1. Your Fine Dining sales are down considerably since there are now twenty restaurants within a five mile radius of your club and they all charge around 25% less than you in an updated atmosphere. Do you:
A. Decide to serve creole remoulade with the blackened Sea bass.
B. Increase your average per plate from $24 to $26 and leave the portions the same.
C. Decrease your average per plate from $24 to $22 and decrease the portions slightly.
D. Switch to grass-fed beef, free-range chickens, and fair-trade coffee exclusively.
E. Consider closing the fine dining all together when only 15% or less of your membership actually uses it.
2. You have few, if any juniors ever tee it up and you know that like churches, if you don’t get young people involved at your course, they’ll go elsewhere. Do you:
A. Ignore them. They are a nuisance and few eat Sea Bass.
B. Reduce the price of Chicken Nuggets and Fries from $7 to $6 and add an extra Nugget.
C. Serve mini-pizza’s.
D. Tell them to learn to play Tennis, “because the Tennis Pro has more programs”.
E. Build junior friendly tee’s, hold several junior camps/instruction days throughout the year knowing that when kids get involved, parents often follow.
3. You have few, if any women playing your course. Since they are increasingly more responsible for the decision to join a club vs. fifty years ago, you decide to:
A. Ignore them, they are too slow and clog up the course.
B. Add Karaoke.
C. Tell them to learn to play Tennis, “because the Tennis Pro has more programs”.
D. Add “fit” selections with a red heart symbol on your menu.
E. Come up with more lady friendly events. Decide to embrace them like gold knowing that they love to socialize and spend money at the club vs. their male counterparts. They often involve their children. They frequently take more lessons and attend more clinics/camps because they aren’t as ego-bound as men.
4. You are losing members faster than you can sign them up and costs are increasing, should you:
A. Raise your price, decrease service, and fire people because everyone knows that when demand goes down, price should go up.
B. Assess your members for your losses.
C. Add “theme” nights to your Friday night dinners, like “Asian Fusion”, “Tex-Mex”, or “Taste of Rome”.
D. Eliminate or severely reduce your initiation fee and add an extra month free to spice up the annual membership drive.
E. Increase your value proposition for your members by offering more services in the Pro shop, more clinics at reduced costs, more camps for ladies/kids/beginners. Reduce your dues to members that bring in new people as long as they both remain members. Consider dropping fine dining all together if only 15% of your membership actually uses it. Put profits back into the course instead of the restaurant which is usually a financial drain.
5. Your Golf pro does half the lessons his counterpart did twenty or thirty years ago and now people are getting lessons, attending clinic’s, and buying equipment for the same price you could sell it to them for (since everything is sold at suggested retail) at everywhere except your club, you decide to:
A. Let the competition have the lesson/clinic business, since most people now learn the game on YouTube.
B. Save money by firing most of the Pro shop staff and make the Golf Pro check people in, answer the phone, and get range balls.
C. Sub-contract out your Pro shop to a third party, since the Pro is too busy checking people in, answering the phone, getting range balls, and not giving lessons.
D. Promote your Golf Pro to Gm/Membership Director/Restaurant Manager since The Golf Channel’s program, “the Golf fix” is how people learn to swing a golf club these days.
E. Embrace the concept that fewer people will quit the club because they are being serviced “too much”. Have your Golf Pro do what he/she loves which is give lessons, hold clinics, play more with members, etc. vs. spending time on Facebook or watching TV in the pro shop. Also come out of the dinosaur age and take trades towards new equipment. Places like Edwin Watts and Golf Galaxy use this to fight ebay and other online competition + they play up the “custom-fitting” angle huge knowing that people will wait a few days for perfectly fit equipment for them.
6. You have heard adding a gym might pull in the younger demographic that you have always wanted at the club, do you:
A. Say, “that’s nice” and do nothing.
B. Clean out a 1,000 square foot space in the clubhouse and add some equipment circa 1985 because back then, Nautilus was “cutting edge”.
C. Buy a “Total Gym” and treadmill and call it “the gym”.
D. Spend $100,000 on a quality gym that only twenty people use on a regular basis.
E. Meet with a “real” local gym to work out a deal for your members knowing that if people really wanted a gym they would go to one, instead of a time warp you call a gym.
7. You just created a Facebook page for your course after seeing 500 million people validate it, what do you do next:
A. Post the 2005 pictures you took with the clubs 2.1 megapixel camera.
B. Post a daily weather report for a week and then quit since only 100 people joined the first month.
C. Let people know you added creole remoulade to the Sea Bass dish for $28.
D. Do nothing because you think you get more hits on your home page you made in 08’.
E. Post daily on any pertinent information your members and potential members might find of interest knowing that once someone becomes a fan, they automatically get daily feeds about your club (for free).
8. You have a few consistently belligerent and unruly members at the club that everyone considers quasi-GM’s, should you:
A. Do nothing, that’s just the way private clubs are.
B. Try to be friendly towards them but do nothing since you need members.
C. Add a cheap happy hour and buy bigger mugs.
D. Tell them about your decision to add creole remoulade to the Sea Bass.
E. Have a heart to heart discussion with them individually about etiquette and the expectations/responsibilities of being a member, that if they don’t agree to going forward, will end in their termination. You do this for several reasons: 1) They probably don’t have enough friends to truly hurt your business, 2) Their monthly dues are costing you new member dues, 3) Once the precedent is set, incidences of unruly behavior will go down immediately.
9. Your course was designed by one of the best classic architects (Ross, Raynor, Mackenzie, Tillinghast, Langford, and/or Flynn) in America, but it bares little resemblance to the original design today, you decide to:
A. Keep cutting your course superintendent’s budget because “our restaurant is where the action is”.
B. Change your advertising to reflect the real architect today: John Lafoy, Bobby Weed, or the 1982 board.
C. Plant more tree’s so the city will honor you for going “green”.
D. Continue to advertise that you are a “classic course designed by ”__________________” because few people know the difference.
E. Embark on a restoration project that involves collecting pictures, drawings, and routings of the course as it was originally designed to create excitement within your membership and make the course more playable since 3/4 of the tree’s that exist now on your course have NOTHING to do with the strategy intended for it.
10. Your course is in dire straits and is one unfortunate accident away from shutting down, you decide to:
A. Do nothing since it has been around for 50-75 years surviving the great depression, wars, and stock market crashes. “It will never go out of business”.
B. Cut your course superintendent’s budget, fire (more people) people, triple your efforts on the restaurant hoping that spending 250k-500k on a fiscal loser will keep members from leaving.
C. Raise your pricing because 225 people at a higher price vs. 400 people at a lower price works better in the long run...and have a membership drive.
D. Borrow 3-5 million for a new clubhouse but spend nothing on the course since people join a private club for the clubhouse.
E. Work towards implementing the answer E to the previous (9) questions because you finally realize 85% of your membership joined (or will join) your club because of the golf course and not the other way around.