The major breakdowns stopped being part of the year.

The organisation

Evans Head Bowling Club is a community club on the NSW Northern Rivers, run alongside two offsite hospitality venues — the Sand Pit Café, and the Sand Bar and restaurant. Roger Hong is the CEO across all three.

That structure is the first thing that shapes the technology problem. Three trading sites means three networks, three sets of point-of-sale, and three places something can fail on a Friday night while one management team covers all of it.

The problem

Before ClubIT, the club's pattern was major breakdowns — the kind that interrupt trading rather than merely annoy staff. Roger's framing of the issue is the one we hear from nearly every club board, and it is worth quoting because it reframes the whole purchase:

“It's not so much what it costs you to have the service in place — it's the cost of when that service is not working.”

— Roger Hong, CEO, Evans Head Bowling Club

What we did

• Regular scheduled attendance across all three sites, rather than attendance triggered by a fault

• Proactive maintenance on the equipment and systems most likely to cause an outage

• One accountable party across the club and the two offsite venues

• After-hours cover matched to when the venues actually trade

The outcome

Five years on, Roger's summary is that they have had no major issues — measured against a pattern of major breakdowns before ClubIT came on.

His conclusion on how to evaluate a provider is the argument for proactive maintenance made from the buyer's side: paying a little more for reliability beats paying less for a service that fails regularly.

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