Ideas for Taking full advantage of available technology

by C&RB Staff (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
April 2007
 

Welcome WWWagon: At Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla., news travels fast—via e-mail, in fact. When there’s a new member in town, the membership department sends a “New Member Alert” to the entire staff, along with a photo and brief background.

For example: “Mr. and Mrs. Bill Smith are from Kalmazoo, Mich. They became new members on April 1, 2006, and have three children. This is their first visit to Ocean Reef as new members. Please extend your usual warm welcome, and encourage them to make good use of all the club has to offer! Mr. Smith likes to play golf.”

The alerts not only make sure that individual staff members will be prepared to greet new members when they encounter them, but also have some conversation points—hometown, number of children, recreational interests, etc.—to help personalize their welcome. “It’s a good way to break the ice,” says Bill Hackleton, Executive Director of Communications. “The new members are impressed with the staff’s attention and the warmth of their welcome. Our staff members also feel more confident in their initial dealings with the latest members.”

Technical Knockout: Quail Creek CC, a member-owned-and-controlled club in Naples, Fla., employs 200 full- and part-time workers in three buildings. Like many clubs, Quail Creek management was continually vexed by “buddy punching,” the costly practice of workers clocking in for their friends when they’re late or, even worse, looking to scam some free pay that the two pals could later split.

The answer for Quail Creek came in the form of a “biometric” hand-reading time clock that, in less than a minute, reads the shape and dimensions of individual hands and checks them against previously stored templates. Quail Creek found that the cost of equipment was more than justified by the savings not only from recaptured labor dollars, but also elimination of the need for creating and administering employee badges.

The time clocks interface with the club’s existing payroll system and calculate complex pay premiums for overtime, holidays, etc. Quail Creek stopped leasing a time and attendance system, and best of all, “‘buddy punching’ has been completely eliminated,” reports Nina Brown, Manager of Information Systems.

Keeping Labor in Line: “Most managers write labor schedules but don’t cost them out with actual payroll dollars, or compare [labor costs] to projected revenues,” says Scott Fanton, Clubhouse Manager of The Reserve Club in Indian Wells, Calif. To do a better job of keeping payroll in line with revenues, budgets and payroll-percentage goals, Fanton devised an Excel-based program that helps him set a target for controlling labor costs as he makes up his schedule, and immediately calculates actual costs and issues over-budget alerts.

“It may add an hour to your scheduling process,” says Fanton of the extra numbers that must be put into the spreadsheet process. “But payroll never goes over budget without your knowledge.”