EPISODE 115

April I mean, there’s the book, I think it was Ariely who wrote it, called Predictably Irrational, and that’s exactly what sports is. People will do these ridiculous things where they’ll spend their last dollar on a ticket to go watch their favorite team play instead of spending it maybe where they should. And that’s because it’s psychologically driven. So, I got out of my doctoral program, I had normal jobs, spent some time in healthcare, spent some time in retail, and ultimately, I found my way into sports because I just fell in love with the business side of it and the opportunity that it has for creating unforgettable moments and memories for people. And the deeper I get into it, the more convinced I am that understanding the why behind behavior, and I bet we’ll get into this a lot today, too, with respect to clubs, but the why behind the behavior we see fans or members engaging in, that’s where the real value lies. So I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had in my career right now. And windy path or not, I’m really, really grateful to where I landed.

Derek I’ll expand on that a little bit because what you do is so unique, and I have the benefit of knowing you. So it’s how your company is differentiated from anybody else that’s in that space. How do you help your clients, your teams? What do they do with that why? Once you understand what that why is, that’s the goal, then what is the work, the actual work that your firm does with your clients with that?

April It actually parlays really nicely over into the private club space as well. So think about this a little bit more broadly, but so many clients, whether it’s a club that we’ve worked on together or whether it is a professional sports team or league or giant stadium venue, they tend to over-index and focus on transactional touch points. What do people think about the quality of our food and beverage program? What do they think about, in the club space, the amenities that we have? In the professional sports space, they look at attendance and ticket buying, and some of those behavioral elements of that. But what becomes invisible in that is the reason why somebody shows up week after week to support their favorite team, dare I say, even in a losing season, why they show up every time. And when we know that underlying why, when we understand, are you the type of fan who follows your favorite team because you remember sitting on the couch next to your grandpa, watching that same team, there’s an element of nostalgia. Your fandom was sort of inherited in the same way that your eye color was or the shape of your ears. You’re a very different type of fan than another fan who is there because they love strategy, they love analytics, they love getting into the nitty-gritty data of the sport. And by the way, if the coach makes a call that they wouldn’t have made, you’re going to hear from them on Monday morning on the fan line. And then lastly, just to give a couple of other examples, because understanding these whys has really revealed to the sports industry places where they are under-marketing or not doing a good job of taking the incredible product that they have and making it relevant for folks, is some of the more, I would call them casual or secondary fans. There’s a fan that we see in every fan base. I nicknamed her the moon. I like space, by the way. But in this case, the team is the sun. Someone in her life is orbiting that team. They’re a more traditional fan. Their gravity comes from the team, and she’s orbiting that person. So she’s in the ecosystem. She’s in the universe with the team. But she doesn’t have her own gravity yet. So some of those fan segments and those whys have been overlooked for so long, and there’s incredible opportunity to bring more people into the fold. And that why translates over again into the space that you all work in in private clubs as well.

Derek There are so many emotional components to what you just talked about that are the parallels with members. There’s very little that’s rational about being a fan of a sports team, speaking from personal experience. There’s also very little that’s rational about being a member of a club. There’s no cost analysis. There’s no one-to-one of rounds per plate or meals purchased equals what I could have purchased or done someplace else. That’s why I was so excited to talk to you. All the private clubs that we work with, and I would say almost every private club that I’ve come across, surveys its members with some regularity. Typically, it’s an annual survey. It’s usually done as what they call a satisfaction survey. And they’re asking questions about how the food was, how the service was. Some of them actually will actually look at their NPS score, and they look at that data, and they glean from it the answers that they feel are most important. But from where you sit and from the surveys and the data that you’ve helped orchestrate, what’s the gap between the surveys, these general, I don’t want to call them generic, because there’s meaning in them, but the general satisfaction surveys that clubs are doing versus the information that club leaders could actually be taking from that data?

April How much time do we have today?

Derek As much as you need.

April Oh man, oh, buckle in, people. If you think about annual satisfaction surveys, they are incredibly important. We can trend across time, we can benchmark across other clubs, they’re useful. But those annual satisfaction surveys are designed to generate a number, an NPS number. They’re not designed to help you make decisions. They tell you what the temperature is of your member base, but they don’t tell you the diagnosis or the why. So if you sort of parlay what I was just talking about over onto private clubs, invisible in that data is a member who is satisfied with their experience, but is still leaving because it’s not a great fit. You can be thrilled with the food and beverage program. You can be thrilled with the availability of the type of course you can play or other amenities that might be available. But if you don’t feel like you belong there, if this isn’t a place where you want to grow roots, where you feel like your people are there and you have a sense of belonging and home, a sense of place, you may notice that those members leave, and we don’t know why. So in sports, a fan, they can rate the game day experience a nine out of 10. They can say this is fantastic, but they still might not renew season tickets because satisfaction measures the transactional elements of that fan and the team or that member and their club. It doesn’t measure their relationship. So I think where we need to go is not to eliminate those satisfaction surveys. Those are a starting point. But we need to go deeper into understanding not just how satisfied somebody is, but the reason why they’re showing up in the first place. What were they seeking when they came here? And so a high satisfaction score can sometimes, without going to that next level, it can sort of mask softening loyalty. Because the team or the club or whoever, they’re meeting those transactional expectations, but that underlying emotional connection is either eroding or it wasn’t there to the strength that that member was searching for. So satisfaction is sort of like a hygiene measurement, but the real value that a member gets is in the relationship and the deeper meaning. So we really do need to measure both.

Derek Speaking of transaction, a recent guest we had on, his name is Aaron Dawson. He spent a career as a general manager of clubs, wrote an article recently on a vantage point that he described as a person’s left pocket money versus right pocket money. And it’s his idea, the metaphor was that when an experience feels seamless, when it feels right, members are going to spend whatever it takes. They’re not going to look at the price. They’re not going to think about, well, I could have got a cheaper coffee at Starbucks. It’s because they value it so high. But when that experience is not held at that same level, they start counting, and they start paying attention to the actual dollar signs. And he pointed out the gap in those surveys. He tied it to the example that you just pointed out, where the satisfaction surveys were high. But they were read as satisfaction scores, not value scores. So the satisfaction was high, but the perceived value was still low. How can a club get a read on what’s actually happening then? How can they start to see that where the satisfaction looks high, the NPS score is great, the lagging indicators show strong, but to do what you said, take that next step, and to find that deeper level to make sure that the sense of value is also there.

April We started at the place where saying, you’re talking to a psychologist here. So, understand that that is the lens through which I see the world. And that is my bias. So I want to be really clear on that. But we’re dealing with human beings and people. And at our core, we’re all very similar. And when I think about what clubs aren’t measuring today, and this really bleeds over into the work that you all do that is squarely in your expertise around branding, and what does it feel like to be here, we need to start measuring things like identity fit. Is this the type of place that deliberately left vague, people like me belong? Is this where people like me feel comfortable? So measuring that sense of belonging, not just satisfaction, is important. Also, something that I’ve done that I’m sort of, I don’t know, I’m calling it kind of the back half of my career. This is my second dissertation that I am not going to get any letters behind my name for, but understanding the psychographic drivers of what connects a fan to their favorite team. We measure 12 in professional sports, and your unique combination of them tells me a lot about what a team needs to do to show that they are a great entertainment and a great option for you in terms of whatever your unique fingerprint is. Figuring out what that is for members – why does somebody join, why emotionally do they feel connected? And again, there are some similar ones to what we see in professional sports. Nostalgia and legacy. Is this a place that you were coming to when you were a kid, and you remember playing in that splash pad, and you want those same memories for your child? Is this the type of place where you appreciate the clean fixtures and the feel of that place, and it feels aesthetically the way that you want it to? Social and family are the type of people that, absent this membership, you would still choose to hang out with them. Are those people there? These are the underlying human dynamics that you can’t measure using POS or spend data or any of the things that we call internally, digital exhaust, like a consumer or a member goes out there and does their thing, and they leave a trail of data behind them, and we scoop it up and analyze it. That data is easy to get at, but again, they fall in that initial camp that doesn’t tell us the underlying why. And in a space where professional sports is certainly changing, I can’t name a time when people have had more competing opportunities for their time, money, attention, in terms of entertainment and things that can give them the same level of fulfillment as sports can. Same on the private club side. The world is diversifying in terms of what we have at our disposal, and this is where it parlays over to what you all are doing. Deciding who you are as a club is critically important. Because you can’t have a sense of belonging – people like me belong here if people who are not like me also belong here. We have to decide who we’re for, and branding helps you do that. It’s certainly helped me clarify that for my own business. But it also, coupled with that psychological data we were just talking about, helps you make decisions going forward. Hey, we have X amount that we want to put and reinvest back into the club over the next 10 years. Where are you going to spend it? Where do we need to improve? That’s where knowing that deeper level and pressure testing it against who we are as a club and also who we’re not becomes so incredibly important.

Derek Amen.

April He didn’t pay me. He doesn’t pay me.

Derek What you described, though, which you can actually probably attest to from your own professional experience, from your business, choosing who you are, deciding who you’re for, who you’re not, and then acting on that, can be a little overwhelming when you haven’t done that yet. That belonging survey, which I think is an incredible concept, can sound overwhelming, which is maybe why currently the clubs, the leaders, the people that aren’t quite ready to take that big step, they’re defaulting to an NPS, a Net Promoter Score. It’s become that kind of base benchmark that they go to. Is an NPS score part of that digital exhaust? Is it actually useful data?

April It is. Like I said, you can trend it over time, you can benchmark it. I’m a big believer, even just for my years in a retail setting. I led a data science team for a very large retailer in the US, and those data points are important because we have to be able to compare ourselves to our competitors, to our market, in a reliable, defendable way. That being said, I want you to think about, just remember back in the MySpace days and the early Facebook days, and when ads started to appear on every website we looked at. They were very unsophisticated at that time. And we didn’t know any different. Today, if I’m scrolling through my Instagram or my TikTok feed, or I’m on a website, or whatever, everything is tailored to me. I’m annoyed. If you serve me an ad for something that has nothing to do with me, I’m like, who’s running this algorithm? Who’s running the ad platform? We’ve gotten much more discerning about individualized marketing, individualized messaging, and advertising. It’s the same way for the experiences that we choose to spend our time and money on. When we revealed my brand, I remember saying wait, wait, don’t show me. I have to sit on the floor because I am so anxious right now. I literally got up from the table and sat on the floor, and I’m like, okay, go and show it to me, because I was so nervous about making this pivot in the way that I did business. I get it. But the level of trust you get from doing something like that, think about the person in your life who is an incredible gift-giver. My little brother, for all he assumes because he is this software engineer and kind of introverted and whatever, he’s exceptional at giving gifts. And every time I get a bag or a box or an envelope from him, I know that it’s going to be something I’m going to love. I trust his ability to match a gift to what I don’t even realize I need right now. When you use your brand to decide who you are, the people who align with that begin to trust you. So think about your existing members. They begin to trust you that the new members coming in are going to make sense. There’s a lot less skepticism. And trust is that basic building block for having belonging, for people being able to let their guard down and feel like this is the place for them. All of this ties in together. But that branding part in deciding who you are requires some introspection beyond NPS. Otherwise, everybody would just put their NPS score out on their website, and that’s how we would make decisions. No one does that. It requires understanding more about the personality of your brand, the personality of your club, the people in it, what they value and what they don’t, what belongs here and what doesn’t, in terms of the look and feel of it. Deeper than just, should we allow flip-flops in the dining room as a sort of check-the-box metric on a survey?

Derek It’s a trust tree, though. You painted a really nice picture of members and potential members trusting that they’re going to the right place, but having the data and understanding it the right way gives the leadership trust in making the decision to choose who we are and who we’re for and where we’re going as well. So it’s a trust tree. We’re in the nest.

April It is, and if you want your members to become stewards of that environment, number one, the trust has to be there. As they develop that level of belonging, you want to protect what you love. And if you love being a member of that community and you don’t want somebody coming in and messing it up, you’re going to be a steward of that in terms of the people that you talk to about becoming a new member, the people that you bring to visit there, and just how you show up in some of those elements where you want to work to keep this place as pristine and valuable as it is to the people who are there. So you not only develop trust, but stewardship follows from that.

Derek There’s data that backs that up. I think it was a McMahon Group survey that says something like 80% of new members were recruited by members in the first three to five years of their membership. So your members are literally your sales force, with all due respect to membership directors and the people who are doing the hard work on the club side. It’s those stewards and advocates and people, like you said, who love their club. But as leadership, if you have done the hard work of defining who you are and who you’re for, then when you brought in right-fit members, they’re now attracting more right-fit members and building that culture.

April Agreed. Think about a position that you might have been in in your career where you don’t need to be job hunting. You have a position already, but you’re evaluating whether this other opportunity that came up might be a good one. You don’t want to jump ship unless you know that is truly going to be a good fit for you. And I personally wouldn’t make that decision just based on the way that the person who’s trying to recruit me to come there would characterize what it’s like to work in that organization. I want to talk to the team. Tell me why the person who was here left, what was working with them, and what wasn’t. I want to diagnose, like, can a person like me succeed here and feel good about it and come in every day feeling like I can be myself because that’s the type of person who can make an impact here? Same deal. Of course, your members are some of your best advocates because they’re telling you, here’s how they say this place works. This is how things really work around here. And best-case scenario, those two are in line. You’ve got integrity. But of course, your members are going to be the people who sort of tell it like it is and help new members make those decisions.

Derek Tucker and I just had a conversation a couple of episodes ago on those new members. Once they have joined, you’ve got about 90 days to really reinforce the identity of the club, get rid of any buyer’s remorse, and turn them into advocates as quickly as possible. It’s a whole other topic. But a lot of clubs you join, you had your orientation. You might get a little new member packet or a folder of information, and it’s sort of like, okay, thanks, go figure it out. But people who have such a strong identity, an understanding of who they are, are the ones who do a really good job of continuing to nurture those people. I’m sure there’s a whole other conversation on the psychology of that reassurance, and it’s past the conversion point, past that transaction, but now continuing to foster that sense of belonging quickly.

April It’s service design. It’s a basic service design. Lots of times, we think about either the front of the house or the back of the house. We don’t think about the connection point between them. We think about the game day journey of a fan. They wake up in the morning, they’re excited, it’s game day, and they have tickets to the game. They have to get everything sorted at home before they leave, make sure that their bag fits the bag policy, all those little like check, check, check. They get to the stadium, the game happens, et cetera, et cetera. We think about the end-to-end of what a game day looks like for a fan. There’s a whole other half to that, and that’s the back of the house that made that happen. How much did that fan have to look for the bag policies? Did you give them – here are the five things you need to know as a fan who’s coming to the stadium for the first time. Because shockingly enough, like about 60 to 70% of any given stadium is first-timers at every game. So like, what do you need to know coming there the first time, and did we make that easy for you? Did we just remove that friction? You didn’t know the night before. You weren’t thinking about the bag policy. What’s the best lot for me to park in? Which is the gate I should go in? All of those things, you’re not thinking about that. But when you reach those moments, a really good experience will meet you there and give you what you need before you realized you needed to ask for it. All of that that’s happening behind the scenes is what’s creating that for the member or the fan. So, I think sometimes we were like, okay, we have to work on our dining room staff and the way that works. Great. We did that. Let’s look at the journey of our members, and they are so interconnected. We have to look at them at the same time.

Derek Let’s keep going on the sports for a second. You just launched Fauder Labs, and my understanding is that it’s around these deep understandings of fan motivations and their identities. Talk a little bit about this new venture of yours.

April I have never been more in love and never been more obsessed with the work that I’m doing day to day than I am these days. So, fauder is a Latin term. It means fan. And we’re really a fan intelligence platform or a fan empathy platform. It’s interesting because I’ve talked a lot about the transition, or a bit about the transition that professional sports has gone through. But behind the scenes, if you talk to a lot of executives at the leagues, they know that their growth going forward is not coming from their legacy fan. They’ve got them. This is the fan who immediately knows that the product, a particular team, whether it is a professional NFL team, or a minor league baseball, or a pickleball league, they know that what’s being put out there, I’m going to love it because they’re the type of fan who is the stereotypical prototypical fan. That’s not where your growth comes from. Growth in professional sports is going to come from fans who don’t immediately assume that an event that a team is putting out is something that they’re going to be interested in. I talk about the draft all the time. The marketing, oh my gosh, we could get so much more impactful in the weeks leading up to the NHL draft, NFL draft, doesn’t matter. Leading up to that training camps, oh my gosh. The way that we tend to talk about them today is, hey, you know, draft is coming up. Here’s how the coach and the president of the team are thinking about holes on the team and like whatever. We get this very tactical view. Your prototypical fan jives with that. They think it’s great, and they’re going to show up. But how about someone like me? I’m the moon. I’m that fan that I talked about before. I don’t automatically assume that a sports event or even a game is going to be that fun for me until I started watching videos, we’ve all seen them, of the kid who’s anxiously awaiting, and there are the hats on the table in front of them like, oh my God, what hat are they going to put on? And their mom is next to them, and she’s just trying to contain herself. And then the phone rings and the oxygen drains from the room. And you hear this kid saying, Yeah, coach, I’m ready to come work for you. I’m so excited. And then there’s this moment when they hang up the phone, when they reach for the hat and put it on, and their mom loses it. And I’m crying about a kid I don’t know, about a sport I’ve never watched, and I’m invested because now I’m that kid’s mom, and I’m like, You can do it. Oh my gosh, I’m cheering for you all season long. Why aren’t we marketing that? That is a real human element. So, what Fauder Labs, to bring it back to your actual question, what we’re measuring are these 12 psychographic reasons why fans follow their favorite team. From those 12, we can get a fan base. Doesn’t matter the team, it’s United States team sports. Those are our bounds right now. We can place with very good reliability, a fan into one of eight segments that vary anywhere from a segment we call full spectrum fan. They’re the prototypical fan. Love all the stuff. Come to everything. Want every experience. Love it, love it, love it. Subscribe, subscribe. That’s not where growth is. When we look at penetration on that that segment, most teams are maxed out. Their growth’s not coming from there. Social Orbiter. Again, I love space. Social Orbiter, she’s a huge growth segment. And PS, defense is not the game. That’s not why we’re there. I want to see big, exciting plays. I want to see fireworks going off. I want the ambiance of all of it. I’m looking at the scoreboard when the kiss cam is on and those fun human moments. I’m cheering. I’m eating that electric orange cheese poured on everything because it’s part of the experience. I don’t really care that this is the first time somebody’s rushed that many yards on a Thursday against a whatever divisional. Don’t care, don’t care. There for the fun, there for people, there for the atmosphere. Now, where this gets really important is you look at those eight segments, who do your sponsors want to get in front of? And which type of sponsor? We’re starting to see non-traditional sponsors enter the sports industry. Charlotte Tilbury is sponsoring sports teams now. Partners are getting more sophisticated, and they want to get in front of, not just impressions, but they want to impress upon the type of people who look like the people who want to buy their stuff. And so it’s basically bringing the sports industry via psychographics, via standardization, via a common language in a very collaborative industry. It’s bringing all of that to the industry so that we are marketing as a sports industry. The way that I talked about social media marketing before, I want to come to every fan with a relevant offer, create that experience that feels as relevant as my TikTok feed today, for those fans who will be the expansion of the industry as we move forward. Lofty goals from a gal who absolutely hated playing basketball in the fifth grade. I got kicked out of a game because I kept saying excuse me for running into people, and did not score a single point the whole time. I am not a sportsy person, but I am a psychologist, and I know business. And I see this industry as having such an incredible future. We just have to up-level that sophistication a little bit, do exactly what we said, go beyond NPS, go beyond transactional, behavioral, and demographic data, and get to the heart of why humans choose to spend their time this way.

Derek So good. Again, it’s another conversation for another day, but I’m already thinking about the eight personas of club members. I bet if you sat with the general manager of a club, they could literally describe them. I’d also be curious how many of them would have space names and space orbital planetary analogies, and who’d be the moons in there.

April If you work with me, they’re going to. They will have at least one because I can’t help myself.

Derek One of the things I’ve seen you do with clubs, club clients, when we’re putting together the survey, the survey that we’re administering with you to gather the data that helps inform that identity-based work, one thing that you do really eloquently and strategically is push back on them when the clubs start telling you what data they want. And you have a really, really strong way of pivoting to get them to identify the business outcomes they’re trying to solve. That seems like common sense. But why isn’t that more common, and why is that distinction so important in making sure the leaders are starting with the outcomes and then going and getting the right data?

April It’s not common because it’s really difficult. As much as I like space, I also like Venn diagrams. If you think about two Venn diagrams, you’ve got your business folks, right? So the club manager, the relationship management staff, everybody who’s making that place run, who has to make these investment decisions. And then you’ve got the data and analytical people. Both of us are very comfortable right in the center of our little circle. We are very comfortable if I can just stay in the numbers, in the spreadsheet, in the database. Yeeth, I’m much more comfortable there. On the business side, analysis paralysis is a word you hear all the time. Just simplify it for me. I don’t want to go through all of that. Very comfortable in the center of their business circle. That’s not how good work gets done. It doesn’t get done when we both stay really far apart. Good work happens, good decision-making happens, really good research happens, and good strategy comes out of it. When all of us get super uncomfortable, and we start to squish together into that icky overlap where I’m moving into the business sphere and saying, tell me what’s going on right now, what’s your current state, why do you care? Like, why now, not two years ago? Why aren’t you putting it off? What’s happening now? It could be something competitive. It could have been an investment. It could be that you lost a bunch of members. It could you got a big influx of new members, and you don’t understand how that’s changing what’s happening here. What’s happening now? Sure, what do you wish you knew? But where it gets difficult is, if I tell you the answer to that, if I tell you your members are satisfied, how are you going to decide where to spend that money? What are you going to do differently?

Derek And what does satisfied even mean?

April Usually, if you start with, I need to know, and you ask for a report, or we want a predictive model, that used to be like, my god, I couldn’t roll my eyes harder because I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t think you need a model here. But if you started with the data, we’re not tying it to any strategy. We’re not tying it to the business experience, the tribal knowledge, the expertise that you have of being in that club. It’s completely devoid of that. So ultimately, the first question I want to have is not about research, it’s not about designing a survey. It’s about like, tell me what’s going on now, and what are you trying to do? Don’t tell me you want, tell me what you’re trying to do. And from there, we can back into what’s going to get us there. But if we start with the data, it’s like saying, I’m hungry, here’s a hot dog. Well, I don’t really want a hot dog. I’m trying to eat healthier. Well, we could have opened that way, but now you have a hot dog, and here’s your food. So there needs to be a bit more of a partnership there, but it doesn’t happen as often because it’s difficult. It’s a lot easier to just run a quick report off of your membership database and go from there.

Derek So good, so many takeaways. I’m glad this has been recorded. Last question, and it’s a two-parter. For club leaders who are listening to this and they’re saying, I need to do this better, but this is a little overwhelming, what’s a really smart first accessible step they can take, and in that step, what is one thing, if there is one, that they should be trying to understand with respect to what their data might be telling them?

April Number one, your biggest asset is your members right now. If you want some incredible insight, grab 10 members, one at a time. Grab 10 members and have an in-depth, just human conversation with them. Don’t pick the loudest 10. Don’t pick the longest-standing 10. Get a good cross-section of them. Dare I say, call up a member who recently left? Get a good cross-section of people and have a conversation. What did you hope this club would provide for you? What did you want it to feel like? What did you want your average day to look like? What types of people would you hope you would meet here? Are those the people you’re meeting? Has that changed over time? Some of those in-depth, just human conversations are a great place to start. And then going from there. Also, auditing what you have. A lot of clubs have that satisfaction data. Best if you can put these two things together. So you’ve got your satisfaction data from a more traditional survey or benchmarking reports and things like that that come out. So you’re looking at your satisfaction data, you’re talking to your members. And you’re saying, okay, if what these members are saying is true, why do we think we’re seeing this? And what might we not be seeing based on, you know, how we ask the questions or the types of questions we ask. Start making some inferences, and then two, do a little bit of testing. Like a lot of clubs have their social events calendar. You can do a lot by, like, hey guys, we just want to try this thing and see if you like it. Tell us what we could have done differently. And it’s not the tactics. Oh, we needed more seating. We wish it would have started earlier or gone later. Nope. How did it go? How’d you feel when you were there? You’re looking for the deeper why, not the tactical elements. So continuing to remind yourself that that’s what you’re after gives you clues as to the bigger picture of how this place really runs and who this place is for.

Derek April, for people who are interested in finding more about you, about Sprocket, about Fauder Labs, where can they go?

April Sprocketcx.com is Sprocket. We do a lot of our custom project work there. Fauderlabs.com is where the new venture is. You can find out all about the fun work we’re doing in professional sports and that segmentation and persona work there. And I’m very visible on LinkedIn. So come say hi, connect with me, shoot me a DM. I’m always happy to sit down and have conversations with folks about how to think about what they’re doing a little bit differently in terms of measurement, insight, and understanding. So don’t be a stranger, shoot me a note, and we’ll set up some time to just chat and see where it takes us.

Derek You’re also a frequent speaker. You’re on stage often. So people can find out some of those places where you are on stage on your LinkedIn. And if you’re in their city or their area, they should absolutely come see you in person. Thank you for joining us today. This was an amazing conversation. I really appreciate your time.

April Thank you so much. I’m a big fan of yours.

Derek Likewise. This conversation is a great reminder that data is only as useful as the questions you ask of it. April’s perspective sharpens something most club leaders sense, but struggle to name – that a high satisfaction score is not the same as a deep sense of value. And that the path from one to the other runs through a better understanding of what your members actually feel, want, and identify with. The clubs that will pull ahead are the ones that stop treating the survey as the answer and instead start treating it as the beginning of a bigger question. And one more thing, we’ve launched Clubs Made Meaningful Insights, and we’d love to have you as one of our readers. Original content. Frameworks, perspectives, and ideas on identity, belonging, member experience, and club culture. Weekly insights in your inbox that you can share with your board or your leadership team. Sign up at clubsmademeaningful.com. At Sussner, we help private clubs build brands that create belonging. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone in your club world. And until next time, let’s create something worth celebrating.