EPISODE 107

Tucker I’m really interested in, as we have this conversation, your career path, just to start. So we’ve never met. And so this conversation is fresh for me, which I really like. And it seems, from my understanding, you had senior leadership roles at a bunch of different clubs and resorts within Canada, and then you founded The Guru Collective, which we’ll get into, and then The Golf Industry Guru. So talk me through that journey. Give me an understanding of where you have come from and then what led you to focus on team training and development? Like that’s a very interesting angle.

James You know, it started back, to be honest, when I was skipping classes in university. I worked at a golf club. And I was also an actor when I went to university. And I like to say that the best role that I had as an actor was that of a janitor because that’s what paid the rent, because I was a terrible actor and couldn’t get work. But I worked for a great restaurant company in North America called Earl’s Restaurants, and that was kind of my first start. Today, they are a behemoth of a restaurant organization, a billion-dollar organization, and I learned some great things from them. But when I was about 28 years old, I wanted to become a golf professional. There were two gentlemen in Vancouver, British Columbia, where I live, who were known to be the best in the business. So I waited until one of them gave me a job. I guess I kind of knew in the very beginning that if you work for great people, it’s the most important thing to help yourself, you know, is to have great mentors. And so I ended up working for both of them over my young career. I guess that’s where I learned about the importance of people. I mean, the reality is that we’re in a people business, and I learned a lot of best practices from some very smart people about the importance of creating culture, the importance of creating a great work environment, how to find great people, how to get rid of poor people. And I learned those principles really early. So I had this great job. I worked in private clubs, daily fee clubs, and ended up working at managing a resort facility. And when it became time for me to leave there, I thought there’s no better job that I’m going to find. So I’m going to go on my own. So I guess 18 years ago, I became a consultant, and it’s been feast or famine ever since. Cronk Group is my consulting company, and we work with clubs of all different types. I do everything from strategic planning and governance work to motivational presentations to staff. And then my business partner, Scott Massey, who I have known since he was 17, is the reason for most of my success. If you want to call any of it success. Because he’s the guy who gets all the work done. We started Guru Collective a handful of years ago with Golf Industry Guru. And now we offer some other platforms as well. All around, to be honest, it’s all about managing risks, developing people, and the whole importance of your culture, no matter what type of facility you are. So it’s a lot of fun, as you guys know. This is a great business that we’re in, and we are the people business. So, having a great culture or finding a way to get a great culture is critically important if you want to find success

Tucker How many times have you worked with a club, or a course, or any of those different facilities, or maybe just an organization, in which their culture is unique to them, and they struggle with new people coming in and trying to put their own culture onto it? We work with a lot of clubs in which they have a certain culture, but they hire people from the industry. And the industry has this sense of, oh well, I did this here, and so I’m just going to bring that to you. How big a challenge is it for you to get over that kind of road speed bump, I’d say.

James Lots of clubs don’t have a definition of what their culture is. They haven’t defined. Sometimes they have a culture identified about what they’re trying to deliver for their members. But that’s different than what you’re trying to deliver for your team. Your employee culture is different than your service culture. You want to be fast. We want to deliver high-end, exceptional experiences. We want to make sure that the food is fresh and blah, blah, blah. They’ve got all these objectives to deliver an experience for the membership, but they haven’t clarified, if you’re a manager in our club, this is the expectation we have of how you treat people, how you manage people. If you are going to work at our club, here’s your ROI. You have to clearly identify what the ROI is that your people are going to get. It starts at the top. It starts with leadership. A general manager, a CEO, he or she has to be really clear about what kind of culture they’re trying to create. And then ensure that the onboarding process and all the various different tools and tricks that they have to create that culture within their people have some consistency. If you’re on a losing team, the reason why you’re bringing in a new coach is to get a winning team. And that new coach brings in their leadership philosophy, their culture, their expectations. And so how do you get that message down to 50 or 100 or 150 or 200 people, and what are the ways you make that happen? We often work with clubs to help them define their culture and then to put tools in place so that they can deliver that consistently, which is the challenge that we have when you’re in the service business.

Derek James, you work with both private clubs and public golf facilities, from destination resorts to daily fees to member organizations. From your perspective, when it comes to people, what are some of the biggest differences between how a public golf operation runs or thinks about culture compared to how a private facility addresses the same thing?

James That’s a great question. And it’s also, I think, a real thing. Because in my experience, you do find that. If you were broke before COVID, and you didn’t have a waiting list, your members were unhappy, you didn’t have a capital reserve fund, or you didn’t have a full tee sheet – if you’re a public golf course and you haven’t done a whole bunch of drastic different things in the last five years, you’re still broke. If you haven’t made your service better, your sales better, your amenities better, your product better, your marketing better, et cetera, et cetera, the 21% increase you’ve experienced was caused by a pandemic. So think back to those days and think back to the competitiveness that existed to try to get business. Unfortunately, the golf business thought that discounting was one of the ways to accomplish that. But let’s put that aside. So the difference sometimes, Derek, is that the pros and cons of private versus public are that in public, you have to earn that customer’s visit every single time. And so you have to develop a relationship with them, a quality experience with them, and an expectation with them to create a fan. You have to create a raving fan every time they want to put over their hundred dollars to choose your public golf course. When you’re in a private club, they’re coming back tomorrow whether they like it or not. They have joined your community, your culture, your club, and that creates a whole other, first of all, level of expectations. I am here forever. And if I have a bad experience three times in a row, I am not going to put up with that for the next 25 years. So sometimes in the private club world, you can get a little laissez-faire. It can become a little bit more of we don’t have to earn that guest’s appreciation because they’ve got a food and beverage minimum and they have to spend it anyway. And so let’s just try to keep ourselves from having fires. We don’t want to rock the boat. And this is one of the reasons why it’s very difficult sometimes in the private club world to create significant change, because change is difficult. People resist change. People don’t like change. And if you’re going to take Mr. Smith’s bar stool away from him and put a new booth in there, he’s going to lose his mind. And so it’s often easier not to create that experience. It’s often easier just to leave things the way they were going. And unfortunately, that creates complacency. And ultimately, that’s the reason why general managers don’t last longer than four years on average at a club. Because, at some point, the members are going to rise up, or the GM is going to rise up, and say, I’m fed up with Mr. Smith. Or I’m fed up with the board telling me how to make French fries. So you get into conversations in the private club world that you would never get into in the public space. In the public space, if you want to change the French fries, you change the French fries.

Tucker It’s really interesting to me to talk about the public versus private. And you’re talking about it from the acquisition of customers. That’s a huge difference. I also think about it in terms of the acquisition of team members, too. It’s a very different working condition to say we’re going to work at a public facility versus a private facility. And then, even furthermore, the relationships that private club staff members have with private club members put a whole other layer into this, which I’m going to call leverage. And we’ve worked with plenty of clubs that go, well, we can’t do anything about the way that bartender works because everyone loves him and we have no control over him. And that’s just how it is. How do you build a culture in that world in which it can all shift based on relationships, and you can’t build something in which you go, you know, they can leave, and that’s totally fine. How do you find that challenge something that can be overcome, whether you’re public or private?

James You’re bang on with that assessment. And it’s one of the great things that you get that opportunity in a private club to develop those relations and to have long-term staff that knows exactly what Mr. and Mrs. Smith want when they come in every Thursday morning for coffee. I know that Mr. Smith likes his coffee black and Mrs. Smith likes two creamy, two sugar. When you have a revolving door of employees, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith have to tell someone new every week, this is how I’ve been having my coffee for 17 years. Could someone please train you and tell you that this is how I like my coffee? Or you’re not using your POS system and your technology to train your people that these are what our members are, and this is what they like. You’re missing that opportunity. So, first of all, there’s a great opportunity in the private club space. Think about how many times this happens when you sit in the restaurant. Because I can tell you it’s the most important thing that should happen when you go into a restaurant, which is the question of why you are here. Did you just finish your round of golf? Are you here for your anniversary lunch? Are you here to spend your food and beverage minimum? Are you about to go play in 25 minutes? Because if your answer is one of those four things, the experience that I should be delivering for you is different, is drastically different, in addition to all the basics. But it’s going to lead that service experience. In the private club space, you have that opportunity to really develop that understanding, that preference, that relationship. Then, however, when you have that bartender that’s stealing booze out the back door or is watching hockey games on television instead of the golf channel because they’re bored and they’ve been working there for 15, 20 years, that’s when leadership has difficult decisions to understand that their responsibility is to the long-term viability and wealth of that club. No individual should get in the way of that objective. And you will always hear from the 10%. The 10% will always be the loudest. I can’t believe you let Stephen go. Well, I hear you, Mr. Smith, you’re totally correct. But we have been working with Stephen and giving him every opportunity over the last 12 months to stop watching television and taking booze out the back door. We’ve warned him, we wrote him up, we went through the law, we had all these conversations, we’ve given him one final chance, and guess what? This is what happened. So transparency, communication. And then Mr. and Mrs. Smith have got to realize that your responsibility is to run a business. Because if you were a private restaurant owner and you had a bartender like that, I can assure you, you would not let that continue. When we talk about having to have an investor mindset when you are working in the private club business, you have to look at every decision like it is your business. Not that you just have your members’ dues to decide whether you spend it on bunker sand or on an irrigation project. You have to look at everything like I own this business and then make decisions accordingly. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s difficult to improve a negative culture in the private club space sometimes, because those are hard decisions, and leaders often don’t want to make hard decisions. As consultants, we go and fix a business. We were hired to go fix broken businesses. I can assure you, the first thing that happens is we get rid of the bad people, the negative people, the people that are entitled, the people that aren’t accountable, the people that don’t show up, the people that are dragging the team down. So there’s no reason why it’d be any different in a private club than it is in a public club. But we tend to be a little bit more worried about the 10% because the 10% in a private club are really loud and they’re really influential and they could cost me my job. And sometimes it’s easier just to put your head in the sand.

Derek So you talk about difficult leadership questions. We worked with a couple of clubs that would consider themselves semi-private. They straddle this line where one, for example, is a very high-end, maybe one of the highest-end public golf facilities in its area, commands a premium price, but also has a relatively substantial membership. So, more than patron card holders, these people are called members. They feel like members. The members want a private club experience, however, at a fraction of what it would cost them to join a completely private facility. But the bulk of the business operation is dependent on these very high-end daily fee courses. And they struggle with this service aspect of how do we treat the members versus how do we treat the guests? And what are the appropriate expectations? I think my question for you is, can a club successfully do both? Can they straddle that line and have the best of both worlds, or ultimately would they be better off choosing to be totally private or totally public?

James I think they totally can straddle that line. I used to manage a real estate resort property in Western Canada that was considered to be the high-end daily fee resort with a membership that you combine together, and the pros and cons of that. I think you totally can, 100%. With any club, it has to come down, in my humble opinion, to ensuring that you’re very clear on your why and your purpose. What are we in the business to do? What keeps us going? What does our viable business model look like that is going to keep paying the bills for the next two decades and three decades? Whatever that looks like. And let’s just say what that looks like is a balance between daily fee and membership. Well, then it’s setting expectations for your guests and customers about what they’re going to get for what they pay and what they buy. I think right now we have this opportunity, and we’re very afraid to take our prices up in the golf business, where our prices have not been rising to the same level of inflation and costs. When a golf cart has gone up 25% since the pandemic, these things are going to hurt us eventually because we have to put as much money in piggy banks as we possibly can. Whether it’s a variety of pricing strategies, whether it’s a variety of messaging, whether it’s different levels of service experience, I think these are all things –  good communication, good presentation, good delivery, and once again, setting expectations. We end up making decisions or thinking that we are making decisions based on the knowledge that we have, yet we are not going out and getting enough knowledge to make effective decisions. Whether it’s benchmarking, whether it’s data comparisons, whether it is feedback from our guests and our customers, feedback from our employees, 360 reviews, we are not doing enough to gather the data to make the best decision. What we often end up doing, through no intention, is listening to the 10%.

Derek When you write that book on the top 10%, please let me know, because I’ll be first in line to read that. I think that’s a fascinating topic. It’s one that we run up against in every single project that we work with. You and I met about a year and a half or two years ago at the Golf Inc. Conference. And I think you were there representing Golf Industry Guru and all of the online training content that you’ve created under an entire platform. I believe there are several hundred hours of content on this now. Along the work that you’ve done, what was it that made you realize the industry needed this? And I’m curious how much of that training content applies to the team and the staff, and how much is helping you help clubs with those board members and that 10% of the loud membership that we’re talking about.

James Way back when, I was a manager of a club. We were recognized as having the fifth-best customer service in North America by Golf Digest. And our employees rated us as being one of the best employers in our province. And a bunch of other GMs called me up and said, Hey, what are you doing? What’s so special about you guys? And I had no idea. I don’t know. I was like, what is our secret sauce? And so I started thinking about that, and that led me to become kind of a speaker. So for the last 20 years, I’ve been traveling around the world, giving presentations mostly about people, culture, and I would go to these events. And I’m going to hear all these great speakers and all these great people, like brilliant gurus, the Greg Pattersons of the world, the Mike Holtzmans of the world, the Melissa Hansons of the world. All these wonderful experts in their field, and there’d be 100 people in the room, and I thought to myself, why aren’t there 500 people in this room, and how can I bottle this up and make money at it? And that led to Golf Industry Gurus. So I go and find gurus, and I get them to give me their content, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s a webinar, whether it’s a best practice, whether it’s a template, or whether it’s an article. I always say this. I’ve never understood how a club will budget 50 grand for bunker sand, and they won’t budget $5,000 for training their 150 employees. It’s unbelievable to me. Makes no sense to me. And so, first of all, we made our platform $1,000. We made it ridiculously inexpensive. We thought we’d take over the world one club at a time. So we moved price from the issue. But we have everything on there from beverage cart training courses to leadership development courses to how to communicate better, how to use a knife properly, and how to be safe. As you can imagine, the topics are never-ending. What we do now, to be honest, because of technology, when we started that five years ago, 10 years ago, you couldn’t have afforded to do it. I couldn’t have done it because technology wasn’t to the point where anyone like me in a room or my kitchen could make a platform like that. Nowadays, we make customized white-label training videos for golf clubs with talking avatars and four different languages because of AI and technology. So now we make training videos without a $40,000 a week film crew. The opportunity to train people has never been easier. It’s never been more important. Every single conference that I go to, every single conference organizer that I speak with, when I say, what does your committee want to hear about? They say, finding, training, managing, and motivating people. That’s the number one challenge in a private club or public club, in a downtown city or in the boonies, wherever you might be located. It is a very difficult topic these days, and there are lots of resources out there, whether it’s us or anybody else, there are lots of resources out there to help people manage whatever of those things that they might be challenged with. So Golf Industry Guru is our training platform for clubs, where every employee gets access to that training. And I always say to a GM, you don’t need 150 people to go on there three hours a week. First of all, I hope you have a management meeting once a month. And then at that meeting, on the agenda, just put Golf Industry Guru down, and every manager needs to come to that meeting with one idea that they’ve learned from some expert in some field that they’re going to implement in their department that’s going to improve the member guest experience, improve the employee experience, or make the club more money. And at the end of the year, if you’ve got eight managers, you can’t tell me that out of those hundred suggestions, you haven’t paid for the $12.99 price tag of Golf Industry Guru for a year. You can’t tell me that’s going to happen.

Tucker You look at the board members, too, not to do a total tangent on that, but we talked about that earlier. Your board members are filled with most likely successful business people in their own right. And for them to admit that they do not understand the operations, or they do not have a vision for this place, is really hard. But I’m going to digress from that because I could talk about that all day. When you talk about the difference between training and culture, how do you think of that? We’ve talked about culture. You just talked about training. We see a lot of clubs using training as a kind of checkbox exercise. Hey, we’re doing onboarding. We are doing compliance. We’re doing basic tasks. Like, I trained them on how to hold a knife. So we’re good. How do you help them see training as a culture-building tool rather than just something that you have to get done because, you know, it’s like making the bed in the morning.

James I would say that training is the how, and culture is the why. We talk about the employee value proposition, defining your employee value proposition. So when you’re trying to attract people, what are they going to learn? What benefits and perks are they going to get? What kind of people are they going to work with, and what kind of fun are they going to have? And all of those things, if you focused and drilled down on that, and you can tell that story, that’s your why. That is the ROI of why I should work for you. Just like people have a choice about what club to join, they have a choice about which club to work at. But at the same point in time, we always say you hire for attitude, you train for aptitude, so you want to hire the right people that connect with your why, that are service-minded. Now, service-minded is for frontline staff. I don’t need my controller to be the most talkative individual. I need them to be really good at numbers and make sure that we don’t get ripped off. If someone’s going to be on a mower for eight hours a day, they have to have certain skillsets and certain things I’m looking for them to have. And that’s fine because you have goal scorers and you have goaltenders. Everyone’s got a different role to play on a successful team. Task training is required not only from a health and safety standpoint and from a consistency standpoint, but it’s also required from a, this is what I need you to do. This is why you’re here. So if you’re not asking everyone at the counter if they need a sleeve of balls, there are either two things that are happening. I either haven’t trained you, or you don’t give a crap. The why is to understand that your job is to offer products and services to our members and guests, that’s going to make their experience better and make our business better. When the staff walks through the door to start this shift, they’ve got to be powered on. They’re performing. They are in a performance. I don’t care that you didn’t sleep last night and you’re hungover. When you walk through these doors, you are now on stage, taking care of our members and guests. You can’t give an uninterested performance.

Derek James, I know you work with people like John Last, who we’ve had the pleasure of having on this podcast also, and I follow his industry report. What sort of trends are you seeing? There was the pre-COVID era. Then there are these next three, four, five years. What do the next five years look like with respect to clubs and organizations, both on the public side and private side, and how they think about culture? And how does that either help them attract more customers, golfers, and vacationers, or more members who are looking for a place to belong?

James What I love about Jon Last and others like him is that they provide data. And whether it’s Ross, Ligamentolius, whether it’s Jon with their group, whether it’s players first and their survey processes, you cannot manage what you don’t measure. That’s the old adage. Data is so critically important. Number one. And we need data to make better decisions. I believe that we are going through a significant period of change in our industry, and from a technology standpoint, AI and everyone are trying to understand how technology is going to change our business. There is, as you know, never been more amenities being enhanced, built, and fixed, and clubs now are looking at this opportunity. There are different opinions about whether or not waiting lists are going to flatten or decline, or are going to stay the same. We have an opportunity right now to develop relationships. If I am a club, private, public, whatever, what I want to be doing right now is developing important, connected relations with my customers and members that are going to sustain any kind of decline in participation that may or may not come over the next five or six, or seven years. But when you look at the world, and you look at the economy, I can’t get my teenagers to do the dishes in my house, let alone to take a job to do that for eight hours a day. And so when you hear over and over again, it is difficult to get people to work in the hospitality business, and it’s difficult to have people get up at five in the morning to go rake bunkers in the rain. Robots are not going to solve all of this stuff. And so, we have an opportunity to manage our businesses, in my humble opinion, to ensure that we have the best team we possibly can have. To be able to address these types of things that are going to come about. The good news for me is that it’s never perfected. Your service has never been perfected. It’s not like we got it. We did it. We can stop now. It’s like culture and training are a daily requirement. It’s not just a task that you update your strategic plan once every four years. Creating a culture and training your people, creating relationships with your guests, and finding ways to make that happen is a daily requirement.

Tucker Maybe we should have another conversation because we’re getting to the end of our time. And I think the one main thing that I can take away from this conversation is you’ve really framed up the difference between training and culture. For me, I was typing notes over here. I was like, that’s a great way of thinking about it because the training is the how and the culture is the why, and then you add the data on top of it. I think data becomes a really overwhelming conversation for a lot of people because data could just mean understanding if it is one or the other. To say, do I even know if the reason why someone doesn’t ask if people need a sleeve of golf balls is because they don’t understand it, or they don’t care? That knowledge between those two is data. And so to understand that information helps you make informed decisions, but understanding what to do with that information is a whole other challenge. And I think that this conversation is great because when we keep working through how people should use AI, how people should use technology, and how people should do all of this, it just kind of comes back to, but do we even care in the first place? Let’s make sure that people care. And then they understand what we really need them to do. And then we can figure out how we can integrate technology and move all that forward. But before I let you dive into all of that, I know that people are listening and they’re saying, this James guy is super smart. Sounds like I need his help. Where could they find you? If they were completely new to you, how could they reach out? How could they find your information?

James Well, first of all, to reach me is easy. So, james@gurucollective.com or james@cronk group.com. What I want to finish off with, probably what we talked about, I was recently speaking in Asia at an event, and I wanted to do some research to make sure that my message was the same around the other side of the world. And I was not surprised when I did my research, and I found that it’s the same issue in the rest of the world that it is every time we survey employees. There are kind of three things that are never enough on a scale of nine out of 10. Okay. Do I like my boss, nine out of 10? Do I like this, nine out of 10? But there are three things that are always five out of ten, four to 10, and six out of 10. People want more communication. They want more training, and they want more recognition. And that is just human nature. I want to know more about how I contribute to this job, to this club, to the success, and why I am here. Tell me why I’m here. Help me understand why I am here and what I’m doing. I want to learn skills, to keep my interest and my mind fresh, so that I feel like I’m progressing somehow in myself, in my career, in my life. I want to learn things. And then I just want a pat on the back. And sometimes I want a public pat on the back, and sometimes I don’t. I’m a person who just needs to hear that’s a great job. I will finish with your listeners with my favorite trick to create an environment where you celebrate staff. Ready? It’s called boss of the day, general manager for the day. And here’s how it works. You have a contest with all your employees, and you ask them to come up with a great idea to improve the employee experience, the member experience, or help us make more money. And then once a month, you pick a winner, a winning idea. And then their prize is that they get to become boss for the day. And here’s what that looks like. They show up at 11:30. They bring three friends with them. They play golf, they play tennis, they go to the pool, they come in afterwards, they sit at the bar on the patio, they have a drink, and then they go home because that’s what every general manager of every club does every single day. Right? So, that is boss for the day. And that’s something that every club should implement, in my humble opinion.

Tucker I’m sure all the general managers love hearing that that’s what they do every day.

James There you go. Awesome.

Tucker  Appreciate your time. It’s been great. I’ve learned a lot, actually, which is funny because these conversations are more for you to talk about what you do, and for me to be taking notes. This is awesome. I really appreciate you being here and having this conversation, and I hope that we can talk again.

James You bet. I really appreciate both you, Derek, and yourself, Tucker, having me on. I love the work that you guys do. I think that we’re in a similar business, which is helping people tell stories and helping them identify their why, and culture is all about that. So I really appreciated the opportunity and look forward to doing it again.

Derek This conversation with James has been a great reminder that clubs creating the most lasting value aren’t just managing operations, they’re investing in their people. Training isn’t a box to check. It’s how you build a culture where every team member understands their role in creating exceptional experiences. Whether you’re a private club with 400 or 500 members or a daily fee course competing for each and every round, that principle holds true. If today’s conversation resonates with you, we ask that you please share it with another leader at your club or another club. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, cheers. Thanks for listening to Clubs Made Meaningful. 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.