accounting system go to somebody’s personal mobile. When they step down, the club can’t get into its own bank account. Put a phone number on the club’s account — a Google Voice number is the cheap way — so the codes arrive somewhere the club controls.
Access control becomes a nightmare when people quit and leave. Everything should be on a corporate drive, on a corporate email, so that when turnover happens the club owns it.
Dominic Pardini, Think BiggerWhat we recommend
Club email addresses and a shared drive, free for eligible nonprofits through Google for Nonprofits. Add a Google Voice number so two-factor codes belong to the club, not to whoever set it up.
Our recommendationA phone number the club owns, so two-factor codes for the bank, Stripe and the books stop landing on a volunteer’s personal mobile.
Our recommendationSame job, if your board already lives in Outlook.
Not an option. This is the stage clubs skip, and the one that quietly costs them a decade of institutional memory.
Who’ll set it up
An afternoon’s work and the cheapest stage on this page. If you’d rather it were simply done for you, say so on the form below.
Covered
What good looks like
The right entity for what you actually are, coverage that matches what you actually do, and waivers collected at registration rather than on paper at the dock.
How you know you’re not there
Nobody can say what the policy covers without finding the PDF. Or you’re structured as a social club while taking donations your donors assume are deductible.
Worth knowing
If your club takes donations, a 501(c)(3) lets donors deduct them and opens up grants, endowments and corporate matching. A social club structure doesn’t. That’s the standing recommendation in Think Bigger — with Dominic’s own caveat: he’s not a lawyer, and neither are we.
Tell us what’s worrying you and we’ll point you at the right person as soon as we have one we’d stand behind. Waiver capture at registration is already handled inside CrewLAB.
Stage three Steps 7–8
Get ambitious
How decisions get made, who’s accountable, and where the club is going. Dominic calls this the second of your two operating systems — part two goes deeper.
Run like a business
What good looks like
Six things: a written vision, the right people in the right seats, the handful of numbers you watch, a way of surfacing issues, three to five processes written down instead of reinvented every September, and traction to show it’s working.
How you know you’re not there
The club stops when you step away. Every three years it reboots, because the knowledge left with the person.
If your club stops when you step away, or if adding staff just creates more management work for you, you own a stressful job. You don’t own a business.
Dan Martell, quoted in Think BiggerThe move
Read Traction by Gino Wickman — the framework CrewLAB itself runs on, and Dominic’s one recommendation if you take nothing else from the series. Then catch up on the series, which walks the six components in order.
Who helps
If your question is about boards, start here.
For clubs that want hands-on help upskilling a board rather than a reading list.
Grow on purpose
What good looks like
You know who your ideal member is and — harder — who you’re not for. You know what a member pays, how long they stay, and what it costs to sign one.
How you know you’re not there
Recruiting is a season of hoping, and nobody has worked out what a member is actually worth.
The move
Retention before recruitment. Then positioning, product, price and promotion, in that order. Two rules of thumb from the series: a member should be worth at least three times what it costs to sign them, and you should get that back inside a year.
Tell us what you’re trying to grow and we’ll tell you honestly whether you need help or just a plan.
Get a hand with it
Tell us where you’re stuck, or read the questions other clubs ask first.
Tell us what you need
One email, one reply. Tell us which step you’re stuck at and we’ll point you at the right person — or tell you honestly that we don’t have one yet.
Nothing here is a sales queue. If the answer is “you don’t need to buy anything, do this instead,” that’s the answer you’ll get.
How we choose
A provider is on this page because we’d hand them a club we care about. That means all of these, not most.
We remove people. If a club has a bad experience, tell us — that’s the only thing keeping this worth anything.
Straight about how this works
The things you’d otherwise work out on your own.
Questions
Where do I start if everything’s broken?
Step one or two, always. A club whose website and core system are sorted can fix its books in a fortnight. The reverse is not true.
What’s the recommended stack?
A website, CrewLAB, an accounting system, and club email and documents. In Think Bigger the shorthand is Squarespace, CrewLAB, QuickBooks, Google Workspace — with the caveat that there are other good options in every slot except, we’d argue, the second.
Which website platform should we use?
Squarespace if you’ll maintain it yourself, WordPress if you have sponsors and several squads, a static build if you’d rather nobody at the club logged in at all. The only requirement is that registration hands off cleanly to the system running your club.
Do we have to use QuickBooks?
No. Xero works just as well. Most US clubs end up on QuickBooks because their accountant already knows it.
Our treasurer gets the bank’s two-factor codes on her personal phone. Is that a problem?
Yes, and it’s the most common way a club locks itself out of its own accounts. When she steps down, the codes keep going to her. Put a number the club owns on those accounts — a Google Voice number attached to the club’s own Google account is the usual answer — and hand it over with the role.
Does it cost anything to be matched with a provider?
No. The introduction is free and CrewLAB takes no commission. You pay the provider directly, at the preferred rate they’ve committed to for CrewLAB clubs.
Do I have to use CrewLAB to use this page?
No. The path applies to any club. Some providers extend their preferred rate only to CrewLAB clubs — that’s their call.
What if there’s no provider for my step?
Tell us anyway. Knowing what clubs are asking for is how we decide who to bring in next.
Who’s vetting these people?
CrewLAB. We check the work, the references, and whether they understand how a club runs. We remove people who don’t hold up.
Is this only for rowing clubs?
No. Running, swimming, and any club with a board, a treasurer and members to look after. Almost none of this is sport-specific.
What’s Think Bigger?
Our webinar series on running a club like a business that lasts. This page is the build-out; the series is the thinking behind it.
Keep going
Work with clubs on CrewLAB? We’re building out insurance, legal, bookkeeping, marketing, member engagement and board development. If that’s what you do, we’d like to talk. Become a partner →