A GM’s First 90 Days: How We Do It vs. Who We Are
You’ve just been hired as a general manager. You’re prepared. You’re eager to prove yourself. You’ve got ideas about how to improve operations, where to invest, what needs to change.
And you have 90 days, a window to see the club clearly before habit and familiarity take over.
That window is rare. It won’t come again. After 90 days, you’ll be part of the rhythm. You’ll start doing things because that’s how they’ve always been done. You’ll miss the gaps between who the club says it is and who it actually is. You’ll stop asking why.
So the question becomes: What do you do with those first 90 days?
Most new GMs face immediate pressure to move fast. The board expects to see progress. The staff expects direction. You want to prove you were the right hire. All of this creates incentive to act quickly, to implement solutions, to show visible change.
But here’s what gets missed in that rush: the only moment when you can see the club as it is.
Luke Burbach, the General Manager at The Club at Golden Valley in Minnesota, made a different choice. During his first weeks, he observed moments of members joining and connecting naturally, the kind of organic community building that happens when conditions are right. His immediate assessment was simple: “This is exactly how this club is meant to be used.”
That observation matters because it came from fresh eyes. A GM new to the club, watching membership unfold without the filters that come from being there every day. From that observation came a question:
“How do we make sure this strength becomes the standard rather than the exception?”
That question shapes everything that follows.
The Real Work of the First 90 Days
In an article co-authored by Sussner and Kopplin Kuebler & Wallace and published in BoardRoom Magazine, the authors outlined a principle that separates effective transitions from those that struggle: the incoming leader must listen and understand before acting.
This doesn’t mean paralysis. It means discipline.
The discipline looks like structured listening. Not informal coffee chats (though those matter). Formalized member insight chats. Team round tables. Specific questions: What do we do well? Where do you see opportunity? How would you describe our culture at its best?
Luke approached this systematically. Bi-weekly member insight chats with 10 members at random, from different membership categories and backgrounds. Member round table conversations with team members from every department. Structured questions designed to surface what was working and where opportunity existed.
The insight that emerges from this kind of listening isn’t usually about finding big problems to solve. It’s about noticing what members and team members are already telling you, clearly and directly. What they need is often smaller than you’d expect. A printer that jammed constantly got replaced in an hour. Communications were updated slightly, and they were well received. These quick wins signal that you’re listening and willing to act on what you hear.
But here’s what happens beneath the surface: When you prioritize listening in the first 90 days, two things occur simultaneously:
- First, the membership and team feel heard. They see their new leader actively seeking input, asking questions, showing genuine curiosity about how things work.
- Second, you build a detailed map of where the club actually stands: where culture is strongest, where stated identity isn’t yet fully lived out, what quick wins create momentum.
That map becomes your foundation as you move forward.
The hardest thing to fix later is relationships. If you don’t dedicate time and energy to building relationships in the early days, it becomes hard to be successful, and the damage is hard to undo. You can repaint a wall. You can change a policy. You can restructure an operation. But damage to trust, to the sense that leadership doesn’t listen or care, is nearly impossible to repair.
The first 90 days are when trust is either built or eroded.
Your Board’s Role: Protecting Your Window
As a new GM, you’re not alone in this. Your board has a critical role to play.
They face pressure too. They want to see progress. They want evidence that their investment in hiring you is paying off. Understandably, this creates incentive to expect visible change quickly. But here’s what they need to understand: that pressure, passed to you, undermines your most valuable work.
Before you even arrived, your board should have answered three critical questions:
What must you preserve? What must you transform? Which truths have we been avoiding?
When your board answers these questions in advance, they give you both direction and permission. Direction means here’s where we need strategic focus. Permission means you have the space to listen and understand without pressure to solve everything immediately.
The best boards understand that hiring you was half the work. Onboarding you effectively is the second half. Their job during these 90 days is not to push for results, but to support your listening. To give you space to diagnose before you prescribe. To protect that window from the pressure to move fast.
When they do this, you arrive at day 91 with something invaluable: clarity.
The Gap Between What You Say and What You Do
Many clubs have done the hard work of defining who they are. Clear values. Articulated mission. Updated visual identity. All of it thoughtfully done.
But identity only becomes real when it shows up in daily behavior. In how staff greet a member. In what language is used at a tournament podium. In the energy on a Tuesday morning.
This is where the relationship between culture (internal, lived) and brand (external, expressed) becomes critical. A club can have perfect brand guidelines and still have fragmented culture. Conversely, a club can have strong culture but no consistent way of expressing it to the outside world.
The question you face in the first 90 days is straightforward: How do you ensure that stated identity becomes lived identity?
That work doesn’t happen in the first 90 days. But the foundation for it does. You spend these months understanding where staff feel equipped to represent the club’s identity and where they need support. Which practices align with stated values and which ones don’t. What resources would help staff do this work more effectively.
One effective approach is to frame this as an ongoing conversation rather than a directive. Ask staff: What do you need to embrace this identity and activate it throughout your experience? What resources would help? What questions do you have about how we’re doing things?
This is leadership grounded in listening, not in telling. Instead of assuming you know what needs to change, you ask the people who live the identity every day what they need to live it more fully. Then you systematically address those needs.
What You Lose If You Move Too Fast
If you skip the listening phase, the costs are real.
You might make decisions without building consensus. You might not give people the chance to feel heard. You might assume you understand the club’s culture and identity without asking the people who live it. Those early impressions stick.
You can reverse a policy decision later. You can admit you were wrong about an operational choice. But the sense that leadership doesn’t listen or care is much harder to repair.
And from a strategic standpoint, you miss what only fresh eyes can see. You miss the observation that something the club is already doing well is a core strength worth protecting and amplifying. You miss the gaps between what the club claims to be and what it is. You miss the early warning signals about where staff need support to live the identity.
Without that listening phase, you spend months correcting course, building trust after it’s been damaged, and operating from incomplete understanding. With it, you arrive at day 91 with a clear map, built relationships, early wins that demonstrate you listen, and a strategic foundation for the work ahead.
What Becomes Possible
A new GM brings something no other moment in a club’s life can offer: the ability to see with eyes that aren’t yet accustomed to how things have always been done.
In Golden Valley’s case, that fresh perspective meant seeing community building that happens naturally and recognizing it as a core strength worth doubling down on. In other clubs, it might mean noticing where identity and experience don’t align. Or where staff are struggling without support. Or where members are asking for something the club hasn’t heard because nobody asked them directly.
That clarity shapes how you understand what drives member experience. What staff are struggling with. Where culture and stated identity diverge. What quick wins create momentum. What strategic opportunities are hiding in plain sight.
When you and your board use those first 90 days strategically (you listening and understanding, them protecting that space from pressure to show immediate results), the club emerges with something more valuable than quick wins.
It emerges with clarity. Alignment. And the foundation for transformation that sticks.
This article draws from Episode 111 of Clubs Made Meaningful, a conversation with Luke Burbach, General Manager at The Club at Golden Valley, as he approached the 90-day mark of his tenure. His insights reveal what a strategic first 90 days requires. References: The Importance of the First 90 Days co-authored by Sussner and Kopplin Kuebler & Wallace, published in BoardRoom Magazine.
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Clubs Made Meaningful
A Podcast by Sussner
