A determined new management team at The Club at Cordillera is reviving what had become a poster property for how the recession rocked the industry.
With a resume that includes a 20-year career on Wall Street in the fixed-income securities market before moving into club management to run high-profile operations for Troon, including the flagship Troon North Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., Mike Henritze can certainly crunch numbers with the best of them.
And in his current position as the General Manager appointed by Troon at The Club at Cordillera in Edwards, Colo., Henritze has plenty of numbers at his disposal, starting with the fact that he’s involved with one of the largest exclusive golf communities in North America, covering 12 square miles in the heart of Colorado’s Vail Valley, 120 miles west of Denver. The club has three distinct 18-hole golf courses, designed by Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin, and Tom Fazio, along with an award-winning clubhouse and impressive facilities for a full slate of year-round social and recreational activities, including dining in three restaurants, swimming, tennis, fitness, and Nordic skiing.
The Club at Cordillera AT A GLANCELocation: Edwards, Colo. Opened for play: 1994 Annual golf rounds: 20,000 No. of Members: 432 General Manager: Mike Henritze Director of Golf: Darren Szot Director of Golf Instruction: Jack LoBiondo Director of Agronomy: Justin Becker Director of Food & Beverage: Charles Gallagher Executive Chef: Matt Limbaugh Membership Director: Suzanne Morgan Director of Operations: Allison Becker Activities Director: Stacey Perkins Management: Troon Privé Ownership: Wind Rose Holdings |
But another prominent figure in Cordillera’s history since it opened in 1994 has been zero—as in the number of members it could claim at the start of 2013, after a turbulent period saw the property’s ownership declare bankruptcy to end a well-publicized and highly contentious, lawsuit-filled clash with Cordillera homeowners and club members.
That led to the sale of the club, for $14.2 million, in a bankruptcy auction held at the end of 2012, along with settlement of a class-action suit that awarded physical assets, including an athletic club, children’s center and nine-hole golf course, to the Cordillera property owners association. The settlement also included stipulations that parties to the suit had to be offered memberships by the club’s new ownership, California-based Wind Rose Holdings, at drastically reduced initiation fees ($3,500) and annual dues (not more than $12,500 for two years).
Back Up from Square One
Wind Rose Holdings contracted with Troon Privé, the management firm’s private-club division, to take on the formidable task of beginning to rebuild Cordillera’s membership under those conditions. Troon tabbed Henritze, who had moved from Troon North to The Ridge at Castle Pines North just south of Denver, to lead the effort. At the start of 2013, he and his staff began an outreach process to try to win back the trust—and dues checks—of former members.
“It was basically just a matter of taking the time to spend a couple of hours each with several hundred former members, listening to them and letting them get everything out about their animosity towards the former ownership and how much they’d lost in property value,” Henritze says of his first weeks in his new position. “The encouraging thing was they all wanted my assurance that the club was going to ‘make it’ again, which showed they still felt a connection to it.”
Providing that assurance verbally is one thing, of course. To demonstrate Troon’s commitment to Cordillera’s restoration, Henritze and his staff also set out to find ways to get the greatest immediate impact from applying capital improvement and operating resources that the new ownership was understandably conservative about supplying.
These measures included very high-profile priorities, such as getting all three golf courses open again (all but one had been closed at the height of tensions with previous ownership) and beginning needed and long-delayed course renovations. Troon also infused Cordillera with a healthy shot of one of its strongest management features, golf instruction, by committing to have Tim Mahoney, Director of Education for Troon Golf Worldwide, spend 45 days at the property during the summer. The club’s full-time staff was also bolstered with the restructuring of the property’s golf operations and programming under the joint direction of Darren Szot and Jack LoBiondo, another instruction specialist.
The effort to rebuild trust and confidence also got effective returns from subtle but equally important touches, such as restoring Cordillera’s signature flower pots at signposts and other visible spots throughout the property.
“I can’t tell you how many times I heard, ‘Oh, the flowers are back’ or ‘I’m so glad you put the flowers back in,’ ” says Henritze. “We got a lot of positive response from something that was relatively easy and inexpensive to do, but clearly mattered to people and was seen as a sign that we were serious about bringing back what they remembered and enjoyed about the club during its best times.”
No Resting on Laurels
The initial outreach and restoration efforts combined to build Cordillera’s membership ranks back up to over 325 as Troon prepared to reopen the property in April 2013, with another 200 expressing enough interest to merit spots on a serious-prospect list. That momentum was sustained to bring in over 100 additional members by July of this year, a performance that earned a management-contract extension to 2020 for Troon as well as internal recognition for Henritze and his staff for the firm’s “Turnaround of the Year.”
But as he reported an updated membership figure of 432 in mid-July, Henritze was quick to add that he, and his staff, recognize the importance of keeping that number in proper perspective.
One number he has never been able to pinpoint, Henritze notes, is just how large Cordillera’s membership was in its heyday. “As best I can tell, there was a point prior to 2006 where there may have been as many as between 800 and 900,” he says. Media reports during the turbulent bankruptcy period set the figure for the club’s peak membership at somewhere north of 600, and Henritze says that represents a level that Troon seeks to reach again, as part of a multi-year strategy to regain, and then surpass, what Cordillera was in its salad days.
“But right now, we’re most interested in a member number of 433, and then 434,” he emphasizes. “It’s all a matter of doing the right thing every day and finding ways to continue to get better and re-establish the club and the community.
“You can cash-flow a club at any membership number—it just means maintaining different service levels for how the math works out,” Henritze notes. “But certainly, we can’t ‘make it’ in the long run with a membership in the 400s, because that means we won’t be able to fully restore the service levels and amenities that this property and its membership not only expects and demands, but deserves.
“Right now, I think we’re still in a bit of a honeymoon period,” Henritze adds. “The members we’ve regained are very, very happy to have the club open again. And those who are still on the sidelines and watching closely are giving us credit for stabilizing the situation and beginning to restore and grow home values again in a sustainable fashion.
“But at the same time, I sense there’s some tolerance that’s still giving us a free pass in some areas, and that certainly won’t last,” he adds. “I think we’ve shown we’re determined not to ever throw in the towel on finding ways to continue to improve the member experience. At the same time, we’re not ready to claim success, because we’re not to Troon’s standards yet—but we will be.”
New Hands on Deck
To help advancement toward those standards, Henritze has continued to bring new staff additions onto the scene, including Executive Chef Matt Limbaugh and the husband-and-wife team of Director of Agronomy Justin Becker and Director of Operations Allison Becker.
This is the first private club assignment for Limbaugh, previously a restaurant chef in Vail. Originally from North Carolina, he has brought signature cuisine, and in particular barbecue and smoker-prepared dishes, to Cordillera’s three restaurants. The club’s fine dining venue, TimberHearth, had a long-standing reputation as a favored year-round destination both for the general public as well as community members, and a commitment to get it reopened and reestablished as “the heartbeat of the community” has been an important priority, Henritze says.
An immediate impact has also been made by Justin Becker and Allison Becker, who came to Cordillera this past spring. Justin Becker’s direction of the completion of a critical drainage project on the Mountain Course that began last year, as well as the overall improvements he and his staff have continued to make on all three layouts, have helped to restore annual golf rounds played to around 20,000, Henritze reports. And as the club’s membership continues to grow, he feels, growing the level of play to over 30,000 rounds is another number that should no longer be seen as unthinkable.
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