· 5 min read · Jason Youngjin Koh
What a junior sign-up is worth
Clubs price a new junior at $250 because that is what the first term invoice says. The real figure is closer to $3,864, and the gap decides whether you can afford to advertise at all.
A new junior in your program is worth about $3,864 to your club. Most clubs price that same child at $250, because $250 is what the first term invoice says. The gap is roughly fifteen times, and it is the number that decides whether you can afford to advertise at all.
The number on the invoice
Ask a club what a new junior is worth and you will get the term fee. Twenty five dollars a week across a ten week term is $250. That is the figure in the booking system, the figure the treasurer reports and the figure the committee plans with, so it quietly becomes the value of a new family.
It is an accurate measure of one transaction. It is a poor measure of one customer. A junior who starts in Term 1 does not stop at Term 1. They keep paying for as long as they keep turning up, and a fair bit happens around them while they do.
The three things that happen after the first term
Program fees keep arriving, a share of juniors move into private lessons, and some of them bring a sibling or a friend. Add those three together and the shape of the number changes.
They stay for more than one term
Four terms a year at $250 a term is $1,000 a year. On an average stay of three years, that is $3,000 of program fees from one sign-up. Even a family who leaves after twelve months has paid four times the figure you had in your head.
Some of them take private lessons
Assume one in five juniors in a group program also books private or semi private lessons, and that those lessons come to about $600 a year. Averaged across every sign-up, that is 20 per cent of $600 for three years, or $360 a head. You do not get it from everybody, which is exactly why it belongs in an average rather than in a headline.
They bring siblings and friends
Junior tennis runs on word of mouth in a way most categories do not, because the same parents stand on the same sideline every Saturday. A 15 per cent referral uplift on everything above adds $504. That is deliberately conservative. A sibling is a whole second player, but they usually start later and finish earlier, so counting the share as a fraction of one lifetime rather than a whole extra one keeps the estimate defensible.
| Component | Assumption | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Program fees | $25 a week, 10 week terms, 4 terms a year, 3 year stay | $3,000 |
| Private lessons | 20% take them, at $600 a year | $360 |
| Siblings and referrals | 15% uplift on the rest | $504 |
| Lifetime value | The whole relationship | $3,864 |
| First term value | $25 a week for 10 weeks | $250 |
$3,864
What one junior sign-up is worth across their whole time at the club, against $250 for their first term.
Why this is a commercial number
It sets the ceiling on what you can pay to acquire a family, and that ceiling decides whether advertising is available to you at all. A club that believes a sign-up is worth $250 looks at a $100 cost per sign-up and sees forty cents of every dollar gone before a coach has been paid. A club that has worked out the $3,864 sees $100 buying something worth close to thirty eight times what it cost.
The advertising is identical in both cases. So is the cost per sign-up. The only difference is the yardstick each club held it up against, and that difference is why one club has a growing program and the other has a flyer on the clubhouse noticeboard.
A Sydney tennis academy we work with has taken more than 300 sign-ups from $24,000 of ad spend across two years, which is under $80 a sign-up. Whether that is money well spent is not a matter of opinion. It depends entirely on which of the two numbers above you compare it to.
Where the estimate can be wrong
Retention moves the answer more than any other input. Hold everything else still, shorten the average stay from three years to eighteen months, and the total falls to about $1,932. Stretch it to five years and it rises to about $6,440. Your coaching, your courts and whether a nine year old has a friend in the squad are worth more than any ad you will ever run.
The rest of the inputs are yours as well, and none of them are ours to guess. Four of them you can pull this week.
- Your weekly fee and term length, straight out of the booking system.
- Your average stay, from comparing this term's roll against the same roll two and three years ago.
- Your private lesson share, from the coaching diary rather than from memory.
- Your referral share, from asking every new family how they heard about you and writing the answer down.
A rough figure built from your own records beats a precise one built from somebody else's assumptions. Keep it in the same document as your term dates and revisit it once a year.
The calculator starts on the assumptions above and lets you change every one of them. There is no sign-up and the full formula is printed on the page, so your committee can check the arithmetic before they act on it. Run your own numbers
What to do with the number
- Work it out with your own inputs and write it down somewhere the committee can see it.
- Decide what you are willing to pay for one sign-up. A fraction of the lifetime value leaves room for the families who do not stay.
- Measure enquiries and sign-ups rather than reach and likes, because the whole calculation depends on knowing what an enquiry cost.
- Then work on retention, because it is the input that moves the answer most and the one you already control.
None of this makes advertising the right call for every club. It does turn it into a decision you can take with a number in front of you, instead of a spend you are guessing at.