Month: August 2019

GGA to Offer Sophisticated Electronic Voting Services to Private Clubs

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Exclusive partnership with Simply Voting provides private clubs access to a secure online voting platform for club elections.

Global Golf Advisors (GGA) and Simply Voting have formed an exclusive partnership to provide a secure voting platform designed to allow private club members a simple and easily accessible manner in which to cast ballots during club elections. GGA will begin offering the Simply Voting system as a stand-alone service or in combination with this governance guidance platform to private clubs worldwide.

Founded in 2003, Simply Voting Inc. is a full-service provider of secure, hosted online elections. Multiple independent third-party audits have validated the integrity and security of the platform. The company has worked with over 2,000 organizations across the world including government entities, political organizations, educational institutions and unions.

“Engaging private club members to participate in important elections can be a challenging and expensive proposition,” stated GGA Manager Martin Tzankov. “The Simply Voting online system eliminates the need for paper ballots and multiple mailings. Members have the ability to access the voting platform at their convenience and once identity is authenticated, a tamper proof ballot is provided that is easy to understand, complete and submit.”

The Simply Voting system is equally easy for club managers. In addition to voter authentication and tamper proof ballots, the system provides a branded club website, computerized tabulation of results and a variety of reports.

“Online voting is quickly becoming the accepted practice across business, government and organizations to provide an efficient and effective method to ensure election integrity,” commented GGA Director of Private Club Services Michael Gregory. “We view the Simply Voting system as complementary to our governance and strategic advisory services and another opportunity to assist our clients in maximizing their operating efficiency.”

“As we sought to introduce our voting system to the club industry, we felt it important to partner with a company whose corporate values aligned with our promise to deliver an excellent product with honesty and integrity,” commented Simply Voting President Brian Lack. “Global Golf Advisors, with its excellent reputation, was the natural choice. We believe the company has the depth and breadth to ensure our shared goal of providing an efficient voting system to private clubs will be met.”

Increasing membership satisfaction is a key goal of all private clubs. The Simply Voting system, with its accessibility, integrity and ease of use, will ensure members will be satisfied with the voting results of important club elections.

About Global Golf Advisors

Global Golf Advisors (GGA) has provided industry-leading advisory services to more than 3,000 clients worldwide including private clubs, hotels, resorts, residential golf communities, developers, homebuilders, government agencies and municipalities, financial institutions, investors and lenders.  Operating out of three global offices in Toronto, Phoenix, and Dublin, GGA is a highly specialized consulting firm focused on club and leisure related assets with a professional services heritage as the KPMG Golf Industry Practice.  The firm’s expertise lies in its ability to effectively meld club management and operational expertise with highly capable professional strategists and experienced business analysts. GGA personnel include former club managers with experience leading exceptional clubs, along with alumni of Arthur Andersen, Deloitte, KPMG, Pulte Homes, PwC, and Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets. For more information, please visit www.globalgolfadvisors.com.

About Simply Voting

Simply Voting Inc. is a full-service provider of secure, hosted online elections. Driven by dedicated staff who value transparency, high security, and the need for customized solutions, Simply Voting delivers excellence in providing secure, efficient voting solutions which create value for their client organizations. Launched in 2003, the Simply Voting system has been employed by over 2,000 organizations from municipalities, universities and unions to safely execute their elections. Many reputable third parties have audited the product, technical infrastructure, and corporate infrastructure, confirming the integrity and security of the system. For more information, please visit www.simplyvoting.com.

For additional information, contact

Michael Gregory
mgregory@globalgolfadvisors.com
416.524.0083

Is Your Club Relevant?

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If your club is relevant, it is closely connected to members’ lifestyles and appropriate to their wants and needs. But how do you determine if your club really is relevant? GGA’s Ben Hopkinson offers three points of guidance to help you self-evaluate and a handful of tactics to deploy in response.

Longevity requires relevance.

Survival in the modern club economy hinges on your club’s ability to remain relevant, both to existing members and prospective ones.

While building relevance is often the easy part, sustaining it is trickier. If left unmonitored, relevance diminishes as the years pass and the club’s value proposition suffers alongside member retention and satisfaction.

What does it mean to be relevant?

A relevant club is closely connected to members’ lifestyles and appropriate to their wants and needs; it’s the ability of a club to instill the notion that, by being or becoming a member, it will enhance their own and/or their family’s lifestyle.

It’s a simple equation. The more relevant you are, or become, the better placed your club is to achieve high levels of member satisfaction, retention, and recruitment.

But how can you understand and become more relevant? Here’s some pointers:

1. Gain a deep understanding of your market and membership

Who are your members really?

The first step to becoming more relevant is knowing your members fully and dispassionately. A thorough understanding of your membership’s demographic, psychographic, and emotional characteristics allows for a tailored Club experience.

This means knowing the answers to questions such as: Where do members live? Where do they work?  Do they belong to other local clubs or have vacation homes? Do they have children or grandchildren? What are their ages? How do they use the club?

Tracking utilization of each facility and space at your club allows you to understand the importance (and appropriateness) of each of them, helping to drive the strategy towards becoming more relevant.

Where does your club stand in the marketplace?

Get to know your potential market i.e. your members of tomorrow by sourcing demographic, psychographic, and participation data to quantify the number of candidates that match your member profile. Your market research should help you understand:

  • Relative to your competitors, how are you positioned in terms of cost to join, payment plans, and annual cost to belong?
  • What features and programming are your competitors offering that you don’t? And vice versa.
  • How do your attrition rates and sales compare with industry targets or, if available, those of competitors?

This exercise allows you to understand your club in the context of the marketplace better and helps establish your competitive advantages and points of differentiation. Leveraging that knowledge, you can enhance or develop your club’s strategy around demand and where it has room to grow.

2. Focus on enhancing individuals’ lives (and the lives of their families)

While understanding your members and marketplace should be your primary starting point on the road to relevance, this is a snapshot of the successful shifts in the approach of clubs across North America in a bid to enhance what they offer:

One-of-a-kind experiences

Members have an appetite for experiences they can cherish and share with their families and friends, so offering tailored, unique and memorable opportunities can not only help build relevance, but the emotional connection members have with your club. Examples might include: tickets to the special events such as the PGA Championship, concierge-type experiences that only your club can facilitate, or access to speakers they would not be able to get in front of otherwise.

Intentional member networks

Offering clubs-within-the-club are very important in today’s environment because building communities and networks drives engagement and connection within the club.

Think about a robust speaker series, associating your club with other clubs or professional organizations in exclusive relationships, creating a wine club or travel groups.

Some clubs have developed virtual membership clubs with their speaker series or programming where members can pay a small monthly fee to participate remotely. It promotes continued engagement and also drives a new revenue stream with no impact to your facilities.

Diverse wellness programming

Physical health, in the form of fitness and wellness, remains highly relevant. The decision to add fitness is a leading trend that clubs are considering, particularly in seasonal and winter climates to keep members connected year-round.

Beyond adding a fitness facility, newer trends in wellness programming that are highly relevant include group exercise classes, off-site activities and excursions, ‘socializing’ fitness activities into events, and increasing the variety of fitness offerings and their frequency of change.

Your club’s wellness programming should not be limited to physical training. Mental exercise is just as critical as physical exercise in keeping one’s brain fit and healthy, introducing more wellness programming around brain health is relevant to your club’s longer-tenured members and can connect them with what are often construed as ‘young people’ activities.

Amenities that support year-round use and lifestyle

The ultimate goal is to make your club the third most important or relevant place in members’ lives, next to home and work. Amenities that best support year-round use and lifestyle benefits go beyond traditional sports to focus on the clubhouse and socialization aspects of membership.

The top amenities that our clients are considering include:

  • Contemporary bar/sports lounge
  • Multiple dining experiences
  • Health and wellness facility
  • Indoor golf teaching area with a bar and HD simulators
  • Outdoor casual dining with fire pits
  • Tennis/pickleball courts
  • Outdoor pool featuring a modern children’s area and adult area with outdoor bar
  • Babysitting/children’s play areas

3. Measure, evaluate and act

Member feedback is key.

Soliciting member feedback tightens the connection between the club (as an organization) and its members (as individuals). Capturing member feedback generates actionable insights to improve all aspects of the club experience, while also helping to isolate which are most critical to their wants and needs.

Relevance can be measured in many ways and the best indicators to watch are attrition levels and the demand to join your club. Constant member feedback is needed to be proactive and instill a culture of measuring, evaluating and acting.

 

The relevant club of tomorrow

Think about relevance on a spectrum. One that changes through different actions or developments.

For instance, introducing new family amenities shifts and broadens the spectrum more towards a younger demographic of members and prospective members.

Similarly, the introduction of mental health training shifts and broadens the spectrum more towards an elder demographic.

In any case, the objective should be to find your club’s sweet spot on this spectrum. As we already know higher relevance = higher levels of member satisfaction, retention and recruitment, so find and occupy a position which is relevant to as many stakeholders as possible. This, ultimately, will be your club’s gateway to longevity.

For help and advice on making your club more relevant to existing and prospective members,
connect with Ben Hopkinson.

Inspiring Member Introductions

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New members can be difficult to come by, especially during times of economic turbulence. But your existing core membership can hold the key to unlocking a wave of new members. GGA’s Michael Gregory explains how.

Why are your current members a valuable avenue for new members?

Members who have developed an emotional connection with your club will be proud to show it off to friends and peers. Friends and peers who will typically be of a similar income bracket, age and family profile.

Since the club’s membership proposition already appeals to those existing members, its relevance to their friends and peers is naturally much higher than it would be for a typical prospect.

Add in our findings; surveys of over 50,000 private club members each year reveal that ‘friends and family who are members’ is consistently one of the top three factors in the decision to join. For millennials, it’s even more important. All of a sudden, the importance of existing members comes into focus.

But what is it that gets these prospects over the line?

Ordinarily, a club employee will be the one selling the benefits of membership to prospects. In this case, however, its existing members. They’ll be your best advocates, your best sales men and women. They can express what it means to be a member, told through the eyes of the members themselves. A compelling and convincing message, and an effective mechanism to generate new members.

Should there be an official referral scheme in place to incentivize current members?

Before developing a formal or informal scheme you should scrutinize the current numbers. How many member referral leads do you generate? In our experience, over half of member leads usually come from referrals. If your number is far lower, you first need to ask why.

A member satisfaction survey can provide the answers. If satisfaction is low in areas central to your club’s value proposition, then existing members will not be as forthcoming in promoting the club to their friends and peers.

After your survey, isolate the areas in need of improvement and build these into your strategic plan. With the root causes of dissatisfaction being addressed, the club will organically become somewhere that members have a stronger connection with, and in turn a place they are more likely to recommend to potential new members.

It’s true that a catalyst may still be required to supplement this process and to help overturn a culture of non-referral. But a word of caution on this: a referral scheme should not be rolled out as a short-term solution to get more members. It could come across as desperate, distorting the value perception of membership at your club, and you could give too much away if not carefully developed.

We have found that recognition can be just as motivating as monetary incentives. So, before opting for the financial route, give some recognition to those who have referred members in a given month or year (which could be as simple as acknowledging the individuals in the club newsletter), then see if this spurs on more to act.

Is there something else club managers should be doing to ‘activate’ their members?

A lack of satisfaction can be one cause of low member referral numbers, but it might be as simple as not having created the opportunities for referrals to happen.

The good news is there are some simple and effective tactics you can roll out to create a fertile referral environment:

Golf days – the most obvious but often overlooked. Open days, invitation days and corporate days are a great way for prospects to experience what the club has to offer and provide the opportunity to spend some quality time on the course with other members.

Social events – allow members to invite guests along to select social events. It will introduce them to the club environment, they’ll get to meet other members and begin to feel what it’s like to be part of the membership community.

Crucially, welcome families along to these events too. We know how important spouses can be in the decision to join a club, so they need to get a first-hand look at how membership could enrich their life.

Discovery days – host a discovery day for existing members to bring along selected guests. Put together a dedicated itinerary where prospects can experience what it’s like to be a member, and give them the opportunity to join at the end of it.

Membership toolkit – arm your members with a “membership tool kit”. This can provide them with clear guidance on what to do should any of their friends or relatives want to visit or even join the club.

Is it all a numbers game?

The thing to remember is, a typical club’s attrition rate stands at around 20-35 members. With conversion rates between 8-12%, that means a club will need at least 200 prospects on any given year just to replace what they lose.

So the numbers are important. Your current members should be your most important pipeline for new members, and if less than half of your prospects come from your existing members, it’s time to pay attention and act. Your future depends on it.

Become an Employer of Choice

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The order of the day went straight to the point: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” In the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, one of England’s more decisive naval battles, Admiral Lord Nelson called upon the sailors of his island nation to ward off an attack by the combined French and Spanish navies. It was a battle to the finish and one in which Nelson was mortally wounded. When told of eminent victory, among his final words were, “Now I have done my duty.”

Golf course managers today are charged with myriad duties, maybe not with life and death consequences, but critical nonetheless. Foremost among them is the recruitment, training and retention of a qualified and motivated staff. There is no more important role to the financial and operational well-being of courses simply because so many moving parts require near constant attention.

What’s more, the job is getting tougher. The U.S. has more job openings than unemployed people, a situation known as “full employment.” The U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs in April, notching a record 103 straight months of job gains and signaling that the current economic expansion shows little sign of stalling. The Labor Department reported in July that the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, the lowest since 1969.

What we should glean from those statistics is that the war for talent continues unabated across U.S. businesses, making it even more challenging for leaders to build a staff with the highest quality workers. Becoming an employer of choice in your market is now a business imperative. Here are five ways to distinguish your facility:

1. Prioritize. With labor costs representing slightly more than half of operational costs at most facilities, making your course and club attractive to job seekers is a smart use of resources. Start by deciding the selection criteria for each position. Thinking through on-the-job performance standards helps to establish the search criteria for each position. This careful job description serves to focus the employer’s intentions and expectations. Detailed job description and criteria also clarify the opportunity for prospective employees, so they know going in what is expected of a successful candidate.

The process seems simple, but many employers fail to prioritize the time and thought process to describe what is needed from a specific position.

2. Organize. Employees want to know what will be expected of them in the job. An organized approach to describing the position makes sure employer and employee are on the same page, reducing surprises and establishing an understanding on key aspects of employment. Carefully organizing the position description signals that you know what you want and will keep searching until you find the best candidate.

3. Standardize. Your search process is a miniature branding effort. Using consistent and professional formatting, job and benefits descriptions and comprehensive summaries of expected annual income guide prospective employees to you. Remember, you’re not simply searching for someone to fill a position – you’re searching for the best possible fit.

Describe the culture of your team with words that demonstrate commitment and dedication. For most people, work is an emotional relationship before it is an economic consideration. In a December 2018 study of employees’ attitudes, Clutch, a B2B search firm, noted that “workplace values are essential to recruiting, retaining, and motivating quality employees.” In the same study, employees emphasized the importance of fair treatment and compensation alongside ethical treatment. While compensation is obviously important, how people feel about themselves in their jobs is even more valuable.

4. Recognize. To keep top performers, celebrate their successes. To many workers, the respect of their co-workers is highly important. Create a culture that recognizes the efforts and successful performance results of teammates. There are many examples of employee recognition successes, but most important is keeping the recognition fair, transparent and generous. Recognition will prove to be one of your best investments in time and money.

5. Evolution-ize. Create a recruitment and retention process that evolves with the workforce, your club and employees. Most staff members want to work where there is a fresh and invigorating environment. Traditions are extremely important and should be balanced with the need of employees to see change and growth in their jobs and lives.

This article was authored by GGA Partner Henry DeLozier for Golf Course Industry Magazine. 

Community… and How To Build It

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A member’s relationship with your club will feel infinitely more connected, more substantial and more emotional if they are part of a community. But how do you create a community at your club? Can you create a community? GGA’s Henry DeLozier has the answers.

It is a genuine sense of community – and the opportunity to be a part of it – that attracts members to a private club.

Members need their club to be a safe place, populated by people with shared lifestyle expectations, and built on experiences that create a feeling of fellowship.

But how does a club create an authentic community?

The foundation of any community is shared values, and for a private club these may be values such as safe haven and healthy lifestyle.

In private clubs today, this culture of common attitudes, interests, and goals cannot be left to chance – it must be facilitated and fostered by the club leadership.

Successful club leaders and managers understand that this requires an intentional plan of action; one which establishes and sustains several key elements within the club’s culture:

Setting the Standard

Clearly stated standards of conduct are essential to establish a shared understanding of the community’s behavioral norms. Members rely upon a common understanding of acceptable – and unacceptable – behavior.

In clubs today, such standards of decorum include dress, usage of technological devices such as mobile phones, and personal conduct. In the main, club members are highly supportive of rules and rule enforcement… for others at least.

How can club leaders effectively implement respected community standards?

  • Engage input from many members when formulating and updating the club’s rules. The more members who participate in establishing the community’s standards, the more widely the standards are supported.
  • Communicate the commonly accepted standards for all to see, question, refine, and accept.
  • Make such standards the backbone of new-member orientation and communicate to existing members that new members are being so informed.

At The Ford Plantation near Savannah, Georgia, the sense of community is a point of pride among club members.

CEO Marc Ray observes, “Everything we do, including our Mission Statement, refers to Ford as a community of “friends and neighbors”. The members, and the staff, genuinely care about each other, and it is a culture that permeates the community.

“We travel together, dine together…and sometimes cry together. There is nothing fake or contrived. It is an ingrained culture that people want to, and get to, belong to. Something bigger than themselves.”

Firm but Fair

Establishing a sense of unity and togetherness is a powerful asset for any club, and this is something that needs to be protected.

From time to time, there will of course be people who do not honor the standards set, and knowing how to address those individuals and the situations that arise is critical to uphold the standards of the community.

How should clubs approach these situations? The best are consistent and firm in the enforcement of community standards with very few exceptions. So too, top clubs enforce their rules evenly regardless of status, tenure or importance.

“If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything” is a commonly referenced quote with mixed attribution and, yet, its aptness is clear. Members like to know that their community and its traditions stand for something worthy of their respect and support.

Behind the Curtain

Employees are a vital component of club communities. In many clubs, it is the staff that hold the club together and keep it the safe haven on which members rely.

This is particularly prevalent at Desert Mountain in Carefree, Arizona, as Damon DiOrio, the Club’s CEO, describes, “Establishing a safe, positive, healthy and energized work culture, built on trust and respect for your employees, is the first step in developing a strong and inclusive brand.

“Having a united and caring culture for your team is critical to forging an environment that emanates membership loyalty and a sense of community. As leaders, we can only fulfil the dream of having pride and harmony in our membership by being open, honest, engaging, transparent and authentic.”

The Power of Tradition

A sense of community also relies upon treasured traditions which celebrate friendship, family, and fun. These are key ingredients to a feeling of “belonging”.

Traditional special events and celebrations at many clubs help to crystalize the community’s values.

Take the ‘Big Little Show’ at Westchester Country Club, for instance, where family is the tradition placed front and center every summer with the club’s vibrant talent show.

Events which celebrate patriotism and love of country are other popular examples that serve to bring club members closer together through shared, cherished moments.

Your club could have all of the facilities and amenities in the world, but it is the sense of community – of being a part of something dear to them – that makes members proud and dedicated to their club for generations.

Facilitate and foster the emergence of this community, and it could fast become your club’s strongest asset.

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