No, that’s not a typo in the headline; yes I am making the comparison to ’19 not ’20. Although there’s still considerable golf to be played this season, the August results bolstered my confidence that, as things return to semi-normal (college/pro football, school activities, local sports leagues, dining out, movies, vacations etc.), golf will experience a natural falloff in interest and frequency for the balance of the year compared to last year’s elevated (likely, record, but we lack extensive historical tracking) level. If so, we’ll fall short of ’20’s 493M national rounds but we’ll still be well ahead of the ’19 baseline figure of 433M.
Colleague Mike Dickoff of Apparation, LLC had an interesting observation in a recent broadcast email where he challenged my suggestion that the $64,000 question in ’21 is “How much of the COVIdend will we give back?” His point is that owner/operators should be more proactively focused on the question, “What can I do in ’21 to keep my newfound customers engaged and playing at their ’20 frequency?” Mike’s general observation that we’re not really “leaning in” as an owner/operator group is worthy of discussion and debate. I’ll get to that in the If I Were King section of this issue, but in the interim paint the quantitative landscape of how this year is shaping up:
- What do the August Year-to-Date (YtD) results vs. ’20 for the GMRC portfolio tell us about Pellucid’s 7 Key Performance Indicators? (KPIs, Rounds, Golf Revenue, Rev. per Played Round, Capacity Rounds, % Utilization, Rev. per Available Round and % Achieved Greens Fee which is the “discount rate”)
- How does that YtD performance compare to the ’19 baseline on a 2-year annualized rate of growth?
I’ll update Pellucid’s crystal ball for where we’ll land on rounds for ’21 vs. ’20 and what the 2-yr annualized growth rate would be vs. our historical trajectory (hint, it’s exponentially better)
At the risk of breaking my arm in patting Pellucid/Edgehill (and our pioneering Charter Members) on the back, this is a conversation we couldn’t even consider having in September ’20 as golf was on fire in rounds and revenue. Thanks to the participation of our just under 100 Charter Members, we now have visibility to these 7 key metrics and, importantly, comparisons to both ’20 and ’19. While you can no longer be a Charter Member, we are running a Fall Promo until 11/1 that you could jump on and start seeing your individual facility’s results through our Monthly Trend and KPI Scorecard reports as well as the summary numbers for the GMRC portfolio and what I’m calling “market collections” until we have enough participants to sample balance, do projections and call them “market benchmarks”. Here’s the details of the Fall Promo:
- GMRC web portal tool access (unlimited, annual)
- Market Profile (from our proprietary Golf Local Market Analyzer)
- Monthly Trend report (monthly Rounds & % Utilization for any months ’19-’21 for which you’ve entered rounds in the portal
- KPI Scorecard (7 measure, single page KPI results, any month and YtD for which data has been entered)
- Cognilogic Weather Impact: Historical facility-specific Golf Playable Hours & Capacity Rounds, accessible daily via web portal
- Cognilogic Foresight: 60 day forecast of Capacity Rounds including comparison to prior year, the 10-year norm and select forecast facts (i.e. hi/lo temp, precipitation amount etc.), accessible daily via web portal
- Three ways to get more information on the program or just sign up!
- By reading the 2-pg program summary or
- By viewing the 18 minute webinar demo by yours truly (you have to register to view the video, don’t worry, you’re not signing up for anything, we just want to know who’s viewing our content as the quid pro quo)
- If you’d like to “test drive” it by putting in your ’19-’21 monthly figures, we’ll let you do that for 2 weeks, just email me to get registered & access
- Subscribe to the Golf Market Research Center (GMRC)