Consulting Services

Through 30 years of operating aquatics facilities, we've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. Lutra Aquatics is available to help ensure that you start out on the right path.

The process of planning, designing, and building an aquatics facility (whether a new facility or renovation of an existing facility) involves lots of decisions, and you'll live with the results of those decisions for a very long time. It's important to get them right.

Unfortunately, the collective body of knowledge in the aquatics industry comes from facilities that have been losing money for decades. Lutra operates from an entirely different perspective—we have a combined 30 years experience in the operation of self-supporting aquatics facilities.

If you want to know what's possible in your area, what revenues & expenses will actually look like, and what type of facility will maximize your chances of becoming self-supporting, then Lutra's consulting services will be invaluable. Our consulting projects fall predominately into the following categories.

• Feasibility Studies. Our feasibility studies are designed for the early planning stages—they provide an inexpensive snapshot of your area's potential. A feasibility study will tell you, in rough terms, whether your area can support an aquatics facility, and if so what general type. This will give you a decent sense of the construction financing that will be required, and whether your facility will be capable of becoming self-supporting or what level of operating subsidies would likely be necessary.
• Revenue Analysis. A Lutra revenue analysis is an exhaustive hour-by-hour, season-by-season estimate of potential facility revenues. We will base this estimate on area demographics, existing large customers, usage patterns, and competing recreation facilities, along with our 30 years of experience in aquatics programming. Our analyses will reflect revenue category conflicts, peak demand capacity constraints, and our knowledge of usage patterns throughout the day, week, and year. Our preliminary investigations will suggest one or two optimal facility schemes (size of pools, type of pools), and we will develop detailed revenue projections for each potential scheme, including the timeline to reach steady-state revenues.
• Expense Projections. Based on the potential facility schemes and detailed revenue analyses, we will project actual operating expenses for the facility. (Expenses are very much tied to facility usage, so you should never accept a generic expense projection.) While there are uncertainties in this type of analysis, our 30 years of experience reduces them dramatically. Our projections will include utilities, insurance, staffing at safe levels, customer service, billing and accounting, supplies, management time required, and every other significant expense category. We've actually been operating facilities for 30 years—we know where the costs are.
• Operational Enhancements. Our thirty years of experience operating aquatics facilities have taught us a lot about what works and what doesn't. In most cases, we can quickly identify four to five relatively easy changes to an existing facility's operations that will significantly boost revenue or reduce costs. Our reviews encompass the facility itself (water temperature, lane configuration), staffing, scheduling, programming, marketing, and other areas. These projects can be as exhaustive as our clients wish, but generally they take the form of a limited review of existing operations, and a brief report outlining several changes that we recommend, including the rationale for the change and the expected impact on the facility's bottom line.
• Design Consultation. Even once you've determined the optimal facility size and layout (or the one you're going to build even if it's not optimal), the design process is just beginning. We're not architects or contractors, and we can't do what they do. But we can help to make sure the things they do don't preclude important revenue streams or create unnecessary costs. Lots of seemingly small decisions can have very large impacts on operations.
  As just one example: at one of our facilities, replacing light bulbs over the main pool costs several thousand dollars per bulb. Why? The architect neglected to include any reasonable way to reach the lights that are 40 feet above 10 feet of water. Light bulbs burn out. Architects sometimes forget these things, because they aren't there when they happen. Lutra remembers.