Budgeting is a process of guestimating what your business will look like for the next 3-6 months, 12 months or more. It’s important to create a budget because it gives you a roadmap for what your business needs to do from a monetary standpoint, so you can hopefully maintain and grow your beach program. A budget includes a revenue forecast and an expense forecast, as well as a cash flow forecast for managing your business.

For an existing club you can look at past accounting reports, history and data, but for a new club or a new beach program, you will need to start with an educated estimation process.

Here are some factors to consider when creating a budget for your beach club:

Coaches

Since beach program offers the service of training athletes in beach volleyball, the coaches are one of the most important investments and expenses. If your practices are about 2 hours long, you can factor coaches pay at $60-$100 per practice.

Equipment

The other most important factor to running a beach program is the equipment needed to train, which includes the courts, nets, and balls. This cost will depends on how many courts you have and how many participants you estimate you will have in your beach program. If you have a smaller beach club with two courts and 10-16 athletes, consider budgeting $2,000-$3,000 for equipment. If you have a large facility with 10-12 courts, you can consider investing $10,000-$12,000 annually to purchase and maintain equipment.

Administrative Costs

When budgeting for administrative costs, make sure to include software such as Google Suite, Quickbooks (for Accounting), your website/registration platform, and labor (whether that’s you or someone you hire part-time). If you host tournaments you will pay a fee for Volleyball Life. You can factor about 8-10% of your budget towards administrative costs.

Insurance

You will need insurance to cover your coaches and all athletes participating in your beach program. JVA offers low cost beach insurance, in addition to AAU and USAV. Coaches will need background screens as well.

Travel

You need to decide if your players and parents are paying for travel or if you’re factoring this into your club dues. You will need to factor in coach travel, so begin by estimating how many tournaments you will include on your schedule and how many coaches you plan to send to each tournament.  Hotel, airfare, mileage, food stipends will all be included in this line item. If you have different levels of travel/commitment, you can separate this into two or three different levels in your budget.

Tournament Registration

Whether your season is 3 months long or year round, you need to decide if your club will be covering the tournament registrations or if you will leave it up for the players and parents. For Club Challenge Series events, the clubs register their squad for the events early before they are full, so this needs to be included in your budget.

Membership fees

There are player membership fees for the different tournaments hosted by p1440, BVCA, AVP Next, USAV, and AAU. If you plan to build these fees into your club dues it’s important to include them into your budget as an expense.

Salaries

Directors typically leave their salaries to the very end, but it’s important to put a salary into your budget so you can have an accurate roadmap for your business. You need to decide if the director(s) and coaches will be an independent contractors (1099) or employees (W2), and if you will pay monthly or biweekly.

Uniforms

Uniforms are a big line item. Players will need more than one uniform, as well as warm-ups/cover-ups. Since you never know what kind of weather your players will be competing in, it’s important to have leggings and/or sweatpants, along with a long sleeve and/or sweatshirt. Sand socks are also important to consider. Backpacks are also an important item to include in the uniform package and are great for promoting your beach program.

It’s important to make educated revenue estimates based on how many athletes you anticipate, camps, lessons, etc. In addition, make educated expense estimates by inputting fixed costs such as rent, insurance, staff equipment and variable costs such as tournaments, travel, uniform, coaches, etc.

Learn more about creating a budget here.

Listen as Spiker Beach Co-Owner and Co-Director Marty Suan shares how he formed his beach volleyball club along with the important budget considerations.