My first bit of advice is do
not believe everything you read. Sunset
Ridge Country Club recently completed a $15 million dollar renovation to our clubhouse
and golf course. Two million of this was
spent on the golf course renovating bunkers, cart paths, tees and greens. That leaves $13 million for Clubhouse
construction, furnishings and equipment, fees, contingency and down time
expenses. Was this a fun and easy
experience? Not really, but it wasn’t a
horrible experience either. Did I learn
anything along the way? You bet!
I was hired as the General Manager of Sunset Ridge a little more than
four years ago in January of 2001. The
planning for our just completed renovations started after I had about six
months on the job. We started slow,
surveying the membership and doing some engineering studies to help us define
the project scope. Did we need to
renovate the existing structure, do a partial tear down and rebuild, or raise
the entire clubhouse and start over?
Based on the engineering studies we were able to determine that simply
renovating the existing building would not suffice as we had numerous
structural problems to overcome and room layouts were either inefficient or
just poorly designed. A complete tear
down and rebuild would be prohibitively expensive and be more than our
membership could justify financially so we settled on a partial tear down and
rebuild along with renovating some areas of the existing building.
Our Long Range Planning Committee
interviewed a number of local and national architectural firms that had some
experience in designing clubs. Based on
these interviews our committee retained an out of state architectural firm that
specializes in club design. A general contractor
that had done renovation work on a number of local clubs was also brought on
board.
The architect interviewed the
Board and Long Range Planning Committee members, staff, and the general
membership in a series of focus group meetings to determine what each of these stakeholder
groups wanted to have in a new clubhouse.
After reviewing this information the Planning Committee prioritized each
item on these "wish" lists to give the architect some direction for the
redesign.
In a few short weeks the
architect flew to Chicago
with "Scheme A" in hand. It wasn’t
perfect but we liked what we saw. This
was the beginning of a series of weekly meetings in which the architect would
fly in and we would review the latest design revisions. After many weeks we reached "Scheme O" and we
thought we had a plan that worked. The
architect assured us we could build this plan within our target budget
ceiling. The architect was then
instructed to bring this schematic plan to a 50% construction document level where
the general contractor could take the project to bid. The construction documents were prepared and
given to the general contractor.
A little more than a month
later, we got the bad news. After the
bids were received the plan was far more expensive to build than the
architect’s estimate and what we felt the membership would approve. A year of effort had seemingly gone down the
drain. The estimate to build Scheme O
was $12 million not counting furnishings and equipment, fees, down time
expenses or the proposed renovations to the golf course. Our Board decided to present this plan to the
membership anyway, not for a vote but to demonstrate what we had learned in the
last year. In October of 2002, two town
hall meetings we conducted for all members to attend. Scheme O was presented and the membership was
assured that the Committee would return to the drawing board to find an
affordable alternative.
In December of 2002 the
architect returned with a totally new plan that he felt we could build within
our target budget. Tweaking, redesign
and tweaking some more became the order of the day for the next month or so. We ended up with a plan that certainly wasn’t
as grand as Scheme O, but it satisfied most of our original "wish list" items
and appeared to fit within our targeted budget.
The architect was again asked to prepare construction documents for this
new plan so we could get some hard numbers on the construction cost.
Finally, some good news! This new plan fit within our estimates of
what we thought the membership would approve.
Our original budget was as follows:
Clubhouse
Project $8,050,000.
Fees $800,000.
Furniture
Fixtures & Equipment $1,050,000.
Golf
Course Project $1,800,000.
Downtime
Expenses $1,300,000.
Total $13,000,000.
Now
the Finance Committee really got to
work on preparing a plan to pay for project.
What was ultimately presented to the membership was to take on $7
million in long term debt, use $2.5 million of cash reserves and assess the
members based on membership class for $3.5 million. Marketing materials were prepared explaining
the finance plan and the project scope. In
early September of 2003 town hall meetings were once again held. The plans were presented and the members were
allowed to comment. The vote for approval
of the project would be called for later that month. The Board and Committees had spent over two
years working toward this goal.
The
votes were tallied and the project received a 92% approval. The Clubhouse would close in just three
months for the start of the renovations.
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