There is no shortage of things clubs could be doing right now.
There are new amenities to consider, technologies to evaluate, spaces to renovate, programs to add and changing member expectations to address. Spend enough time talking with club leaders and it becomes clear that the list of possibilities is growing much faster than the time, money or staff available to pursue them.
That makes deciding what not to do increasingly important.
I was thinking about this after several interviews over the past few months with club leaders who are taking very different approaches to their properties.
At Epping Forest Yacht & Country Club, Hans Grover has no shortage of ideas. He stepped into the club’s top leadership role earlier this summer and can already see opportunities for improvements that could happen relatively quickly, along with larger projects that will require more time and planning.
But those aren’t his first priority.
Grover told me he wants to strengthen the club’s existing operation before turning his attention to what comes next. His reasoning is fairly simple. If the fundamentals are working and demand is strong across the club, future improvements become much easier to make.
“It’s baby steps,” he said. “We’re starting with the fundamentals first, and then we’ll grow into the other things.”
Christie Paich is looking at the same challenge from a longer range at Sunset Ridge Country Club. The club has developed a detailed capital plan for the next three years, with another seven years mapped beyond that. For Paich, knowing what needs to happen is only part of the equation. The club also has to consider the staff hours required, the timing of the work and the financial resources available to complete it.
Neither approach is particularly flashy, and maybe that’s what makes them interesting.
Club leaders are surrounded by examples of what they could do. Grover could walk into Epping Forest and immediately start chasing the opportunities he already sees. Sunset Ridge could look at a decade of identified capital needs and start working its way down the list as quickly as possible.
Instead, both are putting sequence ahead of speed.
That seems obvious until you consider how much information club leaders are absorbing every day.
They visit other clubs. They attend conferences. They see new products. They hear what competitors are building. Members come back from another club asking why theirs doesn’t have the same thing. Boards change. Trends change. Technology changes faster than almost anything else.
There is always another good idea. The challenge is determining which good ideas deserve to become your club’s priorities.
That requires knowing what problem you’re trying to solve, understanding whether members actually want the proposed solution and being willing to wait when the answer isn’t clear enough yet.
It also requires accepting that another club’s successful idea might be completely wrong for yours.
The pressure to keep up isn’t going away. If anything, club leaders will have more options competing for their attention and capital over the next several years.
The advantage may belong to the clubs that become increasingly comfortable saying yes slowly. And no much more often.
