Are You Ready for the 2017 Season?

It’s January. You are probably busy planning for the upcoming season.

Your highest priority may be completing the items on your checklist:

• Hiring assistant pros and shop assistants
• Scheduling vendors to visit at the PGA show later this month.
• Purchasing equipment and merchandise
• Setting fees for lessons, tournaments, driving range, and bag storage
• Developing promotional programs
• Scheduling tournaments and other events

But have you considered the most important item of all: determining your goals for this year?

In an ideal world, your goals would drive your checklist. You’d define your goals first and then tailor your checklist accordingly.

That may not be practical this year. You’ve got too much to do. You’ve got to complete your checklist first. But you still can do some planning before the season starts.

Break down your 2017 plan into these categories:

• Financial goals
• Performance goals
• Activities and programs (Your checklist)
• Tracking member activity – Lessons, Clinics, Tournaments, Purchases

Financial Goals

You may not have closed your books for 2016 yet. But you probably have a pretty good idea of how much money you made.

How much money do you want to make in 2017? Look at revenue and expenses for 2016 and, ideally, several years before that.

Analyze the trends and then set a target for your 2017 bottom line. To get to your bottom line, you need a goal for each of your major sources of revenue:

• Merchandise and equipment sales
• Lessons & Clinics
• Tournament Fees
• Range and bag fees

Performance Goals

Your financial goals are WHERE you want to go. Your Performance Goals are HOW you’ll get there.

Some of your income, particularly your salary from the club, is already fixed. You can’t control that.

However, you can control member-generated revenue. You can set the fees and you can project the number of lessons, tournament participants necessary to meet your revenue target.

Here’s an example:

300 lessons (performance goal) x $100 a lesson (Fee – program) = $30,000 in lesson revenue (financial goal)

Your metrics will drive your revenue. Those metrics include:

• Number of lessons
• Number of clinic participants
• Number of tournament participants
• Number of members taking lessons
• Frequency of lessons per member
• Makeup of merchandise and equipment sales

Your Metrics Matter

Your club’s software and the golf shop point of sale system may provide some or all of the data above. At the very least, it should provide totals for the sources of revenue.

Beyond that, ideally, it should provide information on each member’s activities and enable you to perform analyses. For instance, if there were 300 lessons last year, how many members took lessons and how often?

Did 60 members take an average of 5 lessons each or did 150 members take an average of two lessons each? There is a big difference.

If the answer is 60 members, you want to develop programs to get more members to take lessons. If the answer is 150, you want to encourage members to take more lessons.

This information will drive your communications programs plus special efforts as playing rounds with members and providing free tips on the driving range.

Tracking Your Metrics

If your club’s systems don’t provide the information you need, you may have to set up a parallel system to track member activity.  For this, you’ll need CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. There are a number of inexpensive and easy-to-use CRM software programs on the market.

You’ll want to know for each member how many lessons they took, what was discussed during the lesson, what merchandise they purchased, and the clinics and tournaments they participated in.

One of your shop assistants may be able to input most of the data. Your assistant pros or you will have to put in the information about the lessons.

Having all your members’ info in the database will allow to track individual members’ skill levels and preferences. The information about your members can also show trends that will guide your marketing, programming, and purchasing decisions.

The bottom line: To improve your bottom line you need detailed information about your members! If you don’t have an effective tracking system, make that a priority for 2017.