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The second question we need to answer is “Where do we want to go?” Every operator wants to make more money, but not every operator has that as their number one goal or objective. Some want to retire as rich as they can and as fast as they can, while others want to ensure the club is a long-term and sustainable nest egg for the grandkids. As we make a plan each year, for the club and for every department, we want to establish some overarching goals and objectives that will guide our plan, our budgets and our capital requests.
Third, we need to clearly articulate “How will we get there?” It’s easy to decide you want to “improve your social media marketing”, but more challenging to determine the ‘how, who and when’. We also want to establish SMART goals for our management team that supports the direction we want the club to go.
For example, if our employee survey says we have poor training, and our Chef believes that every cook should know how to make a soup stock, then we need to make sure our Chef’s annual bonus is connected to a better score on next year’s survey.
So, when we want to explore answering these three important questions, we have some tried and true processes and templates that help us and our clients effectively navigate the process.
In this issue of Golf Business Canada magazine, we will explore Question One – Where Are We? In the next issue we will tackle questions two and three. Hopefully, you will find a nugget or two of value in both articles that will help you and your club develop a powered on plan for success!
WHERE ARE WE? THE BALANCED SCORECARD
If you received any leadership books for Christmas, it’s likely that one of them talked about the fact that any successful organization needs to identify their balanced scorecard. For example, you can’t solely focus on profits at the expense of employee morale, just like you simply can’t add a ping pong table to the staff room and expect customer satisfaction to soar.
At Cronk Group, when we work with golf clubs, we have our own version of the balanced scorecard that we believe identifies our clients’ strengths and weaknesses.
We often use the scorecard when we start and end a project. It tells us where we are so that we can then determine where we want to go. More importantly, it allows us to create an annual operations plan with numerous SMART goals that, if achieved, will move that facility toward greater success and ultimately, enhance their customer satisfaction, improve employee engagement and mostly, increase financial results.
Our scorecard (see image above) has four key areas; Operations, Employee Engagement, Customer/Member Satisfaction and Financial KPIs. For each area we ask ten questions, and each question is scored from zero to ten, with zero being terrible and ten being awesome. After completing the scorecard, you would have identified a score somewhere between zero (i.e., you should close the doors and post a ‘Slowly Going Out of Business’ sign) and a maximum score of 400 (i.e., you should be teaching ‘How to Run a Golf Club’ at Harvard).
For us, the benefits of using a scorecard to analyze a facility is that it helps us add some objectivity to a very subjective process. For example, determining employee engagement is much easier if you have an annual employee satisfaction survey that asks the right questions. We also apply the incredibly complex green light, yellow light and red light process, which simply tells you to keep doing the green stuff, keep your eye on the yellow stuff, and focus on improving anything that is red (below average).
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Golf Business Canada