By Ed Heil
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The podcast currently has 41 episodes available.
In the competitive landscape of private clubs, creating a strong, positive culture isn't just a nice-to-have—it's essential when attracting new members and the best talent. Jackie and Three Carpenter are longtime professionals in the club industry and are also authors of the book "People First." Using their years of experience in the private club industry, Three and Jackie are uniquely positioned to share the critical importance of fostering a people-centric culture in private clubs. Their insights offer valuable lessons for club leaders looking to elevate their club's employee experience and, by extension, member satisfaction.
Key Moments:
Ed Heil [00:00:00] You're listening to Crushing Club Marketing, a podcast for progressive club leaders ready to increase their club's revenue. Time for Change begins right now.
Ed Heil [00:00:13] Creating a high performing team in any business doesn't happen by accident. It begins with strong leadership at the top and runs through an entire organization of four clubs through the membership. We know great culture when we see it, but building outstanding culture isn't easy. In this episode, you'll hear from Three and Jackie Carpenter, club leaders and coauthors of the book "People First: The Five Steps to Pure Human Connection and a Thriving Organization.".
Ed Heil [00:00:44] Thanks for listening. You know, bad culture when you see it and you also know amazing club culture when you see it. It's those clubs that they kind of seem like they're okay, but you're not really sure, those are the ones you got to wonder about. You can pick up on good and bad culture, by the way the staff treats you, how they talk to you, how helpful they are. And a lot of times it's just how attentive they are. And you also get a sense for culture when you meet the members and you hear how they talk about their club. Three and Jackie Carpenter have spent their entire careers in the private club industry. And in a business where customer service is expected to be at the highest level. They have created dynamic culture by building connected teams everywhere they have gone. If you know the Carpenter's or spent time with them, you know they are enthusiastic. They are focused and really positive. People who are passionate about helping people, especially their teams. They are so committed to helping people, they wrote a book called "People First." I talked to this dynamic duo recently to talk about their book in the Five Steps to Pure Human Connection and a Thriving organization. Jackie and Three, thanks so much for joining us today.
Jackie Carpenter [00:02:00] Hi Ed, thanks.
Three Carpenter [00:02:01] And we're glad to be here. Very.
Ed Heil [00:02:04] It's great catching up. You know, and just in full transparency for for you who's listening. I've known Jackie, and Three, I think we may have met at a CMAA or something in passing at a conference. But Jackie and I have known each other, you know, just in passing as well for several years. And just learning more about your work in leadership has been really, really exciting and really interesting.
Jackie Carpenter [00:02:31] Thank you. Yeah, it's been fun.
Three Carpenter [00:02:33] Gosh, we've enjoyed it very much. And you know, our involvement with CMAA over the years, we've met so many great people that have had such a huge influence on our lives.
Ed Heil [00:02:41] Yeah, that's terrific. Well, let's start let's talk about the book a little bit. What inspired you to write the book People First?
Three Carpenter [00:02:49] Well, thanks for asking. You know, Jackie and I had spent a lot of years working in operations of clubs. I still do. And throughout that process, I think we sort of maybe took for granted a little bit internally that the things that we were doing, everybody was doing. And as we would talk to other industry leaders and we talked to people that worked at other places, we were finding out that some of the things we were doing were relatively unique. And my primary focus, and this is what Jackie kind of started maybe moving the book towards was this idea that we believed to have great member success. The foundational approach had to be having an employee culture and having an employee centric belief in everything we did. You build the foundation with the employees and then those other things like financial health or member engagement, all those things come from that foundation. Clubs notoriously believe we're only care about member experience. It's all about the members. That is true. Ultimately that that is the byproduct however of having great employee culture.
Jackie Carpenter [00:03:56] Yeah. I think one thing that a lot of clubs discovered, especially during the Covid years, was that it doesn't matter how great your facilities are if you don't have employees to operate the club or to run those facilities, it can't be a great member experience. And so we really wanted to create, to write this book, to sort of create a model for others to follow on what they could do to really create a positive employee experience, a positive employee culture, and ultimately then a thriving organization.
Three Carpenter [00:04:28] You had said all through the writing, though I think it was really interesting. Lots of people write books to identify what's wrong.
Jackie Carpenter [00:04:35] Yeah.
Three Carpenter [00:04:35] You know, this is it. This is the problem. This is it. And the reality is.
Jackie Carpenter [00:04:40] Yes. So you need to change this. You need to change this. You need to change this. Right. But then you get done reading the book and you're like, Wow, I need to change this. What do I do?
Ed Heil [00:04:48] Right, Right.
Jackie Carpenter [00:04:49] It took us a long time to really delve into this process because we wanted you to be able to read the book and go, I know where to start, or I have some ideas to go and implement, or I can follow this roadmap to create change in my organization.
Ed Heil [00:05:04] Yeah, that's it's an interesting point because you've got so many anecdotes and examples and case studies that you point to throughout the book that as you're reading it, you realize like, wow, this I mean, you know, let's face it, for a lot of people, you know, caring about your employees seems really kind of fluffy. Like, yeah, that's what I got to do. I got to care more. But it's like, the answer is yes. And when you look at how some of you know, world class businesses operate, that is what they do. So what let me ask you this. In that spirit, why is it what have you seen in the club industry that makes it really important for club leaders to to read? I mean, is there it seems to me like a lot of other industries where there's, you know, leadership challenges or understanding of what healthy culture looks like. But is there something that you've noticed about the club industry that makes us even more relevant?
Three Carpenter [00:05:59] Yeah, club leaders are too busy for me as well, right? Every one of us are going a million different directions, seven days a week, you know, 18 hour days. Sometimes all those things happen. And then you say, Well, yeah, but look, you've got to focus first on this. And everyone says, Wait a minute, I don't know that I have time. We will tell you it has to be the number one priority. All those other things have to come second. And none of us think that way. And this whole book was intended to be a reminder of prioritizing the employee first kind of message. Those other things will come.
Jackie Carpenter [00:06:35] Yeah, it's really an investment at you know, if you start with the employees, you're ultimately making your life easier down the road. But but it's an investment first and foremost.
Ed Heil [00:06:45] Is this is some of that though some of the challenge with that because so many people that are club leaders or say, general managers. Right. They rise up on the food and bev side, they come up on the golf side and they're very. That work can be very tactical. It's like I've got to execute. And they fill their days with executing tasks rather than saying, take a step back and say, Hang on. I don't have to execute, I just have to help people see a greater vision or, as you know, the MVP's and really make some of that stuff very clear. But is that part of it as well, or how does that play into, you know, the fact that everyone is really, really busy?
Three Carpenter [00:07:23] Well, I think you're 100% correct. Each one of us just digs too much into tasks. It happens to me occasionally as well. I actually try to spend time each day making sure I'm getting out and doing the employee touch stuff, doing the things where they see me, talk to me. We get lots of interaction. You know, you had made the comment about caring. That piece, it carries so much weight because it's such a simple concept. It seems so remedial. But the reality of it is when the employees realize it, you as an as a leader, really genuinely care about everything in their lives, not just their time at work, but everything. Then they work harder. They care more themselves, more loyal. It's that idea that, you know, they they that lead by example show people the care and everyone else follows it like that.
Jackie Carpenter [00:08:10] So that like the people first mentality. Right. And is really where you recognize that it's your people are one of your biggest assets. They're not a tool used to create a member experience, but rather they are an asset that needs to be invested in and cared for and nurtured and developed. And so when you start operating with a people first mindset and using that to make all of your decisions or to kind of lead the way in the way that you lead your club, there are a realm of, you know, trickle down effects and ramifications of that that really, truly benefit the culture and frankly, the overall health of the organization.
Three Carpenter [00:08:53] Years ago, someone might have looked at a club and like, my gosh, that club is so great. And they think of it like, because the golf course is so good.
Jackie Carpenter [00:09:01] The facilities are amazing.
Three Carpenter [00:09:03] The reality is the clubs that are wildly successful. Stop. Don't worry about that. Go dig in and go look at what's going on in their employee culture.
Jackie Carpenter [00:09:12] It's about the people.
Three Carpenter [00:09:13] We'll guarantee that is their strongest component.
Jackie Carpenter [00:09:17] Fun fact we almost called the book. It's about the people.
Three Carpenter [00:09:19] But yeah, People First, won.
Ed Heil [00:09:22] It's concise. It's not, you know, So let's I love to just dive into and we're not going to we're not going to dissect the book. So if you're listening, think, my gosh, you're going to dissect this whole thing. For us to be able to talk through the five C's that in just I've mentioned, credibility, candor, cultivation, commitment and care. And to start with the fact that I think it's important that for the listener to recognize and they may not feel this way, but just by my perspective, I'm anxious to hear yours as well. You have to believe this stuff. It's not enough to say, yeah, we care about our team. You've got to you've got to live it. You've got to really believe in not just like now I got to say this thing because I know that that matters, but it's because people smell B.S. a million miles away. And maybe that's a good, you know, a as good a point to start as as any with credibility. And let's talk about credibility and what that means in, you know, in the people first context.
Jackie Carpenter [00:10:22] Yeah, absolutely. So credibility is really why someone should work at your organization. It is who you are as an employer. It is your message to the outside world. And clubs are really great at why someone should join their club. They spend a lot of time and effort, you know, communicating that and prioritizing why a member should join their club and kind of historically haven't been fabulous at why someone should want to work at their club. And that is a that's what we call credibility today. It is your message to the outside world as to why somebody should want to come and work for you and what is.
Three Carpenter [00:11:04] Your employee brand?
Jackie Carpenter [00:11:05] Yeah, Yeah. And it has to be consistent. It has to be true and it has to be you have to be an employer that your employees can trust. And just like you said, you know, people can smell it. You can't tell someone, we're a great place to work, we're a great place to work. And then they show up and it's awful.
Ed Heil [00:11:21] Right, Right.
Three Carpenter [00:11:22] Years ago, Jack and I worked together at a club in Texas. And one of things I loved watching her do when she was helping us build that culture from the beginning, she would bring in a new employee as opposed to saying, my gosh, we're so great. And all these things that at that moment were not actually true. She would say, Listen, we're hiring you because we want you to come here and help us because right now we're here. We're going to be here. And as we go through the process, you're going to help make us better. And the reality of aspirational thinking and aspirational leadership, which is exactly what that was. Those people wanted to be part of the rebuild, the rebirth of what it would be our culture. Yeah.
Ed Heil [00:12:03] Right. And I was just going to say, and that might be that one of the most difficult first steps to take because you're laying that down and you better have a plan for how you're going to execute that. I mean, if you're the new sheriff in town, that's one thing. You sort of have this clean slate. But if you're listening, you think, gosh, I've got a culture issue and if you make this decision, boy, you better be ready to back it up right now.
Jackie Carpenter [00:12:27] Yeah. And it really starts. I mean, we are all about making things easy for people because we get again, club leaders are busy. But it starts with what do current employees say about you? Why do they like working there? What don't they like about working there? You know, if people are showing up for orientation and they're never coming back again, it's probably a red flag. Or if you're hiring people, you know, on the spot and then they go, yeah, again, a red flag. So there are some things there, you know, to really dig into and take a look at as to what your employees say about you. And that can be really insightful. It can be terrifying to to some people, but it's a question worth asking because they are the people you know. Again, it all starts with them.
Ed Heil [00:13:13] Yeah. You talk about in the book, you know, in the credibility chapter about mission, vision and purpose. Why is it so important that that is clear to everyone in the organization? I would imagine first and then. But what's what's you help the listener understand why that's important.
Jackie Carpenter [00:13:35] To people today. Purpose matters more than ever. It's not about a paycheck. It's not about necessarily even a title anymore. I mean, that used to be pay and title used to be the things that workers were seeking. And today it's much more about people knowing what they do matters and having a bigger purpose and a better mission. And I think clarifying the mission and the values and this is kind of what we reference in the book is people want clarity and they want to know what that is. It's I don't know if you've ever worked for someone where or in a club, they're kind of notorious for this, too, is when one manager says something, right? And then another manager says something totally different. And then a board member tells you something totally different and you're like, Well, what am I supposed to do? I just got three directives in an hour, right? So that clarity, that communication helps. What were you going to ask? Well, I.
Three Carpenter [00:14:26] Was just going to say, too, you know, sometimes we also, as employees of a club in this example, we come in and think our job is to, you know, serve a hamburger. Yeah, whatever your, like, basic task might be. The reality is that isn't anything to do with that. And through the MVP process, we think that paints the bigger picture, that what you're really creating is an employee and member culture. I mean, that's what every employee is responsible for. By the way, here's some tasks you do while we try to work for these bigger things. People want to be part of the bigger part of it, so it gets pretty mundane to imagine. I'm just here on the floor. Just sweep the floor. I mean, that's exactly right.
Ed Heil [00:15:06] Yeah. Helping people understand why their work matters is just is so, so important. And it's not like to your point earlier, Three, it's everyone's busy and it's like, wait, I have to tell him why this matters is like, yeah, "Ed's not very bright. He needs help." No, I'm just kidding. So that wasn't very nice. So candor, let's talk a little bit about candor, because that is one of those Well, in communications, candor can be very helpful and clear communication or on alignment. But within the book of People First. Talk to me a little bit about what candor means.
Jackie Carpenter [00:15:42] Yeah. So candor is what we reference as when you're hiring an employee, right? And it's really the hiring process. So we say that when you're hiring someone, it needs to be a transparent, authentic, genuine conversation. It's not an interrogation. I don't know if you've ever been interrogated in a job interview before, Ed, but it's not something that's very comfortable or very rewarding as an employee. And especially today when it is a probably the most brutal job market out there. I mean, to try and get employees today, you have to be at the top of your game because if not, that person's probably has several other job offers on the table. Right. So. Or are being pursued by other employers. And so the candid process is really about telling people what it's like to work at your organization, why they should want to work at your organization. And it's really connecting with them. And I think that's a piece that so often it becomes an interrogation where maybe the hiring managers like Ed, why are you good enough to work here instead of, Hey, tell me about yourself. What do you like doing? And and maybe let's see if if there's, you know, ways that. We can align right. And your mitt, your values and our values. Let's see if they go together.
Three Carpenter [00:17:01] Well, and it's about being authentic and vulnerable at the same time. And let's be honest, in the club space, it's all about image and, you know, all buttoned up and that whole thing. But, you know, I got to tell you, the reality is for the great leaders in our industry that are vulnerable and authentic, I mean, especially in the interview process, because working for an institution doesn't create loyalty. Loyalty comes from the premise that you are making a connection with this potential interviewee. They meet you and they think, Wow, he was really honest. He was really open, like very vulnerable, told us about the goods in the ads, like those kind of things. People want to work for that, right?
Jackie Carpenter [00:17:42] Right. It's that connecting piece that it comes back to you. It's more about working for a leader or working for a person who genuinely cares, versus we need somebody who can come in here tomorrow. And these are this is what we need from you. And there's not a lot of what what do you want from us? Right.
Three Carpenter [00:17:59] Well, we have preached for a long time at our clubs. "Loyalty is to one another." It's not "loyalty is to blank club". And I'm sorry, that's just a harsh fact.
Jackie Carpenter [00:18:10] It's about the people.
Three Carpenter [00:18:11] It is about those people. And and when you're in the interview process, keeping that in your mind all the time when we start interviews, I'm telling you it is very low key and we open with something like, Hey, we're not doing the kind of normal interview thing. We are.
Jackie Carpenter [00:18:26] Having a conversation.
Three Carpenter [00:18:27] Having a conversation.
Ed Heil [00:18:29] And isn't that really the result of the type of culture that you have in your club? Right. Because if you are able to be vulnerable and authentic in an interview, you're telling that person, this is how we operate as well. Isn't that right? I mean, and then you and I thought there's an interesting anecdote in the book as well about the young man who was interviewing for the job but wasn't the right person. And and that person shared something that was very personal that I think is his parent passing away. That changed the the whole perspective of that of that person and how in it's hard to get someone you're interviewing to be that open about something that's very intimate and very personal. But what it says about them when they're able to is huge.
Jackie Carpenter [00:19:22] Absolutely. Yeah. And I think a lot of times interviewers get really hung up on the resumé or where they've worked in the past, and we're guilty of that, too. We've been there and done that. But what we have found is when you focus more on the person and why they want to work there and what they're looking for, and you really cater, you know, that interview to getting to know that person, it's a much better indicator of whether they're going to fit in your club culture or not, or they're going to be a good fit for your team versus, Hey, have you ever waited tables before or do you know all the drinks to bartend? Like, we can teach people those skills, but we can't teach you to be engaging and outgoing and happy. Can't do that, right?
Three Carpenter [00:20:03] Yeah. Well, and sometimes just finding whatever their triggers are to get them to relax. Yeah. We tell a different story in the book where we talk a lot about somebody who is an unbelievably successful GM today in our industry who was bombing and an intern interview like no one one's ever seen. And. As I watched it happen and I really started to feel really bad for this young man. I was digging into his resume and, you know, had taken a second and started to realize that knowing what his resume said, there had to be a belief in leadership based on the military and Indiana basketball. And when I bridge the question about those things, his posture changed, his body changed and...
Jackie Carpenter [00:20:48] Found the thing that he was passionate about. Right. Able to draw that out versus just asking questions because he was saying what he thought we wanted to hear. Right. So where you change the game. And that's really what candor is about.
Three Carpenter [00:21:01] Sometimes it's as silly as asking about what movies people like or songs or books, because all of a sudden they have to think about themselves personally, not at work. And when they relate that, their whole demeanor changes. And I think that's really important.
Jackie Carpenter [00:21:14] And that's something I think, again, Ed, club leaders really get hung up on is we're hiring a new, you know, golf pro. Where did they work before? What is their background, What's all their credentials, Not necessarily who they are as a person. And does this really fit who we want at our club, running our golf programing and, you know, teaching our children and those kinds of things? That's where that mindset shift really comes into play.
Ed Heil [00:21:38] Yeah, terrific. I love it. Let's talk about cultivation. And I think there is a line that says something like, just once you've hired them, it doesn't stop there. Tell, tell, tell us more. What do you know when you think about cultivating those those people, what does that look like on a day to day basis and why is it so important?
Jackie Carpenter [00:21:57] Yeah. So [00:21:58]I usually show this really awesome picture of a girl pushing a guy into the swimming pool and he's like, falling and she's laughing because that's what cultivation feels like a lot of times or has been in, you know, historically, that's the way that it feels is you're kind of feeding someone to the wolves like it's a sink or swim period, where you got to weed out the weak ones. Hey, you know what? If you if you can't figure it out and you can't get it here, then you shouldn't be working here. And we will tell you today that is the wrong approach. Okay? You are scaring people away. You are drowning people and they're not coming back because today it is all about a very nurturing and supportive period. Because the thing people forget is that when you're new, you feel stupid. And I don't know about you, but we have yet to come across anybody who loves to feel stupid. [46.2s] And so if you can bring in a new person and nurturing and really caring for them and help get them up to speed by answering their questions and eliminating those yucky feelings of anxiety and stress and uncomfortableness, you can get them over that quickly. You're going to have a much better success rate at them coming back the next day and them really taking on the job and the role.
Three Carpenter [00:23:13] Well, I think if you think about gardens or flowers or you talk about this a great deal, but that old cliche of you get out of it what you put into it. So you take time and you take care of it and you grow.
Jackie Carpenter [00:23:24] Plant the seed and you continue to nurture them.
Three Carpenter [00:23:27] Yeah, all of that is really, really true in this phase because so frequently you've hired him and you just let him go. And Jack is exactly right. That culture is a decade ago.
Jackie Carpenter [00:23:39] Well, and it's hard again, we've said club leaders are busy. Right. So we make a lot of assumptions. Hey, I noticed, you know, on your resume, you've done this before, so here you go. Here's the dining room. You know, have at it. Holler if you have any questions. And that doesn't work. You know, that really doesn't work today because, again, people are uncomfortable. And I don't know if you know this. We've heard this several times and seen it in our research that younger generations of workers today, this is terrifying, feel more comfortable ghosting. You just not showing up, not telling you they quit then telling their leader or their boss that they don't understand something or they don't feel confident or telling them that they have a question about something. It's easier for them just to not show up again.
Three Carpenter [00:24:23] Think about that. The power of that is absolutely shocking.
Jackie Carpenter [00:24:27] During that cultivation phase, if we're not meeting with people on a daily basis and saying, Hey, what can I help you with, what questions do you have here? Let me show you this again. I know. Let me give you another tour of the club. I know it's a big facility. I don't want you to be overwhelmed. What are those things of anxiety and stress and those kinds of things? Because those are the feelings that make people not come back again.
Ed Heil [00:24:48] Right. You know, it's funny you said that. Why we wanted to come back. That's always a good thing. We'll have a little joke that someone comes back for day two. It's like, all right, you came back. That's. Exactly. But the you said, you know how no one likes to feel stupid. Imagine, like the value when you make people feel really smart. Yeah. And to the point of what you're saying about cultivation and even going back to credibility, it's like, you know, you hire someone think, you know, under this pretense that you're all these things and then they get it's like, my gosh, they're not like that at all. Right? And I mean, you've probably seen these things too, where sometimes you make a hire where boy, you're not really sure if they're the right person. And in fact, you're starting to you're pretty convinced they're not. But when you take that time to water that flower, when you take that time to nurture and figure out what's getting in the way, how they can just really take off. And, you know, that's it's such a great win when that happens as well. Let's talk about commitment in this. I mean, I love this the section because there are just so many pieces to it. But and maybe if we could start with one of the thoughts that really I think is so hard for people. How do you get people to think of the team first instead of themselves? Like, I got to take care of myself before I think of like, you know, you said you said earlier, I mean, there's this idea of being accountable not to the club, but to your coworkers and the team that you're used to. So how do you how do you do that and how does that fit in with commitment? And, you know, is. You know, as a part of this this whole thinking.
Three Carpenter [00:26:30] Well, just quick on how you get everyone to kind of believe the power of that. I think that we do lots and lots of education trying to tell people about and remind people the feelings they've had when they've actually been part of, as an example, a successful sports team and how that sort of builds camaraderie and how they feel sort of doing it together with that kind of person standing next to them. You know, you think back, we use the restaurant part of the club world. When you think back to the idea that we were in competition for gratuities and we were in competition, you know, for that table, because that one tips better than that one. And all those things that maybe happened a couple of decades ago today. You know, you think about it, we're really working together. Let me help you be great. And I think we try to create a culture by which people are really believing they're not in it alone. Not only do we believe that sort of the traditional hierarchy, you know, of a dictatorial leadership style is really inverse, where we as the the upper leaders are really on the bottom supporting you up and then all your teammates are there trying to help make you successful. The power of it is quite remarkable.
Jackie Carpenter [00:27:36] Yeah. And, you know, it's helping people understand that members don't join the golf course or they don't join the tennis department. They join the club. And so we're only as strong as our weakest link, right? If 90% of the club is awesome, but the golf course sucks, then guess what? That is impacting our experience negatively. And so I think helping employees see how they're really tied to everybody and if they're great, that's awesome. But if the person next to them sucks, it's making them look bad. So it is that kind of link really there. And the kind of the biggest thing too, with commitment is it's all about getting employees to own it and to take ownership of their roles and really seeing what they do every day and really to own it. So, you know, we go we use this example in the book to it about Disney, right? And it's everyone's job to keep the park clean. It's what we call fluidity. It's where there is. Yes, you have a job. You know.
Three Carpenter [00:28:37] These are the tasks that you own for sure.
Jackie Carpenter [00:28:40] You have a job description, but there's a lot of other stuff there that goes on where if you see something dirty lying on the floor, you pick it up. If there's a member walking in and they need the door open, you open the door, Right? It's those kinds of things that go well beyond the job description. And so with commitment, it's about, you know, really investing in those people and helping them see that you want them to take ownership of their role. And I think that sometimes is challenging in the club space because we get a lot of board members or leaders who are maybe micromanaging. We're nit picking where, you know, digging in. We're trying to control things where we're not allowing our leaders to lead.
Three Carpenter [00:29:18] Well, no, just back to the idea of a dictatorial leadership style. When you start to have a collaborative leadership style and instead of subservience, which in in the club industry was rampant for, I'm sure, decades, where it was so much based on this idea that you're just there to do whatever every member, you do.
Jackie Carpenter [00:29:36] What you're told. Right. Don't think you just do what we tell you to do.
Three Carpenter [00:29:40] We believe strongly that what you're really trying to do instead is at the lowest levels. It does make a difference all the way up through the organization. You're creating a leadership culture so that these folks are thinking and solving problems and having fun, really making a difference.
Jackie Carpenter [00:29:53] Right. And one of the things that has blown our mind and over the course since the book came out, when we talk about ownership, is how many people tell us they just needed permission to own it. They needed permission from their boss, that, hey, you know what, Ed, you're doing a great job. I believe in you. I want you to own it. Like take it on. I don't want to be babysitting you. I don't want to feel like I've got to be checking in on you all the time. I want you to take it on. I want you to own it and then let me know what I can do to support you or what questions you have because I want to help you win. And that's a conversation that so many times people assume they don't need to have. They just expect you to own it. But that person needs that confidence and that, you know, encouragement really to to take that on.
Ed Heil [00:30:39] Absolutely. And, you know, the way we always stick to it and it's okay if you make a mistake and if you do have that leeway. Right. And one of my favorite sayings is don't deprive someone the opportunity to make a mistake. Yeah. Because they learn so much. Right.
Jackie Carpenter [00:30:53] And it really comes down to how do people respond when a mistake happens, too. Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Ed Heil [00:31:00] Absolutely. Let's break that down just a little bit more. I'm not a math guy, but plus, plus signs and equal signs with words. I actually think I can do that. So maybe just some quick thoughts around each one. And this is sort of building that commitment. Confidence plus comfort equals contribution. What does that mean?
Jackie Carpenter [00:31:18] Well, people really want to contribute, but they're not going to contribute if they're not confident or comfortable to do that. Right. And again, we literally just made. The case is if they're not confident and comfortable enough to try or to put themselves out there or to take ownership of it, guess what? They're not going to do that. They're not going to contribute at their best. But when a club is thriving is really when everybody's contributing their best, right, they're giving their all and contributing. So we have to instill those things in people.
Ed Heil [00:31:47] All right. Devotion plus daring equals determination.
Jackie Carpenter [00:31:50] Yeah. So a little bit of challenge is good. And, you know, we want to spark people's passion and help them see beyond just sweeping the floor. Right.
Three Carpenter [00:32:01] We love creating new ways, thinking outside the box, like all those things all take a little courage, a little bit of daring, right? So I think that's a big piece of it.
Jackie Carpenter [00:32:09] Yeah, absolutely.
Three Carpenter [00:32:10] And when they care about it enough, I mean, that devotion piece and then they go take that little bit of a risk. And you really see those big, big, big results.
Ed Heil [00:32:19] Yeah, Interesting. You put those two together when they care enough that they say, what if we tried this? Right. Energized. Plus, encouragement equals empowerment.
Jackie Carpenter [00:32:31] Yeah. And again, kind of comes back to giving people permission, right? Energizing people and encouraging them. That is where we see, you know, people succeed. And I think so often we say this a lot is we assume people are getting encouraged outside of their, you know, in their daily lives or not at work. We make assumptions about that. And what if we stop and think about at work is really probably the the place people are encouraged the most. And so what an opportunity to, you know, really energize people, get them excited about it and really empower them to to own it. Right. Empower them to take it on and to show us, you know, give us their best.
Three Carpenter [00:33:13] Yeah. Well, I think that energy thing, you know, you talk a lot about being an energy giver as opposed to an energy sucker. And we think about it from a leadership perspective, being an energy giver, that is that energized thing. Yeah. No matter how I feel as a leader, I do my very, very, very best to always be in a very high energy sort of mode because I believe that's a little bit contagious
Jackie Carpenter [00:33:36] Positive.
Three Carpenter [00:33:36] In changes. And I think that's really what energize. I'm trying to energize others. Right?
Jackie Carpenter [00:33:41] Yeah.
Ed Heil [00:33:42] Interesting. Foss Swim Schools. Local based swim school. And they have this thing when they hire new swim instructors, they say they look for the light bulb. Can they be a light bulb for their kids? So when some kid comes to the pool, "Oh Three is here today! High Five!" And that's you know, the way I always think about that is just in people's light. Do they have a light bulb? Do they light up, you know, putting them all together, contribution plus determination plus empowerment, which is the outcome of the others, equals bold achievement. What is that like? Help Help put some context around that.
Jackie Carpenter [00:34:18] Yeah. Bold achievement is really what, you know, another name for thriving. I mean, ultimately, it's where everybody is doing their best. They're caring about it. They're contributing at a high level. You know, when people are disengaged, Ed, you know, there's a gazillion studies about how that negatively impacts an organization when people are disengaged or they're just clicking, the mouse is just working, right. They're punching a clock. Right. And when we can truly get people who are engaged and they're caring about it and they're looking for solutions and they're asking questions that aren't being asked yet and they're inventing and creating. Well, that's the secret sauce right there. That's where the magic happens. But it all those other formulas. Right. Kind of have to be in play because they all add up and they're all sort of stair steps or building blocks to get to that result.
Ed Heil [00:35:12] Yeah. Got it. Let's let's bring this home with with kind of how we started, which is care and caring. And one of my it, one of my favorite sayings is that people don't care about what you know until they know you care. Right. It's just a huge thing.
Jackie Carpenter [00:35:27] Yeah. And caring is really what it is. But it's evident in all the other steps. The four steps prior is you have to show that you genuinely care about your employees, that you are willing to invest in them. It comes down to really this and this might freak some people out, but it comes down to really loving your employees. And we know love in business freaks people out. It's you know, we run from it because we've been trained, you know, by our four years that like, no love in business. Right.
Ed Heil [00:35:57] Right. Exactly.
Jackie Carpenter [00:35:58] But really, think about it this way. Love is loyalty, ownership, value and excellence. And it comes down to we show that we're loyal to them and we're going to help them succeed so that they can be loyal to us. It's ownership that we want to give them permission to own it and help them have the resources and everything they need so they can own it and feel comfortable in their jobs so that they can own their jobs. And then value is really about where you're seeing their value as a human being and a contributor in our workforce so that they can produce value. And then the E comes down to excellence, and it's where we give them an employee experience that is excellent so they can produce excellence for our members. And what we haven't talked about yet is, Ed. What care really is and what people first really is, is a focus on how our employees feel. And that's a warm and fuzzy, touchy feely thing. We get it. But when we are paying attention to how we're making our employees feel, whether that is overwhelmed, frustrated, micromanaged, or whether that's empowered and energized and comfortable and confident, those are the things we have to be noticing. Because when people don't feel good at work, guess what? They're not contributing. They're not engaged. And they may or may not come back the next day. That's the reality of the world we're living in right now.
Ed Heil [00:37:26] Yeah. It's so interesting, you know? And who doesn't like it when someone asks, How are you doing? Yeah. You know, and I do.
Jackie Carpenter [00:37:34] What can I do to help you and.
Ed Heil [00:37:35] Right.
Jackie Carpenter [00:37:36] The day.
Ed Heil [00:37:37] And, you know, we talk about this sometimes a storyteller when someone says, I'm doing all right, you know what prevents you from saying just all right?
Jackie Carpenter [00:37:45] Yeah.
Ed Heil [00:37:45] You know, like, how do I get you from being all right to, like, amazing, right? And maybe you can. Maybe you can't put that level of of concern and interest in someone goes such a long way.
Jackie Carpenter [00:37:57] Absolutely.
Ed Heil [00:37:58] Yeah. So, I mean, you just said this is a touchy feely stuff. We don't like talking about love and business, that's for sure. Right. Which is so true. I mean, and it doesn't. It doesn't really make sense to me. But how do you what do you recommend? What do you recommend for club leaders that hear this? And go, "Yeah. I can't do that at my club. I'm not you know, we're not really that's not the type of team we are. It's not the type of club we are." How do you how do you help people take that first step? What is the what is the hardest. How do you get them to push through that?
Three Carpenter [00:38:36] Well, a couple of quick things. One, we think that, you know, since Covid, Jackie and I will tell you that for, you know, 20 years prior, this was always a competitive advantage that the clubs that we worked at, we were having success with sort of this modeling. Right. And and it was it was kind of winning on the other side of that, being honest. Now, after Covid and the pandemic, it's no longer a competitive advantage. It's an absolute must for everybody. So even those clubs are like, gosh, you know, we're more prim and proper than that or, you know, whatever it is. The reality is today you've got to build this strong foundation of culture, you know, before you can get the other things, because.
Jackie Carpenter [00:39:15] It's an expectation of the workforce today. They expect that the people first mindset is going to be in play.
Three Carpenter [00:39:22] And if not, they're going to leave.
Jackie Carpenter [00:39:23] They're not going to stick around.
Ed Heil [00:39:25] That's right. Right. Yeah.
Three Carpenter [00:39:27] So go ahead.
Ed Heil [00:39:29] No, you go.
Three Carpenter [00:39:30] So just the idea, however, that maybe you as the main leader are not that touchy feely person. That's okay. Go hire somebody who is. Very frankly, make sure you have that sort of culture keeper. It doesn't have to be the general manager. Just as a note. Yeah.
Ed Heil [00:39:50] That's so big. I mean, even just for a general manager to know that I. I recognize this being really important. It's not who I am. But I get that I have. You know, I love that. And so it's so important to. Gosh, is going to mention one other thing around the culture stuff and but it's it's escaped me.
Jackie Carpenter [00:40:09] Or if it comes back just say so I have a recommendation to add here. Here's what I would say. If a club is struggling with this or that's not who we are or, you know, that's the belief. It's really small things make a big difference. And so some simple changes, some little adjustments. It could maybe simply start with an employee survey. Ask your employees what do they want? What how do they feel about working at the club? What do they wish they could change? What is it that could be very insightful and not that you're going to be able to implement every single thing or change every single thing on that list. But that is a very insightful piece of information that club leaders can look at and then make the decision, Hey, do we need to make some changes? Because our employees say, hey, it sucks working here.
Ed Heil [00:41:03] Right, Right, right.
Jackie Carpenter [00:41:04] Or we don't like it here. I'm only here because it's a paycheck and I worked here for ten years or I'm hoping to get my bonus or whatever it might be, but that that can be a very telling resource. If club managers or board members are brave enough to ask those questions.
Ed Heil [00:41:20] Right. And it is one of those things where be ready to do something. Because there's the other thing that we know too, is that ask people what they think and then don't do anything about. It is it's really tough to remember what I was going to mention about the hiring and caring about your team and having the right culture, which is that, you know, we talk about this quite a bit. You know in some of my my talks is just that how the younger generation wants experiences and part of the experience is having a staff that really cares about you. And you talk about this in the book. If you don't have the right people, they're not going to provide the right experience for your members. And in this time where younger, this younger generations got a lot of options and private clubs might not be their thing. You're not It's just it's yes, it's about attracting the right people, but it's also about creating the right culture for your employees so that your club can grow and be and be healthy as well. So, so many parts that are so valuable. Well, it's a big mountain to climb in for some people. But the book is terrific and so, so needed in not just in the club space, but in all businesses especially, I think. Well, you see it in all sizes. But so often small, medium sized businesses that are really struggling with how to create the right culture. Boy, I know I've had my challenges and this is great information. Thanks so much for your time today.
Jackie Carpenter [00:42:48] Thanks, Ed, We appreciate it.
Three Carpenter [00:42:50] Well, thanks for all you're doing for the industry and we really appreciate being on today. Thank you so much.
Ed Heil [00:42:57] Thank you for listening. If you find this podcast helpful, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep crushing your club marketing.
Not long ago, a club’s membership director was the receptionist at the front desk. As it related to new member acquisition, that person’s primary job was to provide and receive, membership applications. In some cases, they may also be asked to provide a club tour. However, the idea of the membership director also acting as a salesperson was not only foreign, it was considered tacky and frowned upon. After all, any club worth its salt should never “sell” memberships. Then the recession happened in 2008 and the private club industry had to adapt.
It took time and, later, a pandemic to turn the tables on the downward trend, but as clubs rebounded through the 2010s, some clubs struggled and started to revise their perspective on recruiting new members. Emotionally tethered to their past ideas of exclusivity, prestige, and privilege, some clubs were forced to reinvent themselves.
It was during this time that Melissa Hansen entered the private club industry as the Director of Marketing and Membership at Hammock Bay Golf & Country Club. A lifelong learner and networker, Melissa became a member of the Membership Directors of Southwest Florida (MDASF) and launched her career as a membership professional. Today, Melissa is the Director of Marketing and Membership at a private club in Naples, where she has been since 2011. She’s also a consultant and educator to membership professionals providing content and Masterclasses to those eager to transform their careers. Melissa routinely fills her classes and online training sessions with helpful content geared towards people entering the industry as well as those who are more seasoned.
Episode Highlights
Ed Heil [00:00:00] You are listening to Crushing Club Marketing, a podcast for progressive club leaders ready to increase their club's revenue. Time for change begins right now.
[00:00:13] Marketing and communications isn't what it used to be in the private club industry. And if you do what you've always done, you get what you always got. Which isn't too bad for clubs that never worry about driving membership. But for most clubs, driving new members is an ongoing concern. Melissa Hansen is a consultant for membership directors and an evangelist for digital marketing. In this episode, Melissa tells us why change is needed and what club leaders need to know to set a course for long term membership growth.
Ed Heil [00:00:44] Well, in our world, it's StoryTeller. Every club should have a Melissa Hansen. She's a membership director. First of all, she's someone who embraces technology to help her do her job better. She cares passionately about her members and her club. She juggles a million things at one time and magically, somehow, she finds time to spend with her family. Now it gets better. Melissa also takes time to help other membership directors grow and learn with her mastermind classes. Her passion is to help them become better membership professionals as well. If you're interested, you can learn more about Melissa's Mastermind classes at Melissahansen.com, and we'll plug that again later at the end of the this episode. But Melissa and I connected recently. We had a terrific conversation about the changing responsibilities of membership directors and the many aspects this job has here in the 21st century. Put it this way, as you know, it isn't the same job it was 20 years ago, and it's actually a job that today transcends all business, not just the club industry, but you got to want to learn. And Melissa has the knowledge, the desire and the platform to teach. Melissa, thanks so much for joining me today.
Melissa Hansen [00:02:03] I am so excited. I have been such a fan of your podcast for the longest time, so I'm very excited to be here.
Ed Heil [00:02:10] Oh, you're very nice. The old joke is you're the one, it's been it's been a lot of fun to get to know you and spend some time with you. And in Naples at the MDASF. Right. And, seminar and, really, really cool. For people who are not as familiar with you in your work, can you give me a little background about, like, how how did you start your consulting practice? Like what inspired you to do that?
Melissa Hansen [00:02:38] Yeah. So, I would definitely say that. So a couple of years back, I was the president of the organization, the membership directors of Southwest Florida, and I was on the board for about seven years. And I think we're we're lucky in that organization because we really have such a big group. There's now about 100, people in our direct area that are part of that association. [00:03:03]And through the seven years, really what I saw and I felt was not only the opportunity to get to know so many membership and marketing professionals in the area, but I was also meeting so many of the general managers, and what we would see was they would have a new hire on board, and there was really kind of a need for, to educate that membership professional. And so I just kind of decided to jump in, I've always been like an education junkie, and I've always, you know, always continued to educate myself, you know, after graduating from college, I always want to know the latest and the greatest. And, I really what I was trying to do was to take what I know and share it, you know, with the people that that I worked with that were in my role and really it just kind of spurred from there. [51.5s] We it first started local and now it's gone national. I work with over about 350 clubs, throughout the country.
Ed Heil [00:04:04] Wow. And yet you're also a membership director. How do you have time to do all this stuff? And you're a mom?
Melissa Hansen [00:04:13] I mean, there definitely aren't enough hours in the day. I'm not going to lie with you. You know, it's not easy. But I think at the end of the day, what it comes down to is it's my passion. Membership and marketing and the private club industry is my everything, and I just can't turn my brain off.
Ed Heil [00:04:31] You've got so many educational opportunities for for your students. What do you, how do you hope they benefit the most?
Melissa Hansen [00:04:39] I really just serve to inspire them. And just I love doing these. We do kind of discovery calls before we get started on a one on one and really kind of go through maybe a challenge or two that they're having at their club. And I think that after so many years of being in the industry that you've just you've tested it all right, you realize that there's things that work and things that don't work. And so I really just say, okay, this is your challenge. These are three things that worked for me. These are three things that have worked for other students at other clubs. Let's go ahead and try implementing these at yours and and helping you get through this challenge.
Ed Heil [00:05:19] Yeah. Got it. The, there has been so much change. And, you know, in the time that you've been in the industry and, and really, you know, dare say that after 2010 there's been, you know, quite a bit of change with so much digital, presence in private clubs. What do you think, are some of the biggest changes? You've seen in the last 15 years and how those affected the membership director role.
Melissa Hansen [00:05:50] Yeah, there there definitely been a lot of changes. I think as you mentioned, you know, the customer, the digital customer journey has been the thing that has changed so much and the way that our members and prospective members, really kind of, you know, expect to be communicated with, you know, 15 years ago as a membership professional, we might be pumping out a quarterly newsletter, or we might be creating a flyer, to promote an event. But now, as a membership professional, we are in charge of not only developing the website, but continuously keeping it updated. We are in charge of social media. We are charge of lead management and managing a CRM system. You know, our clubs have mobile apps and we're using push notifications and all that. Technology has just evolved so rapidly, and it is up to us as membership and marketing professionals to really continue to be educated and learn how to grow with those products.
Ed Heil [00:06:57] You know, you say that and, you know, and I, I love the the willingness to say it's our responsibility. But that's a lot of stuff. I mean, is it how realistic is it if if, you know, if I'm a general manager listening to this, this is like our opportunity to say like, is it realistic to say you got to know all this stuff and you know, your newsletters and all the other things? Is it is it realistic, do you think?
Melissa Hansen [00:07:24] I mean, I think it is essential. I think it is essential to be a thriving club, you know, a waitlisted club, you know, a club where you are, where you need to be. Do I think that everything has to be implemented at once or by one person? No. I mean, I'm at my club, a department of one. You know, I work with so many companies and vendors behind the scenes that get me to where I am.
Ed Heil [00:07:55] How do you do it? I mean, you're you're a team of one. And yet, I mean, there are so many things. How do you determine, you know, what to implement? When is there and is there, an approach to that that you've seen that works across the board, or how do you advise people in that way?
Melissa Hansen [00:08:13] I would definitely say, you know, [00:08:14]focus on on one thing at a time and, you know, get that under your belt for, you know, six months or so. For example, I like to I love to connect with other, you know, experts in the industry and see, you know, especially technology gurus and see what's working for them. [16.3s] And, one of the things that had come about for me about a year ago, was implementing this online chat on the website, and I was like, no way, no way am I going to implement this live chat where basically I have to respond when a right away when anyone asks me a question like, I'm doing a million things, I'm walking around the building, I'm part of tournaments, how will I be able to do that? But I decided, you know what? I'm going to give it a go. And worst case scenario, we can turn it off. And that has been one of the biggest tools in my toolbox over the past year. Literally converting members at $100,000, memberships that have never stepped foot in the club through chat, through live chat.
Ed Heil [00:09:18] Interesting. So just to break that down a little bit, I mean, "A" that's awesome. That's amazing. Just maybe how do you manage it like, you know, do you have like notifications going to your phone and while you're walking around you like how does that work?
Melissa Hansen [00:09:36] Exactly. So the notifications go to your phone. We always have our phones next to us. I mean, that's just how it is. So it comes in just like a text message. We can toggle it off. So when I'm heading home and getting ready for my son's baseball game, you know, I'm not listening to or replying to online chat, so I toggle it off, you know, in the evening or when I'm not available. And that's, I think, the biggest misconception that I wasn't aware of before I dove into it. But when I am available, when I am making my phone or I am next to my computer, it's just been such a phenomenal resource for us.
Ed Heil [00:10:11] So, this is a little bit of a tangent, and if you'll just bear with me a little bit, I'm I'm really interested to hear your perspective on that because, you know, go back five years ago and the idea of using chat in a private club just felt really cold and informal. And why would you do that? And there I'm sure you talked to membership directors who might say, I would rather try to go for that tour and bring them in, and that's going to be a barrier like it seems. Count. Well, I get it. And yet it probably feels very counter intuitive to a lot of membership directors who prefer to, you know. Have people come on site for a tour?
Melissa Hansen [00:10:52] Definitely. I mean, [00:10:53]I think at the end of the day, Ed, like as membership professionals, we need to be the face of our club, okay. We, you know, biggest pet peeve of mine that I posted on LinkedIn recently is when I go to the membership pages of these club websites and it's just like, contact our membership department. Who am I contacting? You know, I want to see what the membership professional looks like. I want to know their name. You know, I want to buy one them. I want to, you know, this is about to be my second family. I'm joining a club. This is my lifestyle. I want to connect with someone. And so I truly feel that that the online chat has just allowed me another opportunity to put my face in front of my club and just allow me to, to connect with these prospects. [44.4s]
Ed Heil [00:11:39] What is the in your opinion? What is that mind shift of, the membership, maybe not the membership professional. It might be the general manager, it might be the board members. But what is a shift that needs to occur to say, hey, this website, I will see if I try to turn this away when people come to learn more about us, this is not about what information we want to share. It's really about how can you provide that visitor the information they're looking for? You know what I mean? It's, I think historically, for a lot of clubs, there's been this idea of like, no, no, no, we're very exclusive. If you want to come, you'll play by our rules. Rather than saying, how do we make it easier for people to learn more about what club life is like at our club?
Melissa Hansen [00:12:38] That is so good. [00:12:40]I feel like that that that has been such a shift. And if you're not shifting with the change, of that kind of vibe at your club, I think that you are missing out. [11.0s] I think that if you just take, for example, the last time you went to purchase a card, you know, which is a high end purchase. You were doing your research online before you ever stepped foot into XYZ dealership. And I just remember the last time that I was doing it, I had narrowed down my search to to three different cars, and it was the online chat and the sales person that was following up with me that was answering my specific questions about if this would be the right vehicle for my family. That ultimately swayed me to purchase that vehicle over the other that were in my top three, and I feel like it is so similar in the private club journey. At the end of the day, our buyers are all in a different point of their buying journey, right? Some of them are just starting this journey. They might be, you know, becoming a member of a club for the very first time. And they just might want to collect some information. Some of them might be ready to schedule a tour, but, you know, they've been a member of a private club. Maybe they've played here as a guest. They're ready to schedule a tour in their, you know, a little bit more of a hot lead, and some of them might be able to, to purchase right away. And I just think that you as a club and you as a, you know, membership professional, you truly need to be able to meet them wherever they are in their journey.
Ed Heil [00:14:16] Yeah. And this idea that, because you are accessible and because you make it easy for someone to learn about your club doesn't mean that you can't be exclusive like this whole idea, right? It is as a as a club, you can still be just as selective or selective as you choose to be about the members that become members of the club.
Melissa Hansen [00:14:40] Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ed Heil [00:14:42] I want to go back, though, to, something that we were talking about a couple of minutes ago. We went off on a tangent, which is the implementation, and we're talking about the fact that you don't necessarily have to do everything at once. If you're a membership director looking to implement change. You picked certain things. And that's when we started talking about chat and using chat bots. And so with that, how do you in your experience and conversations you have, how do you recommend membership directors approach those conversations with their GM or, you know, who's also reporting to a board that in some cases want things to happen really fast. And as we all know, board members and committee members, you know, different clubs will, you know, fly off the handle with an idea and say, hey, we should do this. We should do this. How does a membership director in this day and age manage that kind of stuff while trying to set priorities?
Melissa Hansen [00:15:46] Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely tough because like you're saying, everyone comes kind of like from a their personal side of it, right? That they think that this would this is the next best thing that they should implement. But at the end of the day, all of our clubs, we have budgets, right. We most of us have marketing budgets. And oftentimes some of the things that we're looking to implement may not have been budgeted for that year. And it might be something that we have to plan for, for the future. You know, I think, Ed, I know that you are such a huge advocate for, for CRM systems. And I know that you and I, we use we're both lovers of HubSpot. But I would say that that is like, the number one mistake that I see in clubs is the lack of utilization of a, of a good CRM system, because if you're starting with a good CRM system and you are able to start to report these different tactics that you are implementing these different marketing tactics, then you can go to your board and say, you know, we implemented this gated content piece and we received this many qualified leads and this many qualified leads ended up turning to this many sales. But without having the backbone of a something like a CRM system, I really think you're missing the boat on on all things marketing.
Ed Heil [00:17:07] Yeah. So that idea of being able to say to whether it's your GM or whether it's, committee chair or something like that, to be able to say, hey, we're actually tracking this, we're implementing this part, we're tracking the results, and then we'll be able to make better decisions about other things. But right now, this is what we're focusing on. And we have real data as opposed to just like chasing down 10 million things, not tracking a darn thing and going, I don't know what I'm doing. You know, it's because even if you do kind of know what you're doing without good data, it's hard to it's hard to go to anyone with any real explanation.
Melissa Hansen [00:17:45] Exactly. I mean, I think at the end of the day, those are what the boards and committees are looking for. They want the data. You know, if you're going to be spending 5 to $10,000 on some sort of campaign or implementing something new or a new website or or whatever it is, we need the numbers to be able to justify that and to back that up.
Ed Heil [00:18:05] Let's go down the, the road where you started with HubSpot. And yes, you know, in full disclosure, we are HubSpot partners, and I know you're a, user as well, but I think you from a bigger, more broad perspective of technology and we, you know, talking about chatbot, it's the same thing. And, and as we discuss membership directors, more and more are is being asked of them in their roles. And I know that a membership director I spoke with recently, I just said, if you leverage more technology, it will help you be more efficient in your job. And yet that seems to be you know what always blows me away, Melissa, is that there are so many board members who are successful business people probably use these tools, but they don't look at their club and say, how do we become more efficient that way? But I mean, that's a huge part of this, isn't it?
Melissa Hansen [00:18:55] Definitely. I mean, I definitely have to say that I think the clubs are a little bit behind the times when it comes to implementing. I mean, don't you agree when it comes to. Totally. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I just think it's, essential. I, I'm a HubSpot user. I spend my day in HubSpot. I think, you know, one of the things I love most is that, you know, all of the clubs were on board now with getting these, online inquiries. And. Right, so our online inquiries are what we live for. Those are prospective members. That's how everything gets started. But so oftentimes we go through a process of, you know, providing them with the information, potentially getting them in for a tour. And then there's not really, too much follow up after that. And again, as a department of one or even two and just having your hand in so many different things, you need to be able to rely on tools like that to assist you. And, you know, these different touch points that that our prospective members need.
Ed Heil [00:19:59] How important do you think it is that membership directors today are, you know, have a big part of them that's kind of like a salesperson. I mean, they've always been kind of like salesperson, right? But like to be able to use some of these tools is also. You know.
Melissa Hansen [00:20:15] Yeah. I mean it's huge. I at the end of the day. I always say we are the storytellers. We are the cheerleaders. And and that that's what turns into our sales. And if we, we can bring our prospective members to the club when it is, you know, the most vibrant and the most happening, and we can show them, you know, what they're missing out on. If they don't join that, at the end of the day, it is what's really going to create that sale.
Ed Heil [00:20:41] How have you seen? Just in your, there are a lot of a lot of people out there that, you know, different people who have campaigns for membership drives and things like that. How have you been able to see this convergence of, like, member referrals and technology and social media and digital like, have you been able to see them come together? And I'll just give you a little bit more texture around it, which is the, use of social media, you know, and, do you I mean, do they all do they interact differently, today than they used to? Me. Member referrals have always been a great source for new member prospects. But how do you see all those things aiding that? You know how that works today. You know what I mean?
Melissa Hansen [00:21:28] Yeah, definitely. You know, social media is one of my, my favorite things to talk about. And there's just so many clubs that have jumped on board with it and they get it. And I think that now that user generated content. So you've got your members, they are at the club, they are enjoying the club with their family, their friends, and they start to post their pictures and tag the club. And now the club can share that. Now it's not so much becoming, you know, the club selling to somebody. We're just simply sharing the amazing time that our members are having at the club. And we have just seen that that sharing of that, you know, that user generated content really, really, really thrive, as far as, member referrals go, I actually got a DM from a prospective member on Instagram the other day, and, I had posted something about the reciprocals that, that we enjoy, that we enjoy in Southwest Florida in the summertime, and that the reciprocal access was really what got that prospective member, you know, off being on the edge. And she said, oh, what do you mean? The, you know, reciprocals that, that you guys have. And and she's like, I'm a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Jones and I have been following the club for so long now. We've really been thinking that we want to join. But I didn't know about this program. And she's like, can you tell me about this? And I did. We signed her up.
Ed Heil [00:22:58] How do you feel about the clubs that want to lock down the social media and have for members only?
Melissa Hansen [00:23:05] I'm not. I'm not a fan of that. Yeah, I get that. [00:23:10]That's honestly the number one question that I, that I get and I get the exclusivity, I get being private again. Our club, we are a waitlisted club. You know, I understand all of that, but I think that everyone wants a bit of a peek inside. Everyone you know, needs to create that. That fear of missing out. And it you don't have to be posting every day. As long as you come up with some sort of schedule and you are consistent with that schedule, people want a little bit of a peek inside. I think. [32.2s]
Ed Heil [00:23:43] You know, it's funny because, I did, you know, look at your website. There's a little bit of, you know, you talk a little bit about FOMO, fear of missing out for a lot of people. You just kind of like a joke. Oh, you have bad FOMO. So, yeah, I do, but it is such an important part of, you know, of referrals and things like that. Is it? How is it different today? It seems like FOMO in general for people you know, is so much more intense today, you know, than when it was before social media. You know, it's like you might hear someone on a trip, but now it's like you see them on the trip where they went, where they go to eat, how much fun they're having.
Melissa Hansen [00:24:25] I'm booking my kids there.
Ed Heil [00:24:27] Yeah, exactly. How real is that, do you think in, you know, as a membership director and really trying to create that, especially if you're not on a waitlist, if you are trying to create, you know, maybe a different narrative about your club? I'm guessing you probably all about that.
Melissa Hansen [00:24:43] Yeah, [00:24:44]I'm definitely all about FOMO is real. I mean, it is a real thing. It's a bit scary. I think the way that it's taken off so much, you know, with social media over the past couple of years. But, you know, if, if when you see your friends and your family having fun, it's something with inside our souls that we want to be part of that too. And we see it a lot, you know, especially with the clubs that that are family clubs. [29.7s] And, you know, you've got the families that are posting the, fathered out their dances or the Taylor Swift event, which has been so popular around the country. And, you know, if you're not part of that, then you feel like your, your children aren't getting the experience that you want them to have.
Ed Heil [00:25:33] Yeah, for sure. And that and that's important to parents, right. What are you, in the conversations that you have with your students and people you're networking with, what are the biggest challenges membership directors are facing today? Do you think.
Melissa Hansen [00:25:49] It's a great question? [00:25:51]So I would say the biggest challenge is definitely, the challenge of onboarding their new members. That's become a really hot topic, over the past couple of years, because what we saw in the membership directors role is that everybody was doing such a great job, you know, replying to prospective members, getting them in for the tour and then making that sale. But then we were really missing the mark on integrating that member into the club 100%. And we just really realized that, you know, proper programming needs to be in place, proper communication and, you know, continuing to have, you know, funnels of communication that are set up, you know, at least for the first 90 days to six months. [43.5s] But getting that member integrated in the club, it's a challenge, especially if you are a department of one. You know, I think a lot of times the membership director might be the cheerleader, but the whole entire team in the club might not all be on board as much as they are. So I think, you know, integrating that new member for, for retention, you know, purposes is a challenge.
Ed Heil [00:26:58] I mean, that's a big cost, right? Without it, it's, you know, it could make retention. You could maybe not necessarily more difficult, but there's there's a gap now in their, in their experience. Is that right?
Melissa Hansen [00:27:11] Definitely. I mean, you know, we have to be able to justify those dues that we're spending every year.
Ed Heil [00:27:18] Yeah, absolutely. Just, I'd love to get your thoughts on, what you see as being some of the most important skills that a membership director has today, knowing that, like, hey, you might be listening to this podcast, and if you're a GM, maybe your membership director is like, I shouldn't say this like, but hasn't had the experience that we're talking about, but you believe in them and you want to develop them. Or maybe you're a membership director listening to this and gosh, I've never I don't, you know, they're Google and CRM to see what that stands for. What do you what are the most important skills do you think that a membership director should have in this job to be successful?
Melissa Hansen [00:28:00] Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, the ability to adapt and grow is the number one most important thing when it comes to this role. And if you don't know what a CRM system you are googling it, that is 100% okay. It's okay, you know, to start somewhere. And I think, being being an innovator, you know, being willing to learn and there's different ways that we can learn. I feel like, you know, there's so many online tools now. There's conferences, but we can simply learn from, you know, reaching out to our colleagues and just going to lunch with them and seeing what they're doing at their club. And I think that, you know, you and I were together recently, at the conference at Bonita Bay and I think, you know, just going there and seeing how they do things. I brought so many ideas back to my club. But I have to continue to be in that innovative mindset and be the cheerleader that wants to do that when everybody's ready to, you know, leave for vacation and in the off season. So I would say, you know, definitely those are skills that, that you need to portray in the role.
Ed Heil [00:29:09] Yeah. So much about that adaptability, right. I mean, if you don't have a willingness to learn and to grow and like, I think what you're seeing as well with the CRM stuff, it's like and being okay, saying, I don't know that today, but I'm going to learn it. That's, you know, that's such a huge part of it because a lot of those people are still learning, you know, and, and and that's totally fine.
Melissa Hansen [00:29:31] I'm still learning.
Ed Heil [00:29:33] We all are. Right? I mean, hey, one of our core values is driven to mastery. And it's that idea that you're always learning and just, you know, always feel like it's okay if you don't know it. As long as you have that drive to learn and drive to master it, then that's a good thing. How if for a word, if you just think about, you know, club leaders in general, what would you ask of them to to keep in mind as it relates to, you know, development of their people and, you know, because, hey, education costs money. Networking, where so many people in your world learn it just from talking to other membership directors. What would your message be to club leaders who are a little bit reticent to maybe invest in some of the whether it's technology or training for people, why is it so important, do you think?
Melissa Hansen [00:30:27] I think investing in your people, first and foremost, is the most important thing. Before you're doing the technology or any of that, invest in your people and and give them the opportunity to learn and grow from the people that are doing it right. You know, again, just such an advocate of continuing education and going to these conferences, like you mentioned, PCMA, CMAA, you know, I'm attending the inbound conference by HubSpot, which I, I learned so much from, but giving them that opportunity to get out side of the club, you know, expand their mindset. And then, most importantly, take these ideas, ask the membership professional to come back to your staff meeting. And, you know, we expect you to present to us five things that you think that we should implement at the club. And let's all talk to that, you know, talk about them as a whole and as a team. That I just think is is key. That's, that's the most important thing. And then just being in that spot where you have management and you have your board supporting your growth as an employee, that is just everything.
Ed Heil [00:31:40] Yeah. And if the club doesn't get behind it, invest in yourself, right. Invest in your own career and development as a professional.
Melissa Hansen [00:31:47] Definitely.
Ed Heil [00:31:48] Yeah. Melissa, this is great. How can people learn more about you and your work as a consultant?
Melissa Hansen [00:31:54] Yeah, they can certainly go to my website, which is just Melissahansen.com. I'm really loud on LinkedIn. Melissa Hanson and, also, anybody can feel free to email me, [email protected].
Ed Heil [00:32:11] Awesome. Melissa, thanks so much for spending time with me today and sharing your perspective. And I know it's so valuable for. For the people that you already work with, and hopefully there's some people out there that will, that will reach out as well. And, and, and look to you for more advice.
Melissa Hansen [00:32:26] I appreciate you and thank you for the time.
Ed Heil [00:32:29] All right, Melissa, we'll see you soon.
Melissa Hansen [00:32:31] All right. Sounds good.
Ed Heil [00:32:36] And thank you for listening. If you find this podcast helpful. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep crushing your club marketing.
The words Selling and Private Club Membership typically do not go hand-in-hand. In fact, most Membership Directors, wouldn’t be caught dead saying they “sell private club memberships”. People sell timeshare properties and vacation packages, but not private club memberships. Or do they?
Sales trainer and consultant and founder of Master Connection Associates, Cindy Novotny, is with me in this episode to talk about SALES processes that every club should implement to create long term success.
Episode Highlights
Ed Heil [00:00:00] You are listening to Crushing Club Marketing, a podcast for progressive club leaders ready to increase their club's revenue. Time for change begins right now.
Ed Heil [00:00:13] The word selling, and private club membership typically don't go hand in hand. In fact, most membership directors wouldn't be caught dead saying they sell private club memberships. People sell timeshare properties and vacation packages, but not private club memberships. Or do they? Sales trainer and consultant and founder of Master Connection Associates, Cindy Novotny is with me in this episode to talk about sales processes that every club should implement to create long term success.
Ed Heil [00:00:47] Thanks for joining me today. As I mentioned in the intro, you usually will not hear membership professionals in the private club industry talk about quote unquote selling memberships. It sounds tacky. It lowers perceived value, and the stature of the club is overall cheapened when you use words like that. Typically when you're talking about new member acquisition. But there's a difference between saying you sell club memberships and having proven sales processes in place to drive new member inquiries. So with 50% of the clubs in the country enjoying a new member waitlist. Why does this matter? You might ask yourself, well, we know it won't last forever, right? And with most clubs financially stable today, now is the time to invest. And we know that most would agree with this, especially the healthy clubs, because they're making considerable capital improvements to increase the value of the club and make it, and to invest more in their club. So clubs have all been through the ups and downs of the economy with rising and falling membership initiation fees. And you know that that's not good for your brand. But by building strong processes, investing in technology to improve efficiency and reporting, and even redefining the role of the membership team and membership director, your club can be better equipped to weather the storm that you know is coming.
Ed Heil [00:02:17] So Cindy Novotny joins me in this episode as we dive into some of the issues clubs have and some recommendations she has for club leaders. Now, she is bold, she's direct, and she looks at the industry extremely realistically from a business and sales perspective, which in this day and age, it's changed so much through the years with technology and how people shop and how people buy. So we caught up earlier this year, and I was able to pin her down for a half hour while she is traveling the globe, and we had this conversation. Cindy, thanks so much for joining us today.
Cindy Novotny [00:02:51] Absolutely. I am thrilled to be with you. This is fantastic.
Ed Heil [00:02:55] Well my gosh. All right. So if you're listening to this you don't know how long. I mean it's been years. I think it was actually pre-pandemic when we were you know, I was, you know, talking to you and then to lefty and then we ran into each other at PCMA in Savannah. Yes, I think a year and a half ago or something like that. So, man, I'm just glad to catch up with you finally.
Cindy Novotny [00:03:16] Absolutely. I mean, I just I think everything you're doing is so great. And, the fact that I am such a road warrior living on the road, jumping from place to place, I'm so glad we have this opportunity.
Ed Heil [00:03:28] The road warriors and understatement. I think you would probably agree for the way. The way it's been going for you. So. Well, let's jump into it. You know, for for the listener who maybe hasn't had the opportunity to be part of your training or heard you speak, let's help help people understand the connection between, you know, the hospitality industry. And if you think about that from the perspective of like hotels, resorts and things like that, private clubs are also very much part of the hospitality industry. But how do you see those, the two worlds, maybe if you think about hotels, resorts and that sort of part of hospitality connecting from a sales and marketing perspective or otherwise with private clubs?
Cindy Novotny [00:04:08] Well, it's huge. And I, I grew up in an industry that was I worked for private dining clubs, in Chicago, in New York and at a very young age learning, oh, wow, this is kind of cool. And people pay a membership to just come and have dinner. And then I recognize that it's really all about the experience, and it's all about what somebody wants to feel like. Then, as I continued in the hospitality industry, crossing over into hotels and resorts and now private engagement and jets, we do a lot of work, as you know, in private clubs on sales, training and sometimes sales is like, oh, well, we don't have to sell because we're a private club and you know everybody. We've got a list of people waiting to get in. And I always back up and say, yeah, you have a list of people waiting to get in right now. But there was a time when you were fighting to get members because we compete with so many other experiences. It's not just like we're competing private club to private club, we're competing private club membership to a second home or a yacht or something like that.
Ed Heil [00:05:13] Let's talk about that. And, because I'm, I'm interested first in your take on that change, that shift in, in what you're seeing out there from the recognition of your clients as it relates to, hey, we you know, we can't just wait for people to walk in the door. We actually have to have more of a process. Are you seeing just how much greater awareness are you seeing around that? Or is it is it been slow, is have been fast, especially with the pandemic being so good for so many clubs?
Cindy Novotny [00:05:42] Yeah. I mean, as I say, I can't even say the word C-O-V-I-D. Right? I cannot. But the one thing there was two things that happened. One is zooms and calls and teams. That's now status normal. When you talk to clients, getting them on a call face to face. Okay. That's because of the pandemic. The second is golf. Even golf clubs because we work with lots of golf clubs. Prior to the pandemic, the younger generation, it was dipping down. They weren't. It's like it's I don't want to go to my dad's club and I don't want to get married at my grandpa's club. And there was a lot of that kind of slowdown. And what I saw happen is that even I belong to a private club in Codo de Caza in California, and then also in Cedar Rapids, a private club. But I saw all of a sudden, like, outdoors. Oh my gosh, I don't want to be like, I don't want to be held back. I can't do things where private clubs were giving people the ability to get out on the golf courses, the fresh air, play tennis, pickleball, all these things. And because the private dining there was sometimes less. It was it like jams of people. So now that has taken the trajectory right up. I mean, that that's why so many people are seeing waiting list to get into those clubs, right?
Ed Heil [00:07:02] You know, in many ways, because of this lack of maybe pressure, it seems like this is the time for private clubs. If they're thinking they they need to get their membership directors trained and sales that this is the time to do that.
Cindy Novotny [00:07:20] Oh right. And and by the way, if you can sell, you'll always have a job. Let me just say that. All right. Transactional order taking will be replaced is being replaced by AI. So if you're just sitting back and managing your membership, what are you doing? I mean, there's a there's a new member behind every member. There's a new event, a new party, a corporate event. There's so much for that incremental revenue into a club where they can have their company sponsor dinners. And so you have to work your existing membership to be able to get that. But more importantly is there's a lot of competition now. There are private hotels, membership only. There are so many more private city clubs, so many more private bars and fun, cool places that unless you're a member, you can't even get in. You've got to know somebody who knows somebody. And because of that, that is starting to dilute some of the traditional clubs where people go, you know what? I'm not going to join. I'm not going to be a member of this club anymore because I actually don't live in the city anymore. I moved out to the suburbs. So I'm, I'm, I'm going to get rid of being a part of this athletic club or this dining club, and I'm going to move out to the suburbs. Secondly, I'm going to rid of my golf membership because do we really need that is a lot of money. I mean, you know, we have to force ourselves to make sure we every quarter get our dining, you know, minimum. Right. And so what happens is a lot of people have that same thought. So if you're not working it to keep that pipeline full, the people just like me now, we haven't canceled our club. But I could say, you know what, I don't even. Why do I even bother? So that's why you have to keep your grit, your nose to the grindstone, a new one, a new one, a new one all the time. Even those that have waiting lists.
Ed Heil [00:09:12] Yeah. Interesting. You know. Yeah. There's so many things in there. Let's let's talk about the, part one. Part of it is just the competition. And you talked about this before, and I've heard other people in other podcasts, interviews that people I've talked to that have said, if you're thinking of your competition as the club down the street, you're missing it. And then, you know, three different people have said, look at what the hospitality industry is doing. If you want to see how to really enhance your presence online, if you really want to see how to, sell experiences, look at what resorts are doing and how they positioned themselves. How do you feel about that?
Cindy Novotny [00:09:51] Oh, it's all about that. And most of the clubs that I even work in their social media presence is sad. Sad, I mean, and I think to myself, well, they and they say things like, well we can't really show a members event. I go, you're not showing the member and you're not giving the member's name, but you can show the setup because it's like what we've done. But a backing up to that. You know, I look at hospitality as an experience, hence why 40% of our business is outside of the hotel, club, private dining industry, automotive, you know, medical. And you think, well, how does hospitality relate? Because everyone in business today wants an experience. Okay. Even if you're going to a hospital, you know, it's not the clinical side that we're not messing with. But you don't want to go and feel you're already nervous. You want your your. Registration to get into the hospital. Be nice. You want the billing. So if you think about clubs, private clubs. All right. It's like if you really want to go to a tennis match or a football game because you're so in to the game, to the techniques and to what, you'll watch it from your massive screen at home. Okay, that's it. But if you love the experience of going to a football or a hockey game or a tennis match, you don't want to watch it from your sofa. You want to be in those stands and eating that Dodger Dog and having fun and doing what you do. And that's like a club. If I want to go to a fine dining restaurant, there is 1,000,000 and 1 Michelin star over the top. Cool chefs. I can go anywhere and edit everybody open to the public. We all can go.
Ed Heil [00:11:39] Yeah.
Cindy Novotny [00:11:39] But if you want an experience where they actually know you and they call you by name, and they you bring guests and they, they make your guests feel very special. And there's always that certain thing that's not in the menu, but they make for you. And there's that certain cocktail that they know you like and they make it for you. That is an experience. Okay. Same thing with golf. So, you know, my husband's a big golfer, but he golfs at a public course that is small, but they make you feel like a member because there's very few people and it's gorgeous overlooking Lake Michigan. And he actually at time says, you know, I actually like it here better than even some of the private clubs I'm at. Right. Because so if it's just the game, I can get it anywhere. But the club makes it an experience and you have to be trained to know how to do that. And your social media presence, your online presence has to portray that.
Ed Heil [00:12:37] Awesome. So I mean, what I'm hearing you say, well, let me ask. Yes, that's a shift, right? Because there's still a lot of private clubs that believe they're selling the exclusivity. Like you get you get to be a member of this exclusive group. But I mean, what I'm hearing you say is really in many ways, that's not enough anymore. It's not enough to just say we're exclusive. You can't get in now.
Cindy Novotny [00:13:03] And by the way. That's okay. But not everyone enjoys that tag line. I love exclusivity all the time too. I like, you know, I'm in. You know, I travel all the time. So you know, obviously United Club is for anybody that wants to pay their money. But because I'm global service and I'm global service for life, I've flown 10 million miles. Even when those clubs, as you know, when you travel, if they're too busy, they start stopping people, people that have paid for a membership but not me. I show my ticket, it says Global Service. I'm let right in. Yeah, I board the plane first. I love the exclusivity of that feel, but. I can also fly another airline and get to the same destination, right? The word exclusivity has got to be in combination with experience, and some of the big, big country club groups have lost their edge. They've got they've taken a private, kind of more intimate experience with all the big social memberships, which I'm all about builds your business. But what they do is they fail to forget, oh, you're actually a golf member. You actually pay five times more than what this social member pays, right? Used to be that there's private like at our club. And I have no problem saying this out loud because it's my club. You know, we're golf members, all right? We pay way more money, and we paid way more investment to get into that separate golf bathrooms for us. When we're dining, we go only club members only now. They could care less. Everybody's in there. Doesn't matter. That takes exclusivity and destroys the experience.
Ed Heil [00:14:50] Yeah. Interesting. That's a really interesting take on that that that differentiation there. What are the most common things that you see, maybe the most common issues that you're seeing in your work and your consulting membership teams struggle with today? You know, especially as it relates to some of this stuff, you know?
Cindy Novotny [00:15:08] Right. First of all, lack of training. They they promote somebody who is young working there. And I love youth, believe me. But, you know, we have to be trained and be developed. So they they just say, oh, well, you were really good. You worked your summers while you were at school and now, you know, you were like a restaurant manager. Would you like to be a membership director? Would you like to. And then bingo. Put them in it. Then they have no idea. They don't know how to reach out, how to talk to an existing member. They're Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 hours. So I'm not even kidding. Some of them. I mean, it's hilarious. Okay. And I'll say to him, you know, if there's a big event going on, a membership event for members, you need to be there and talk to the members and who else they know and and ask about what kind of events they like, because it's not just about the new, getting new members. It's about enhancing what the current members really like. Sometimes we're putting on things for our members that no one cares about. They're like, I don't even like, why? Why are you doing that? And yet some of the things have to be continued to be changed because the age difference, the youth, the people that don't want that, they don't want that, you know, Thursday night card game, they might want a game night for all families of all ages and things. So I think the biggest thing I see is lack of knowledge of the industry, lack of training, lack of how to actually use online presence, social media to find business. Right. How to follow up. We do a lot of mystery shops, of private clubs where we call inquiring about membership and it's like hilarious. Okay, we'll send you out a packet. And by the way, there's 50 people. There's 50 people on the waiting list. All right. So we'll just email and no asking questions. What would we be interested in. That's what I see is one of the the biggest problems.
Ed Heil [00:16:59] Yeah. So the training thing is seems like a big thing because, you know, I mean, I think of this from the terms of it's hard to find good people in a lot of industries in the club industry and hospitality I know has struggled with that as well. So let's just say you do have these people who are eager enough, but they really have no training at all, is there? And this is probably a softball for you, but I am kind of interested because it can be a deterrent for a decision maker general manager. But, to invest in, you know, cash. What's it going to cost me to train this person? Right. So where do you start? Where do you start? With someone who just doesn't, you know, an employee who's like, yeah, I'll try that. I think I could do that. Like, how do you start training?
Cindy Novotny [00:17:44] So my answer to that is simple. I say to every GM, even the equity, clubs. And you know, when I deal with boards, I'll say, you know, if you say, why should I invest? What if they leave, I go, what happens when you don't invest in training and they stay? And that is the number one biggest issue. And sometimes the turnover could be like they come in, they want to make a name for themselves. Well, remember a majority of those clubs are not looking for profit. So some of them are trying to deliver excellence. Now I happen to work with some clubs like that are phenomenal like El Niguel in Southern California. Unbelievable. They're, you know, head of membership in their general manager and what they do monthly learnings with every single employee training reading books like Unreasonable Hospitality book clubs. I speak probably like once a quarter with them. They are so invested in training and the the actual members members talk about it all the time. I cannot believe how well versed the staff is, and some of them have been there for ten, 15, 20 years. And you and I both know I love to have people stick around if they get continue training. I don't want you sticking around because it's just an easy gig, right? And that's the difference.
Ed Heil [00:19:09] Yeah. It's like the the old line is the only thing worse than an employee, who quits as an employee, who quits and stays home. Right? Yeah, it is a it's a hard thing though, you know, I mean, in you're you're seeing more of a shift probably every day than, you know, some of the people that I speak with. But, you know, in our work, we're trying to help people understand the value of marketing, the value of doing things in a different way from an online presence and things like that. Sales and marketing are just words that, you know, historically haven't been really embraced. By private club. So, I mean, are you seeing that change?
Cindy Novotny [00:19:46] You know, I'm seeing that change. Oh, hugely. I mean, first of all, I am a sales trainer, sales service and leadership. So even law firms that I work with, even hospitals. But before it, like up until like ten, 15 years ago, I'd be like, well, the law firms we don't sell. Why would we don't sell? Well, yeah you do, because new business development. How do you build your book of business? How do you go from being a young associate to being a managing partner? You have to know how to sell. You don't think sales is a bad word? Private clubs that have that arrogance, that think, oh, well, we're just so good. Everyone wants to join until they start losing members and when they lose members or they lose the spending. Okay. Because it's not just their quarterly spending that they have to do. Depending on the kind of membership you have when you start losing every event, every banquet, every wedding. All of this to all the other unbelievable venues. You are hurting the club. We have to invest the money back to keep the club going. How do you do that if you don't have any new business coming in? We have to make sure we're upgrading the golf courses. We're bringing in better staff. We're hiring a better golf pro. How do you do that? If you don't have that new money coming in to reinvest in the club? So whether you're looking for profit or no profit doesn't really matter. You need new business coming in. So marketing and sales to me have always been two separate things. I believe that marketing has to create the story, has to put that out and make sure the story resonates. Sales has to tell the story. So salespeople have to take what marketing puts out. Marketing, you know, does all of their online presence, all of their work, all of their messaging. Then the salespeople, the membership director has to sell that story. So instead of storytelling, I call it story selling.
Ed Heil [00:21:45] There you go. I like that. Although, the name of our company would contradict that a little bit, but I guess I would say the. Well, let's talk about that because, you know, selling, if you are a general manager of a certain age or a certain vintage, or anyone in the club industry of a certain vintage, you think of selling in a certain way. How has selling changed? You talk about story selling. What does that mean, though? I mean, people aren't cold calling, you know, people are, you know, direct mail is, you know, is more difficult. What do you like? What do you see?
Cindy Novotny [00:22:21] Well, first of all, I believe and our statistics that we use, I'll find all this stuff as you do. I believe that about 60, over 65% of most decisions in any business are made based on a referral. I would never suggest a cold call as long as I live. I do believe that if you're working your existing members, there's a customer behind every guest, customer behind every member, a customer at every wedding. There's new members, but at every event it's there is so much business, but we aren't working our own members and there's a finesse to that. You're not like my club. I got just I got disgusted with how they did it. Like table in that lobby. When you walk in with all this wedding paraphernalia, I said, guys, and I don't even train for them. I said, as a member, I'm a golf paying member. I said, this looks so tacky. It looks like I'm walking into, you know, four star, three star hotel. You shouldn't even. Where's your membership? Where's your person that handles special events? Why aren't you working? Why are they walking around? You know, turnover in turnover and restaurant managers. At the end of the day, the vintage GM can't wear that. It worked for that. I think the vintage GM has had a wakeup call. And the wake up call has come from the board of directors, from the corporate groups that own those, the Club Corps of the world, right? Even some of the Sterlings, the smaller ones that have less of we need more profit. We need more of this because we're building, we're investing. So when you look at the profitability of some of these clubs, they are being looked at. So a vintage just walk around and have a cocktail with the members, which I'm all about a general manager being all about that, hanging out, chatting, but not investing with that membership director to make sure they know how to go out and work the local community. Volunteer, be involved. That is exactly where they're starting to wake up, because they recognize there's no other way to do it. It's all based on referrals.
Ed Heil [00:24:26] In the in the clubs that you have worked with and that you continue to work with. How many of the successful like really vibrant, healthy clubs have a general manager who has more of a business background or is business minded as opposed to just straight F&B? And I ask you that because so many general managers come up from that food and beverage side and they their, their business savvy might not really be there. What do you?
Cindy Novotny [00:24:58] All of the successful clubs we're working with, they're all business savvy and they've come up through golf. They've come up to hotels. Lots of them come from hotels. They've come up through food and beverage, but not as much as they used to. Now it is all about, you know, the tournament business. It's all about, you know, that that the hospitality, hotel business, regional kind of executive directors, things like that. And every club we're working with that's successful has a GM that gets it. Hence why they're working with us.
Ed Heil [00:25:30] Right. Yeah. Do you feel like the pandemic in the success I mean was it was very good for clubs. Oh yeah. Good clubs is very good. Did it give people a false sense of security or. Right or, you know, club leaders, a false sense of security, do you think?
Cindy Novotny [00:25:45] Oh, for sure. And and not just a false sense of security. They got a little bit cocky like, oh, everybody now wants to golf. The year before that, we're running around teaching people how to get to the young people to get them excited about golfing. And I am not exaggerating. It was like the Tiger Woods movement back then, right? Got got the younger generation golfing. Okay. All right. That's done and done. So now you swing up and all of a sudden the younger generations like, I don't want to do that. It's not fast enough. I'm an adrenaline. I'm an adrenaline rush, you know, junkie. I like to go parasailing. And this. And I don't want to waste money on golfing. It takes too long. Boring. The pandemic only allowed people to really like it. Because you could be outside and with your friends, right. And that was, you know, after like, March, April, even our club, because it wasn't our club, but it was the neighbors that live. Some of the neighbors that lived around the golf courses were like calling. They should be out here. I mean, obviously, oh my God, I'm not going to catch Covid on the golf course. But the idea was the club didn't want to stop that. But that was only like two months and then you couldn't get a tee time and the membership and everybody saw that because the younger people and when I say younger, I'm talking 20's, 30's. Right. Sure. They couldn't get on a plane and fly to, you know, Australia and go to where they wanted to go to do the stuff they wanted to do. So they said, all right, we're going to let's enjoy the club. And then that's why, I mean, the rise of pickleball courts, okay. It used to be just for the vintage seniors. Then all of a sudden, you see, you use that. Yeah. Tennis tennis courts are coming down and like, oh, now we only have three tennis courts and four pickleball courts. And that was some of the younger. And so it did. But it to me it's really important that what goes up goes down. It is a mentality that all of a sudden now the revenge spending is back. Luxury travel is back, luxury goods are back. People are, you know, it's really all about spending money. We call it the revenge spending. And so you have to look and say you're membership. You don't you're not tied into a lifetime membership. So I can quit anytime I want. And that money goes away that day. So that's the sort of thing you can never rest on. Well, we're just very popular.
Ed Heil [00:28:09] Right? Yeah. It won't last. Just a couple of tactical questions. What I see so often are membership directors that will have people inquiring, especially, you know, up north where we are. This is the time of year people start inquiring about memberships of clubs and there is no follow up. There is someone who fills out a form and it sits there and a lot of membership directors. It almost seems like they have this mentality like, well, if they're interested, they'll call again.
Cindy Novotny [00:28:40] Oh, yes.
Ed Heil [00:28:42] What's the deal with that?
Cindy Novotny [00:28:43] Because they've not been trained. Okay. So we know that they go online, they fill things out. And again I mystery shop all these. I shop them online on their websites. It takes three, 4 or 5 days. No response. I call, they're out of the office. I'm too busy. Busy with what? Busy with what? You're not the golf pro. You're not the food and beverage director. What do you busy with? Okay, so the idea is they've got to be able to have a process in place to be able to catch those leads and follow up with them. And this is part of a daily job of a sales person that understands that. And then second, that they if I hear what they hear it a hundred times, what our GM doesn't want us to look like, we're hungry. Our GM doesn't want to follow up. Get over that too. Because when your GM leaves and you get some hotdog GM in there, there's going to ask you how many new members you brought in. You're going to be dead out of the water. Done. Over. So the follow up is that they just, I think, are lazy. They don't. It's like they sit around doing who knows what. And that is one of the biggest issues today with which lots of hospitality industry companies. But in private clubs, it's it takes days for people to get back to you. And then if you check on a weekend, oh my god. And private clubs weekends are the hot ticket. And you ask someone like you the front desk. No one's ever sitting at any front desk any more to club, no matter how big it is. You go down to the restaurant and say to those I really like, I'm with my friends who belong to this club. I would really like to talk about joining and, okay, we'll give the name. Never Hear back. Now I'm going to give Elm credit again in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. All right. Unbelievable. Their membership director. All over it. I called and said, you know, I wanted a club where my husband could golf when we're there and that sort of thing. Janice. Okay, I'm going to give her name. I mean, Janice, so unbelievable. All right. She responded within an hour of the message. I left her because we're out of state. She gave me all the options and our farm is just over. You know, the membership of. You're a little bit farther. She worked it all out, got us all set up, invited us to dinner for our first dinner. And on them, my daughter. We. We've gone so many times. My daughter now is living at our farm and running that and works for us in the business. So we're have her and she doesn't want to go there all the time, but she can go now and dine or take her friend. Janice follows up with me. And by the way, I don't live there, by the way I'm there. Maybe, I don't know, 4 or 5 times a year. I see you on social media. She'll send me a text. She it. She makes me want to go there when I every time I come into town. That is somebody who understands what we call a luxury retail clientele.
Ed Heil [00:31:41] Yeah.
Cindy Novotny [00:31:42] That's that's it. And she gets.
Ed Heil [00:31:44] I get I give you vintage. But now you've given me to client telling and revenge spending. Yes, I appreciate that. Thank you. The, this is something you're pretty passionate about. So, you know, from your perspective, what is the right process like when you think about that follow up that, you know, someone has inquired about membership, they filled out a form membership director, goes, oh, I got an email from someone, or, you know, the form someone submitted a form. What should that follow up look like? And how many times should a membership director follow up? I mean, what have you learned as far as the most you just best practices? Okay.
Cindy Novotny [00:32:24] So I used to say it takes 6 to 7 times to touch a prospect before they ever become a customer. Jessica from our team, she last year tracked it. Okay. So from we get a ton of inquiries too. And I'll I'll just walk through my inquiry process. Sure. Which which I teach to all the clubs in the members. All right. The idea is she now tracked it and it's literally now 12 to 14 times. That could be over a year.
Ed Heil [00:32:49] Wow.
Cindy Novotny [00:32:50] For her to close a deal. Okay. So we know it takes time. You keep going until someone says, don't ever call me again. I'm not interested. I only was checking it out. Never want to hear for you, but that never happens. Okay.
Ed Heil [00:33:04] Is that phone call and email or emails and phone?
Cindy Novotny [00:33:07] We're all about phone calls. First follow up with email, so I'll kind of walk through it. Got it. So as an example, when you get an inquiry, whoever catches that, which should be the membership director, because very few of them have coordinators and all of that. But you get the inquiry. So and our company [email protected] comes to me. I'm a little busy. Just so you know, I get them off and I literally look at my phone to I'm constantly looking at my phone because when I'm speaking or training, I might be talking for an hour that another trainer gets up or I walk off stage, I check, so it's no longer than two hours max that I don't respond. And the inquiries come in. And this is what we teach everyone to do, I respond. Thank you so much for reaching out to Master Connection Associates, or thank you for reaching out to the Coto de Caza Country Club at Golf and Racqet Club. I am thrilled you thought of us. I and for me, I have copied Shelly Marlow, Jessica Baker, Carla. I assign it right then. I have copy to follow up with you. Now, if I'm the membership director. I am thrilled you thought of us. The secret sauce right now is what is a good time today or tomorrow for you and I to connect.
Ed Heil [00:34:21] Interesting. Yeah.
Cindy Novotny [00:34:22] And that's what we do. 100% of the time. Ed. Not 99. Not 89. 100% of the time we get an email back. Thanks so much for your prompt response. I every day I can count them. So appreciate it. I'm not going to be in the office or I don't have time to talk this week. Could we set up a call for Monday? Now for me, my account manager takes over and runs with that. For that membership director, it's like, absolutely. I will send an outlook invite. No phone tag here. I will send an outlook invite for the two of us to connect on Zoom or teams. That's the other thing you just said yourself. When we get on this, even though this isn't a video podcast, you and I are looking at each other right now. It creates more emotion, more rapport. Today's world allows us to send that. We send a Zoom invite to every client. We never have anyone say, I don't want to be on Zoom call. They all get on and then you can share your screen. You can show them the dining room. You can show them this. You can show them that every single time.
Ed Heil [00:35:30] Wow. I love that. You know, one of the things I read early on in the pandemic was just how, you know, when more and more of this was happening. They said it builds trust. And notice when people don't turn on their camera. It makes you wonder. I know what's going on.
Cindy Novotny [00:35:47] Exactly, exactly.
Ed Heil [00:35:49] Yeah. Hey, I am so appreciative of your time today and for you taking, for you to take a few minutes and share some of your findings and your perspective, with the people who listen to this podcast. Anything you'd want to leave people with? As far as just some thoughts, people who are especially the general managers who are struggling with the shift, and sometimes it's dealing with boards who are of the vintage, you know, you know, board members who are more traditional. Is there anything that you would you would say to those people who are really trying to make a change, they just don't know the best way to go about becoming more of a sales operation.
Cindy Novotny [00:36:29] So I do work with a lot of the boards of some of the private clubs we work with. So I speak at them, I come in, I talk, and I start out, and this is what every general manager should do is what are our objectives, what are our objectives of the board? Just private club. What do we want to do. You hear the same thing. We want to have unbelievable service. We want great food and beverage. We want restaurant quality food and beverage like we get at unbelievable restaurants all over the city, right? We want to have a the staff feel very well taken care of and feel very good because tips many times are brought are all they're all added on anyway, right. We also want to have profits so we can reinvest into the club. Like this. I hear it every time. And then I go, okay, and this is what every GM say. So how are we going to do that. All right. You got to spend money to make money. So the idea is if we want to have better food and beverage, we need a better chef. We might not have a decent chat. If we want better service, we need training. If we want to make money, we need membership directors that know how to sell for events, because some have a membership director and some have a special events manager, depending on the size. But a lot of times the membership director is doing all the special events too. So just depends. You have to be proactive to book the weddings, to book the graduations, to book the corporate events. You have to be proactive. You know who your members are if you're not reaching out to them. And that is called training. And if you don't invest, you're going to get exactly what you've been getting.
Ed Heil [00:37:59] I love it. What a perfect way to end.
Cindy Novotny [00:38:01] Excellent.
Ed Heil [00:38:02] Cindy, thanks so much for your time today.
Cindy Novotny [00:38:04] Thank you.
Ed Heil [00:38:09] Thank you for listening. If you find this podcast helpful. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep crushing your club marketing.
Most successful businesses have a defined sales process. One that identifies the best prospects, converts them into leads and then nurtures those leads with emails into customers. Most private clubs are missing this process. If your club has enjoyed a waitlist, this isn’t a big deal, but what happens when the well runs dry? In this episode we’re talking about lead management with Kevin Page, Managing Director at StoryTeller and lead HubSpot strategist and lead management expert. We'll dive into managing new prospective member leads, increasing efficiency and helping clubs avoid reactive membership recruitment.
Key Moments
Podcast Transcript
Ed Heil: You are listening to Crushing Club Marketing, a podcast for progressive club leaders ready to increase their club's revenue. Time for change begins right now.
Most successful businesses have a defined sales process, one that identifies the best prospects, converts them into leads, and then nurtures those leads with emails into customers. Most private clubs are missing this process. When your club has a waitlist this isn't a big deal, but what happens when the well runs dry? Today we're talking about lead management with Kevin Page, StoryTeller's lead HubSpot strategist and lead management expert.
Hey, Kevin Page in the house. How's it going, Kev?
Kevin Page: [00:00:48] I'm great. How are you, Ed?
Ed Heil: [00:00:49] Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today. And, I know that our audience is, is interested in this topic because, you know, as you know, working with many of our clients and in clubs that, the actual like, how would you say the actual, like, member application and intake process for that is, is not always the same at every club. And, it can differ from club to club, but in general, it's a pretty outdated process. Like in your work in, in the clubs you've worked. What sort of the typical process when someone expresses an interest or goes to a website to learn more about about a club.
Kevin Page: [00:01:36] Yeah. Good question. Often times, you know, these, clubs will have some type of form on the website, whether that be, contact us form, request a tour, download our membership pricing, something along those lines. And that will send a notification to the membership director that membership director, you know, typically is doing one of two things right there, either reaching out and sending, you know, some type of personalized email, to try to nurture that relationship and get to know the person a little bit better, or oftentimes, they're just sending over whatever information that that particular person is asking for. And, you know, crossing their fingers and hoping that an application comes in soon after.
Ed Heil: [00:02:22] Right. And so, I mean, I'm in truth, I think that we see a lot as well is that there isn't a, you know, there there might be some sort of like download, get our membership guide or something like that. But in so many cases, especially the more, gosh, what would you say? Maybe the more conservative clubs are just like, hey, request a tour, get more information or something like that. And while, you know, I think that it's not like it's not that that doesn't work, right. I mean, it's not like there isn't you're not getting that information, but they're missing allowed, missing out quite a bit if all they're doing is responding. Just. What, like a notification? That's what a lot of people get using club software today is they'll get a notification in their inbox, their email saying, hey, Kevin Page, apply to be a member today. Right. So. They're missing out a lot of stuff, aren't they? I mean, as far as what they could glean from that person.
Kevin Page: [00:03:26] Yeah. Well, what what we oftentimes find when we're working with, with new clubs or consulting with new clubs is there's not much else after that initial outreach. So that initial outreach, many of these membership directors and clubs are, you know, really great at and being on the ball with, hey, those notifications come in. I want to strike while the iron is hot and get out to this person and see if you know they're truly qualified and interested in in joining the club. Others maybe want to either appear very exclusive or, you know, and actually are very exclusive and, and want to, kind of handle the, the sales process with that sort of, dynamic as well. So there's just. Yep. Here's the application process. You know, it's a bit colder. So, you know, either of those approaches. What typically happens is that after that initial approach, it's all right. They join or they don't. And if they don't join, there's very rarely a process in place for, you know, the ongoing nurturing of those people. And as we know, you know, joining a club and membership for most folks is a big decision and a decision that takes some time. You know, a lot of people submitting those forms or understanding or trying to reach out and understanding what membership pricing looks like may not be ready to make that decision within the next 14 days. 30 days, you know, even six months. So it is a bit of a process. But it's not always treated as that type of process, if that makes sense.
Ed Heil: [00:05:04] Oh, for sure. And it's, you know, again, that, not to go too far down how old school a lot of processes are, but they have something that's just not necessarily the most efficient process. And I think the one thing I just don't want to lose sight of, if you're listening to this and you happen to be a membership director, you're going, my gosh, are you kidding me? Like, I've got so much stuff I'm responsible for and frankly, with, you know, social media today and with so much digital communications, not to mention a lot of membership directors are responsible for the club newsletter and other things that they're pulled in a lot of different directions, and we get it. So one of the things that we hope that you're able to walk away from today, if you're listening, is, some ideas and ways you can make that process a little bit more efficient. Free up to do some more things and really focus on the the areas where you can really maybe drive the most success and not just for yourself, but for the club as well. So, Kev, let's talk a little bit about, the automation process. Because when you say automation to people in the private club space, it is almost like oil and water. So "oooh, automation doesn't sound like a personal touch," which is very much what historically clubs have wanted to provide that that level of intimacy, especially since they're joining, there, you know, that prospect might be joining their club. And yet automation can feel very, you know, very cold. So let's just talk about what let's start with maybe what does that look like? And when when we talk about automating the process of someone applying or filling out a form on the website so that the membership director doesn't have to handle each one, what does that look like?
Kevin Page: [00:07:00] Yeah. That's a great question. So, you know, I look at it in kind of two different parts. And the first part of it is really trying to optimize, the, the time of, you know, let's, let's say the membership director you just mentioned, the number of hats that they wear, the responsibilities that they have oftentimes to member retention and engagement as well as driving new members. And so through that automation, what what we're attempting to do is make sure that they're focusing their attention on the right people, the most qualified people. And so a lot of times, you know, the initial outreach is pretty similar prospect to prospect that comes in, but once there's a reply that happens, you know, or some type of actual connection, that's when automation might become a little bit more difficult, because now you've had that connection, and you want to move forward with that context. And so oftentimes what we do with automation is that initial introduction or outreach can be an automated process. And we have a software called HubSpot that we use to actually implement and and execute a lot of these automated actions. It appears that it's coming from your inbox. It looks like, you know, this membership director is is emailing me directly. We can add, what HubSpot calls personalization, where you can actually fill in people's first name or some other information that you might have about them. So it really does look like a personal touchpoint. [00:08:39]
Ed Heil: [00:08:41] So let's I'll just say let's dive into that really quickly though, so we can talk about that, that initial engagement. So let's swap out, this automation process to what, you know, for what, membership directors might be doing today. So I am interested in joining the club. I'd go to the membership page and they say, you know, there's a form that says, hey, tell us about yourself. I feel that that, or if you're interested in membership, you know, fill out this form. Right. So I fill it out today, the membership director gets it, you know, and they she replies back to me with you in many cases with membership information, with pricing and everything. And that's done manually. That person actually stops the what does it look like in that automated world? I fill out the form. Then what happens using HubSpot that you mentioned?
Kevin Page: [00:09:36] Yeah. So oftentimes we'll have, you know, some type of or nice design, esthetic marketing email that would go immediately following the form submission. Thanks so much for doing that. We'll have a member of our team reach out. We've just learned over the years that that's just a really important confirmation and touch point to ensure that that information has been received and that we're working on it. What we don't try to do is send a personalized outreach email immediately following a form submission. Right. That looks very automated. We kind of want to create that artificial gap between that form submission and when someone might want to reach out. And clubs are different on that approach.
Ed Heil: [00:10:22] So you can actually set that time right. What you're saying so that it actually feels more natural, not like, hey, I just hit send on my form and next thing you know, in my inbox, I've got a hey, thanks for your interest. So again, what you're saying, I think, is depending on your club and how you feel about that stuff, you could make it, what, 24 hours? You can make it, two hours. You can make it 20 minutes. Is that right?
Kevin Page: [00:10:46] That's right. Yeah. And a lot of that is how maybe exclusive you want to appear or if you, you know, are on a wait list and want to kind of create this sense of, you know, we'll get to it when we can. We're really busy or yeah, we're on top of it. An our after that form submission comes in, there's an automated email going out that looks like it's coming from the membership directors, inbox or email.
Ed Heil: [00:11:12] So, the whole idea of being able to schedule, you know, how much time elapses between when someone submits that form and gets the email is, you know, can create that sense of where a lot of people feel a lot of, you know, membership directors that I speak with at least, are, you know, afraid that it's going to feel too needy. And like you said, you know, it can make it look like, you know, we're not in a big hurry here. We will get back to you on our time. The one thing that I do think is sort of important to think of is that a lot of times when we're filling out those forms, we expect to get that information fairly soon. I mean, that's just one of those things. I think that based on your club and how you handle things, you might want to look at it differently. But one of the other things I know you've you've seen a lot of success with Kevin in your work. Is also when that email goes out that thank you for submitting or for your interest in our club to then also provide whatever PDF for downloadable brochure or if you want to call it that, that you typically send to someone to include it with that email. Is that best practice, do you think?
Kevin Page: [00:12:24] Yes, I do, and it might be easiest to look at that as like a marketing email versus a sales email, if you will. In a marketing email, has that more designed email look might be from membership at your club.com or some type of inbox like that. And it's thanks so much for submitting the form. Here's what you're here's the information you requested. Our team will be in touch shortly. That goes right away following the form submission. And in some cases, depending on how your website might be formatted, when they click that submit form, they could actually be taken to a web page or given that link right there, in that experience as well. But either way, give them that information right away would would be a best practice. But then to have that personalized follow up, come from you soon after, is something that we've found a lot of success in as well. And again, that's, that's really up to you on the cadence. You're probably right now grabbing those form submissions, you know, or a lot of people and copying and pasting some type of message in there anyway. And this automation is just trying to remove that, unnecessary, tedious work from your process.
Ed Heil: [00:14:15] So once someone receives that information, and let's just keep in mind that there are there are a lot of variables, right? I mean, there are a lot of different, ways to set this up. There are a lot of different things you can include and include. So what we're saying is not like this is gospel. This isn't like there's only one way to do this. And the process is really totally customizable. But from that, if if I was the person who applies to the club, I get, I'm automatically sent that information. So now I've actually sort of optimized that time of the membership director that that they get it, they get a notification, right, that I have filled out that information. What happens next?
Kevin Page: [00:15:01] Yeah. So in in some cases it's, it may not even be important to send that notification to the membership director if you're automating that introductory outreach. Because what we typically try to do when we're consulting with clubs is to keep that membership director focused on people who are qualified and who may be, you know, truly interested in looking at membership. And they're getting a lot of inquiries. And these introductory emails that are being sent in an automated fashion can help to understand, okay, who's actually responding to those? And once they respond, that pops up in their inbox, just like any email would. Right. And then they pick up the conversation from there and the automation shuts off. But if that if that, visitor, that prospect doesn't reply to that message, well, then another message could go out in a few days. And another. Right to the point where you probably stop and store that person in your database to be later nurtured, but you kind of, have have work them through that introductory process. They didn't show interest. And now, you know, they're earmarked for something later down the road.
Ed Heil: [00:16:14] So let's talk about that later down the road. So, if I'm just recapping what you're saying, what I'm hearing you say is that, is that the membership director might only get notified if that person reaches out again, and which really, to what you were saying earlier, helps that membership director focus on the most qualified leads. I mean, how many times, you know, we see this all the time where we've been in meetings actually with clients, and the membership director gets up and says, oh, I've got to excuse myself because I have a tour that I'm supposed to do. And then they come back five minutes later saying, oh, they are, they were qualified. And you think, wow, well, that was sort of a waste, you know, waste of time and energy and, and that sort of thing. But like what you're saying. So what happens next then? So this is where, you know, we talk about this in the lead in of the, of this episode, which is we all like lists and anyone that's doing what we do, we love to try to help a club get to a point where they have a waitlist. You love having waitlists, but what happens when it's gone? The one thing that we see quite a bit is that you've had people through the years reach out in in some cases, one of our clients I was we were talking about the other day is that's a stack of about 700 names. Like looseleaf, she, she prints out all of the the people who have applied no idea who they are. But now by people filling out the form, capturing their email addresses when they download information, you have a database that's built, that's built up, not just in the cloud. I mean, this is businesses have been I mean, you've seen this. I mean, you can shed more light on this and I can because you've worked so much with us. But database of names of people who have expressed interest, what can be done with that kind of information? I mean, within, you know, the confines of the this discussion.
Kevin Page: [00:18:10] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, oftentimes we know the sort of cyclical nature of, of clubs, and the seasonality. Right. And, and when you might be making a push, you know, especially around golf or around other activities that you may have or sports or things like that, to do some type of re-engagement campaign, typically an email campaign to an audience like that. All the people who have expressed interest in the past but didn't reply to your emails or didn't take, didn't click that button to request a tour, right? They stalled out in the process after requesting information, and that's where they're stuck still. And instead of having this daunting task of, well, I have these 700 names, I guess I could start just ripping emails off to all of them. You have that stored in a database, and you can do it in a matter of clicks to say, let me just piece together a couple emails and shoot it off to this audience again and see what bounces back. See if some of these people, reengage or show interest again or, you know, maybe do take action to request that to or and and reengage in the process.
Ed Heil: [00:19:22] And you had I mean I think this is kind of a just a quick but interesting story. Client of ours has a waitlist. And what they wanted to do is make sure that all the contacts that they also have just stay engaged. They sent an email out to those people saying, join our waitlist, which in full disclosure, I thought was a crazy idea, but it actually had some benefit.
Kevin Page: [00:19:50] Yeah, yeah, they had some success with it. So this was about, fall in a, in a climate where winter, you know, outdoor winter golf is not a thing. And so the, the intention of the email was, yeah, join the waitlist. Now, if you're interested in playing golf next year. Right. Because if we get to spring and then you reach out, the waitlist is likely to be longer than it is now in October, November whenever we sent that email. Yeah. And there was some success there. So, just another, you know, creative thing that you can do when you have that database, and that list of names that you can easily, you know, the weather is nice outside in in March. Let's send an email to all the people who've downloaded the guide in the past year. Right. I mean, things like that can be done on a whim.
Ed Heil: [00:20:38] Right? Exactly. And then even scheduling over time and, you know, one of the things that we we also talked about and touched on is. This is when you can start determining the most qualified prospects. What are the different ways that using using a tool, and again, not to pitch HubSpot. We talk about it, but it is a tool that we work with quite a bit. What can you do within a tool like HubSpot to really try to identify the most qualified prospects?
Kevin Page: [00:21:08] Yeah, there's a few things, you know, with, with the email, marketing that we've been talking about, who's opening the email, who's clicking the email, who's doing that multiple times? You know, there's people who open an email ten, 12, 20 times. And that's all data that you can see in HubSpot, and do things with take action on, in addition to email. You know, what HubSpot allows us to do is, track visitors on the website as well. You can see which of those prospects are coming back to the website, what pages they're viewing, what, buttons they're clicking, what videos they're watching, to, you know, understand how engaged they might be and sort of also warm up your outreach to that person so it doesn't feel as cold, but touchpoint, and HubSpot is to take it one step further, also allows you to actually attribute points to some of those actions so you can give prospects a score based on how, how qualified they're perceived to be based on some of those things. Email opens, web visits, and information about them, like what type of membership were they engaged in, is it a social member engagement or a, golf member? When what might they have been interested in things like that?
Ed Heil: [00:22:27] And to take that even one step further. And not all clubs have catering services or weddings and events, that are open to the public or, you know, some clubs obviously don't prioritize that, but some do. And so by segmenting even. Right. So And maybe if you could just do a quick high level, like how a club might do that and what you've seen as far as being able to capture all those contacts, people who are interested in golf, social and then banquets.
Kevin Page: [00:23:00] Yeah, many of the clubs that we work with, also have a, you know, a catering goal in mind or an event, and wedding goal and.
Ed Heil: [00:23:10] Monday golf, one of those things. Right? I mean, it's. Yeah.
Kevin Page: [00:23:12] Yep. Golf outings. Exactly. Right. So one of the first things that that we oftentimes do in consulting is to establish that segmentation right away. Right. Are you interested in membership or weddings events, something along those lines. Just so we have that to know when we're segmenting and pulling lists for, you know what, we should do an email campaign that promotes, you know, our the fact that we added new tees in our course. Well, you know, you have a list of people that that's probably not appropriate for. And those are all the people who have reached out to you looking for, you know, a wedding venue. Right. So it's really easy to be able to segment those folks when you use an automation tools such as HubSpot. But there's a lot of, you know, a lot of opportunity for segmentation depending on what kind of data you're bringing in. And so we talked a lot about, you know, people submitting forms. But what we recommend when we implement a tool like HubSpot is if people are calling you, if they're walking in and visiting the club and asking for information, if a member referral, if a member refers someone, that all of that information get brought into this tool. So you have all of that prospect information there. You know what those people, what message those people want to hear from you. And you can, you know, attempt to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time, which is kind of the second part of all the, you know, lead management automation conversation that I alluded to earlier, which is more of that user experience and creating a user experience that, that your prospects will, you know, respect and, and hopefully take action on.
Ed Heil: [00:24:58] And if you think about a lot of resorts, high end hotels, those types of experiences, they're also very good at this, very good at making sure you're getting the right information at the right time. So we've talked about, that conversion point, right, filling out the forms and automating that, taking some time off of your membership director, the nurturing of these of these contacts and staying in touch and trying to figure out who the best and most engaged member prospects are, and, you know, and also weeding out those that aren't qualified, which is is super valuable as well. Let's talk a little bit about the customer relationship management software, the CRM. And it's just, you know, if you could maybe just share some best practices, how it's useful, especially at a time when reporting is so important for boards. They want to know what's going on, what the health of the club is. How how are you seeing CRMs being used by clubs?
Kevin Page: [00:25:57] Yeah. You know, the segmentation is something that I already touched on, so I won't go too deep there. But really understanding what people have done, to get into the CRM is a really important step. You know, we work with a lot of, organizations, clubs included, that have a list of names in their CRM or in spreadsheets or whatever they might be using, and they're not sure how they got that or what they might be interested in. So, you know, that's a really important step, is making sure that that when that, when you're collecting that, that it comes in with some of that helpful information. But then from there, it's, it's really important to understand what stage in the journey are, are these folks and, you know, are they have they reached out and inquired about, you know, the membership guide and that's where they start. Did they request a tour? They they took a tour and that's where they started. They didn't show up for their tour and that's where they're at. So building some of these milestones in this, the CRM tool helps you really understand where people are in that overall journey, which can help craft the messaging that's going to be most beneficial to them.
Ed Heil: [00:27:08] Right. So just to put this in, what's in it for you as a membership director or as a as a general manager or someone who's trying to really understand what is the health of the club from a new member perspective, to be able to look into a CRM and to see how many people are at various stages of that consideration process or of your, new member onboarding process or application process to say, hey, we have actually, right now, you know, five people that have actually applied and that we're considering we're vetting these. Prospects right now. And let's just say it's five people just using, you know, round numbers at $50,000 a pop. Then you can see we have $150,000 in the pipeline. That's at the stage. People have maybe filled out a form and you might have a lot more there. But if it's a $50,000, you know, golf number prospect, you can actually start to see the health of that pipeline to say, how many people do we think we're actually going to bring on, or move on to our waitlist in the next month or three months or six months? And that information, and I'm sure if you're listening to this, you've sat in these meetings or had to prepare reports for the board so they can see that. And all this information is in one place.
Kevin Page: [00:28:34] Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And, you know, where how many people have have toured this month? Really helpful metric to have, right. Just to know, how many people are doing that? How many people have applied? Where are people, in that journey is incredibly helpful for that pipeline development. But in addition to that, you can also take it a step further and say, what's the probability that will actually close these people based on data? So as you start using these tools, you can understand, well, we have five people right now who have completed a tour. Well, historically we closed about 20% of those people or 50% of those people. So that revenue that you just alluded to, you know, sometimes it can look, oh, wow, we're going to close $200,000 based on what's in our pipeline. But we try to take a realistic look at or you're probably not going to close everyone that's in your pipeline. And so you can look at these weighted sort of reports in order to, get some of that additional information and just, you know, an incredible amount of insights that you're able to pull out of some of these tools when you really get in and start making it a part of your everyday life in probability.
Ed Heil: [00:29:51] I mean, what you're talking about, there is something that you know you can do today to a degree with, but it's usually in the form of a hunch like, oh yeah, and and usually it's inflated a little bit, like we closed 90% of the people who go through tour. Maybe. But wouldn't you rather have that data? And, you know, a lot of the things that we're talking about today are, are these are things that we've seen it before, where there membership directors who are tracking it, but in oddball places. I mean, I've seen everything from three by five index cards to something more common, which are just spreadsheets. Yeah, that is the membership. And you might be one of those people, if you're listening, is like you have a spreadsheet and it's fine. It's not like that doesn't work. But when you bundle all of this into one process and one umbrella, to be able to say, hey, we're bringing in new people, well, you know, who are filling out forms, we're nurturing them through email, and we're actually tracking them in, like you're saying, Kev, you're scoring those prospects to find the most, you know, to find the best prospects. All of a sudden this becomes really powerful and and way less manual. Someone isn't going through and filling out a spreadsheet. And that's maybe one of the biggest benefits. What are we missing, Kev?
Kevin Page: [00:31:04] Well, another, you know, feature of really all of these CRM tools HubSpot included is task management as well. So, you know, not only does it do all the things you just mentioned, but also, you know, oh, this guy's this prospect I'm talking to is heading out of town or, you know, wants me to call them back in three months. You know, after they complete this home renovation project and, you know, cash flow returns in their life, and. All right, I'll set a task to follow up with this gentleman in three months. You know, it's it's all there. Instead of, again, trying to make sure that it's managed in a spreadsheet or written down somewhere. Post-it notes. You know, I've seen as well. So, again, just a really helpful way to, to kind of continue to move forward and lean into some of these tools that so many other clubs are leaning into and having success with.
Ed Heil: [00:31:54] Glad you brought that up. I mean, I think that's one of the most powerful things is how do you track your follow up calls today? And by having something that actually feeds you a list of people that you're supposed to call every day or every week, however you want to set it up is is incredible, especially when it's based upon the most qualified prospects at the the the you know, your your foundation is, is feeding you. So, yeah. Super helpful. Anything else? What else are we missing? I know this is really high level, but, you know, the point today is to just hopefully help you think through other ways that you can do your job that make you more efficient, but also give you better data and better information that you can use to provide to your GM or your board or whomever that might be.
Kevin Page: [00:32:48] Anything. Yeah. Yeah. A reporting is reporting as such a big part of this in making sure that you have intelligence in your reports, you understand? You know, what might be coming and where some of the concerns might be in terms of, you know, our pipelines getting really light. You know, maybe it's time to go, you know, do some additional outreach or, you know, attend some events, do some ads, you know, depending on what your club is, is interested in doing from that regard. But one of the, you know, one of the things that I'll, I'll say is I'm really passionate about this topic because I've seen so many clubs dump a lot of effort into generating leads. And not a lot of effort, and all businesses, not just clubs, not as much effort into managing those, and managing those properly. And so, you know, you end up with a database or a spreadsheet or whatever, with, you know, list of names that you you may not know a lot about, that you're not really following up with on a, on an ongoing basis. And it can be really difficult. And so when you're able to lean into a tool like this, you can really develop a well-oiled machine for outreach to the people who should be receiving automated outrea ch manual things, you know, when necessary. Right. So someone replies to an email that goes to a membership director. I can now take over the follow up and move people through different stages. Set tasks when I need to. So you're not sacrificing the experience of your prospects, or, you know, anyone that you might be communicating with in these tools? Which is, I think oftentimes a big, roadblock in some of these decisions is that we don't do things that way. That's impersonal. And these tools have come so far, in really making this, appear very personal. Also, you know, saving you a ton of time. So, you know, I'm really passionate about it because I've seen it work time and time again. Yeah.
Ed Heil: [00:34:53] And, you know, to your point, it actually is now doing the opposite. It's actually making you seem more attentive and more personal and more connected, which is really what we all want. And, and probably one of the big fears that people have when trying to use this, this, this type of technology as part of their process. So, Kev, thanks. I think we're going to have more conversation around this at some point, hopefully before too long. So thanks for helping out, for being a part of it.
Kevin Page: [00:35:25] Absolutely, I hope so. It was a pleasure.
Ed Heil: [00:35:30] And thank you for listening. If you find this podcast helpful. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep crushing your club marketing.
Websites are constantly evolving. No longer is your website an online brochure. It should be a critical part of your membership and marketing team. Remember the early days of websites? Some businesses didn’t think they even needed one. They were really basic and let’s face it, were more of a digital brochure. Lots of copy, a few pictures and of course, no video. In the early years, the idea of having a website that could drive new members, increase revenue and answer questions for members and prospective members was unheard of. It just didn’t exist.
Today, people who come to your website want to know more about your amenities, your staff and mostly, they want to know about your members to see if they’ll fit in. They are looking for answers and they want them now - are you able to help them, even if it’s after hours?
In this episode, Lisa Schmidtke, a seasoned website developer and designer, and I get into websites to talk about what you can do to make your website the top performing of your membership team.
Episode Highlights:
Podcast Transcript
Ed Heil [00:00:00] Hey there, Lisa. How are you doing today?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:00:03] I'm great. How are you, Ed?
Ed Heil [00:00:04] I'm doing just fine, thanks. Thanks for for joining in on the fun here with Crushing Club Marketing.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:00:10] Happy to be here.
Ed Heil [00:00:11] All right. So in full disclosure, Lisa and I do work together. So the conversations that we're having have been had before to some degree, but to frame it up for you to just, you know, to be able to hear some some different thoughts around web design and development, you know, we thought that it might be helpful for Lisa to share her insights because Lisa, as we mentioned, has her career has been in building and designing websites and and so much more expert in this area than I am, for sure. So looking forward to the conversation today, Lisa.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:00:51] Yeah, I am as well.
Ed Heil [00:00:52] All right. So let's just talk a little bit about we'll just dive right into this because club websites are, you know, depends first of all, it depends on the type of club you're at. We recognize the fact that there are some clubs and there's very few, but there are, you know, the elite clubs in this country that really don't need to worry about this. I mean, in my opinion, I think in I think you would agree that all clubs really should think about how they're presenting themselves online these days, because it's an opportunity to show your club off and your space, your membership to some degree. But recognizing this might not be a priority for some clubs or for the vast majority of other clubs. How they look and come across online is pretty important.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:01:37] Yeah. Yeah. I would agree. In just like you said, even if they're not using it as a marketing tool or a lead generation tool, you know, inevitably somebody, one of their members may be a guest of a member is going to go to access the website. And, you know, it's got to reflect the vision and the professionalism of the course.
Ed Heil [00:02:00] Yeah. And so when we talk about websites and the conversations that we have with club leaders, so often they go to the functionality of the back end and there are some very strong developers of the back end experience for for members and they're getting better and better. And that member experience in the back end is getting better and better. Well, we're going to talk about today is really that front end that what we always refer to internally is the public face and that part of your website where when I'm searching your club and I find you that side of the website, that is where we're going to spend most of our time today. And so let's just start with there. Like why does that matter? Why? Why are we spending time today talking about the importance of that side of the website?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:02:53] Yeah, you know, I say it's because, you know, as far as the private the member side, as we call it, you know, that the software that most people are using do do a fine job of of allowing people to make a tee time and sign up for dinner reservations and, you know, things like that. But and most of that functionality people are getting from their their app anyway. But really with the front with, the front facing side since the members are really just looking to come to the website, do what they need to do, log in and move on. If they go to the website at all, the the majority of the websites should be focused on on the front facing and and by that I mean the copy, the graphics, the design should, should be designed so that prospects can actually see themselves at the, at the club and envision what it would be like to be a member there.
Ed Heil [00:03:46] Yeah. And as I was saying, you know, in the in the intro to our conversation, today's, you know, in talking to so many club leaders through the years in fact there's there's one at one of my CMAA workshops we use one of the clubs as the organizer of the, the host of the event I should say, we use his club as an example in a lot of beautiful spaces, a lot of beautiful amenities, but no people at all. And which is really, I think, you know, is that that's one of the biggest mistakes that we probably see out there, isn't it?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:04:24] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, because what happens in is the photos often look like stock photography. People can't even tell if it's really a photo of the club or not. And then back to what I said, it's really hard for a person to envision and see what it would be like using that pool, playing that course, if there are no people on the course and in the pool.
Ed Heil [00:04:45] Right. Everyone wants to be able to look at that and go, Can I see myself there? Can I see my family there? Right. And if it's stock imagery, let's face it, stock images look like stock images. I mean, they look kind of hokey, right? I mean, there's some. They're better than others, but for the most part, kind of hokey.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:05:02] Yeah, for sure.
Ed Heil [00:05:03] All right. From the back. From a development perspective, let's just talk about that. You know, as far as, you know, and you've been you've seen the back end some, you know, some club websites today, they're missing certain elements that would enhance organic search. Can you just talk about what is organic search? Why does it matter and what, what's missing?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:05:29] Yep. Yeah. So organic search, you know, that that is, you know, not to be too elementary here, but that is, you know, somebody puts a keyword into the search engine. There are paid ad results below that and on on pages beyond the first page there are organic. So the goal really should be to try to rank as high as you can organically so that you don't have to well, number one, so that you start showing up at all. And number two, that you don't have to then do paid ad strategies. You know, there are a number of of coding practices that a platform should adhere to that backend code, that metadata all important. But, you know, I would say that the web building tools should just automatically be optimized for that. You know, you shouldn't have to work around or spend a lot of time trying to get your code to be up to par for search engines. So that should be a given. And we find that a lot of clubs, software that, you know, that are used for these private club side of of the of their websites, even those are not really built to be optimized for that's a lot of messy code lots going on they're hard to update. So just getting a website on a platform that's just there code and back in is optimized is step one. Really is everything you do beyond that, the and the key to then being ranking high in search engines is to providing valuable educational content on a consistent basis. And that doesn't mean adding a bunch of web pages or spamming it with keywords know a very effective tool for that. And in our world is blogging and with the, you know, blogging, that is how clubs can really help to seed new members in a more detailed way. So not just photos, not just a web page, but information, detailed information highlighting members and staff is a is a really effective tool for that as well.
Ed Heil [00:07:39] All right. I want to go I want to dive a little bit deeper into blogging in a minute, because in the workshops that I've done that always comes up is like because storytelling always ends up with like, well, how should we do it or should it go? And blogging is is one of those vehicles. And we could probably spend a whole other podcast talking about that as well, as well as organic versus paid search and all of us. But anyway, I don't want to complicate it. I do want to just if you're listening to Lisa and you're going, well, code, what is that? And metadata and stuff like that. Just, I do want to try to provide some explanation of that that's not going to go too in-depth. And let me just take a quick crack at at least until or I'm screwed up. Websites are usually built with their, you know, code. Right. And we think about that. And sometimes there's words that go into the back end of the website that tells like, Google. When we talk about search engines, Google is a search engine. Yahoo is a search engine, Right? So there are certain words that go into a website or that should go into the back end of a website that automatically tells search engines certain things about your website, right, like content or what you do or things like that. So we talk about coding, we talk about organic search. We want your website to perform in a way or all web sites to perform in a way so that when people are looking for certain things, whether it's golf courses, tennis facilities, things like that, that your site organically comes up. How do I do?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:09:12] That's perfect. Great job.
Ed Heil [00:09:14] Oh, thank you. Thank you for that. So so just with that as a backdrop, so let's just let's dive into the blogging and organic search thing for a minute here so we can just, you know, hopefully provide some ,some clarity around that because people will say sometimes, like one of the questions I always get Lisa's like, well, when people come to our website, who's how will they find our blog? Yeah, right. Like, that's a common the common thing. So what do you say to that?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:09:44] Yeah, I mean, certainly it should be, you know, promoted all over the website. You know, sometimes we use "pop ups" to say, subscribe to our blog. It should be featured on the homepage. But, you know, a lot of times depending on the topic, search engines like Google, will, will even show the blog before they show your homepage or another page on your website. So if it provides enough information that that user is looking for, it's likely to show up.
Ed Heil [00:10:14] Yeah. And so that's why it's such a great differentiation, differentiation to make, because what people forget sometimes is that a lot of website visitors find a website not through the homepage or if you think about it as your house, not through the front door, but through a side door, which is a blog. So there's a term that I love in and some of the analytics we see, which is entrances, right? Like visits and entrances. And sometimes an entrance is like, how did they enter into that website? And a lot of times like you're saying, they're their biggest their most entrances are coming through a blog post that someone has written.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:10:54] Yeah, exactly. Especially if that blog is then also promoted through social media. So if there is a Facebook post or an Instagram post or something like that that says, hey, you know, here's some information about our club, we just wrote this blog, go read it. Sometimes the social media post will show up on Google before the blog itself, before a Web page, you know, so it's also important to, you know, not just write the blog, not just post the blog, but really promote it.
Ed Heil [00:11:24] Right. So hopefully you're you know, if you're listening, this is this is starting to make some sense to you. And if you just think about it from how you might search for information and what you find, like a lot of times people will say, they say it less now, but they said all the times, like I don't read blogs, you know, like, actually you probably do, but you just don't realize you're reading a blog, right? I mean, it's like, oh, I was just searching for this and I found this great article, right? Yeah. And it's really a blog. And a blog is really just Yeah. I mean, again, correct me if I'm wrong. It's really just another page on your website, is that right?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:11:59] Yes. Yep. That's a way. It's just it's just indexed and promoted in just a different way.
Ed Heil [00:12:06] Okay. So I do want to just go one step deeper on this now that we have this idea of blogging, because what a lot of people says, like, well, what are we going to write that people will find? Or this is maybe that next level question, right? And so what I want you to think about, if you're listening, is today's member or that 42 year old member that you hear a lot of people talking about. And by the way, there is, you know, the greatest transfer of wealth in history will happen in the next, you know, next ten years or I think by 2045, they're saying will be the greatest transition of wealth in history. So there will be young people with discretionary income to spend and they are going to go online to look for a lot of information that may or may not have anything to do with your club. So what I think of is sometimes, Lisa, I'll go, well, you know what? They're going to be looking for things like activities for their kids. At what age should I get my child involved in sports? When should they start taking swimming lessons? How to become a competitive swimmer. Right. What age should I start my child playing golf? And imagine if those people who are searching for those four answers to those questions, if they find blogs that your club has written, then all of a sudden you're coming up on their radar. They might be thinking of a totally different experience for their family, but they come across your website.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:13:35] Yeah. And by the way, they don't want to pick up the phone and call you and they don't want to, you know, wait for information. They want this information, especially the younger generation, right away at their fingertips. If they have to pick up the phone, that's a barrier to entry. They won't do it.
Ed Heil [00:13:49] Right. And, you know, it's funny. I'm glad you said that, because what's, if you think about that a little bit more, you know, we'll talk about that target member prospect who knows like, well they don't do this and they won't do that. But what you really need to do is think about yourself. Right? It's like I don't, I don't shop or look for things, especially like things like a private club membership between eight and five. You know, it's at night and it's on the weekends, and it's when I have the time to do it. And you're into your point is like, I want the information when I want it, not when you're available for it. And you can you can argue the fact that, it's like, well, that's not the type of club we are. And and that's fine. And some people will, well, you know, be okay with that, but some people may not and they'll move on to the next club in your in your market.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:14:42] Yeah that's right. You know, or it'll just take them longer to become a member or become your prospect. So you know, it's getting them in the door as soon as you can and providing the information as quick as they can.
Ed Heil [00:14:58] Right. Okay. So just. Really quickly recapping because we're going to move on to that. Next thing that we're talking about is that people don't want to wait until you're in the office on Monday or Tuesday because you're closed on Monday or whatever. So the idea that the front end of your website or the public facing part is really important, and that with that, that part of your website, you can leverage that so that more people find you through organic search. Or when they go to your website, they can find more information that is sometimes in the form of a blog, and blogs are helpful for helping you get found for certain things. They answer questions and it's helpful information, and it also tells search engines that you are known for or an expert in some of these areas or these topic areas. So I just want to make sure everyone's everyone's staying with us here because, you know, ultimately, if we can provide people more information so they can determine whether or not the club is right for them because you've given them so much information that should make your the life of your membership director a little bit easier. Right, Because people will self-select out. But what they're going to do and we know this and this is the next part that, you know, is is part of this whole evaluation of your website is really, you know, having the information that your prospective members need. And I'm sorry that your prospective members want when they come to your website. A lot of times today, you, you know, websites, club websites, you guys have contact forms and people will fill that out, which is great. And what I usually hear is that, yes, someone fills out a contact form we receive at the membership office and then I send a letter to that person or an email with membership information, and I'll usually ask and I'll say, Do you call them first? Do you try to qualify them before you send that membership information? People nine out of ten times say, No, I just get it and I just send them because that's what they want. They want the membership information. So it takes some time. The person has to wait to get what they want. You know, your membership person has to take the time to send that email. Even if it's a copy and paste, they still have to take the time to do that. What's a better way to to make that happen?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:17:22] Yeah. So I think you need to have, you know, sections of your website that, number one, they're gathering information along the way. And so these might be people who are not ready to reach out and become a member. They might not even be ready to receive pricing and all the information that they need. But there are certain pieces of content that websites and clubs can offer for those just kicking the tires. And maybe these are people who are not qualified quite yet to be a member of your club. Maybe they're looking for more or less or something different. So like you said, you want to allow those people to kind of opt out, know that themselves if they're not ready, and then the membership structure doesn't have too to waste time for that. But for some items like pricing and membership, more deep membership information, you know, that could be offered automatically, but not necessarily for free. And what I mean by that is you can ask the prospect for a little bit of information about them in the end with the form. So there's a form that says just just give me your name, phone number or email. You might not call them right away because maybe it's a piece of content that's just giving a little bit more of information about you. But now they're in your system so that at some point you could reach out. When they do get to that prospect level that request a tour, contact me now phase and while they're in this dip in their toe and in the prospective member phase, you kind of don't have to worry about them at that point.
Ed Heil [00:18:58] Right. So that whole idea of having like almost different levels of interest. Right. Like kind of interested I kind of like your blog is helping me to learn more, right? Maybe you're not really ready for a phone call or tour or anything like that versus when someone is saying, hey, you know, let's say download our membership guide for more membership information, download our membership guide or something like that. That's probably a little bit more of a serious prospect.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:19:25] Yes. Yeah, it is. But that person might not be the at the request a tour stage yet. Right. So Yeah. So varying levels of interest and it's all just about getting the information that your prospects want, how they want it when they want it.
Ed Heil [00:19:41] Yeah. And I think you know, just this whole idea of allowing people to opt out, to self-select out, like, I get your membership, you know, your initiation and your monthly dues. And I'm like, Ooh, I didn't know it was going to be that much. Right? Then then your membership person isn't spending time with the tour, is it? Like, you know, and we all know the line, which is like, Hey, if I can get someone in for a tour, then I can usually, you know, convert them, which is great. But how many tours do you do with an unqualified prospect? You're like, you know, you get through the tour and they're like, Oh, wait, I didn't know it'd be that much. I'm not interested. Right.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:20:19] Right. And how many more leads could you be gathering if you didn't make people request to, you know, take a tour just to find out if they kind of like you or not.
Ed Heil [00:20:28] Exactly. Totally. Yeah. So having additional information, making it easier for people to understand what your club is all about, and then ask and then converting them in a way that really makes sense for that prospective member. But also something that streamlines that process for your membership team is huge.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:20:49] Yeah, yeah. We hear from a lot of membership directors, you know, they are a team of one and then when they're not there, it might be the receptionist giving a tour and it might be, you know, somebody in the back office that's, you know, sending out this information. So a lot of times it's, you know, a shoestring kind of team. And so in this way, this process that we're talking about, where you're offering this bit of content, you're asking them for an email, maybe you're setting up an automated email campaign to kind of stay in touch with that person until they're ready to buy. You know, your what you're doing there is creating a whole 'nother salesperson really, right. That you don't have to worry about.
Ed Heil [00:21:30] It's 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:21:34] Yeah. We we heard some statistics recently that say it takes about 8 to 12 touchpoints for a prospect to become a customer. And, you know, I was just talking with a membership director today that said, you know, think how much time do you have to reach out to somebody 8 to 12 times of your list of, say, 100 leads. They don't have that time.
Ed Heil [00:21:57] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think we all know that people in the membership roles are are overworked in many ways. I mean, there's a lot that they're responsible for and that they have to keep track of. Okay. There's probably a whole I know there's another, another conversation around that whole idea of what happens once someone converts and this ah, you know, there's a whole conversation around how do we as we would say, nurture those contacts? You know, like so often in a membership office, someone will fill out a form like that on the website and if they're not ready, then the membership director just disregards, or throws the form away or, you know, and then they wait till the next time instead of trying to stay in touch with them. So we'll talk about that later. Just some final thoughts, Lisa, from your perspective, and I'll put you on the spot a little bit. We didn't really prep for this in our pregame, but but I'm just wondering, like, what do you, for someone who's listening to this going, yeah, you know what, we do need to update our our club website, what will be the things that you would say are most important for that club leader to really think about as they think about because they're thinking just redesign, right? And sometimes they might even think, well, hey, our our, our web provider right now is going to do it for free, Like they're not even going to charge us. But what are the things that they need to take and consider into consideration?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:23:33] Well, you know, right away, you know, think about it like you're building your house. You're getting your house in order, you know, and you're not going to build your house on Styrofoam or, you know, sand. You're going to build it structurally sound. So the first thing right off the bat is using web building tools that are right away, just like we said, built, built so that search engines can find them. They a lot of the tools we use are are you can automatically migrate onto the platforms we use and immediately they're more modern. So we even say even if you just have the budget to migrate off of your WordPress site or your club software site and onto a platform like what we use, it's going to automatically elevate, modernize the look and feel of your website.
Ed Heil [00:24:25] What does that mean, though, when you say I mean, I get like modernize the look and feel, I don't really know, you know, just thinking for someone who might be listening, what does that mean?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:24:35] Yep. So there are certain practices. You know, we see now that, you know, that are much different than websites even five years ago. And the reason being, is because websites now need to respond quickly to whatever device somebody is using. Most people looking at your website or not on a desktop, probably. They're on a phone. So your website needs to respond to whether the size of the phone, whether you're on an iPad, things like that. So the navigation needs to work a little differently. The way that the photos work around the text needs to respond so that it's easy to scroll and read. You don't get to choose that you want this navigation on the left hand side, you know, right there next to this one little graphic, you can't get that picky. But it does need to be readable and look nice for the user. A lot of white space.
Ed Heil [00:25:27] You got it. Yeah, isn't it interesting. All right. So let's keep going. So. So right away, you know, it's like getting it. Make sure I think your thought is. Make sure that you're building this new site on a modern template or templates going to that will allow you to sort of modernize your website. What else do you think?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:25:48] Yep. Well, like we talked about before, you know, graphics. So another part best practice of new modern professional websites are lots of graphics, big graphics, video, even at the top. So you pull up your website. Boom. We've all seen the drone video of your course doing the flyover. You know, that's like that's come and it looks nice. But somewhere along the way you need to show people, people playing your course video does that amazingly, because I think people can really see themselves like in the course on the course playing even more than graphics. But if all you have is, you know, a half day photoshoot and a couple of people that are willing to kind of, you know, be stand ins for you. I mean, that's going to elevate it immediately.
Ed Heil [00:26:34] Yeah, for sure. Any other thoughts around that?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:26:40] Probably not a whole lot more without digging too much into the technical aspects of your website, for sure. But I would say just a proper navigation. Making sure that the items in your navigation. I, when, when...One thing that has surprised me over the years of designing websites for private clubs is the number of clubs that don't have golf in their main nav.
Ed Heil [00:27:05] Oh, right.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:27:07] Like what is your most what is your greatest asset? They say our golf course, what we have done in the May NAV and other items that you want to feature events if you're a private club that offers events, especially if you offer rent, space, event space to nonmembers, that's a great sales marketing tool. Your website can really help to boost that revenue.
Ed Heil [00:27:31] Yeah, it's so interesting in again, I mean, this conversation could go on and on with different things to consider, but some of those really basic things like that, you know, when you said when you mentioned that a second ago, I thought about things like, you know, like WordPress, right? It's like, you know, oh, you got to run. Another update. Ooh, do you have that plug in? You like it? Not to say that WordPress is not a good platform and a lot of businesses run on that and it's terrific, but it's, you know, updates and maintenance and all those things and is easy to make changes. Is that user friendly? You know, all those things that you know, whether you are some of you are more technical than others and more capable in this, more comfortable than others. But but just in general, today's modern Web site, like you're saying, lisa, just it is built to be is they say whizzy wig. What you see is what you get. And and that's something that's important to to think about. You know, the idea just you know, one of my last thoughts around that is just the idea that, you know, you don't want to get in a mess up your website, right? Like you want to have the wrong person, like, hey, I'll just make this change. This is something I would do. And then all of a sudden, like, why does this image look like this? But, you know, if there is someone who has some background in web dev that you know, or that is on your staff that can help make some changes or it's not as scary to make some basic things. You know, it can be good to have a platform where you can do that without having to pay 150 bucks for someone to go in and look in, do something, or, you know, it's not a lot of money, but it is something, you know.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:29:08] Yeah, well, like you said, you know, we hear that well, you know, our club software will do our public facing website for free. Well, think about how free that is, because, you know, just like you said, the first thing they'll have to do is start somebody's got to start doing updates. You can't just have the same, you know, code platform, call it what you want, module widgets.
Ed Heil [00:29:28] All right?
Lisa Schmidtke [00:29:28] But, you know, they need to be updated. And then number two, when with when we work with clients to say no, we want us to keep our website where we are, that's great. And then we say, Hey, let's do this membership guide idea where we put a form on there. People have to give you some information before they get the membership guide here. Here's the form. Can you put this on your website? I have heard of some of the software companies charging up to $700 in order to just add a form to their website. So start adding up these costs and you know, it's really not free.
Ed Heil [00:30:02] Yeah, for sure. All right, Lise. Hey, good stuff. Thanks for, uh, thanks for jumping in and helping us out. And we're going to be doing this again. So we're going to not so much this exact format, but we are planning a, a webinar on topics similar to this that we will have, right now, it's early 2024 and will be available once we record it on our website as well. But but thanks for so much for sharing your expertise and I will see you soon.
Lisa Schmidtke [00:30:37] Yes, look forward to that webinar.
Ed Heil [00:30:39] All right, Thanks.
John Schultz, CEO of Club Leadership Alliance, has been around the block - a bunch of times! Prior to his current role, he was the GM for over 20 years at Carmel Country Club in Charlotte, North Carolina. Taking over a club with financial challenges, he put his flywheel in motion and turned the club around with more than 60 million dollars in capital improvements in 2 decades.
Balancing the shifting demographics of new, younger members with longstanding members, facilitating town hall discussions, managing the conflict and debate that goes with member assessments and day to day communication challenges that are hand-in-hand with running a club, Schultz has done it all. John Schultz built his career at Carmel Country Club with more than 20 years of service AFTER doing 9 years of military service as a United States Marine. There were probably some days as a Staff Sergeant in the Marines that were easier than his days as a General Manager, but that’s another story! Needless to say, when you stay in one place for over 20 years, you did a lot of things right and you also dealt with a lot of change.
Today, John Schultz is the CEO of the Club Leadership Alliance which is a collaborative effort between The McMahon Group, Club Benchmarking and Kopplin, Kuelber and Wallace. Their mission is to aggregate the best practices they’ve seen from the hundreds of clubs that they work with and then help clubs take advantage of the knowledge they have gleaned. What better guest could we have for an episode on change management and managing shifting club demographics and dynamics?
Episode Notes
Episode Transcript
Ed Heil [00:00:01] You are listening to Crush and Club Marketing, a podcast for progressive club leaders ready to increase their club's revenue. Time for change begins right now.
John Schultz, CEO of the Club Leadership Alliance, has been around the block. Prior to his current role, he was the GM for over 20 years at Carmel Country Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, taking over a club with financial challenges. He put his flywheel emotion and turned the club around with more than $60 million in capital improvements in two decades. In this episode, John Schultz shares his stories of change management, navigating, shifting club demographics, member assessments and of course, member conflict.
Balancing the evolving needs and goals of private clubs, including the shifting demographics of new, younger members with long standing members, town halls, conflict and debate that goes with assessments and day to day communication challenges that frankly, just go hand in hand with running or leading any business, including clubs, are endless, all you club leaders know. Our guest in this episode, John Schultz, has been there and done that. He built his career at Carmel Country Club with more than 20 years of service, after doing nine years of military service, which I'm sure there were some days in the Marines that might have been easier than his days as a GM, but that's probably another story for another podcast. Needless to say, when you stay in one place for over two decades, you do a lot of things right, and you also had to deal with a lot of change. Today, Schultz is the CEO of the Club Leadership Alliance, and it is a collaborative effort between The McMahon Group, Club Benchmarking and Kaplan, Keebler, and Wallace. Their mission is to aggregate the best practices they've seen from the hundreds of clubs that they work with, and then help clubs take advantage of the knowledge they have gleaned. What better guest could we have for an episode on change management and managing shifting club demographics and dynamics? Thanks so much for joining me today.
John Schultz [00:02:13] Glad to be here. Appreciate being invited.
Ed Heil [00:02:15] Well, this is a I know this is an important topic for a lot of people. Leadership positions at clubs, and and man, with your your history at Carmel Country Club for almost 20 years. I guess the first question I have for you is, what is the key to making a long run like that at one place?
John Schultz [00:02:37] Yeah, 20 years is quite a while. And. And it's not like I had one plan going in and trying to move through and only executed to this one set of objectives and priorities. It's constantly moving. It's constantly changing. It's listening and seeing what's going on. It's feeling where the industry's going, what what people and members are looking for and the experience that they that they want from their club. And and that changed in many times through the dynamic. When I, when I first got to Carmel, they were in financial distress and the membership was, sliding. There was some debt and we really had to analyze where the club needed to go and and take advantage of those things. But also it changes, and about every five years we would take a new look out to to the future and see what was what were the opportunities and how could we, take advantage of where we were in the Charlotte market and, and what would make people, the most satisfied and, and engage at their club.
Ed Heil [00:03:48] This kind of reminds me of a conversation I had with John McFadden, last year from the Union League, Philadelphia, where he came into a club that was, you know, a little financially distressed, and, and hearing what you're saying, there's a the two words that came into my mind are brave leadership. And, you know, can you just talk about what that was like to walk into a situation where you're relatively new, unproven, and you're going to lead out of this, you know, kind of challenging times? Can you maybe just speak to what the mindset is and what it was within you that that gave you that ability to do that?
John Schultz [00:04:29] Sure. And Jeff is an inspiration to all of us and a, you know, visionary that jumps out there. And, and I hope to just be a portion of that. So, you know, when you look at the opportunities and the areas and what you can get done in a reasonably, financial responsible way and, and see where the club's going, I tend to look not necessarily, at the clubs next door and what, what they're doing, in our backyard because you get too homogenous when, you're only staying within that, constraint. And what are what are the resorts doing? What are the hotels doing? What are people doing? And the better restaurants and, and that kind of thing. So looking for those opportunities outside just "clubdom". And I have to admit I stole many, many ideas from many clubs around and repurpose them. And, and put my name on it and took credit for it and and and enjoyed the success from some of those. But it was outside the industry that really brings more opportunity. And, you know, the hotels resorts tend to be further ahead of us, and many in the Florida market, of clubs have to be more progressive in, in what they're providing. The competition is, much more, tighter down that way. So, so if you look at those areas and seek out what, what is going to be the next, the next big thing and, and try to take advantage of those and be on the front end. Carmel, was more open to, being progressive in the space because we weren't as traditional and we weren't as classic as some of the other clubs around. So we had the opportunity to take advantage of that, be a little risky and not a lot of risk, but some that would allow us to build, the, the, resort style pool and have social, engagement that was not typical. And so that social thing is really the first initial, area that I started at Carmel was to take advantage of the events and club functions and expand those things so that the, the members that lived around the, the club felt like that was their outlet. And to build that up was really our first, issue. We couldn't build anything because we had debt. So, I was able to really get the momentum going and it became their home away from home, as everyone likes to say. And the membership growth started, when we announced the pool, the year we announced the pool, put out the pretty drawings with the, you know, the tiki bars and all the rest of it, we brought in 131 new members, and paid for the pool in. Just the one year, of initiation.
Ed Heil [00:07:39] What year was that?
John Schultz [00:07:40] That was 2008. Okay. And so, right.
Ed Heil [00:07:43] Before the the downturn. Yeah.
John Schultz [00:07:45] Well, this was seven eight. Yeah. And then that roll that that success then rolled into the next big thing. So we proved that we could pay for it. We got out of debt. We, paid off the pool. And then we started the next big thing, which was in 2009, which at Carmel, a 36 hole facility allowed us to renovate the South course. Rees Jones came in and we did a 10 million, a $10 million renovation right in the middle of that disaster recession that we went through, and in 2009 and ten and came right out of that, paid that off, the growth, came after it, and it allowed us to roll right into the next big thing.
Ed Heil [00:08:33] So that really I want to come back to the next big thing, though. But just to frame this up a little bit, what I always think for, for GM's is how they relate with the board. Right? And having that sort of like a relationship that provides a GM to be visionary sometimes to execute on on big ideas, the next big thing. How would you describe your relationship over the 20 years with the board at Carmel?
John Schultz [00:09:03] Well, it's got to be a partnership because, there's not many. There's a few GM's that are making these decisions on their own. I'm not sure they're any. And we have to legislate up to, board members and the membership as a total in in are these good ideas and are they going to be successful and what is what's the outcome going to be? There's a there's a, Jim Collins, chapter. In "Good to Great" that's that he's written recently on social, sectors and in this, chapter, he talks about ledgers that that nonprofit, GM CEOs, have to legislate these decisions. We can't just make the decision. We have to provide that information and persuade the decision makers. And it's really a great, book or chapter to about 60 pages. I'd recommend it highly. And the other one, I'm not to be a Jim Collins, just, fan here, but.
Ed Heil [00:10:08] I'm a fan.
John Schultz [00:10:08] It's called The Flywheel Approach, and in there it talks about how I'm saying this next big thing, you, as you go around in a circle and you have a vision and you, and you act on it, it allows that, flywheel to spin. And the faster you can get the flywheel to spin, you get more and more done. And in turn, the confidence, grows, the momentum grows, and the membership has trust and faith in where you're going. I can tell you there was not a lot of people were not necessarily, at Carmel or saying, oh, the thing we need next is a swimming pool, right. But a golf club, with 36 holes. And the board, unanimously jumped in on this idea because it it was the next big thing that really allowed us to be successful.
Ed Heil [00:11:03] And that sounds like what you were describing earlier. I mean, before I interrupted you was just really that flywheel, like you got that thing going and people started. I'm assuming the membership trusted you more. They believed in you. They got it, you know, got behind what was happening. Is that kind of what happened?
John Schultz [00:11:18] That's right. And and then they invite their friends out to the pool. They invite them to social events. And the the more the community started engaging and seeing the animation and the fun and the, lifestyle that was happening, that was that was part of, the community. It allowed them it would create that demand, and they would then, of course, join the club. And and now there's a waiting list of almost 200, people on the waiting list, which is partially, you know, yes, it's Carmel, but it's also just the life, style that's, that's out there right now from the, pandemic.
Ed Heil [00:11:57] And you had mentioned in a previous conversation that in your time there, and correct me if I'm wrong, you did 60 million in capital projects. Is that right?
John Schultz [00:12:05] We did. Yep. And no assessments. All of that was initiation fee growth. Combined with, you know, operations were always, in the, in the black. And so we would fund capital improvements, and maintenance capital and all of those things. And I would be, remiss in not mentioning, you know, our net worth over time increased at one of the highest levels across the country and recognized as one of the better growth patterns. It was consistently going up and adding net worth. Over that time. Wow. And just a little bit there. We never missed a budget. Inside of that, 20 years. Wow. Good.
Ed Heil [00:12:50] That's awesome. What was your most challenging initiative that you that you put out there that, that required the most, maybe, arm wrestling?
John Schultz [00:13:00] Yeah, it was probably that, it was it probably came into the the 2009, golf course renovation just because of the timing and the uncertainty with the recession and, that kind of thing. And, and it and it created some dissension that didn't really come out in, in holding up the project or delaying it or changing it at all. It just created, it was at the time when, corporate atmosphere out in the, in the world was question everything, and communication and transparency was not really one of our best, skills at that time. And we learned from that. And, and found that being more, transparent and, and the entire industry moved in that direction and corporate world had moved in that way to just being, more open about what things are going on behind the scenes. And, and I, we really focused on that following that, situation, we kind of had a, uprising within the membership, and a couple of board members got voted on by petition, and, and it and it created just, you know, there was a blip there and just, satisfaction level, but it was, mostly tied to a lack of communication and transparency at the time.
Ed Heil [00:14:28] Interesting. I mean, that alone. So in the spirit of just, of, managing conflict, I mean, that is one of those moments. How did you handled that? Like with the membership, too? Because, I mean, you you know, that that can you know, what we says in the absence of information, people always go to the worst place. They make up their own mind and they go to the worst place. But and to recover from that can be hard. Like we we used to talk to our kids about the trust board, you know, say you put a little in, you earn this trust. And what just takes one second to lose it all. So how do you get back on track?
John Schultz [00:15:00] Yeah. So, so this was one of those moments in time where you had to take that introspective look we had done right about the time we, we did a membership survey, and, and this is one of those member satisfaction surveys that gets down into the most granular level. And one of the questions, or five questions in there was what do you think of the game? And so coming out of that survey, I out of a ten point scale, my number was 6.9. Okay. For those of you out there that, apply that to a, you know, a, a grade scale, that would be a D plus. For somebody who's this.
Ed Heil [00:15:46] Close to a C, though. Yeah.
John Schultz [00:15:47] Well, you know, that was my average in most of my schooling, but. And what? It was just a negative group out there just, wanting to pillage and burn and that kind of thing at the time. But it did make us have to say. All right. I was on the cover of magazines at the time, and there were a lot of things going on, and I had to say introspectively. What's that about? But it's what the members thought. So I had it was that point of inflection to say, you know, I need to respond to this. And we did, and it really allowed the club and it's kind of what has made me what I'm doing today in the governance area is to find the, and set out the roles and responsibilities, set objectives, and create clear lines of responsibility within the leadership of the club management committees, board. And it allowed us to grow that process to where we're setting objectives. Were establishing, long range plans. So everybody knew what we were doing. And we were then communicating that and using that as the means to which to share with the membership why we're doing what we're doing. And and it allowed us to really build on, those, things that, advanced the club and the leadership to where the trust became even greater. And so that, that that lesson allowed the communication, transparency and advancing, governance to the point where, Carmel was recognized as having one of the best governance, board policy manuals and processes and systems that is around.
Ed Heil [00:17:42] You're right. Got it. It's interesting. The, you can take that experience and sort of parlay that into turning it really into a positive, which is what you guys did. But, you know, I hate to I don't want to get overly granular here, but for some people who might sit there and go, well, but how did you do like when you would you tried to say, hey, we we made a mistake. We should have been more transparent about this. They how did you do that? Did you do it like in an email blast that went out to everyone? Because that's the first step. The rest is how you do everything after that. But what's that first step look like?
John Schultz [00:18:16] Yeah, it and this tends to be, how most of us operate with doing the newsletter. You know, the newsletter is due on the 10th. And by the and that's the day everybody starts doing the newsletter and then, you know, all the different communication pieces, whether it's the website, social media or wherever it is, we're always in our reach. I say we, are always but it tends to be reactive. We need to respond to this instead. Let's get proactive and. Yeah, and at the time, my communications director, came up with the idea that let's get ahead of it, and, let's put together a calendar of 12 months and let's go ahead and figure out what the topics are that we're going to share with the membership. Every year we get the same comment from, the members that there's no grass on the fairways. You just cut it down and burned it to the ground every spring. Well, it's because the leaf blade drops all of it, the grass drops all of its leaves, and there's nothing but a stock left. It happens every year. It's the same grass. That's how Bermuda grass acts. And so we would get these complaints. Let's go ahead and answer the question in advance. So we took the opportunity. And it's 12 months based on each department. And every department has a different set of things that they're going to then talk about, and share with the membership. And it's generally the same story rewritten every single year or message because it tends to be, you know, what's cyclical. And then we just, add to it and it's now a big spreadsheet that's, you know, many pages, many depth, of topics. And, and we just, we just keep adding to it. And it was really a successful piece to keep us ahead of the message.
Ed Heil [00:20:12] Interesting. So by doing that, you're you're sort of removing the possibility of someone questioning and being very upfront about the, the various issues that are that are going to happen. Like, you know, it like you said, like every year it's sort of the same thing.
John Schultz [00:20:26] Yeah. Try to get ahead of the ones that you can, because, you know, there's going to be something that that surprises you, right? Try to be prepared for the, events that are in front of you. And then, when you're surprised on something, hopefully there's some trust built in. Or the best answer is when we the staff don't have to give it. It's when a member read it somewhere or knows it from another source, and they answer the question to say, hey, you know, that was listed over here on the website, or this is over here, and I heard it over, you know, through the committee system, using the board and the committees to be, talking heads for what we're doing and how it's getting out. There is another means to get the information to the membership. That way they feel engaged with what is happening.
Ed Heil [00:21:14] Let's talk to let's talk about you touch earlier about, you know, on that the time where there was, perceived lack of transparency and clarity around vision or whether that was I, it sounds like that was something that was happening, but, and you said something about a fact is like different factions, which which happens. I mean, I don't I don't know if there's a club in America that hasn't experienced that in a group of people that rally around in a, a contrarian view, potentially. In the time that you managed those situations, did you have sort of a go to way of handling those or what was, you know, and I guess, you know, at the time it can really feel like crisis for, for a general manager or for club leadership. What did you learn in those situations?
John Schultz [00:22:02] Yeah, some of those are the school of hard knocks. And, having spent nine years in the Marines, I tend to, meet things head on, and, weren't necessarily, thinking about how to persuade somebody. I would just try to knock them over, but that doesn't work anymore certainly and the, idea of moving forward. Yeah, it's, we had quite a few, at Carmel. When I first got there, there was a situation where the seniors and honorary members had put in a situation where they wouldn't pay any dues after the fact after they were 65 years old. So changing that system, was was difficult and trying to, you know, get them to understand why you couldn't just use the club for the rest of your life for free. And put that burden on the rest of the membership. And we would use what would be common, tools out there today, whether it's, fireside chats or, you know, newsletters or just going out and talking to, smaller groups, getting getting the board members to maybe go out and talk to smaller groups, one on one and share with them and, and allowing members to be heard. Probably 90% of it is just that they've been heard and that we're going to consider their side of things because they they think some think that the board is so close minded, they're only doing these things for their own best interest. And I've yet to see any club that behaves in that manner. And isn't, thinking what's the best for the entire club? And, and it isn't their personal agenda. It tends to be how does this impact the club in the best way. And that isn't necessarily understood outside the boardroom.
Ed Heil [00:23:57] You know, it's so interesting you just said that because that is sort of the perception, I think, of a lot of members of clubs, which is that, oh, people just want to get on the board, or they want to lead committees because they want to push their own initiative forward. But you're saying you really haven't seen a lot of evidence of that? Yeah.
John Schultz [00:24:16] That's true. It happens. There are some. But they've got to persuade a a larger group that their agenda item is something they need to do. And then after they get into the board, I mentioned these, two gentlemen who got on the board by petition, after they got in and sat and listened and actually heard the information firsthand and were part of of those decisions, not a single thing changed of what they wanted to do, because then they had the information. And this again, is that "a-ha" moment when we shared it with people, they went, oh, well, that makes sense. Why wouldn't you do that? Well, without sharing it, without, making it, known. The question is there, and they think something frivolous is go or, you know, something else is going on behind the door, right?
Ed Heil [00:25:10] Something nefarious. Yeah.
John Schultz [00:25:12] No, there you go.
Ed Heil [00:25:13] And I'm not a great you know, I'm not. I'm not like, I'm a C student, too. So someone taught me that word. So I just want to sort of maybe sort of, pivot a little bit to this where, and just with some of the conversations that I've had recently with different people and, we just did an episode with Frank Vain, from the McMann Group, as you're, well, familiar and, and he's referring to this time, it's like the next golden age of clubs and coming out of the pandemic. And, one of the things he said in a talk that I saw him at was, the pandemic is the single best thing to happen in private clubs. And with that, now you've got, waitlists and you've got a lot of younger members, you know, that for that prime 42 year old young family that's looking to join a club, that, you know, they're excited. They want this experience. It's just maybe a little bit different than, the other things they've done in their lives. And so how do you, how much of this at Carmel would you have with as far as like balancing the enthusiasm and the things that young members want versus the old guard and what they're really, you know, what they think is right. What they think is the, you know, is best for the club. And you have much of that in the time you were there?
John Schultz [00:26:29] Oh, sure. So and we had this situation starting in about 2016. I remember because we, we were starting to get, negative feedback that we couldn't no, the members couldn't sign up for events and we couldn't, there were waiting lists for everything, and we couldn't, they couldn't utilize the club, which is a threat to the club, because if that gets around, well, you can join and you might be able to get on the golf course. At the time, the golf course was not playing as many rounds as they are today. But why would you want to? Because you can't get into any of the events. So we had to actively try to manage out of that situation. So some of it was how we were taking reservations. Some of it's, expanding the number of events, creating more. And so it, it led us to just taking an introspective look and saying, how can we solve for this challenge and this problem with, expanding, creating more and, and or utilizing the, the facility in a, in a more proactive way. And so back to your question. My answer would be not very popular with the older, members that are out there, and I wouldn't necessarily share this in my marketing, pieces, but the members that are joining are 42.5 years old with 2.5 kids, and that's our market. And if you just take the business sense here and apply, who's our market and where are we going to get members from and who are going to replace them? It's the 42.5 year olds that we need to be focusing on. It isn't that we're not trying to be multi-generational and create, programs and events and things that that all ages can take advantage of, but our primary market, we're we're the younger members. And so that was our focus in swimming pools and, events and creating, you know, engagement, for that group that would expand who we are. So that was that was our primary motivation.
Ed Heil [00:28:40] In the in the spirit of our earlier conversation around transparency and things like that, how how open were you with some of the older members that this is where we need to go and this is what we need to do. And and how was that received?
John Schultz [00:28:53] Well, if and I don't remember all those conversations, but when you do $60 million of, improvements, and these are aspirational improvements. This isn't just maintenance capital or replacing the roof and that kind of thing. These are these are "Golden Easter eggs" that we're putting out, without assessment. And when you share with them that this is how we're generating the money to, to and the new members to fund those improvements. And it's not on the back of the current members. They kind of get the message pretty quickly that that's the, the tool to to create the, the demand and, and the energy around people wanting to join. So, so they're, you know, if, if they're not having to come off the hip and pay for some of these improvements and things, they're, they're like, great, do it all. We're we're all we're ahead. Why not?
Ed Heil [00:29:49] Yeah. Interesting. So, as we kind of turn towards bringing this home, in your experience, I mean, for club managers that might be listening to this GM's, I should probably say, or even, you know, board leaders, that are trying to navigate some of these things and they're trying to make everyone happy where they're trying to make sure, like, we want to do some things that maybe some capital improvements that some members or the young members are on board, but the orders are not. And there might be assessments. What is your message to them? How do they, you know, from what you've seen, what's worked, what hasn't worked? How what would you say to them?
John Schultz [00:30:31] So Carmel started off on this and unknowingly, had this, net worth and this growth over time, just by the demand, the activity and the success that we had, we we didn't look out 20 years and go, oh, we want to have an 8%, net, you know, growth over time. And that's our goal. We took care of it on the, operating side with, with the budget, and we took care of it, with the demand. I would say, for those clubs that are out there, that are that might want to look at it, you've got to figure out how to maintain the club as at the status quo with basic dues and the capital fees, and to take care of the the everyday and what you what you have today. And then the growth and the aspirational things come through assessments and, and through the opportunities that that come out there with, the new member growth, especially since there's a cap on generally there's a cap on membership in many clubs and that growth isn't unlimited. So, you know, it's capital planning. It's it's looking out, in the future and being able to project, what's the membership, numbers, what are the initiation fees? What are the replacement costs of of all of the, assets that are already there? And the current members need to understand that the, the replacement cost of those items are their responsibility. It's it's not it shouldn't be on the new members to have to replace the old equipment and the worn out, irrigation system or the roof or the whatever. It's it's on the current members that need to be taking care of the club financially.
Ed Heil [00:32:22] Yeah, that is the old, this assessment is actually not for what's coming is for what you've actually enjoyed for the last 20 years or whatever. Yeah. Interesting. How important, how how important is strategic planning in this process to, you know, not only just from a. Health of the club. But even for just bringing members together and rallying around a vision in a in a goal.
John Schultz [00:32:50] Well, this is one of the tougher questions that are out there because there are so many facets to strategic planning. Whether we're talking about governance and, leadership and the board. What what where is the club going? What's it founded on? What are its core values? What are the principles that are going out there? And I would say the area here, that's most important is setting those annual goals and objectives in search of what that five, ten year strategic plan is going to be. So it builds on it and it keeps you in a forward, forward momentum and not just a one time, event where we're going to write the strategic plan, put it on the shelf, and, and it just sits there. One of my major goals in the Club Leadership Alliance is to get rid of three ring binders. Those three ring binders that go up on the shelf are just become useless. Instead, this just needs to become an annual update. And and it's a continuous process to ensure that the club's moving in the right direction. And then the bigger every five year kind of thing is to take that introspective look and say, all right, are we still on track? Does something major need to be changed in where we're going? Because the the core values and the vision and mission shouldn't change every year, but, we should set it up so that it's ongoing. And every year the objectives are set to solve a little bit of where we're going.
Ed Heil [00:34:33] Awesome. John, thanks so much for, for joining me and for sharing all of your insights. I'm sure it's helping a lot of people and, helped me a little bit as well. So thanks so much. And thank you for listening. If you find this podcast helpful. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep crushing your club marketing.
The private club industry enjoys a steady resurgence, with waitlists becoming the norm in markets across the U.S. Furthermore, experts predict the greatest generational wealth transfer in history, from Boomers to Gen X and Millennials, by 2045. So, how will this new generation spend its time and money?
Frank Vain, CEO of the McMahon Group, joins us this episode to share his perspective on the future of private clubs, and what he believes will be critical for their continued success.
Vain's perspective is unique. As the leader of the McMahon Group, he works with club leaders nationwide, surveys members, creates long-range strategic plans, and provides counsel. Therefore, he has a pulse on the industry and insightful thoughts on what clubs are, and should be, considering as they plan for the future. Generational experts will tell you that Gen X, Y, and Z value very different things than Boomers, and they measure their status and identity in distinct ways. How clubs adjust to these various demographics could be the difference between continued success and failure.
The make-up of future club members is changing, and club leaders are struggling to keep longtime members happy while attracting new, younger ones. This balancing act involves many factors, and Frank Vain and his team at The McMahon Group help each club discover the right approach -- because, as we know, all clubs are unique!
Key Moments
Podcast Transcript
Ed Heil [00:00:00] You're listening to Crushing Club Marketing, a podcast for progressive club leaders looking to increase their club's revenue. Time for Change begins right now.
Ed Heil [00:00:12] The private club industry continues to enjoy a resurgence, with waitlists becoming the norm in markets around the U.S.. On top of that, experts predict the greatest generational wealth transfer in history from boomers to Gen X and millennials by 2045. So how will this new generation choose to spend their money and time? Frank Vain, CEO of the McMahon Group, joins me today and shares his perspective on the future of private clubs and what he believes will be critical to the continued success of private clubs in the future.
Ed Heil [00:00:44] Thanks for listening. So, Frank Vain has a unique perspective as the leader of the McMahon Group. He works with club leaders across the country. Surveying members, creates long range strategic plans for clubs and provides his counsel, his advice is experience to club leaders so that clubs can make the best decisions for their clubs. He has a pulse on the industry and a perspective on what clubs are doing and what they probably should be doing as they plan into the future. And generational experts will tell you that the values of Gen Xers, Gen Y, Gen Z was totally different than the values of Boomers. And they'll also explain to you how they measure their success or their status or credibility in a totally different way. So for Boomers, where a country club is totally, you know, status type thing, it is not really the case necessarily for Gen X, Y and Z peers. In fact, they're more concerned and more interested in experiential type of engagements than they are things like club memberships. So the landscape of future club members is changing. And yet club leaders today who are typically a little bit older are trying to figure out how to balance keeping longtime members happy while attracting young, newer numbers or new younger members, if you will. There are so many factors in this balancing act to consider, and Frank and his team at the McMann Group are helping to figure out what is right for each club. Because, as we all know, all clubs are different. So here's my conversation with Frank Vain. Well, Frank, thanks so much for joining me today.
Frank McMahon [00:02:36] Well, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ed Heil [00:02:38] Yeah. So, boy, a lot to cover today. And in what you have called the golden age of clubs or some variation. Sorry, I don't have that, but the golden age of clubs, I guess. Let's start there. What? When you talk about that, what does that mean?
Frank McMahon [00:02:57] Well, I think, you know, it's a combination of things. I mean, in one way, it signifies that we're a little bit out of the wilderness. And in a way, you know, certainly, you know, the financial the Great Recession, 2009, 10, 11 were, you know, pretty tough period, a very tough period for clubs. And and they came back in sort of fits and starts after that. So you had really a good, gosh, 10 or 15 years there of some pretty challenging environment for for most clubs. And then, you know, and so the golden age and saying, you know what I'm trying to signify and that is that while it is an industry that that is subject to to ups and downs over time, we've seen that in the past. I think there is more here. There's a combination of things happening that that are more enduring. And so the golden age signifying that there was a convergence of sort of lifestyle, really a lot of that triggered by the pandemic was certainly a big part of it. There's innovation, whether spurred by the pandemic or other factors. Clubs have really changed quite a bit over the last several years. And then there's demographics. The demographics have turned in their favor where, you know, particularly the millennials now are at the age where club membership makes social and financial sense for them. So that whole golden age is meant to say, yeah, you know, things go up and down. And obviously if there's another major economic break like we saw in 2008, you know, sort of all bets are off, you know, But but really, that doesn't see any sign of that happening in that with with all these things converging at one time. It really ought to be something that lasts for quite a while. And I would say it's, you know, six, seven, eight, nine years you can look out there and all these factors seem to be playing into their favor.
Ed Heil [00:05:05] So maybe if we can put some of that in context within you know, as you started, you go back several years and the industry is in a pretty constant decline up until the pandemic. Is that right?
Frank McMahon [00:05:22] Yes. Yeah. Really over over the course. And I say 2008 or 9 there, but really over the course of a good, you know, 20 year period of time. Number of clubs declined, number of golfers, if you're a club with golf, you know a number of golfers in the US declining for a long period of time, particularly among younger people. You know, you certainly saw the number of clubs went out of business about 20 to 25% of. And we're tend to follow what I would call the, you know, the member owned club. You know, there are other quasi commercial entities and semi-private kind of things that are in there. But when you think about the sort of the traditional member owned club, they all their numbers were down. So yeah, I think by every metric you could say it was a I would say they were out in the wilderness for, for quite a while. Yeah.
Ed Heil [00:06:15] And then I've heard you say that the pandemic is the single best thing that has happened to private clubs. Is that, in what way? Well said.
Frank McMahon [00:06:25] Well, it really again, it's a it's a bit of a combination of things, but I think at its core, it just it it made evident their their value. Why do I why do I want to belong to a club? And so whether it was for access to services otherwise difficult to come from come by or, you know, sort of their personalized service or dealing with an a, a, a group of known parties, if you will. Right. That all of a sudden smaller was better, more intimate and privacy was better. People were nervous about sort of being out in the public. We were cautioned about you know, cautioned about that. So, you know, a lot of that, you know, just really expose that, well, hey, a club is more than access to a golf course or a swimming pool or whatever. It's it's a community. It's a collective group of of of people. There's an approval process. There's a, you know, a communications process and a whole sense of community around that where we were all searching for that, right. Or going Covid as that was suddenly yanked away from us in many ways and, you know, cautioned about going outside or traveling on an airplane or going to a meeting or going to a restaurant club, stood out as a bit of a beacon during that period. So while I could still enjoy a lot of those things, but also do it in a way where I felt a little a little more comfortable because even though those members could have been susceptible to the same disease as everybody else was, there was just sort of a sense that you're a member and a kind of of that extension of family almost, as opposed to something worse, you know, completely out there in the public.
Ed Heil [00:08:16] In some ways. Did. Do you think the pandemic reintroduced people to private clubs may be in a different way? I mean, some of the stereotypes of private clubs and private club members for so long was, you know, I mean, especially if you're a golf club with limited activity. But it seemed like through the pandemic, it brought families together and community together, like you're saying, in a way that was. In some ways more fulfilling, enriching than it was before.
Frank McMahon [00:08:53] Well, I think that's right. Yeah, I think it kind of turned it on its head. Right. You you had you know, you had kind of a political and social environment of getting over that same take, that same 20 year period, 2000 to 2020, where, you know, exclusive, exclusivity was sort of judged a little more negatively. And all those things sort of, you know, you were seen as not as our exclusive exclusive access, but exclusionary, discriminatory, you know, those sorts of negative connotations assigned to it. All of a sudden it turned that on its head because it said sort of, well, hey, I get it. You know, I, I get why I would want to be part of a smaller group and then share value, share activities and experiences within that group. And so as opposed to exclusive exclusivity being seen as this this pejorative and you don't want me sort of thing, it was seen as, Oh, that's a way to build a little network there and and a group and thrive and grow even within a rather challenging environment that was going on around them. So yeah, I think it flipped that on its head and said, Well, actually there are some there are some value there to all that. And and I get it. And you know, and you saw that call because prior to that it was often interesting anyway. And once you had that negative perception about being in a club and clubs as they were struggling often had this goal, well, it's maybe it's too expensive, maybe we should do this or that. And all of a sudden it was more value. The price went away, initiation fees went up, the dues went up and all those kinds of things. And so the value perception increased dramatically and, you know, dollars and cents followed it up with that. But it was really the sense of, okay, this is this is what I want from, from a from a group.
Ed Heil [00:10:59] Yeah. And as someone who consults with with private clubs and I've heard you talk about this, but it's the the innovation that occurred at the start of the pandemic. And I remember conversations that I was having with different people, and I was floored by how quickly clubs were putting things into motion, you know, you know, whether it was a little igloos that were going up, especially in some of the north courses up north or whatever they were. And, you know, their bureaucracy was gone. Things in there were innovating around family. And it was it was it was pretty remarkable. So now here we are at this point where it seems like people have been, I don't know if this is true or not, but it's almost like there's this renewed sense of value for your club and in how much you can do and what you want to get out of it. Matched with this golden age, this run now and I reading some other things about the amount of generational wealth that's going to occur in the next several years, right? So there are going to be a lot of younger people with more, you know, potentially more discretionary income that they can spend towards that. Are those all sort of the things that like, as you were saying in the beginning, are those also factors as it relates to the next 8 to 10 years?
Frank McMahon [00:12:21] Well, I think so. As long as that and that sort of as you turn to the future and say, you know, and I think most of our clubs are saying right now, how do we keep it going? Right. That's a that's a good question at all club leaders should be asking. And I point out and you're you're wise to mention this whole notion of of innovation, you know, the the notion that people wanted community and privacy during Covid and, oh, yeah, I get that, right. That's a pretty easy connection. They wanted outdoor recreation. So yeah, golf boomed out, outdoor tennis boomed, all that. I think you could get there on those pretty quickly. I think the innovation piece of it often goes underreported. And and yet it was the way that clubs responded and it and it just shows and it should be a good lesson for club leaders that a lot of those things you say happened overnight, whether it was let's all of a sudden start, you know, Tuesday night tacos on the terrace or whatever or. Now building the igloos outside the great little City Club in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The Westmoreland Club had a courtyard next to it, primarily a dining club. And all of a sudden they popped these igloos out there and people are out there in the courtyard having fun, you know? I suspect if management had gone to the board a couple of months in advance of that and say this winter we're going to try igloos outside and people are gonna dine in them, that's an idea that that dies at the boardroom table. You know, I think so. So they were there. So they were ready to respond. And, you know, I don't know, I guess somewhat some of those ideas are work and some of them won't work. But it was the fact that they were so willing to try because in many ways they were scared to death. I think many of us being included at the beginning of Covid, that was my my first reaction was, "oh my gosh, here we go again". You know, it's going to be another 2009 or 2010 and people aren't going to want to join clubs and we're going to have another raft of closures and all that. And of course, after about a 3 to 4 month period of time where all that was incubating, the future turned out to be far different. But yeah, whether, you know, clubs just took snack bars and made them in the outdoor restaurants or, you know, the igloos as we're mentioning, or put simulators or there were clubs that took they're all ballrooms, right? Because no, no more activities, no more group events. And they put, you know, simulators in the ballroom and all of a sudden people are in there hitting golf balls and having fun, you know? So, yeah, that that carried through and that that is a big takeaway is that I think that's just a lesson that there ought to be, you know, you can't reinvent the club every year, but having a healthy dose of innovation in your, you know, in your business plan and your strategic plan is extremely important.
Ed Heil [00:15:17] Yeah. Let's talk about who the clubs are targeting or maybe should be targeting in this golden age. What what are you seeing and what's your. Because I think for a long time they target guys that are I'm in my late 50s you know my age maybe a little bit older. It's you know, that that's the target member. But it looks a little bit different today, doesn't it?
Frank McMahon [00:15:43] Well, it does. And, you know, it's certainly a bit younger. I mean, again, you'll have the joining age versus, you know, I think the average club member nationwide still mid-fifties is you're talking, you know, 54, 55 is generally recognized as a, you know, pretty much the the profile of the average member. But the joiner, as you know, tends to be about a 42 year old couple. And a lot of joining happens age 35 to 45. And now that's again that's that's why we're very optimistic about the about this being able to continue into a golden age, that we continue to innovate and we continue to have demand for things like golf and tennis and some of these recreational activities, health and wellness. But the addressable market, so to speak, is expanding the you know, the millennials just now, the oldest, you know, where where clock the clock ever starts ticking on these demographic things. But if you just say, you know, 1980, right, then the the oldest millennial right now is 42, 43 years old. So they're getting right there and there's a whole cohort of 80 million people behind them that that suggest over the next decade, the number of people in their early 40s is on the increase. And so, you know, you just look at lifestyle in general, right? Look look at what's happening out there and, you know, housing. Right. All the demand for housing today and and schools that go along with that. You look at equity markets and the resilience and the amount of investment and capital flow that's happening there. Those all happen around a period of time where the middle age group is expanding. You can almost transport a lot of what's happening in the club world today. Back to the mid 90s, which was another good boom period for clubs. Guess what? The baby boomers were in the same position there, you know, at that point as millennials are now. And so you know so clubs should be thinking about that group and thinking about that they're ready to you know, they were very urban a decade ago. Our cities were booming and people want to live downtown. And we saw that renaissance in the American city. We're having a similar uptake now. And the American suburbs where those millennials who were 40, 42 years old had some kids. Now they got married a little later. I got married in the early 30s or so. Now they've got some six year olds and eight year olds and ten year olds, and they're ready to move to the suburbs, get to where the schools are. The. Houses with space and all those things that they need. And guess what? They need a club that helps socialize and get ingrained in the community, meet other people, meet other young families, or have outlets for those clubs where the kids are on the swim team or they're playing junior golf or, you know, just the family can go there for holiday brunches and, you know, those sorts of things. It's just right in their sweet spot. And so, yeah, I, you know, clubs ought to be targeting on and we all we think of it in a couple of ways Yeah you know you get the 6065 and over a group you're pretty set in your way at the club get that mid age group and they tend to they've got money and time. They're using the club quite actively more golf players played and things like that. And then you have the young family that's sort of 45 and under. So but that's the future, right? The older group is natural attrition. You know, they they move to Florida. Obviously the biggest thing is people get sick, they pass away or whatever they need to be replaced. And so that young group and that early 40s is is ready to come in and replace them. I think you've got a lot of people that are if we're offering the right things that they're looking for.
Ed Heil [00:19:37] Right. And I think that I mean and hence the I think the crux of the conversation because you know so many well, you hear generational experts talk about the country clubs don't mean the same thing to this younger generation than it meant to say the Boomers. And there are so many things they're interested in, whether it's travel or just other activities, experiential things with their with their families. Right. That you hear generational experts talk about. So given all that, you know, while there is this population that, you know, this this market, if you will, that's potentially available or that clubs can go after. What do clubs need to do differently, in your opinion, as a as it relates to amenities, messaging, how clubs position themselves in the experiences they offer these 42 year olds?
Frank McMahon [00:20:36] Sure. Sure. Well, I think I think the big one to really think about is their approach to to family is I've often said that the young the young members coming to the club today are bringing their children with them. But the punchline for all that is that they expect you the club to be actively programing and and ways kind of taking care of those kids while they're on campus. I think historically you go back to, you know, the Boomers and even pre prior to that children came to the club and it was almost a sort of, you know, you know, it could be seen and not heard sort of approach. Right. And and if you took your kids to dinner at the club, they were going to sit at the table and you were going to figure out how to keep them under control that whole time while they were sitting at the table and and making sure they weren't, you know, upsetting the apple cart and the quorum of the dining room or the club in general. They might have even come in with their little blazer on. Right. Right. To come in and set at dinner with you. Today's young family says, well, we're coming. We're going to have dinner. The kids probably are going to get a little rambunctious. Are you going to show them a movie down the hall and they're going to be able to go to the game room or you're going to do something for them? Of course, aren't you? While I'm having dinner, you know, and they they really have a hard time understanding why you wouldn't be doing that. And and frankly, it's not all that complex. It's not all that difficult to do. We typically have a lot of space and and all that, but it's about programing to ease that. Again, these families are busy, probably both adults. The likelihood that both adults are working is very, very high. So they're crunched for free time, so to speak. And so if the club is seen as, again, that refuge, they may want to be with the kids in doing something. But they also want to know that the family is there at the club and participating either jointly or separately in these kinds of activities. And so, you know, I think as the court looks to to to to satisfy that group, really recognizing that the children are vitally important in that whole equation and and the kids aren't coming to the club to be disciplined or to be told to sort of sit down and be quiet. They want them in. You know, they want them to learn something. They want to make sure that the junior golf or the junior tennis or whatever programs are, there's real instruction there. There's real training that goes along with that. I mean, I remember junior golf, right, was the mom and dad's would walk along the golf course with the kids and you just sort of made sure that nobody got hit, had with a golf club was kind of, you know, watching her golf was all about today. People want their junior golf the. There is instruction there and you to go along with that. And so at all levels, it's it's really programing across the spectrum there. And with with for this group in particular a real high priority on that. The families are welcome. Kids have spaces that they can enjoy. Pool locker rooms are no longer it's no longer acceptable to have these kind of, you know, industrial strength pool locker rooms, but something that's kind of attractive of the food and that sort of thing that you're serving now. All those things really saying that the family is really, you know, in the wheelhouse, really part of our mix. And you've thought about that in all aspects of physical facility too, and most importantly programing so that there's there's engagement.
Ed Heil [00:24:10] You know the idea of having club this more family friendly for lack of a better term it's it seems like you'd have a lot of club leaders that would agree with that and say oh yeah for sure, but it's how they they get from where they are to that in some cases that match with the fact that, you know, I mean, you talk to more people than I do. I'm sure in the in the space. However, it seems like everyone sort of a lot of clubs are making capital improvements. And in I know many clubs the decision is might be around something focused on whether it's a golf course and what we're doing with the golf course versus, gee, should we spend more money to update our dining services, to expand more families, family areas? What are you seeing out there as far as you know, where clubs are investing?
Frank McMahon [00:25:03] Yeah, well, you're you're correct in our opinion. And again, the core of McMahon's business as we got into the call, the space 40 years ago was actually an outgrowth of our architectural company and with with really a focus it was going to go around the country and do Cornell architecture and all and a lot of a lot of ways that's still a big driver in our business. But again, it's the strategy and the concepts that go behind that. But overall, that period of time we've been involved in a couple of billion dollars worth of capital projects. And yeah, it's a it's a you've seen few periods, if any, frankly, where there's been more capital spent. A number of clubs as well as the size of what clubs are doing. It's the number of clubs. We all read the periodicals and you know, we certainly experience it firsthand, the clubs doing, you know, 20, 25, $30 million projects, you know, values that are unheard of. And there's obviously some inflation in that. But but it's also the scope and the reinvention and the things that they're doing. So, yeah, they're spending a lot of money, you know, and really across the board, I'd say first and foremost, it is the reinvention of the food and beverage outlets, all of that, that that, you know, the people don't want stuffy and so the formal traditional dining room or the past and all that they want that same sort of feel that they get when they go to the new hip place downtown. So indoor outdoor, you know, the sliding nano walls, the outside sitting areas, the fire pits, the radiant heat so that we can sit outside in a room that's we're not just dining on the terrace. The terrace has actually been reinvented to be an outside dining room. Right. You know, that sort of thing. Certainly the bar areas that clubs are putting in that, you know, again, in the bar itself, as you know probably many members like a like a good drink. But the but the beauty of the bar room and these well, I'll say these pubs and such the clubs are building it's a space that you could just walk into by yourself and just see who's there. You know, I'm going to go to the wonder if Ed's at the club tonight or whatever, whoever just walk in that room as opposed to walking in the dining room and everybody's looking at you and, you know, it's just you and somebody else or whatever. You know, it's it's a it's a communal thing, you know, and a place to meet. So and I think they, you know, the upshot of that also that we always say is right everybody eats right. So, you know, you can you can affect the most members, the hardcore golfer to, you know, the social member who, you know, is just there for dining all them and their spouses and their families all have have the ability and the interest in using the food and beverage facilities. So I think that's been the, you know, probably the top reinvention area that you that you've seen. But, that continues right on down the line. There's a lot of stuff going on in the golf world. You know, I mean, we again, we think of golf as you make the course the best we can make it. And frankly, the data would often show that, you know, clubs may overspend on on the course itself. But today, a lot of money is going into the practice facilities, the simulators, the golf learning areas, the putting courses, the short game areas, top golf and other features, other other other facilities have shown us there's multiple ways to enjoy golf. And so, again, if you're going to be great in golf today, you've got to have a golf performance center. Or why would your members go to name any names or why would they go to so-and-so sporting goods to get fitted for their clubs? They need to be doing that at your club, right? That's that's why they join the club. And if the club wants to be cutting edge, it ought to have a fitting room. It ought to have, you know, simulators not only for fun, but for training or short game area and all that. And, you know, modern golfers have have seen that. So, you know, in almost all our activities, you know, you can you can talk about swimming. Right. Swimming used to be a swimming pool was a box of water with a, you know, a concrete deck around it. And there were some lounge chairs and there was a snack bar where you could get a, you know, a hamburger or a hotdog. And, you know, that was sort of the fine of the day. That was that was what people felt was there today. You know, the whole vernacular around the resort style pool complex. And there's spray grounds or slides or shade structures, upgraded food and beverage. And, you know, the water is about the same. You just need a good a good place to take a dip. But the environment around that is completely different than what what we had in the past.
Ed Heil [00:29:53] What's the biggest objection you hear from from club leaders when you advise them to do what they can to make their club more family friendly.
Frank McMahon [00:30:05] Well, I you know, it's it's the leadership in clubs like a like a lot of you know ultimately it's a bit of a of a of a political activity if you will. And then you know politics generally skews to the, you know, to to the older demographic. Right. Again, people who have time, they want to get back. They're well-meaning. But, you know, you've got a lot more time to serve on a club board if you're in your 60s than when you're in your 40s. Right. But again, unfortunately, there's a big disconnect, disconnect between what this what the 60 year old may be thinking and what the 40 year old really wants to buy. And, you know, and that's that's not to criticize. I'm I'm certainly above that myself. And, you know, not not all folks in that age group means that they're resistant to change or opposed to it. But I think it's often hard for them to really appreciate it. Right. And to really, truly, truly sense that demand and and always have a level of skeptical skepticism on this as well. You know, is it really worth the money? Should we make that expenditure this summer? So it's tough for them to walk in the in the shoes of that young group. And and, you know, there's often a you know, a sense that, well, they either take what we've always offered or they're not willing to pay up for what it would take to to have these kinds of services. And, you know, the reality is often very different. Again if it's for their family, the millennials are often willing to pay for that. You know, the millennials, on an inflation adjusted basis, the 40 year olds who are out there today make more money than the 40 year old baby boomer did. You know? So they they they are in a good financial position and are generally probably willing to spend it on their on their club. But, you know, I think it's that just that generational divide that's often you know, unfortunately the the to make those investments everybody in the club is probably going to have to pay up in one way or another. Right. So again, getting that that that older member to say, yeah, we ought to expand the fitness facility, we ought to renovate the pool complex. And by the way, you're going to get a, you know, a dues increase or, you know, a capital fee or an assessment to make those happen, You know, and that's why it's important in any capital plan to look across those age groups. You know, you can't just go one direction and say, okay, we're going to focus all our energy and focus all that on the pool. You're doing that pool. You ought to be giving the golfer something at the same time and, you know, doing shopping and dining or whatever. You tend to want to spread that around a little bit. So, you know, each of the each of the age groupings can look at it and think that they're going to get some feel they're going to get some real value.
Ed Heil [00:32:57] Out of it. Right. There is a policy. The politics of it all is is your say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what happens next? I mean, you know, some clubs are going to adapt and change. Some clubs may not and and obviously painting with really broad strokes here because some clubs are you know, not all clubs are the same, right. And different clubs have different ability to do things and these but generally speaking, what is your thought as far as how this plays out as we move forward with the Golden Age?
Frank McMahon [00:33:31] Yeah, well, it's certainly a better environment where, you know, the rich have gotten richer, so to speak. To use analogy, those clubs that can put up the capital have furthered themselves from the rest of the marketplace and even put themselves in even stronger positions than they were than they were in previously, which again, can, you know, eat up, you know, eat up the demand in the marketplace. Some of them have created capacity. And, you know, that allows them to expand their membership a little bit and things like that. Said the other way, right now, if your club is not doing very well in this environment, I'd be really concerned. You know, at the club today, that's not what I want. You know, we we we believe and the data suggests that more than half the clubs in the country have a waiting list today. So, you know, if you're in that other half and you're not close, well, then you you know, you've got some some real concerns. And, you know, it's it is time to shake it up a little bit and see that, you know, what what innovation can you put in there and how can you rally to do things? I think in a lot of ways, it's you know, we see those big projects as we're talking about, but things can be scaled. And that's, again, what we were talking about earlier about the innovation period. You know, I have a client that comes to mind Manor Country Club outside the Baltimore area. They had a, you know, a snack bar area that was, you know, the golf. First made the turn there. They put some money in that. They put some shade structures outside of it, bought some new furniture. This was not a big expense. And all of a sudden they had a really valued casual outside area on a lawn where people could just come in and chill and they were able to put a little money in the cooking equipment and picked up. You know, expanded that menu somewhat. So, you know, this was not a, you know, $1 million rebuild of the of the snack bar. It was taken an existing facility. And if they spent 50, $75,000 on that, but they they got to where they needed to get to for that. So I think a lot of times, you know, the there's a thought, well, we need to blow the whole place up. It's often very valuable to to incubate programs and, you know, move ahead with, you know, at least get your toe in the water and start to do things. I think the smaller clubs can do that. The trends are probably going to be the same across those demographic groups. You know how much you can do with each club will be determined by the market location and the support of, you know, the overall financial wherewithal of that community. But society's moving in the same direction. And and I think the goalposts are the same. You just have to figure off, you know, figure out how much of that you can bite off at any one time.
Ed Heil [00:36:30] Yeah. You talk about the clubs that are not maybe the clubs that don't have waiting lists for clubs that maybe aren't doing aren't doing real well. Obviously, change is something that I mean, they might as well think about it, right? Let's do something different. Shake it up. What about the clubs are doing well that that are sitting on their hands. Is there a risk in being cocky at this time?
Frank McMahon [00:37:00] Yeah. Well, I'd I'd say, you know, it's funny I the experience when I, you know, sort of first in the in the club industry, you would go and sort of make a sales call for lack of a better term. And then a lot of times, you know, we find ourselves in the metropolitan New York area and you go into a club and you might have had a pretty famous sort of brand before you showed up. You had a perception of, well, this is really a special place. And you got there and you looked around and you're like, Wow, this is this is not all that impressive on the surface here. And then you talk to some of the club leaders and everything else, they're like, well, it's fine. We're full, you know, So why why do we need to do anything where, you know, we're doing great. You know, so. And so, you know, that was just instructive for me that, you know, Yeah. Resting on your laurels or sitting back and saying, yeah, it's fine. That's that's not going to be a valued, you know, a valued club or valued membership down the line. You certainly see that in the Florida market today where, you know, some new and innovative and big clubs have come on and some of these clubs have spent. I mean, talk about club spending 30, 40, $50 million. All of a sudden, some of the older clubs in some of those market places, you can go on the west side of Florida right now and find some folks that were the market leaders, you know, a decade or so ago. And right now, they can look down the street and find that boy, you know, brand X as all of a sudden, really about quite you've got a lot going on over there, you know. So, yeah, I think in any business, you know, leaders need to be thinking about that 5 or 10 years and and challenging sometimes that's harder. You know, for our conversation a moment ago, we always say, you know, it depends on how much pain the club is in. Right. You know, in any business, if you're if you're, you know, staring at solvency or viability, you're probably at some point say, okay, well, let's try that because this isn't working, you know? You have to guard against that notion that we're there. Right. We're done. And so, you know, and and you see that a lot of clubs, clubs, clubs tend to approach both strategic planning and capital planning in an episodic way. Okay. We're going to do a strategic plan and we're going to check that box and it's done, or we're going to do a capital plan. We're going to go out and we've spent a lot of money here in 2025, and that's going to be done. And we're never going to have a capital program again, you know, or, you know, almost that that's inferred or assumed or sometimes even used as the language of selling the program as well. We haven't done anything for a decade or two decades or we're going to do this and then we're done. What we're trying to get clubs to realize is it's, you know, it's much more of a flywheel approach. You've got to put some investments in. You're going to create some new programs. You're going to have some new activity. Hopefully that's generating some new membership and new interest. But then you go back to the beginning again and you you know, you do your research to find out internally and externally what do people want? Are we providing it or what's next for us that you could continue to, you know, continue to do and to, you know, to push the thing forward and so know that that can you know, like I say, sometimes that can be a tougher, a tougher, you know, sort of sell or a tougher mission because, you know, everybody else is just sort of sitting there saying, well, it's fine. You know, gosh, we're full. We got a waiting list. This is just great, you know? Well, on the facility side, you know, facilities are always in some state of challenge. They're aging. And so there's some level of deterioration and, you know, getting enough capital to either maintain or improve is always a battle. Also, they you know, they might sit on their hands relative to that where if they could take an a more consistent way and manage their resources work under the concept of a of a long range plan and always be looking ahead. That's you know, that's what the great clubs can do is what a great organization can do.
Ed Heil [00:41:02] Yeah. Awesome. Frank, thanks so much for your time and for your your thoughts on this.
[00:41:10] And thank you for listening. If you find the content from this episode to be helpful, subscribe to Crushing Club Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep crushing your club marketing.
In the world of City Clubs, Jeff McFadden is well known and well-respected. As the CEO of the Union League of Philadelphia he has developed a national reputation as a club leader. Ask GM's who know him and they use adjectives to describe him like "Brilliant", "Visionary" and "remarkable."
In this episode, Jeff shares his involvement in transforming the Union League from a club in financial trouble generating about $7 million in annual revenue to a club that does about 100 million annually. He also shares his perspective on breaking away from old financial models and how to engage new, younger members with long-time club personalities. Is now the time to double down and invest in your club? Listen to Jeff's thoughts on that topic as well.
Noteworthy Moments:
Episode Summary:
For club leaders who feel stuck in the "same old, same old" Jeff provides a fresh take on some long time issues. He also offers some insightful thoughts around managing the issue of engaging younger new members while keeping long time members excited about the club. As the General Manager, now CEO of the Union League of Philadelphia, Jeff is gone from managing day to day operations of a city club to running a $100 million business. If you're someone hoping to create this kind of growth at your club and this type of career track for yourself, you'll appreciate Jeff McFadden's Perspective
Let's Connect
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Transcript
Ed Heil: [00:00:00] You're listening to Crush and Club Marketing, a podcast for progressive club leaders looking to increase their club's revenue. Time for Change begins right now. In the world of city clubs. Jeff McFadden is well-known and well-respected as the CEO of the Union League of Philadelphia. He's developed a national reputation as a club leader, as GM's who know him and these adjectives to describe him like brilliant, visionary and remarkable. In this episode of Crushing Club Marketing, I catch up with Jeff to learn more about his involvement in building the Union League from a club in financial trouble to a club that does about 100 million in revenue annually. He calls it accidental brilliance, but there's more to it than that. [00:00:44][44.7]
Ed Heil: [00:00:46] Your name has come up in so many conversations regarding just what a strong leader and visionary you are and in the work you've done at the Union League. And I know that it's difficult to talk about yourself in that way. But there was a quote that I read from Jason Straka from the Frye Straka, a global golf course design firm and Jason Straka, said Union League CEO Jeff McFadden is one of the most respected general managers associated with the golf business. He's credited with vastly expanding the Union League's social and business opportunities, knowing that many of their members on a vacation home down on the Jersey Shore and or vacation there quite a bit. Jeff saw an opportunity for a second golf facility, and obviously this is referring to one of the the golf clubs that the union now owns. But when you hear those kind of accolades, and that, what goes through your mind. [00:01:46][60.0]
Jeff McFadden: [00:01:47] Well, first of all, what goes through my mind is I pay Jason, which is a good thing. And that's probably why he had those nice accolades about us. But when he and Dana Frye did at Union League, National is just over the top. It's the Disney World of golf. It's spectacular. Over the last year, 27 holes. And now we're proud. I'm very proud of what I did. I think a lot of what we've done over the last 25 years was accidental brilliance through really just perseverance, hard work, you know, trying to get the right strategy and then keeping your head down and, you know, working through what you could do and keeping a smile on your face to, you know, that's. [00:02:27][40.1]
Ed Heil: [00:02:27] Yeah, well, you make it sound simple and, you know, I guess when it comes second, nature probably feels simpler. Although I know it's not always been super easy, as is. Most jobs are when you're there that long. But 25 years, you know, that's a long run. And your first two jobs in you know as I think GM and both both jobs five years and three years which is pretty typical, right. I mean, is that do I have that right? Help me out with that. [00:02:56][28.7]
Jeff McFadden: [00:02:56] Yeah. No, When I graduated the hotel school at Cornell, I went to the Cosmos Club as food and beverage manager, got promoted to assistant GM clubhouse manager. And then my first GM job is in Denver, Colorado, at the University Club, which I never thought I'd move back to the East Coast from Colorado. But I did. Yeah, right. When I got headhunted to go to the Union League at at age 30. So good times. [00:03:20][24.1]
Ed Heil: [00:03:21] Guess, you know, at age 30. What did the Union League see in you at that age, especially looking back now? I mean, what's it like looking back now and, you know, knowing what you were like then? I mean, what do you think they saw in you that time? [00:03:34][12.4]
Jeff McFadden: [00:03:34] Well, I think in in reality, I think I was the fifth person they offered the job, too. So, you know. [00:03:40][5.2]
Ed Heil: [00:03:40] You sort of you I wish I got I got a vet that won out. But yeah. [00:03:44][3.5]
Jeff McFadden: [00:03:45] You know, right place, right time, situation. It just worked out well. The league was struggling in the late eighties, 1990s, as Philadelphia was struggling quite a bit before Ed Rendell, who was a gregarious mayor, wind up becoming governor of Pennsylvania. Just a terrific leader, inspirational type of person. So, you know, when I was young enough, probably dumb enough and not experienced enough to know what I was getting into. And the the more senior statement statements in the club industry probably looked at the league and said, I don't want to touch it. Right. It's it had sort of had terminal cancer. At the time it wasn't bankrupt, but it was very close to bankrupt. But I saw that it had great bones as well. It had a great foundation. You know, at 30, you think you can change the world? I think I've done well in changing the league. And it was just being again at the right place at the right time for the right situation. And we made a bad decision or a mistake. We were young enough to outhustle the mistake or the bad decision. Right. [00:04:57][71.7]
Ed Heil: [00:04:57] That's interesting. So what has made you successful for so many years? I mean, if you just take the years alone, that's an incredible achievement in in the private club space to be at one place for 25 years. What do you think has made you successful in that role? [00:05:13][15.8]
Jeff McFadden: [00:05:13] Well, I think the way we acquired and operate the club as sort of, you know, being an innovative type organization. Now, when I did my independent study at Cornell, I studied close to 5000 city clubs throughout the world. It was from the 15 person City Club to the to the club that had 5000. And you needed three things. You needed to have parking, you needed to know, because I gave members assurance coming in from the suburbs that they had a place to park. As you get older, you have more net worth to spend. You get a little worried about where you're going to park. The data showed that that was a huge part of being a successful city club. Yeah. So we bought a parking garage right when I got there, and then we just doubled our revenues in in less than one year. While the number two thing at the greatest city clubs in the world shared was they never sold their land and built the site skyscraper and put their club at the top of the building because eventually the I guess after the data shows after three days that you went away and then the elevator became a barrier to entry, there were a few clubs in New York, Manhattan and Tokyo that buck that trend. Windows on the World, that was a public restaurant. There was a small private club component of Windows on the World. But truly, if you were successful, members had to walk into your club, right? So the league had that as well. And then you need overnight rooms. You have all the expenses running a club, marketing, administration, engineering, you name it. If you add some overnight rooms to the equation, the profitability or the surplus that they could throw off departmentally, you know, $0.60, $0.70 on the dollar really were work well. So I was able to. Run those three things when I first got there and then reinvest into the club with incredible dining business centers, cigar bar, you know, fitness centers, that sort of thing. And so for if I look at my 25 years, the first ten or 15 was taking that incredible foundation that the league was all about. Investing in that. Growing, growing the institution. And then after ten or 15 years, we use the profitability or the surplus that was gained to really have a longer strategic plan that we entitled "Building Your Granddaughter's Club". Yeah. And and that was you know, that was sort of a light bulb moment, like, okay, are we just going to be the greatest 1965 club in 2005? Right. Or, you know, in in 2025, were we going to be what your granddaughter and great granddaughter are going to want in a private club? You know how to how do they socialize? How do they use it? You know, we started asking ourselves all those questions. [00:08:13][179.3]
Ed Heil: [00:08:13] I love that. I want to come back to that next, but if we just step back to you being 30 years old, when you took that job and, you know, you come in and, you know, buying the parking structure and then you started, it sounds like, you know, in the first ten years, there's a lot of innovation and things moving forward. And I know that some of the games that will pay attention to our conversation, they're younger. There's definitely a trend towards a lot of younger jobs or it seems that there is. How did you get their trust, at that you know, I mean, and what was the mindset of the board? Were they just like, hey, we've done our homework, We know Jeff's the right guy, let him go do it. But, you know, there are a lot of clubs out there who are like, Yeah, we'll get him in there, but we'll just tell him what to do. I mean, how do you know what I mean? How do you get in there and earn their trust and really go like that? [00:09:06][52.7]
Jeff McFadden: [00:09:07] So and is fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time, as I said, because of their how they were struggling financially. But with that said, you can't go in and change the world overnight. You need to start small, you need to show a small victory and then capitalize on each of those victories. You know, as they say, having, you know, having, you know, one bite at a time, you know, you just that's way you have to do it. I think we we had, you know, coming in in 1998 on the heels with Ed Rendell being the mayor of the Republican National Convention, was held in Philadelphia in 2000. We had a tradition as a Republican club. So that was really, you know, helped us springboard into reinvesting in our facilities. But I convinced them to do little things, that the garage was a big thing. But we had already started putting new carpeting, new wallpaper, you know, one dining room at a time, hiring younger, more robust, enthusiastic, vibrant servers and studying what people wanted on food menus and that and so forth. And we just basically started with one dining room and then did another dining room and then did a bar and then bought the parking garage. And the parking garage was, was a struggle. We it was a first assessment we had at the league in 50 years. We did not have a lot of support for it. Yeah. So we, we did wind up getting about 67%, 68% in favor of it. Yeah. And, and I figure just a quick story. I was very transparent because I was I was very young at that time. So I shared everything. I still and I still am as transparent as they come. I just don't lead with my chin. Right. What's actually going on in things? [00:11:01][113.7]
Ed Heil: [00:11:01] I gotta remember that. [00:11:01][0.6]
Jeff McFadden: [00:11:02] Yeah. You know, it makes talking so much or sharing so much as being transparent. I know that's not necessarily people want to be let right. Need to be led and you want to be transparent in everything you do. You just don't need to tell everybody everything every minute of the day. Right? [00:11:19][17.4]
Ed Heil: [00:11:20] Right. Yeah. No doubt. [00:11:21][1.1]
Jeff McFadden: [00:11:21] With social media and, you know, it just seems that's what the next generation is doing. Right. So we were we were we were trying to figure out we needed to do an assessment. It was very was it very much about $2,000 a member. And we you know, they were hemming and hawing about paying that. And and one member said, could I get my money back at a town hall meeting? And I said, Mr. Grossman, you are absolutely brilliant. That's a great idea. We're going to make your assessment refundable. All you have to do is propose a new member. And it was like a light bulb went off and we ran with that. You had actually proposed two members you got $1,000 back for your first member, 1000 for your second. I love it. This is back in 1999. And basically all the naysayers and we still had it still 30 to 33% of the people voted against it. I would say to them, I said, you don't have any friends or colleagues or business people that you could propose to become a member of the league to help us out, to make sure, you know. And that was on top of all the importance of parking, obviously. Right. And then we were about a $7 million operation. We bought the parking garage. And I think the next year after it opened, we were 21, $22 million operations. Wow. Doubled, tripled what we were doing. And all it is is take the you know, the folks from the mainline or from South Jersey who are uncomfortable coming into an urban environment. Yeah, we just assured that they had parking. Right. We just said we have valet parking. It's right next to the club. [00:12:59][97.8]
Ed Heil: [00:12:59] Yeah. Safety and convenience. [00:13:00][1.1]
Jeff McFadden: [00:13:01] Yeah. [00:13:01][0.0]
Ed Heil: [00:13:02] Exact easiest things. [00:13:02][0.8]
Jeff McFadden: [00:13:03] Wow. So and so. I rode that pony for a long time,Ed, the parking garage. You know, work magic for me for the next ten years. [00:13:11][8.5]
Ed Heil: [00:13:11] Yeah, no doubt. I love that. Let's talk about building your granddaughter's club. When did you come up? When did you, like, come up with that phrase that I love that I read that one of the articles. [00:13:20][8.6]
Jeff McFadden: [00:13:21] Yeah. It just, you know, obviously being a men's club for so long, over 125 years of the men's club, we allowed women in 1986. The idea is there's there's so much connotation in that phrase granddaughter building your granddaughters time, meaning that we're becoming progressive more, you know, more forward thinking, more inclusive. And I also got everyone thinking not about themselves, but about the next generation and the generation after them. So I think that's almost more important than than the gender identification of saying building your granddaughters club the to show and to get the culture of our members to think that yes, we've been here 162 years, we're going to be here another hundred and 62 years. Let me not get tied up in minutia of today, but think about tomorrow and you see this and golf clubs and country clubs where they fight over a new irrigation system, you know, an 80 year old to say, hey, I don't want to pay for the new irrigation system. I'm not going to be here. Right, right, right. And you say to that person, well, you're not paying for the new irrigation system, you're paying for the irrigation system you consumed over the last 30 years. Right. And and and that's the sort of the mindset that we started to and now people are like they're proud when we build we have built into their views a capital do structure but they're proud with the the advancements that we have made, the investments that we've made and they don't they don't think of it as for them. They think, Wow, my granddaughter and my grandson are going to love this place. And it's just a little nuance, a little change. [00:15:05][104.6]
Ed Heil: [00:15:06] But I've not heard people position it like that. What has been your overall philosophy, you know, and how do you share that as far as like keeping people thinking forward? Like, is there an overarching sort of, I don't know, almost like value or belief that you have that you sort of, you know, live by that way? [00:15:24][18.3]
Jeff McFadden: [00:15:25] That's a it's a great question. Yeah. I think it's it's always thinking about the future. And I and I and I tell members and a lot of clubs do not do this. We have $54 million in debt, which people are like, Oh, oh, that's a lot of money. And then I don't know. And we also have $20 million in the bank, right? And if we had saved a dollar per member per month since our inception in 1862, yeah, we'd have $1,000,000,000 in the bank. And when you tell stories like that to members and you know it resonates and it gets to them that, you know, you're you're not just here to enjoy the club, but you are a steward of the club. You are a steward of the institution. You know, you need to think of it in that capacity. And for 100 years, clubs never did. Right? Right. They matter of fact, to this day, your investment income of a 501c7 is taxable. So I'm trying to tell people that they need to start a foundation to do a charitable set aside for their foundation. Do you know, do well by doing good in your community and people? Some of the greatest clubs. And I'll say, Jeff, we don't have any investments, we don't have any investment yet. I said, What do you mean? You're Aronomik, you're Marion Golf, you're Pine Valley, you don't have investment income. Like now we don't have any debt, We don't have any savings. We live hand to mouth, right? And then we assess for when we want to build something. I said, I just don't think that's the right way to run the railroad. I think, you know, you you boil the frog slowly, you add capital dues monthly into your regular dues, and you always plan for the future. You don't you don't pay off your mortgage without saying without saving for your kids college education. Right. It's right. It's not rocket science. [00:17:26][121.7]
Ed Heil: [00:17:27] Yeah, well, but why don't more ask why is it so commonsense? You But I mean, so many clubs operate exactly how you just explain it. [00:17:35][7.3]
Jeff McFadden: [00:17:35] Because they let emotion get in the way. You know, they bail They they you know, we're all self-serving, though, don't get me wrong. I'm self-serving as well. But, you know, if you don't have the mentality that you're part of a greater good. You know, you can easily get into. You know? You know, what are we spending today and how can I have the best results and the best experience at the least cost and. And group think happens, very quickly, you know, great leaders, you know, can change culture quickly and then you can get into the abyss quickly as well. In that group thinking and psychology of pricing, whether it's dues or golf fees, food and beverage, menu prices, whatever is important to understand because people want value, right? They still want value, and yet they're going to do that. And we're trying you know, we're trying to ride the wave, tap into a new way of thinking, a new way to run finances and hopefully don't take off. [00:18:37][61.9]
Ed Heil: [00:18:38] And I mean, what you're saying just makes so much sense. But let me throw a wrinkle in on this where it's like a lot of times people will join committees of clubs, they'll join boards and clubs because they have something they have an agenda that they are pushing, right. And they want to get one. I get that. I'll make sure this gets done. How do you how have you been able to manage that? Because that's like that's such a reality that people struggle with. [00:19:03][24.8]
Jeff McFadden: [00:19:03] Well, that takes investment, believe it or not. And here's the investment. The answer is yes. Now ask me the question, says a club professional. You have to have the ability to take no off the table. Not that you can say yes to everything, but a lot of people get into committees and committee services because they haven't been satisfied by the team or by the professional folks they weren't listened to. More often than not, it's not one or the other, right? It's not, you know, should we have sesame seeds on our bun or should we not have sesame seeds on it? But by the way, I've had that conversation at the board level, which is idiotic. You know, you have to believe the right thing. So love it, right? We always tell folks, don't waste your time getting on a committee, because the answer is yes. What do you need? What do you want? We're here for you. And I train everyone never to say no. Even if you know it's impossible. You always say, Let me figure it out. Let me see if I can get back to you and come up with a couple of solutions that may not get you all the way to yes, but takes no off the table. Sure. The other thing we do with committees, which I think is brilliant and I thought it because I stole it from the Missouri Athletic Club and it's worked really well, is that we don't allow anyone to serve on a committee unless they have proposed successfully proposed amendment. Interesting. So one of the things you have, I mean, if you get in a very domineering type member who wants to get on committees and has very strong opinions about something. Nine times out of ten, they have not proposed a member because they usually have a bombastic attitude or they're so aggressive. Nobody wants you know, they're just they're a bull in a china shop. And so we put that qualification in that you have to successfully propose the member to serve on a committee. You need to answer a whole bunch of questions, fill out an application and send us your CV, which is another high hurdle to get over. And then we limit our committees just to 3 to 5 people with two professionals. So the total committee will be 5 to 7 and the two professionals have a vote and we only put on committees those who have an expertise and whatever the committee is doing, you know, which drives me nuts when you have the dentist, you know, as chair of the Green committee, you know, and the gardening and all of a sudden he's an expert on agronomy. [00:21:35][151.7]
Ed Heil: [00:21:36] Right, Right. [00:21:36][0.4]
Jeff McFadden: [00:21:36] Yeah, right. So we'll have that. Instead. We'll have the person that owns the garden center. Right? That's the excuse me. That's the national alert. We were talking about getting a. You know, we want to make sure. So on our food and beverage committees, we have restaurateurs, we have hotel people, we have staffing h.r. Directors who staff for hotels. So we we're pretty smart. We try to put the right people in the right, in the right position. We try to push decision making down to the subcommittee level as best we can. And then quite frankly, the answer is yes. And it defuzes a lot of that tension that you have between members. And then if you couple that with a capital dues at party or regular dues, you don't have to ask for assessments where you could get the tennis racket players fighting against the golfers and the golfers fighting against the wine, people on the wine, people fighting gets the fitness people and the older folks fighting against the younger folks who have kids. And you're putting money into child care and baby pools and that sort of thing. Yeah. So by building the capital into it, into the, you know, you hopefully can trigger projects that are the right decision at the right time. I have a woman right now who is a member, I love her to death, you know, a part of our ten year master plan. We have we are not going to build a outdoor family pool at one of our locations until 2029. And she looked at me and she goes, Jeff, I have an eight year old, ten year old and 12 year old building in 2018. 2019 is not going to serve me a purpose, right? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you know, so I have to understand that I have rationalized that over. [00:23:26][110.4]
Ed Heil: [00:23:27] The course of the last. Gosh, what since you've been there in the last 25 years, you've the club has purchased restaurants and golf clubs, and for a city club you don't hear city clubs doing that often. What, what was behind this and what is behind it? And is this just part of the mission and what you see going forward, you know, for years to come? [00:23:49][22.2]
Jeff McFadden: [00:23:50] So we were studying city clubs for a while and you know, back in 1967, we served 2500 lunches a day. Right? It was it was, if you remember, the old movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy. That was the Union League, right? It was Mortimer and Randolph. Duke and Duke. Yeah. And so lunch was losing. You know, the urban downtown environments were changing, becoming much more residential. The younger kids were moving in and we started to think long term, how is your granddaughter going to use the club versus your grandfather? And we and we just we really started to just think and do some studying about trends and and thought patterns. And it really dawned on us that these younger generation wanted more experiences. Right? They didn't they didn't do the same thing over and over and over. Their grandfather would dine at the same table, you know, every Saturday night, 50 weekends a year, right at Philly Country Club and sort of have the same menu item. Their grandfather had five friends. Their granddaughter now has 500 friends. Right. So the way he or she socializes in a club is totally different than the grandfather, though you typically would find the grandfather on the board making decisions. Right? [00:25:10][80.2]
Ed Heil: [00:25:10] Right. Totally. [00:25:11][0.4]
Jeff McFadden: [00:25:12] We had to kind of think through that. And they and then we thought, you know, the granddaughter only eats out at her favorite restaurant three or four times a year where the grandfather again, a 50 times that is her, right? Yeah. At their favorite restaurant, you know, And then they saying that the granddaughter wants a condo in Manhattan and a condo in Manhattan Beach and it has more of a lock and load mentality, experience driven versus a $10 million house. You know, we're in Grosse Pointe with ten bedrooms on ten acres, and the next generation just doesn't want that. [00:25:51][39.2]
Ed Heil: [00:25:52] For sure. [00:25:52][0.2]
Jeff McFadden: [00:25:52] So we started to to to to think about what could the league become and we started to think a lifestyle club. So can we get them in? It's not just a city social lunch club, but it could be more of a lifestyle club offering more experiences, more amenities. At the same time, we realized that because we had increased our revenues by so much with the parking garage and some of the smaller investments we've made, we realized scale was important. So not only was the next generation changing how they wanted to use the the club and socialize within a club environment, we realized scale is important because clubs have just gotten downright expensive to operate 100, 125 years ago, in the golden age of private clubs, immigration was inexpensive, labor was cheap. There was no environmental laws. There was no. Health care. So you. You know. Tom, Dick, Harry, Sally could start a club back in the early 19th century or 20th century and be very well and be very successful at it. If you look at Detroit or Boston, Westchester, New York, Philadelphia, there are a lot of clubs that were started from 1890 to 1920, the Golden Age. And so that that hit us like like, like a sledgehammer. We needed to increase our top line because our expenses were more were very high. But we also started small. I don't want to anybody think we had this grand strategy or, you know, we have three country clubs now. We'll soon have 81 holes of golf, two independent restaurants that are members only that are really cool, tony type restaurants that you you can't eat in unless you're a member. But it didn't start that. It was very slow. As you said, I've been there 25 years. And people say, Jeff, what you've done to the league overnight is incredible. Like time. It's been like the Bataan Death March in some respects, though, obviously we respect veterans and everyone who gave their life for this country. You know, a quick story about our first acquisition was this little 100 seat restaurant in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, a block from the beach called the Bungalow. And it was just truly accidental brilliance and luck. And we started very small in branching out from from Center City, Philadelphia. I was down staying down the shore with a board member of the league. My wife and I were staying there and we were playing golf. It was July when Philadelphia was just completely empty because everybody goes down to the shore. And I figured that out. You know, I didn't realize it at the time. I figured out shortly after this new swanky hotel called the Reeds, it was just built in on the harbor of Stone of Stone Harbor. So the board members, let's go over, have a drink. After topside went over their back deck overlooking the water with all the boats. And I run into like 20 members. I'm like, Oh, Mr. Turner. Mr. Smith. Oh, man. It was like, Oh, and it was great. Brand new. They put like, you know, 80 million into this place and it was fantastic. They said to Jules, my wife, I said the next night before we go to dinner, let me, let's, let's go show you the reeds and we go back to The Reeds, back to the back bar on the deck overlooking the harbor. And I run into like 20 more members that were magnificent. The numbers are around on Friday, and I'm like, Wow, A light bulb went off. Yeah, where everybody's at. And so we quickly did some data analytics realize that over 65% of our members spent two or more weeks at the Jersey Shore. We then did some zipcode analysis. We found that most of the wealth was moving from Atlantic County, which is home of Atlantic City, little north of Cape May, down to Cape May County, the Avalon Stone Harbor, Cape May area, Ocean City area. Yeah. And we bought a $600,000 restaurant that was in a fire sale because there was a tax lien on it, put about another 600,000 in. So it was a million to investment. And it just took off. We had we had it. And it not only took off as a great place to eat because you can't get into a restaurant down there. Plus, you as a restaurateur, you wouldn't start a restaurant there because the season is so short. So it was a real conundrum. You couldn't get. There were enough restaurants seats from July 4th through Labor Day. But you couldn't make enough money as a restaurant tour to open a restaurant because there was only a ten week season. Right? We had 500 net new members join the league because of the bungalow. [00:30:56][303.8]
Ed Heil: [00:30:57] Wow. [00:30:57][0.0]
Jeff McFadden: [00:30:58] So what I said and then with an equity focus group, the whole bunch of them, we found out that they they loved the Union League in Center City, Philadelphia, but they just didn't get there enough to use it. But now you couple the bungalow down the shore in a marketplace, you can't go out to eat because you can't get a reservation and all of that, except I'm willing to join the league, pay dues because you have Center city. And the Bungalow brought us to buying Torresdale buying Sand Barrens which became Union league National. Buying the Ace Golf Club and Chubb Conference Center and buying the guardhouse in Gladwin. So we just kind of over the next ten years, kept adding properties that grew our membership, our net membership. And if you think about layering that onto the thought process that your your grandchildren are going to have 500 friends. And you need scale because clubs are expensive. It just started to click win, win, win win, Right. You know, and and and these cranky old small clubs that the kids don't want to belong to. They all want to belong to the league now. And we just changed our strategic plan to be called from 28 to 88. And that the concept is not only are we a great club, but we want to be a great club that you're a member of for six years. Yeah. So we get you we get you in Center City when you move in after university in college, we keep you when you move out and have kids. And when your parents die, you inherit the house down the shore. We have we have two properties down there to keep you until you're 88. Wow. That's the concept. [00:32:45][106.8]
Ed Heil: [00:32:46] That it's remarkable. I mean, and so far, no regrets. [00:32:50][3.2]
Jeff McFadden: [00:32:50] No, no regrets. It's just it's a it's not fun for me or not as rewarding for me as much as when you operate one location. You know, I got into hospitality, pealing potatoes at the age of ten and sort of never look back on it when I talk at universities across the country. So how did you decide to get into hospitality? Well, I never did. I just started working and just never stopped working. Right. I just I didn't I didn't conscientious like, think I was going to stay in hospitality. The one regret, though, is that, you know, we have 1200 employees now. We're over 100 million in annual revenue. I miss the satisfaction of day to day operations and people. Jeff, you have the greatest life. You know, you're not responsible. But yeah, but you don't realize, you know, it's the intrinsic value you get from. [00:33:44][53.8]
Ed Heil: [00:33:46] That intimacy. [00:33:46][0.2]
Jeff McFadden: [00:33:46] Location. Right? And one one. So I miss that. [00:33:50][3.1]
Ed Heil: [00:33:50] Yeah, for sure. Interesting. What a machine, though. It's amazing. I got to call you on this show because you've used the term accidental brilliance and luck in a somewhat different spot here. At some point, it's no longer an accident, and it's probably not luck either. But what I'm wondering is, you know, 28 to 88, you know, that is something that I think that a lot of clubs would aspire to be, you know, to say or to to be able to pull off. And yet it's also very difficult for whatever reason, you know, for the reasons you've talked about as far as like appeasing the, you know, just two different generations or maybe three different generations in many cases, for people who are listening to this podcast who are like, you know, you don't have as well. Yeah, well, McFadden has this or he's done that or, you know, somebody who knows you have to. It starts with a vision. It starts with a belief. It starts with great membership, obviously, and, and visionary people. But for people that are listening, that are struggling with how to how to make changes to their club, to appeal to a younger membership, but also engage their aging membership. What what do you say to them? [00:35:05][75.0]
Jeff McFadden: [00:35:06] Well, you got to figure out how to bring those two groups together, right? If you want people to live longer, you've got to surround them with younger people. Right. And that's the easy part. The hard part is getting the young folks to value older folks. So we look at multiple activities that an eight year old and now being very, what your eight year old can do that, an 80 year old. So that's them. But things like bowling. Right. I mean, as silly as that is, it's a thing that a young person can do. An old person do pickleball. Young person can do and an old person can do. Yeah. You know. Lectures and education. Social programs are real important to bring in those young, young people. Go. I try not to think of serving a younger market. I'm serving an older market. I'm serving a club market and try to bring the two generations of three generations together and then keep things lighthearted and fun. The crankiest old guy, you know, will respond with the young folks surrounded around them in an enjoyable environment. You know, cranky, cranky old club members make more cranky old club members. So you have to just stop that cycle, right? You got to you got to put everybody together and try to get them to enjoy each other's company in light hearted activities that everybody can do. You also have to be, as I say, you can't be all things to all people, but you have to offer enough niches at your club to satisfy multiple generations, right? You need to have. You need to be adding pickle at the same time. You're putting Padel in, you know. You need to have a resort style pool. You know, at the same time, you need an Olympic or half Olympic lane pool. So people in their seventies can stay limber and flexible. So it's not one or the other. The answer more, more often than not, is both. [00:37:12][126.4]
Ed Heil: [00:37:13] You kind of create like a win win in that environment. I mean, is that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It just that is one of those those challenges I think so many people are perplexed with is the do I have to make a decision of one over the other instead of saying, is there a way that you can actually kind of make both parties happy? But like you said, you're never going to please everyone all the time. We all know that, too. [00:37:41][28.0]
Jeff McFadden: [00:37:42] Right. Yeah. And that's the hard part. But with the manager, you know, one of the one of the things that I always tell tell members or other managers is, is I never write a member newsletter. You never see my face in our newsletter. I am not, you know, I hope I'm the like the little I am little short and fat, my wizard behind the curtain. I want I want other I want other folks and basically the president of the club to take all the glory, to be the mouthpiece and so forth. So I think being are 25 years and part of my success of being here 25 years is that I'm not front and center. I am I'm sort of front and center on the professional side, but certainly not on the membership side. You'll never I have never written a column and newsletter. I never write an email from from the CEO or from the general manager. It's always from the president or or from a department head or from a vice president or standing committee chair. You'll never see anything from myself to the membership. [00:38:46][63.5]
Ed Heil: [00:38:46] Awesome. Well, last question for you. With so many clubs doing so well, is this I'm going to ask you a question. I probably feel like I know what you can say, but is this the time to really say, let's invest? Is this the time to take some chances? Is this a time with clubs healthier maybe than they were for sure before the pandemic, to maybe look at some things and making changes and having a little more courage? Or is it, what's your general mindset, especially for those clubs that maybe aren't as healthy and those that are, you know, really trying to figure out how best to take advantage of this time? That is better than it was before the pandemic? [00:39:27][40.7]
Jeff McFadden: [00:39:28] I think the time is right to create the right strategy of constant improvement. I don't think it's the right time to do major, major improvements unless you desperately need it. You know, sometimes you just need to knock a clubhouse down to rebuild it because you're going to spend, you know, good money after bad money, so to speak. But I do think the strategy at all private clubs needs to be we are going to have constant improvement over the next ten, 15, 20 years. We're going to continue to change and adapt and better our product. If you spent if your budget over ten years was $100 million, but that's obviously ridiculous to say your budget was 10 million over ten years. If you spent all that 10 million in year one by year three, your members would say, What are you doing for me now? Right. So I think good leadership will put a strategy in that recognize this is the best of times or one of the best. And it's important for us to realize that we need to have constant improvement. And that's the right strategy. So don't give them it's like your kids. Don't give them everything right out of the bat, you know? Give it to him a little at a time. Keep them excited. You know, don't. If you're going to build some paddle courts, you know, don't build paddle, pickle, padel, hydro, clay courts all in the same year. Now you say, Well, Jeff, it might be easier. Well, do the master plan and then, you know. Dole it out a little bit at a time. Keep people excited about, you know, make sure you have something going on for multiple generations, you know, for the old folks, the middle folks, the young folks. I don't think clubs because we always relied on assessments every 10 to 12 years to do major projects. I think if we get in that we should be constantly improving each and every year and share that with them. And I think you'll keep members and members will enjoy your club so much more. [00:41:33][124.9]
Ed Heil: [00:41:34] Jeff, thanks so much. It's so much fun talking to you today and hearing your perspective on what you've done in the industry in general. [00:41:40][6.5]
Jeff McFadden: [00:41:41] I appreciate that. You're doing a great job. Thanks for having me on. [00:41:43][2.6]
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