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Club Growth Path

Run the Club Growth Path MicroSim fullscreen

About This MicroSim

Most clubs never leave stage two, and that is not a failure. This timeline lays the four stages out in the order they usually arrive -- founding year, scaling, optional multi-site expansion, rare franchise -- so a founder can see which one they are in rather than which one they feel behind on.

The useful part is not the sequence. It is the one condition attached to each stage that has to be true before advancing. A club that is still recruiting mentors one at a time cannot staff a second site, and opening one will cost it the first. A club that has never survived a leadership handover has not yet proved the thing multi-site expansion depends on.

Two of the four stages are marked optional, and the fourth is marked rare. A growth path that ends at stage two with a full room and a stable rota is a successful club, not a stalled one.

Drag the amber You are here marker to where your club actually is. It snaps to whole stages and it is the only draggable thing on the timeline.

How to Use

  • Click any coloured block to read what the stage involves, why it lasts as long as it does, and the condition that gates the next one.
  • Drag the "You are here" marker to your club's current stage. It snaps to whole positions and cannot leave the range.
  • Read the axis as club age, not calendar dates -- "Year 1-2" is a typical duration, not a deadline.
  • Reset returns the marker to the founding year and clears the panel.

Lesson Plan

Bloom level: Understand (L2) -- explain

Learning objective: Given a club's current size and stability, the learner identifies which growth stage it occupies and what condition must be met before advancing to the next stage.

Before the sim (5 min). Ask the group to say, in one sentence each, how big they want the club to be in three years. Note who says bigger and who says better. Both are legitimate and this timeline is mostly about the second.

With the sim (10 min). Read the four stages in order, then drag the marker to where the club actually is and defend the choice. Groups routinely place themselves a stage ahead of where the gating condition says they are, and the argument about that is the lesson.

After the sim (15 min). Take the gating condition for the next stage and turn it into a checklist with dates. For most clubs that is the mentor pipeline: how many mentors, recruited through which channel, by when.

Check for understanding. Describe a club -- twenty students, one venue, one leader who has never taken a week off -- and ask which stage it is in and what has to happen before it expands. Naming the leadership transition, not the student count, is the objective met.

Embedding This MicroSim

Paste this into any page of the book, adjusting the relative path to docs/sims/ for the page's depth:

<iframe src="../../sims/club-growth-path/main.html" width="100%" height="622px" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Specification

The full specification below is extracted from Chapter 6: Growing, Branding, and Promoting Your Club.

Type: timeline
**sim-id:** club-growth-path<br/>
**Library:** vis-timeline<br/>
**Status:** Specified

Purpose: Show the typical progression from a single-site club to scaling, to multi-site expansion, to an optional franchise model, so a founder can see where their club currently sits and what the next stage would actually require.

Bloom Taxonomy: Understand (L2)
Bloom Taxonomy Verb: explain

Learning objective: Given a club's current size and stability, the learner identifies which growth stage it occupies and what condition must be met before advancing to the next stage.

Time period: Represented as club-age stages rather than calendar dates -- "Founding Year," "Year 1-2," "Year 2-3," "Year 3+"

Orientation: Horizontal

Stages (each a clickable event on the timeline):
- Founding Year: "Single Site, Starting Small" -- click reveals "First three students through a pilot cohort, per Chapter 5. No growth decision needed yet."
- Year 1-2: "Scaling a Club" -- click reveals "More students, more sessions, more mentors -- all at the same single site. Requires a stable mentor pipeline via the Volunteer Coordinator Role (Chapter 4)."
- Year 2-3: "Multi-Site Expansion (Optional)" -- click reveals "A second venue, run by a trained assistant leader. Requires the original site to have survived a leadership transition already."
- Year 3+: "Franchise Model (Rare, Optional)" -- click reveals "An independently run club elsewhere, using this club's charter and curriculum as a starting template."

Interactive features:
- Click any stage to reveal its detail text in a panel below the timeline
- A "You Are Here" marker the reader can drag to any stage to bookmark their own club's current position (stored only for the duration of the page visit)

Visual style: Horizontal timeline with connecting arrows showing the typical (not mandatory) progression order

Color coding: Green for the founding stage, blue for scaling, amber for multi-site, gray for franchise (signaling it is optional and rare)

Implementation: vis-timeline library with custom click handlers for the detail panel

References