Stuart Lindsay and I have spent a considerable amount of time in the past year thinking about facility performance tracking and how to make it right, easy, insightful and actionable. Much like a 6′ sidehill putt, on the surface it doesn’t look that difficult but it’s devilishly tricky in actually pulling it off. In this issue I’m going to share the three levels of complexity and insights that we’ve coalesced around as a roadmap for golf facility owner/operators and the industry in general as a necessary future barometer for facility owner/operators in specific and the industry in general regarding how they’re doing and who’s winning/losing in the battle for “share-of-golfer.”
• Level 1 – Compare yourself to your previous history
• Level 2 – Compare yourself to your weather-adjusted previous history
• Level 3 – Compare yourself to your market peers (and any other golf facility for that matter) using weather-adjusted metrics
Most of our thinking on this topic comes in the wake of PerformanceTrak’s industry exit after yeoman’s work over a decade in trying to assemble some level of national and PGA section reporting that fell somewhere between the first and second levels above. We’ve also had the benefit of working with a handful of our clients in implementing the 2nd level above on a monthly basis over the course of multiple seasons with them so we have actual experience in seeing what metrics matter and the impact of decisions made upon those metrics to improve in-season results in rounds, revenue and building their customer franchise. We believe we know the path to the 3rd level of complexity above as it relates to the data needed, the math behind the benchmarking and the reports and metrics but building any type of “coalition of the willing” has been the barrier to any meaningful progress on that front. Nonetheless, I’ll lay out the roadmap here based on the path that other more mature industries have taken and then we’ll see how and if the golf industry makes the migration and finally gets enough momentum, participation and leadership to navigate from pre-Level 1 to Level 3 maturity in my lifetime.
For our subscribers, read on to get the supporting facts to the above arguments. For our Executive Summary recipients, the entire treatment on this topic can be previewed (free trial issue) or purchased at Pellucid’s website (www.pellucidcorp.com):
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