Most Clubs Have a To-Do List That They Call a Strategy
Your calendar is full. A new amenity launched last spring. A membership promotion ran over the summer. There’s an event on the books for nearly every weekend through the fall. By any reasonable measure, your club is busy.
Busy is not the same as strategic. A packed calendar can produce a quiet, nagging feeling among members and staff alike that the club is moving without knowing where it’s headed. That feeling is not a communication problem. It is a strategy problem, and it starts with a confusion most clubs never fully untangle: the difference between a goal, a strategy, and a tactic.
Three Different Things, One Overused Word
Boards say the word strategy constantly. Our strategy is to renovate the clubhouse. Our strategy is to improve communications. Our strategy is better food and beverage revenue. Each of those statements sounds substantial. None of them is a strategy.
Avi Olitzky, president and principal consultant at Olitzky Consulting Group, has spent years helping membership organizations sort this out, and he leans on a simple analogy to make the distinction click. Muhammad Ali’s goal was to win. His strategy was to tire out his opponent. His tactic, in the fight that made the phrase famous, was rope-a-dope: absorbing punches on the ropes until his opponent wore himself out, then coming off them to finish the fight.
A club’s version of this looks the same, once you separate the layers. If the goal is deeper member engagement, the strategy might be building smaller, affinity-based communities inside the larger membership. The tactics underneath that strategy could be a new member dinner series, a young families calendar, a women’s golf pathway, staff training focused on member recognition. Renovating a clubhouse, improving communications, growing F&B revenue: these are tactics too, useful ones, but they are not strategy unless they connect to a larger choice about who the club serves and what promise it is making to them.
That distinction matters because a club can execute a long list of good tactics and still have no strategy at all. Activity is not the same as direction.
Picture two clubs, both investing heavily in their calendars this year. One adds a new member dinner series, a young families cohort, and staff training on member recognition, each one deliberately built to strengthen the same small, affinity-based communities inside the larger membership. The other adds a similar volume of programming: a new fitness class, a holiday party, a revamped junior golf clinic, each one reasonable on its own, none of them connected to anything beyond filling a calendar slot. Both clubs look busy from the outside. Only one of them is executing a strategy. The other is just staying occupied.
The Tell: When Everything Is a Priority
The clearest signal that a club is operating tactically rather than strategically shows up the moment you ask leadership to name their actual priorities.
“If everything is a priority, then the strategy is avoidance disguised as enthusiasm,” Olitzky says.
Ask a board what their strategic priorities are, and a surprising number will answer with things like better golf, or stronger F&B, or improved amenities. Those are not strategic priorities. They are operational goals wearing a bigger title, and the fact that a club reaches for them instead of something sharper is itself informative. A real strategic priority ties back to a decision about identity: who this club serves, what it promises them, and how it is different from the club down the road. Without that anchor, every initiative floats free, disconnected from anything larger, and boards end up making dozens of individually reasonable decisions that never add up to a coherent direction.
This is also where the well-known 80-20 pattern shows up in a slightly different form. A small fraction of concerns, the loudest or most persistent ones, tend to consume a wildly disproportionate share of leadership’s attention. Chasing every one of those voices individually produces a calendar full of reactive tactics, not a strategy. The discipline is looking past the loudest input for the pattern underneath it, and building toward that instead.
What a Real Strategic Priority Sounds Like
Olitzky uses a simple structural test to separate a genuine strategic priority from a tactic wearing a bigger title: can you name the priority, then name the specific interventions underneath it, then name the tactics underneath those interventions, without the layers collapsing into each other?
A club with real clarity might say its priority is strengthening cross-generational belonging. The intervention underneath that could be building smaller communities inside the larger membership. The tactics underneath the intervention are the new member dinners, the affinity groups, the staff training. Ask that same club to name its priorities and hear only a list of amenities or revenue targets, and the layers have nowhere to sit. There is no pillar for the tactic to hang from, which is usually the clearest sign that the pillar was never defined in the first place.
A Filter for Where Energy Goes
Even once a club has real strategic clarity, leadership still has to decide, constantly, where to spend limited time, money, and attention. Olitzky uses a simple binary test for this: does a given initiative energize the club, or does it enervate it? Does it feed the organization, or does it quietly drain it?
The test is not about whether something is popular or prestigious. Hosting a major tournament might generate excitement and press. It might also consume resources and staff energy in a way that leaves less for the things that build member connection day to day. Neither answer is automatically right. What matters is being honest about which bucket a given commitment falls into, rather than assuming that anything impressive must be worth the cost.
Clubs that skip this filter tend to dilute themselves without noticing. Every individual yes seems defensible in isolation. It is only in aggregate, once enough enervating commitments pile up against a finite amount of organizational energy, that the club starts losing the very members it was trying to serve.
The Telescope, Not the Microscope
There is a temptation, especially for a board trying to fix a directionless feeling, to reach for the microscope: audit every program, scrutinize every line item, diagnose exactly what is currently happening. That work has its place, but it answers the wrong question. It tells you where you are stuck. It does not tell you where you are going.
Strategic planning is closer to a telescope. It starts by identifying the destination and works backward from there, building the specific path that gets a club from where it stands today to where it wants to be. A club that only ever reaches for the microscope will get increasingly precise about its current problems and no closer to a clear direction out of them.
This is where the goal, strategy, and tactic distinction earns its keep. The goal is the destination the telescope is pointed at. The strategy is the route. The tactics are the individual steps along that route. Skip straight to tactics, and a club ends up with a full calendar and no coordinates. Define the goal first, and even a modest set of tactics starts to feel like real progress, because every one of them is now pointed at something specific.
Where to Start
For a board or GM who suspects their club has drifted into tactics without a strategy underneath them, the first move is not another initiative. It is a harder, quieter question: what are we building toward, and can we say it in one sentence that isn’t just a list of amenities?
If the honest answer is unclear, that is not a failure. It is useful information. It means the next capital project, the next membership push, the next event calendar should wait for that clarity rather than adding more activity on top of an undefined foundation. A club that takes the time to define its goal and strategy first will find that its tactics, even ordinary ones, start compounding into something members can feel: not just a full calendar, but a place that clearly knows what it is and where it is headed.
This article draws from Episode 117 of Clubs Made Meaningful: Strategy, Not Tactics, a conversation with Avi Olitzky, president and principal consultant at Olitzky Consulting Group. His perspective on the difference between goals, strategy, and tactics informs how we think about what separates a club with real direction from one that is simply busy.
Schedule a 30-minute discovery call. We’ll show you how to turn a full calendar into a real strategy, one your members can feel. Want more content like this? Sign up for Clubs Made Meaningful Insights: original frameworks and ideas on identity, belonging, and club culture, delivered weekly to your inbox.
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Clubs Made Meaningful
A Podcast by Sussner
