I received a phone call a couple of weeks back from an industry colleague who belongs to a private club. He said he was serving on a committee to look for ways to increase membership and revenues, while cutting costs. While I mentioned a couple of ideas, I launched into my familiar pitch that almost any club could benefit from attending to the basics of the business in an organized and disciplined way.
Most of us recognize that our business is not rocket science. The basics of what we do are well-known to any club professional. What makes our jobs so challenging is the sheer volume of things that must be attended to daily in a detail and people-intensive business. Unless a club operation is well-organized and its managers highly disciplined, it operates in a state of barely-controlled chaos interspersed with periods of downtime. The challenge for all is to transition quickly from storm to calm back to storm while remaining focused on long term goals, ongoing projects, and continual process improvement. The solution is to organize the club so that most things happen routinely and that managers at all levels be highly disciplined in approaching their duties and efforts to improve the operation.
The great majority of private clubs suffer from similar problems rooted in the same underlying causes:
- Standalone operations with limited resources and few economies of scale.
- Clubs operate multiple businesses — food and beverage, golf, tennis, aquatics, retail, recreation, and the major maintenance effort involved in golf course operations. The knowledge and skill set to operate clubs efficiently is large and complex, and especially challenging for lean management teams working long hours and weeks.
- The club business is both labor and detail-intensive requiring significant ongoing training, yet without the necessary resources to adequately provide it. As a result most clubs operate from oral tradition and service complaints are a continuing issue.
- Most clubs operate without a written operations plan made up of detailed standards, policies, and procedures which, as Jim Muehlhausen says in his book, The 51 Fatal Business Errors, requires managers to reinvent the wheel every day.
- The hospitality industry as a whole and clubs in particularly offer relatively low wage jobs, limited benefits, and challenging working conditions. As a result high levels of staff turnover are common, particularly among line employees.
- Older clubs with aging memberships and outdated facilities find it challenging to find the right mix of facilities and activities to attract new members.
- In most markets, there is ample competition for the members’ discretionary spending — and often from operations that offer limited well-designed and executed products or services; whereas clubs must be all things to all members.
- In a sense, club members are a “captive” audience and can quickly grow bored or dissatisfied with the same old events and activities. A club staff, without the ability or resources to provide frequently changing “wow” factor events, will often hear the comment, “What have you done for me lately?”
- In some clubs ever-changing boards offer little continuity of direction.
Given these and other specific challenges that vary from club to club, it is absolutely imperative that club managers organize their operations in detail. My own list of requirements includes:
- Leadership and management training for all managers and supervisors with an aim of having consistent and disciplined, service-based leaders taking disciplined actions (the benefits of which are discussed by Jim Collins in Good to Great, Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t).
- Well-defined and consistently reinforced organizational values and culture of service.
- A written operations plan made up of standards, policies, and procedures — absolutely critical for human resources and accounting, and fostering organization and discipline in club departments.
- Communicate thoroughly with members through a variety of tools and techniques, including newsletter, members only website, management calling programs, and General Manager’s letters. Understand members’ wants and preferences by taking the pulse of the membership with an annual online survey and monthly surveys of smaller subsets of members. Analyze member spending habits and purchases to determine individual likes and dislikes, as well as popular and unpopular club initiatives and offerings.
- Provide ongoing, thorough training of managers and employees. This coupled with service-based leadership and a constantly reinforced culture of service will foster employee empowerment — and as John Tschohl, President of the Service Quality Institute says, “Without empowerment, an organization will never be a service leader. Empowerment is the most critical skill an employee can master and a company can drive in order to lure and keep customers.”
- Use Tools to Beat Budget or some other means of real time tracking of revenues, payroll, and other expenses to quickly spot and intervene to correct operational under-performance.
- Benchmarking of all areas of the operation to establish the norms of the operation. The value of benchmarks tracked over time is immense and includes establishing realistic goals for future periods, establishing measurable accountabilities for managers, and easing the preparation and improving the accuracy of future budgets.
- Detailed planning, both strategic and tactical, at all levels of the operation and a habit of Continual Process Improvement.
- Thorough work planning and performance reviews, coupled with a policy of strict accountability for performance. This requires developing measurable performance criteria for all managerial positions.
- A membership marketing plan based upon the realities of the marketplace and requiring weekly call and action reports from the membership director. Recognizing that satisfied members are the best recruiters of new members, involve hand-picked members in the membership sales effort.
Each of these necessities, while challenging, will improve the organization and discipline of the club while fostering consistently higher levels of service. The resulting efficiency and service of a well-run club will make it easier to attract members, which improves dues and revenues and ultimately better positions the club in the marketplace.
Many of the tools and resources to implement the initiatives mentioned here are available on the Club Resources International website — most at no charge. Currently the website has 1,550 high quality, fully integrated resources available — and more being added all the time. Come explore the site and see for yourself!
Next Week: Creating Measurable Accountabilities
Thanks and have a great day!
Ed Rehkopf
This weekly blog comments on and discusses the club industry and its challenges. From time to time, we will feature guest bloggers — those managers and industry experts who have something of interest to say to all of us. We also welcome feedback and comment upon the blog, hoping that it will become a useful sounding board for what’s on the minds of hardworking club managers throughout the country and around the world.
Club Resources International - Management Resources for Clubs!
Instead of the traditional view that employees are easily replaceable elements in an organization, people who must be trained to do narrow, well-defined tasks and who must be closely watched and supervised at all times, the concept of empowerment says that today’s more educated and sometimes more sophisticated employees need and want to contribute more to their employer and workplace. Yet many clubs marginalize their employees by refusing to listen to them and by failing to let them contribute to the enterprise in any meaningful way.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES: Principles that guide the conduct of our business!
While the instructor provided ample handouts to explain and illustrate the Ritz-Carlton way, I took over fifteen pages of notes. I shall try to summarize the main elements of how they consistently provide such high level service.
First, Ritz-Carlton has a well-defined corporate 
Here’s an example: an international guest at the Ritz-Carlton, Washington DC, checked out and flew to NYC to catch an international flight. Upon arrival at JFK airport, he realized he had left his overseas flight tickets at the hotel. He called the Ritz-Carlton in a panic. The desk clerk with the OK of her supervisor and the hotel GM, took a flight to NY and personally delivered the guest’s tickets in time to catch his plane.
Know and use employee names. Everyone likes to be recognized as an individual and be called by name. Certainly your members do, and your employees do as well. Introduce them to members, guests, and visitors, when appropriate. Failing to do so implies they’re just part of the scenery instead of key contributors to the success of your club.
Treat employees as adults. When you treat employees like children, they will act like children. Don’t talk down to them or treat them as if they’re immature. When you give people responsibility, most will reward your trust. Those that demonstrate they can’t be trusted should be encouraged to move on. 
Given the importance of empowering your employees, it’s helpful to understand the many ways to destroy such empowerment and that none of them are caused by employees. If your employees do not feel empowered, look no further than your 
You’ve given them guidelines, but then micromanage them. Maybe you’ve done a good job of defining limits, but then micromanage them. When you do this they will quickly understand that they are not “empowered” and that you will continue to make all the decisions, no matter how trivial.
“For employees to feel empowered, you have to create a culture that nourishes and sustains it. By conscientiously and sincerely working to become the best Service-Based Leader you can be . . . you will create an environment where employees will recognize their empowerment and enthusiastically act on it in all they do.”
