Programming Note: Monthly Membership blast arriving a day early as I will be traveling tomorrow. Gambling Manager Brenda DeMars will provide the monthly update at the meeting. Good day FRYS Membership, Well, that’s a wrap: Faribault Rotary Youth Services completed its fourth year of charitable gambling at the end of August, and a record-breaking year it was! FRYS posted record sales volume – awesome – but sales alone do not make donations, that requires profit, and profit was produced. Before evaluating the full year, let’s quickly summarize August. Heading into tax planning for year-end, FRYS board of directors estimated a $10K net income total for August, which was remarkably close as net income came in at $9,993. Turns out after going through the year-end exercise a few times that there is proficiency to be gained even in the volatile industry of gambling. Turning to the more interesting data, the aggregates of 2024/2025 compared to the prior year of 2023/2024:
Total sales across the organization surpassed two milestones in 2024/2025. The first milestone eclipsed was the $2.5 million in sales, an increase of $58K year-over-year, translating to 2.3%. Significant growth in paper tabs and bino overcame the decline in e-tab sales. Hard to say if the fall in e-tab sales and growth was from the change in legislation as correlation does not mean causation but certainly something to keep an eye on going forward. Back to the data, I will be the first to tell you that never in my most ambitious expectations did I expect FRYS to turn out $2.5 million in sales when the groundwork was established to get charitable gambling up and running at Boxers in October 2021. For those curious, the annual sales in the inaugural year of 2021/2022 were a healthy $1.77 million, meaning sales have grown by over 41% in the four years of operations, a testament to the quality of service and team FRYS has developed at Boxers. But as we learned earlier in the commentary, sales do not mean profits (maybe somebody should tell that to all the AI companies spending billions of dollars to hyperscale large language models trying to achieve artificial general intelligence – whoops, was that a shot at overvalued AI companies? Indeed, but I digress). We at FRYS certainly understand that revenue and profits are two different things, and profits we made! No doubt $2.5 million in sales is great but surpassing $100 thousand in profits is even better as FRYS tallied $101,632 in net income for the year, an increase of $32K year-over-year / 46.7%. That surge in profits, over $30K more than what was budgeted for, meant FRYS had a lot of funds to allocate at year-end, as discussed during the August membership meeting. For those that missed the meeting or did not see Murray’s commentary in the weekly bulletin, the 2024/2025 Give-A-Thon broke down as follows:
Looking ahead to 2025/2026, the budget is calling for a slight reduction in profits out of conservatism (this is volatile gambling after all), projecting $80,000 net income. Only time will tell if those figures are reached. Clearing $2.5 million in sales and $100 thousand in profits was a great achievement; however, there is no rest for the weary as the teams across FRYS and Boxers have hit the ground running in the new year, and after the Vikes dominating performance last Sunday, maybe a good start as well? Much appreciated, Faribault Rotary Youth Services Charitable Gambling | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
