EPISODE 117

Avi However, my most recent congregation, which I served for about fourteen years, really gave me a platform on a national and international level, and it allowed me to channel that energy to leave the world in a better place, which is really my MO in life, Derek. However, I wanted to do more beyond the walls of my institution. And even though I still will work as a rabbi and serve as a rabbi in life cycle settings, and for those I know, I love to teach, I’m an educator and a storyteller at heart. I stumbled upon the association world and club world quite naturally, because the broader world of membership, the belonging, is really written into my professional and personal soul. I spent many years leading this congregation and other congregations, which, in many ways, a congregation is a membership organization like a club or an association with a sacred purpose, high emotion, legacy families, competing expectations, revenue pressure, deep questions about relevance. But then I moved into consulting, as you mentioned, with nonprofits, with for-profits, with associations, with member-driven institutions. And clubs, in a way, felt like a natural extension of that, Derek, because the work sits at the intersection, as you know, in the private club space of tradition, of experience, of identity, of hospitality, of belonging. Because I’ve come to realize that a club is never just amenities, that it’s really a promise of belonging wrapped up into an experience, it just felt like a natural fit, a natural transition.

Derek Perfect. We’re going to get into all of that stuff here in just a minute. You’re speaking my language. When a club or a membership organization brings you in, I’m envisioning you coming in, sitting with the board, sitting with the general manager, sitting with leadership. What does that kind of work look like? What are you doing with them?

Avi It really all depends on the engagement. Any work that we do, unless I’m giving a keynote or a workshop, and even then, any work that we do is broken into four phases. There’s discovery, synthesis, ideation, and outcomes. The discovery is listening. Everything we do begins with listening. Even if I’m giving a keynote, I’m listening to what those pain points and challenges are that they want to address. The synthesis is not the listening. It’s the learning. What did we hear? Then the ideation – that’s when we collaborate. We brainstorm together. And then the outcomes are: here’s what we’re looking for. If that’s strategic planning, we run through that gamut. If it’s a board retreat or a workshop, we run through that gamut from briefings to surfacing. And so it could be that we’re doing a board training around governance. It could be strategic planning where we’re developing a framework, or we’re going through a year-long project. And it could be a staff building. So there are so many different areas that we engage with the club on.

Derek The discovery part of that, in my experience, is it’s probably the most important because it sets the foundation for everything that goes forward, but it also can be really challenging. You’re walking into a group of people who, like you said, belong to that organization. They, by all accounts, are proud of it. They love it. They want the best for it, but they’re also emotionally charged, and they have a personal reference of what they want or what they expect. When you go through that discovery phase, is it hard to filter out what we would call personal preference versus what you’re actually hearing is the most impactful component that will then help you move that group forward?

Avi That’s a great question, Derek. We look for patterns. So, no different than if you see someone hit a hole in one, you know that they don’t do that on every hole, and so you don’t immediately say, oh, that person must be an incredible golfer because of that one hole or that one drive. So in the same way, I had a teacher many years ago who was a rabbi. Bill Lebow is his name – amazing. He was the dean of my seminary at the time, and he always used to say, two percent of your congregation is going to try to take up 98 percent of your time. And then I would add, and you’ll get 100 percent of nothing done if you let them. Likewise, when we do discovery for any of these member organizations, you know 2% of that club is creating 98% of the angst, 98% of that challenge. So as long as you look for the patterns, and you don’t chase the loudest, and you don’t chase the biggest, then we try not to get detoured that way.

Derek I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you speak a couple of times, and for anybody listening, I would encourage them to track you down at a conference or an association. There are a couple of things that you’ve said that have really resonated with me. I actually went back to my notebook, and I looked at my notes from the last time I saw you present, and something you said that stuck with me ever since is the concept that most people, maybe all people, confuse tactics for strategy. And that they lose sight of what their actual goal is because they’re so focused on that tactical component. Let’s start there. How do you, as a consultant and as a leader, define the differences between a goal, a strategy, and a tactic?

Avi My favorite analogy that I often use is Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali’s goal was to win. His strategy was to tire out his opponent, and his tactic was rope-a-dope. And for any of the listeners who don’t know what rope- a-dop is, that’s when you get in the corner, and the opponent just wails on you. And you’re blocking, and you’re taking that. But they get so tired from wailing on you that finally, when they spell, then you come out swinging. Muhammad Ali’s strategy was to tire out his opponent. He could have done rope-a-dope. He could’ve run and chased them around. He could have just gabbed their ear off, but that was the tactic that he chose. The goal for a club, if the goal is deeper member engagement, the strategy might be to build smaller affinity-based communities inside the larger club. But then the tactics might be a new member dinner, a women’s golf pathway, a young family’s calendar, a staff training around member recognition. The problem is that many clubs call their tactics strategy. They say, Our strategy is to renovate the clubhouse. Our strategy is to improve communications. Those may be important, but they’re not strategy, Derek, unless they’re tied to a larger choice about who the club serves, what promise it’s making, how it is different, and on and on and on. So you want to make sure that you’re moving above the weeds to, let’s call it the 10-15,000-foot level of the strategy, and then the 30,000-foot level is the goal.

Derek With all due respect to the colleagues of mine that do amazing work around facilities, facilities and amenities, and building them and restoring them, that’s tactical, but that falls underneath what is usually called the strategic plan. So there’s a little bit of angling up that seems to be happening in that process. You walk into a club, and they tell you, Hey, our strategy is this. And I know there’s a whole process in this, but how quickly can you tell that they’re speaking tactically rather than strategically, or even understanding what their goals are?

Avi If everything is a priority, then the strategy is avoidance disguised as enthusiasm. So what we will do is, if you could tell me what your pillars are, if you can tell me your priority areas, and they’re not tactical, they’re actually general strategic priorities, and then within each of those, you tell me, Okay, here are what we call interventions, and then under the interventions, you tell me the tactics, I know we’re on the right page. Otherwise, I know we have to backfill. I know we’ve got to plug some holes. The clubs that either can’t share those priorities or those pillars, or they start saying things like, Oh, one of our strategic priorities is better golf, or one of our strategic priorities is better F&B surplus or revenue, those aren’t strategic priorities. And so it makes it pretty clear that way.

Derek There’s another phrase that I’m going to pull from hearing you speak that’s stuck with me that I would love to have you talk about. It’s the concept of energize versus enervate. I’m assuming you’ve trademarked innervate by now since I last heard you talk. But expand on that a little bit about why that matters regarding how leadership spends its energy.

Avi It’s a solid distinction. It’s a solid binary. I look at the world, fortunately and unfortunately, in a very binary way. You know, good versus evil, light and dark, etc. Likewise, any time we navigate things strategically, you look at path A or path B, and it’s really easy to look at the grays, but then sometimes you get stuck. And so when we’re working from an organizational development standpoint of a club, you have to look at something and categorize it. Is it this or that? Does it eat us or does it feed us? The energizing is what feeds you. The enervating is what eats you. And so sometimes, if you’re able to truly look at something, it might be 51% and 49%. It might not be a hundred and zero, but that 51% you’ve got to put it in the enervate bucket, or you’ve got to put it into the energize bucket. Yes, it might be amazing to host insert major tournament or PGA or US Open or whatever it might be. But again, is that eating you or feeding you? Is it energizing you or enervating you? And once you land in that area, you’ll realize that everything that you’re doing that enervates is preventing you from successfully deploying that which energizes. And if you think that everything that you are doing that energizes is OK, I could do this because I’m getting all of the great energy from over here, you’re deluding yourself and the club is deluding itself, and you’re going to lose members over it.

Derek When you’re working with a club, and you’re sitting down in that strategic boardroom, one of the biggest decisions that we would tell the club that they have to get right first is deciding who they are. But I’ve heard you also say one of the most important decisions is deciding who the club is for. You talk about drawing. You also talk really nicely about the difference between access and elitism in the private club world. And that the club has the opportunity to decide that, to decide who it serves, who it’s for. Walk us through that distinction between a club built on access and one that’s built on elitism.

Avi I think clubs have to be really honest about this, Derek. And this is not always true in the association world or other membership spaces, but a club is by definition built around some kind of access. That is not automatically a bad thing because access could protect quality, intimacy, trust, shared standards in a particular kind of experience. But elitism is different. Elitism is when exclusion becomes the point. Access says this is who we are designed to serve. And here is the promise that we make to them. Elitism says our value comes from other people being kept out. And that’s a very dangerous place for a club to live. And I think if you could live in that, we want to provide access, and you’re purchasing access. That’s different than we are date keeping and you are purchasing other people being kept out.

Derek Choosing who you’re for as an organization – if you’re a sports organization, you’re choosing who your fan base is. By your nature, you’re not excluding a demographic or a race or a very specific type of people that then gets us into that dangerous place you’re talking about. You’re talking about your target market. You’re talking about the people that you’re trying to attract more of that align with the culture and the values of the community that you’ve built.

Avi That’s right. If you look at a certain club, there are some clubs that say, Our audience is anyone who lives within 10 miles of our club. Let’s just use that as an example. Well, what’s the socioeconomic status of that zip code? What is the school district? That’s going to inform where you’re marketing, where your outreach is, what calendar you’re observing, and what the feel of the cultural milieu of that area is. That is not about racism. That is not about elitism. It’s about where you are at. Now, if you say, Well, our target audience is anyone within the state, that’s going to impact your choices very differently. Or our target audience is anyone who plays pickleball or anyone who plays racket sports or anyone who does this. Now that is not overlooking or ignoring bias. There is unconscious bias, and that’s a different conversation. Franklin Covey’s Leadership Guide to Unconscious Bias – highly recommend, highly recommend for conversations around bias. But the idea of building around and excluding is different than what it means to be exclusive.

Derek Pivoting to inside the club, you’ve talked about the idea – you just mentioned this a little while ago – the idea of a club within a club. What does that look like when a club gets it right?

Avi I think the best clubs, Derek, really understand that belonging usually happens at a smaller scale than the institution itself. People may join the club, but they stay because they find their people inside it. So that might be a regular foursome. It might be a wine group. Maybe it’s a young family’s cohort, or a women’s league, or a book group, or now, Maj is taking over the nation. It might be a pickleball crowd or a table that always feels like home. People join the club, but they stay for the micro community. So when a club gets this right, I think members feel three things. I can access what I need, the experience is easy, and people know me. And that combination is incredibly powerful. I can access what I need. Again, that’s that access conversation. The experience is easy, and people know me. If all of a sudden I’m just part of this biggest universe, well, maybe access is a little bit harder. It’s harder to feel known and seen. And at the end of the day, that idea of the experience being easy can’t possibly be as easy unless it’s small. And so you want these communities of a community and the micro community idea.

Derek What an incredible amount of work and energy goes behind the scenes to make it come easy for the members.

Avi Sure, totally.

Derek When it comes to how members think of their club, compared to how the outside community might think of a club – perception, the perception from inside versus the external perception – what’s your take on which matters more? What should a club be most concerned about, or in what order?

Avi The hallway is your brand. If members feel ignored, nickel and dimed, confused, or disconnected, no external marketing campaign is going to solve that. So the lived experience inside the walls has to match the promise outside the walls. The hallway is your brand. Clubs often worry about how they’re perceived externally, in the market, by prospective members, compared to the club down the road. And, yeah, that matters. But honestly, Derek, the more urgent question is, what do members say about the club when leadership is not in the room? The hallway is your brand.

Derek Well, statistics back that up. I think McMahon had a report that says something like 80% of a club’s new members come from the referrals of club members within their first four or five years of membership.

Avi Not only that, but if a club looked at their marketing budget and they spent half of what they’re currently spending on marketing and on engagement and stewardship of their current members, they will see the return in multi-fold because their members become deeper, intentional ambassadors of their club even more so than what they’re putting out on social media and things like that.

Derek We’re looking at the entire set of our membership and trying to create and foster and nurture the sense of belonging across multiple generations. Now clubs are getting younger across the country. So if you have 40-year-olds coming in and you still have 85-90-year-olds at the club, that sentiment needs to hold true across that. And a lot of clubs are feeling pulled right now between honoring not just the club tradition and their history, but how do we make sure that our club stays inclusive to these long-time members while making sure this is the place for the people who we’ve decided we are for, that are, let’s call them new, because the new ones are the ones that are going to keep attracting our future members.

Avi I often talk about meeting a generation where they’re at and how you create the personalized experience. But I don’t think the answer is to chase every generation separately, because that leads to a calendar full of disconnected tactics. We were talking about tactics. The better question is, what is the common thread? So some common threads – every generation wants belonging. Every generation wants ease. Every generation wants value. Every generation wants to feel respected. But they may define those things differently. So you don’t want to build four separate clubs for four generations. You want to build one clear promise with multiple doors into it. So the strategy is to find the shared human need and design different access points to it.

Derek When a club takes your advice and they start to be intentional, they start to make decisions, which then results in change and evolving certain parts of their club that haven’t changed in a long time, it’s natural for people to resist change. It’s scary. They don’t know what that means, but you’ve done a diagnosis. How do you kind of help them through that change management? Or what are some things they can be thinking of with that data, that diagnosis, that you’ve gathered that will help them move through that in a way?

Avi So first, especially to the listeners, one of my favorite books on change is called Master of Change by Brad Stolberg. It’s excellent. We can have a whole conversation on his mapping of homeostasis versus allostasis. I give a whole talk on this. It’s excellent. We’ll parking lot that for now – maybe a future conversation. But what I will say is when members or clubs resist change, I try not to assume, and I would encourage others to do the same, try not to assume that they’re simply being difficult. Resistance usually has a source. So maybe it’s about loss. Maybe it’s about trust. Maybe it is about process. Maybe it was because members were surprised, or they don’t understand the why. I like to ask, what do you think we are really changing here? And what are you afraid to lose?

Derek Alright, one last plug to prove that I’ve seen you speak a few times, which I have so many great notes. You said strategic planning isn’t about a microscope. It’s about the telescope.

Avi Oh, yeah. You want me to dig into that?

Derek Dig into that a little bit.

Avi Okay. So I think that people like to use strategic planning, or they think strategic planning is about, for lack of another hackneyed expression, looking under the hood or using the microscope, trying to diagnose what’s actually happening. Yes, diagnosing what’s actually happening is part of the strategic planning process. But what strategic planning really is, is using the telescope to look down the road of where your future is going to be. It tries to be prescriptive and proscriptive. We like to do planning to say, ah, you want to get to that island? You want to get to that future? You want to go on that path? Well, we’re going to build you the path to get there. And so it’s more about the telescope saying, this is how we’re getting to a future instead of saying, here’s what’s happening right now that we’re stuck in.

Derek If a club’s listening to this and they’re associating with some of these issues, they can see themselves with some of the opportunities that we’ve been talking about, obviously, hiring you would be a great first step. What’s one piece of advice that you would give that person listening? What’s one thing that they should be thinking about, starting to understand, or observing within their club that would then help them confidently take a step towards activity?

Avi I appreciate the plug for Olitzky Consulting Group. There’s a little bit of a mutual admiration club going on right now because of how much I love Sussner and what you guys do as well. And one of the places I think we meet in the middle, and this is 100% in what I call the statement of competitive distinction. And I think you lean into this the same way, even if you don’t call it that. And that is, why do we have to exist? And I don’t mean we as human beings, but we as the club. It’s what I call a but-for statement. But for, insert club name here, the following would not be true in the world. The following would be true for our members. The following will not be in the universe. If the club can’t articulate a statement of competitive distinction, then they’ve got work to do. If they can, then that’s the foundation upon which they have to build.

Derek So good. So good. This is such a fun conversation, Avi. I could talk to you. I’m going to take you up on follow-up, and we’re going to come back to the other ones, and we’ll dive in. If somebody wants to speak with you, learn more about you, where’s the best place for them to go?

Avi So we, of course, have our website, olitzkyconsulting.com, although that’s really more of a placeholder for someone to find us. The beauty of a name like Avi Olitzky is you can Google it and spell it wrong, and you’re still going to find me. And usually my LinkedIn pops up even before our website. So feel free to ping me directly on LinkedIn. I’m a big believer in not blind connections. Tell me why you’re reaching out, or go to the website and email us info at olitzkyconsulting.com, and that’s O-L-I-T-Z-K-Y.

Derek Awesome. I don’t want to be between me and the beach and your family. So we’ll wrap it up here. Again, really appreciate you joining us today.

Avi Thanks. Have a great weekend, Derek.

Derek If there’s one thing I’m taking away from today’s conversation, it’s the order of operations. Know your goal before you reach for a tactic, decide who you serve and who you don’t, and then spend your energy on the members already inside your walls because that’s where belonging actually gets built. Get that sequence right, and events and amenities stop being a to-do list and start adding up to something that members can feel. One more thing before we go. If you’re finding value in these conversations, we’d love to have you reading Clubs Made Meaningful Insights. Not episode recaps or highlights, but original content. Thinking frameworks, perspectives, and ideas on identity, belonging, and member experience weekly in your inbox that you can bring to your board or 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.