The Country Club at Mirasol Moves Smoothly to Member-Owned

After they build, developers will go. But management at this successful development club is already taking important steps to ensure a comfortable transition for all who will stay.

by Joe Barks (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
February 2008
 

The CC at Mirasol at a glance • Opened: 2002 • Number of Memberships: 1,142 • Clubhouse Size: 52,000 sq. ft. • Sports & Fitness Center: 17,000 sq. ft. • Pro Shop: 5,500 sq. ft. • Annual Rounds: 59,000 (two courses) • General Manager: Matt Lambert, CCM • Director of Golf: Terry McDowell, PGA • Director of Golf Course Maintenance: Michael Thomas • Director of Food & Beverage: Joe Gamlin • Executive Chef: Sal Franchino • Director of Sports: Jeremy Barker

Matt Lambert took his Certified Club Manager exam during the Club Mana-gers Association of America World Conference when it was held in Orlando as part of the Golf Industry Show earlier this month. Like many club managers who take the test after years of working in the “real world,” Lambert, General Manager at The Country Club at Mirasol in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., had a mild and momentary crisis in confidence as he went through the review sessions before the exam.
“I don’t know—there’s a lot of material in areas I really haven’t been exposed to since hospitality school [at the University of Massachusetts],” Lambert said during a break in the intensive process, when asked how it was going.

But Lambert passed the test and earned the designation—and then returned, as a newly minted CCM, to direct the staff of a club that has been passing every test since it opened in 2002.

As The Country Club at Mirasol marked its five-year anniversary last fall, it also celebrated a profitable year that saw it surge past the 1,000- member mark and continue to build a well-rounded, family-oriented club offer, in which all departments are thriving.

Just as importantly, the attractions offered by the club have played a significant role in helping to establish Mirasol as the most profitable real-estate project in the history of the developer, Taylor Woodrow Communities. As a result, the timetable for turning club ownership over to its membership has been moved up a year; it is now scheduled for mid- to late 2009.

Not Mandated to Fail
All of this is the result of smooth execution of a well-conceived plan to avoid the all-too-typical fate of development-based, mandatory-membership clubs, which often hit rough transitional patches—or fail entirely—once a developer has sold its properties and moved on to other sites.

General Manager Matt Lambert, a newly minted CCM, directs a staff that’s passed every real-world test with flying colors in its first five years.

“From day one, Taylor Woodrow has shown that it sees the big picture, in how it has positioned the club as its number-one marketing tool for Mirasol,” Lambert says. “They’ve made it clear from the start that the key to selling a home is to run a good club, and have set us up to succeed and given us a lot of free rein to do so.”

Lambert and staff have seized on that opportunity to not only build a diverse mix of strong operations in an impressively short period, but also to lay a foundation for the change in ownership. “Working for a member-owned club is very different than for a developer-owned club, where you’re focused on driving sales and can do a lot of that just through the golf course and other facilities,” Lambert says. “The original plan was to not turn the club over until 2010—but I started emphasizing to everyone a couple of years ago that we needed to establish the service culture right away that will be the key to prospering after the transition.”

The Mirasol staff didn’t wait for an official transition in ownership to establish the service culture it wants to provide.

How has this translated into what The Country Club at Mirasol has provided to members from the start—and what’s planned for the next level, when the club is member-owned? Here’s a department-by-department look:

• Fitness/Spa—In its first five years, Mirasol has already run laps around clubs that are just now getting pumped up about the full potential of these areas. At a time when many properties lament that the space they’ve devoted to fitness and spa operations is proving to be woefully inadequate, Mirasol’s 17,000-sq. ft. Esplanade Sports Center (a stand-alone building) continues to operate comfortably, even as across-the-board growth continues in a widening array of services and activities.
“In 2007, we saw strong year-to-year growth in areas like nail services, where revenues were up 36%, aesthetics services, which were up 37%, and spa retail sales, which were up 65%,” reports Director of Sports Jeremy Barker. “In the last three months of the year, we saw personal training average a 26% increase. And the start to 2008 has also been good, with 18% overall growth for the sports building, compared to January 2007.

Director of Golf Terry McDowell has come back home to help new arrivals to Florida learn to love the game.	Director of Golf Course Mainte-nance Michael Thomas goes out of his way to inform members without being a “turf nerd.”

“All of this has been without any price increases and with only an 8% increase in the number of occupied homes—and a large decrease in the number of annual members,” Barker notes. “That tells us we’re doing the right things to provide what our [equity] members want and need to have a full club experience.”

That experience now also includes activities such as spinning classes and ballroom dancing, where instruction enrollments are at all-time highs, Barker says. Traditional areas like tennis are also prospering, with the club’s 15 courts seeing record levels of team activity under a program directed by Head Tennis Pro Chris Pressley.

An important key to managing all of this activity efficiently while providing the proper service levels, Lambert notes, is how the Mirasol sports center was designed with a “central command” desk just inside its main doors. “There aren’t multiple check-in points,” he says. “No matter what you’re coming in for, we greet you and take care of you and direct you properly as soon as you enter. This really helps to eliminate stresses during the busiest times.”

• Golf Operations—Mirasol also hasn’t hesitated to make major adjustments in its first years to enhance its golf-related facilities and services for members. The club boasts two championship 18-hole layouts (Arthur Hills and Tom Fazio designs) and in fact hosted the PGA Tour’s Honda Classic from 2003 through 2006 before it was moved across the street, to the PGA National Resort. Rounds have been strong from the start and are now at an annual level of 59,000, largely concentrated in a seven-month period.

But for its first two years, a Golf Digest teaching academy that was on site cut into available space for an adequate pro shop. When that arrangement ended, Mirasol took the opportunity to reconfigure its stand-alone golf building to create a new, centrally located 5,500-sq. ft. shop (the old 800-sq. ft. shop, in the main clubhouse, was converted into a co-ed card room).

“We put the pro shop where it should be,” says Lambert, adding that the larger shop now allows Mirasol to offer a much more expansive line of resort wear to members.

The Mirasol golf staff, led by Director of Golf Terry McDowell, immediately stepped in to fill the teaching academy void with a strong in-house instruction program, combining updated facilities (new driving range, putting green and indoor hitting bay with video-swing analysis cameras) with an emphasis on clinic-style teaching.

  “A lot of people who retire to [Florida] are new golfers, and they can be a little intimidated by individual instruction, so we find that clinics often work better for them,” says McDowell, who came to Mirasol last year to return to his native state, after directing the golf programs at The Philadelphia Cricket Club and The Forest Hill Field Club in Bloomfield, N.J. “We make sure we have two pros per clinic, to give enough individual attention, and we also recently added a female instructor to the staff.

“We have a real mix here of many very good players and an equal amount who have never played,” McDowell notes. “That can create some pace-of-play issues, unless you emphasize instruction and make it easy and comfortable for the new players to not only learn to play and enjoy the game, but also get their indoctrinations in rules and etiquette in instructional settings, rather than out on the course.”

To further enhance member services and improve pace of play, Mirasol is also looking to implement a global positioning communications system this year.

• Course Maintenance—The Mirasol property encompasses 190 acres of turf, 13 miles of cart path, 8 acres of bunkers, and 40 lakes. Parts of it are still remote enough that course maintenance crews occasionally encounter a stray wild boar, in addition to the many exotic cranes and herons.

Trying to keep golfers informed about course maintenance projects and issues, therefore, is not something that’s easy to accomplish through one-on-one contact. So while Mirasol’s Director of Golf Course Maintenance, Michael Thomas, tries to be as accessible and visible as possible, he learned early on that the real key to effectiveness in his position at this sprawling property would be through regular and effective written communications, of both the electronic and print variety.
The “regular” part is accomplished through “Weekly Golf Course Updates” e-mailed to members; summaries of key points then appear in the club’s printed monthly newsletters.

The “effective” component comes through the format of the updates: quick-hit summaries of what Thomas wants to convey about the subject of the moment, and photos to illustrate his messages whenever possible. For a recent Update about fairway divots, he used an effective “Frequently Asked Questions” style. The Updates also feature a day-by-day summary of scheduled maintenance for each of the two courses for that week.

“At first, it just seemed like one more thing to do that wouldn’t work,” Thomas says. “But I quickly found out it was very effective. It creates accountability for me and my staff, but also for the golfers, so they’ll police themselves.
“One thing that I think really helps is that I try to make sure I don’t sound like a ‘turf nerd’ in what I write,” he adds. “It’s not highly technical at all, I just point out where problems are being created and how they’re being addressed. And again, using as many pictures as possible really helps.”

(Editor’s Note: Samples of the Weekly Golf Course Updates can be view HERE)

Director of Sports Jeremy Barker likes the percentages, no matter what fitness or	Director of F&B Joe Gamlin and staff keep providing new reasons to eat at Mirasol for all parts of the day, and all courses.

• Food & Beverage—The drive to provide an appropriate level of service in a member-owned setting is perhaps most visible—and most critical—in dining operations. Here, too, the Mirasol staff has not been sitting around waiting for the official transition; it is already giving members a good taste of what can be provided in all key aspects: menus, settings and service.

On the menu side, Director of Food & Beverage Joe Gamlin and Executive Chef Sal Franchino continue to expand both a la carte offerings and special dishes for Mirasol’s extensive lineup of theme nights. To help extend members’ enjoyment of meals, Jason Jones, a sous chef, was recently made a full-time pastry chef.

“He’s self-taught and has good skills,” reports Franchino. “We got him a new oven and he’s been pulling sugar, making chocolate molds and cake rings. Desserts are a big thing for our members but we have to be conscious of dietary restrictions, so it helps to have our own source for making items that go beyond sugar-free jello. Now we’re able to offer an imaginative assortment of things that you just can’t get at restaurants. Whenever we can create advantages like that, it’s huge.”

The Mirasol staff has also taken important steps to make it easy for members to use the club for other day parts, such as complimentary bagel and coffee service in the morning, and a new carving station, positioned in a corner of the Grille Room, that has proved to be extremely popular at lunch.

“[The station] took one table out of our lunch area, but it’s been well worth it; it really took some strain off our kitchen staff,” says Gamlin. “For $8.95 we offer a fresh-carved sandwich from a choice of three meats, with fresh bread choices, condiments and sides. The station is manned by a chef with a great personality, Milton Owen; he really makes it work.”
Mirasol will continue to unearth and develop service talent on its own through an “MIT” (Manager in Training) program it is establishing with leading hospitality schools. And it will also continue to seek new ways to expand its service offerings in all areas, particularly in response to an anticipated shift in member demographics that stands to make the club even more family-oriented in the future.

“Of the 2,700 people within our membership, there are over 600 kids,” Lambert notes. “Like a lot of development clubs in South Florida, this one wasn’t built with day care or a kiddie pool—but we can clearly see a need to think about providing those kinds of things now, along with more play areas and programs geared to younger people. We’ll probably also want to look at ways to provide good quality takeout meals, too, as another service to families.

“There are always going to be new ways to enhance what we have here,” Lambert adds. “We’re pleased with what we’ve been able to accomplish for members under the developer’s ownership, and look forward to even more success when the club belongs to the members themselves.” C&RB