The Island Golfer: Lemon Bay and Coral Creek chart their paths forward
Change is inevitable is an oft-used phrase that applies to most everything in life. No more so than around here where the locals have been dealing with changes – some temporary, some permanent – from devastating weather-related events during the past three years.
The best way to deal with change is to get ahead of it, charting plans using instruments and data, most notably historical trends, and forecasts. Like it or not, hurricanes are a way of life in Florida. Everyone must adapt and plan for the future. And that is what is happening at area golf clubs.
Recently, Lemon Bay and Coral Creek, two member-owned private golf clubs serving the Gasparilla Island area, engaged outside consultants to help advance and solidify their missions, visions, values, and brand identities; preserve and enhance their facilities; generate capital funding strategies to improve the member experience; and attract a new generation of members to ensure long-term viability. At private clubs like these, strategic plans typically have a lifespan of three to five years. About the time it takes to fully recover from debilitating weather events.
According to Meg Taylor, President of Lemon Bay, bringing in professionals who work with golf clubs gave their strategic planning process legitimacy. The club’s strategic planning committee employed a variety of strategic, financial, and creative consulting firms during its long-range planning process, including The McMahon Group, Club Benchmarking, and Creative Golf Marketing, among others.
“For us, especially at Lemon Bay, getting our financial house in order using Club Benchmarking was really powerful for us,” said Taylor. “That allowed us to get our biggest strategic initiative done over the last five years, which was to completely redo our golf course. So, we started knowing that we needed some infrastructure updates like new irrigation. That led us to the process of hiring a golf course architect and deciding to finance our golf course renovation.”
But even with careful, thoughtful planning some things cannot be controlled.
“Our strategic planning has been highly successful, we accomplished renovating our golf course,” said Taylor. “Of course, everything that we planned got hit first by COVID and then the hurricanes. So, no matter what plans you have, you’ve got to adapt to the reality of what’s happening.”
According to Frank Vain, Chairman of The McMahon Group, the St. Louis based consultancy that serves more than 2000 clubs as clients, developed 800 strategic plans, and fielded more than 1200 membership surveys, some of the greatest threats to successful strategic planning initiatives at private clubs come from within the enterprise. This is because of the typical governance structure of private clubs, which depends upon volunteer leadership and the rotation of board members from year to year. Add to this dynamic the typical club member, a Type A, ex-CEO, who may be used to getting their way, and you have the potential for a perfect storm to brew in the boardroom.
“Common practice in the club is we get a new president, and everybody turns to the president and says, ‘OK, what do you want to do,’ and you get these individually driven agendas,” said Vain. “One of the key challenges in the industry is that smart people, successful people, want to impose the practices and their experiences in completely different industries on the club without taking the time to understand what the club business model is all about.”
According to Vain, the private club business model is about paying dues for a bundle of satisfactory services that drive membership value. The internal threat comes from individuals employing for-profit business logic to the not-for-profit club model, focusing incessantly on generating incremental revenue, fixating on cost centers, and trying to drive operational efficiencies.
“The efficiency crowd says, ‘well, expenses are bad, right?,’ explained Vain. “Well, in a not-for-profit private club expenses are how we create experiences. Obviously, we have to be fiscally responsible, but if we come at it with an efficiency mindset and experiences are bad, we’ll underwhelm the members with what we deliver them on a regular basis.”
Coral Creek, after two decades of private investor ownership, has been transforming since the members voted to purchase the club in 2022. The club’s board approved its first-ever strategic plan this year. Although its culture has become well-defined since the club was founded, understanding what the members wanted their club to become was priority one. The McMahon Group was hired to assist with developing and fielding a membership survey as a part of its strategic plan engagement with Coral Creek. Vain was the lead consultant.
“We needed to get the best member experience we could and in order to do that, you need to understand what people are thinking and where they want to go, what they want now, and what they may want in the future,” explained Ted Devnew, President of Coral Creek. “We have developed a culture, but it was a culture that came under the wing of corporate ownership. So, we needed to establish our own identity as a club, our own culture.”
Zayra Calderon, a Coral Creek Board Member, drafted the charter for the strategic planning team. The first guiding principle was for the planning to be data led. It was at once forward and backward looking.
“The Cheshire Cat famously said to Alice during her journey through Wonderland, and I am paraphrasing here, ‘If you don’t know which road to take, then any road will do,” said Calderon. “We conducted a comprehensive member survey that is the basis for our plan, and I think it’s going to serve us well. We created a road map that verbalized what the majority of members are looking for and put it into initiatives that are underway.”
While the two clubs are at different stages of their lifecycles, Lemon Bay and Coral Creek have followed a similar formula: hire outside experts; survey the membership; navigate internal politics that might derail success; deliver membership value through initiatives, services, and facilities plans; attract new members through investments in facilities and services; and adopt compelling statements of vision, values, and culture.
The leaders at Lemon Bay and Coral Creek are optimistic about their plans for the future even as they cast one eye toward the heavens and the other inside the boardroom. With strategic plans in hand, and with the guidance of outside experts, they believe their clubs have the instruments and data to weather storms of both the internal and external kind.
Scott Cotherman writes about all things golf-related in and around the Cape Haze Peninsula. Contact him at the.island.golfer@gmail.com.
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