We must have active member-marketing budgets with real money behind them. If you aren’t spending on this, you aren’t serious.
We are now in our 10th year of publishing Club & Resort Business and it seems worthwhile to look back and see where our industry was then and what it looks like now. We have made some tremendous strides, but we also have some things we must pay attention to.
We can’t begin this type of discussion without looking at the size of the market then and now. When we launched C&RB in 2005, depending on how you count, there were between 16,000 and 17,000 golf courses in the U.S. Now, there are between 14,000 and 15,000. The recession that began in 2008 was a roller-coaster ride, but some very positive things came out of that experience. Here are a few:
• We did a better job of budgeting and living within ourselves. Yes, the disappearance of waiting lists scared us, and for a while we slashed our capital-expense budgets because we were worried about initiation fees. But a funny thing happened to the private segment—few, if any, private country clubs went out of business. The combination of the demographic, the unwillingness to walk away from our initiation fees, and the fact that our members could afford the monthly dues led to a stabilization of our segment. Those clubs that did experience financial difficulties didn’t disappear. They either refinanced, got new ownership, or were absorbed by one of the club management companies. In short, we did OK.
• Those courses that did shut down tended to be privately held, daily-fee courses owned for generations by people who then realized that the land held more value to developers than current or expected green fees, and hence they sold. This is not to dismiss these contractions as irrelevant to our market, but they speak more to ownership economics than to the overall health of golf.
• There has been a sea change in club dining. From the days of burgers and club sandwiches to today’s status as a dining destination of choice rather than obligation, dining is at the forefront. Annual average food-and-beverage revenues for clubs are now $1.8 million, and our overall market is $28-$30 billion. By comparison, the average annual revenue for a full-service fine-dining restaurant is under $1 million. Today’s club chef is a culinary virtuoso who will oversee casual, fast-casual, formal, banquet, weddings, and outings, usually in the same week! This is something the finest chefs in the country would have difficulty handling, yet our chefs do it with aplomb.
• We have “gotten it” when it comes to families. Virtually every story we field today demonstrates the fact that for clubs to thrive, they have to attract families with family-friendly activities. Kids camps, sports programs, overnight campouts and kid-friendly menus are all manifestations of the realization that we must have families or decline.
But there are also some areas that we still have to worry about and address:
• We must have active member-marketing budgets with real money behind them. Our current demographics demand that we attract younger families, and we can’t do it by having a committee meeting saying we have to do something about this. If you aren’t spending money on this, you aren’t serious.
• We have to develop young golfers. The golf pros have to get out from behind the retail counters in the pro shop and aggressively develop golf programs especially aimed at younger golfers. They are our future.
• We should seriously think about developing more par-3 courses. They can be three holes, six holes, or nine holes. There is no rule about what the length of the course should be, and older and younger golfers would love to tune their game in a par-3 environment.
• I don’t know what to think about the discussions of new hole sizes. The idea of a golf hole being the size of a basketball hoop doesn’t appeal to me personally, but I applaud the kind of thinking that will expand our game.
Finally, at the end of the summer I will be going to England for a while, and I’ll keep you updated on what is going on with golf in its ancestral home.
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