President’s Letter – March, 2006

By Dick Stafford

Greetings Fellow Skålleagues!

The club held our March Annual General meeting at the Renaissance Hotel in Ft. Lauderdale. Our host, General Manager Heiko Dobrikow and his staff provided another excellent meal with Marriott's usual professional level of service. Heiko is a prospective member for our club.

It was great to have Jim St John join us again - since Jim spends most of his time cruising the world in his position as President of ResidenSea he has been missed. Jim was kind enough to give a short presentation to the members about his company, the ship and the challenges of dealing with the resident owners of the ship. He is off to the Far East but hopes to be back in time to attend the April meeting.

During the annual meeting the members were brought up to date on the status of our name change since we received approval from SIUSA to include Ft. Lauderdale in our name. A motion was made and seconded to officially change our name to SKÅL International Ft Lauderdale & Palm Beaches. The motion was put to a vote of the membership and received unanimous approval.

Our membership has now reached 43 as of this week. That is an increase of 7 more new members in just the last month. Our club is now ranked in the top 25% of all the clubs in North America. The addition of 17 new members since the first of the year has brought new vitality and interest to the club. In an effort to help everyone get to know our new members, we will begin having our members give a brief presentation about themselves and their companies at future meetings. We have set a goal to build the clubs membership to at least 66 by the end of the year. Once we reach that level we will have 2 votes at all SKAL Congresses. As fellow Skalleagues, we are asking each of you to assist us in achieving that goal. Just think, if every member brought in only one new member we would be at 86 members!!! To provide an incentive to you to help in this effort we will award each member who brings in a new member a $50.00 credit to be used to attend a dinner meeting or to pay for a guest attending one of our functions.

The board has made a decision to obtain a credit card processing program so that everyone can pay their future dues, dinner charges and auction item purchases by credit card. We have had many requests for this service and now feel that it is time to provide this convenience to our members. We will let you know when we have everything in place to begin the program.

Paul Cook has set up this year's golf tournament which will take place on Saturday June 10th. The tournament will be held at the Winston Trails Golf Club in Lake Worth. Paul will need some assistance with the tournament - please contact Paul to let him know what you would like to do to help. We are also going to need auction prizes and look forward to each of you helping out in obtaining gifts for the auction. Our semi-annual auctions are major fund raisers for the club that enable us to support the charities that are sponsored by SKAL International and our own club. Your contribution of things like wine, gift baskets, hotel accommodations or travel certificates and other like items to the auction are important to the success of the event. June 10th is not that far away. Paul has already sent out the flyer about the tournament so get your foursomes together and sign up early. For those of you who will be single golfers, Paul will take care of the pairings. Click here for the tournament registration form.

Our locations for upcoming dinner meetings are:

April 18, 2006 - we will be at the Marriott Hotel in Boca Raton.

The April meeting is our formal Installation of Officers Dinner. We are fortunate to have Mok Singh the new President of SIUSA coming to the dinner to assist with the ceremony. Please block this important date on your calendar and plan to bring your spouse or a guest to the dinner. Let's have a great turnout to show off our expanding newly named club.

May 16, 2006 - we will be at the Hilton Hotel in West Palm Beach.

The board is working on our future venues which will hopefully include several new and exciting locations that will add an element of fun to our meetings.

Don't forget to check the club's website for additional club news and pictures. www.skalpalmbeaches.org Looking forward to seeing everyone at the formal April meeting at the Marriott in Boca Raton.

SKAL!

Dick Stafford
President