The Club + Resort Business survey results on current capital spending activity and future CapEx plans had a business-as-usual tone—with the business looking pretty darn good.

“This is a time when it’s important to remember that the club industry has a backbone. There will be opportunities to come out of this.”   

Some golf communities are seeing the need to take a different approach to preserve all that drew people to live there in the first place.  

While you might think the club world is insulated from the search for “stories” that can prime the pump of sensationalism, it’s not hard to find examples that show we’re not immune to the fake news cycle. 

It’s always good to pay attention to the value of “addition by subtraction” and know how to take the right steps to properly dismiss those from the membership ranks who have proved to not be a good fit with a club’s culture.

The real trend that we’ve been seeing lately is that there are as many, if not more, parties that are interested in starting or acquiring club or course properties now as there are those looking to shut them down.

Some from outside the club industry might not understand the urgency that was felt to expend so much energy on getting a golf course playable or a clubhouse functional after such catastrophic events. But to those closer to the business, the efforts spoke to why clubs are vital pieces of social fabric.

It might be worth looking into arranging to take a group of members to clubs built around concepts and activities like race-track driving or archery or poker, rather than another excursion to a golf or tennis property. New club concepts and reports of popular new activities continue to pop up by the day, it seems, and they all bear taking note…

A troubling new trend has newspapers and business journals combing through private clubs’ tax filings to find material for easy, hard-to-resist stories they can publish on clubs’ revenues—and on what individual club managers are paid. When online publications go fishing with “click bait” (which helps them reel in readers, and thus advertising), they’re no different…

While many excellent club managers and their staffs have helped to pull the industry out of its biggest collective scare in history, it’s important to stay diligent against getting too complacent, and to remain prepared for all possible scenarios.

More and more public courses and facilities seem to be realizing they need to be more club- and resort-like to attract new business.

At every club I go to, all I hear about from GMs, golf pros and superintendents is how much success they’ve had in promoting that no one has to play a full round of golf, or use the full course, if they don’t want to. When Jack Nicklaus talks, we all should listen—especially those of…

The lists of “expert tips” I’ve found on making a facility “Millennial ready” sound a lot like what I find at just about every club I go to now.

General-media reports about the fate of club properties when disasters strike—and recognition of clubs’ contributions to recovery efforts that extend well beyond their boundaries—always fall short of the full story.