Renovating Your Club is Fun and Easy! Part One

by Jim Petersen, CCM, General Manager, Sunset Ridge CC, Northfield, Ill. (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
January 2008
 

My first bit of advice is do not believe everything you read. Sunset Ridge Country Club recently completed a $15 million dollar renovation to our clubhouse and golf course. Two million of this was spent on the golf course renovating bunkers, cart paths, tees and greens. That leaves $13 million for Clubhouse construction, furnishings and equipment, fees, contingency and down time expenses. Was this a fun and easy experience? Not really, but it wasn't a horrible experience either. Did I learn anything along the way? You bet!

I was hired as the General Manager of Sunset Ridge a little more than four years ago in January of 2001. The planning for our just completed renovations started after I had about six months on the job. We started slow, surveying the membership and doing some engineering studies to help us define the project scope. Did we need to renovate the existing structure, do a partial tear down and rebuild, or raise the entire clubhouse and start over? Based on the engineering studies we were able to determine that simply renovating the existing building would not suffice as we had numerous structural problems to overcome and room layouts were either inefficient or just poorly designed. A complete tear down and rebuild would be prohibitively expensive and be more than our membership could justify financially so we settled on a partial tear down and rebuild along with renovating some areas of the existing building.

Our Long Range Planning Committee interviewed a number of local and national architectural firms that had some experience in designing clubs. Based on these interviews our committee retained an out of state architectural firm that specializes in club design. A general contractor that had done renovation work on a number of local clubs was also brought on board.

The architect interviewed the Board and Long Range Planning Committee members, staff, and the general membership in a series of focus group meetings to determine what each of these stakeholder groups wanted to have in a new clubhouse. After reviewing this information the Planning Committee prioritized each item on these "wish" lists to give the architect some direction for the redesign.

In a few short weeks the architect flew to Chicago with "Scheme A" in hand. It wasn't perfect but we liked what we saw. This was the beginning of a series of weekly meetings in which the architect would fly in and we would review the latest design revisions. After many weeks we reached "Scheme O" and we thought we had a plan that worked. The architect assured us we could build this plan within our target budget ceiling. The architect was then instructed to bring this schematic plan to a 50% construction document level where the general contractor could take the project to bid. The construction documents were prepared and given to the general contractor.

A little more than a month later, we got the bad news. After the bids were received the plan was far more expensive to build than the architect's estimate and what we felt the membership would approve. A year of effort had seemingly gone down the drain. The estimate to build Scheme O was $12 million not counting furnishings and equipment, fees, down time expenses or the proposed renovations to the golf course. Our Board decided to present this plan to the membership anyway, not for a vote but to demonstrate what we had learned in the last year. In October of 2002, two town hall meetings we conducted for all members to attend. Scheme O was presented and the membership was assured that the Committee would return to the drawing board to find an affordable alternative.

In December of 2002 the architect returned with a totally new plan that he felt we could build within our target budget. Tweaking, redesign and tweaking some more became the order of the day for the next month or so. We ended up with a plan that certainly wasn't as grand as Scheme O, but it satisfied most of our original "wish list" items and appeared to fit within our targeted budget. The architect was again asked to prepare construction documents for this new plan so we could get some hard numbers on the construction cost.

Finally, some good news! This new plan fit within our estimates of what we thought the membership would approve. Our original budget was as follows:

Clubhouse Project $8,050,000.
Fees $800,000.
Furniture Fixtures & Equipment $1,050,000.
Golf Course Project $1,800,000.
Downtime Expenses $1,300,000.
Total $13,000,000.

Now the Finance Committee really got to work on preparing a plan to pay for project. What was ultimately presented to the membership was to take on $7 million in long term debt, use $2.5 million of cash reserves and assess the members based on membership class for $3.5 million. Marketing materials were prepared explaining the finance plan and the project scope. In early September of 2003 town hall meetings were once again held. The plans were presented and the members were allowed to comment. The vote for approval of the project would be called for later that month. The Board and Committees had spent over two years working toward this goal.

The votes were tallied and the project received a 92% approval. The Clubhouse would close in just three months for the start of the renovations.

Part Two: Put on the Hard Hat

View / Download PDF of Floor Plan