EPISODE 113

Tucker They have a clear diagnosis for themselves. They say we need a new website. We need a refreshed logo. We have an idea for a membership campaign. And that conviction to them feels like clarity. They think they know what they need. So they feel very clear on that. But what we’ve found through working with dozens of clubs on a transformation is that that conviction about a solution can mask the uncertainty that they’re not seeing. They’re not seeing the whole picture or the whole challenge in front of them sometimes. And so what I want to get into today is when clubs skip the step of defining their actual understanding between what the challenge is and what the opportunities are, that creates a flaw in the ultimate solution that they believe they need.

Derek Board members are elected or choose to participate because they want to be stewards. They’re brought on to be stewards of the club, to help the club and whatever it is that it’s working on for the future. But they’re also people. This is a human thing, and being a member of a club is an incredibly human, emotional endeavor. It’s the opposite of practical. And therefore, the ability for a person who’s emotionally invested in belonging to something can often have a really hard time being able to step back and see what’s best for that club as a whole, as compared to what might be best for that specific member. Sometimes those interests don’t always align.

Tucker When we work with a club, it’s normally with a long-range planning committee chair, a board member, or even a president. And they have incredible experience in their professional lives. They bring an expertise to their club that is very nuanced, very specific, and very impressive most of the time. And they do their own insight gathering before they even start the conversation with us. But I want your perspective on how come those people who might have had incredibly impressive careers, even in the topic that we might be dealing with at the club, how come their perspective is a little off, or maybe doesn’t see the whole picture?

Derek I’m gonna give all of them the benefit of the doubt. I just had a conversation the other day with a person at a club who described how involved his members want to be in all the decisions that are made at their club. He very politely and kindly described them as passionate and interested, which I have to imagine is better than them being disinterested. But on an organizational level, a club is different than what I’m going to think of as most of the for-profit organizations that these board members probably worked at or ran or currently run in their professional careers. The way that you organize or run an organization that might be targeting a customer base of thousands or millions of people is different than an organization that’s targeting a few hundred. And so, while I do believe they have the best intentions, if you don’t have the proper guidelines or guidance in place, I can see how someone can, without maybe intentionally doing so, get clouded in the personal preference that they have.

Tucker Working with a community or a club-based organization is far different than working with a B2B brand or a B2C organization that’s trying to sell a transactional product or service. It’s even different than a hospitality organization that might be trying to get people to stay at their facilities or eat at their restaurant. While I work directly with big restaurateurs on the restaurants in their club, that’s an extremely different situation than building a restaurant on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. And that idea is hard for members to overcome. It’s hard for you to take yourself off of, I don’t know everything. I’m not seeing all the corners of how this could be different. You just put it into your context. And I would wonder, how does that tendency for them to put their context in the professional or the outside of the club world, how does that shape the decision that the club makes around their investments and their identity?

Derek Causes a lot of problems. I think one of the most common things that we see, that I see all the time, is that they misdiagnose. That initial diagnosis, they misdiagnosed, they missed the root problem, and they end up landing on tactical solutions. Tactics like, I don’t know, we need a new website or tactics. Even you might say we need a new logo or we need to have the restaurant open late on Tuesdays, where normally it’s only open Tuesday mornings, whatever. These tactical solutions, again, while they might have the best intentions, unless you’re throwing darts and you get lucky once in a while, it’s very unlikely that they’re actually going to solve the core issue, problem, or challenge that’s causing it in the first place.

Tucker How do you know when a club is solving the right thing versus just solving something that feels urgent or visible? Like you say, the website is a great example. And we hear that all the time where someone goes, our website is no good. And how do you know if it actually is just your website versus some deeper challenge that you’re not overcoming?

Derek Well, before we get to the answer, let’s sort of irritate the problem a little bit. We’ll talk to people who said our website’s not working, so we hired a company, and they made us a new website, and it’s still not working, or it’s still not achieving what it is that we think that it should be doing. So now we’re putting together an RFP to get estimates on having a third new website. Whatever that solution is, whatever that tactical solution that you’re trying isn’t working, it’s clear that you haven’t started at ground zero. We see this in terms of RFPs, requests for proposals, where a board or a committee or a general manager will self-diagnose what their problem, challenge, or opportunity is and then ask for a proposal from a professional services firm to help them solve that problem. But what if they’ve misdiagnosed the problem, and now they might be looking at three or five proposals from experts that are all coming at this through their own lens, solving what they’re assuming is the actual problem. So frustrating then to choose one of those. Frustrating for the club and frustrating for the partner when they choose to move forward, but they don’t take the step of stepping back first. And then they keep running into the same issue all over again.

Tucker Right. The analogy that I’ve been told many times is that the sink is full, and the faucet is on, and we’re just going to keep taking a cup of water out of it every single time. But that’s one, inefficient. It is not solving the problem. It’s cost-inefficient when you talk about we’re going to keep paying for these things, but that’s not really solving what we want. I go to facility-oriented conversations where they go, We need a pickleball court. And someone goes, Okay, why do we need that? Well, if someone else has a pickleball court, we need a pickleball court to be competitive. And that’s not the gist of competitive differentiation. That is actually the opposite of how you compete. You don’t compete by having the same things. You compete by having different things. And so that is this conversation of reactive decision making rather than proactive decision making and strategic decision making, which makes it really hard because the club world is so used to making reactive decisions based on a member saying they want this, let’s do that. A different club does this, we should do that too. The members are unsatisfied with the way that this dining situation happens. Let’s just do exactly what they want. And to dig a little bit deeper and say, they don’t necessarily say the problem. Very, very, very infrequently will you hear the problem come out of someone’s mouth in a way that goes, yeah, that’s exactly it. You have to go dig for it. You have to go find it. You have read between the lines and say, Here’s what’s really going on. So, back to my question. How do you know when you’re solving the right thing versus solving whatever just feels the most urgent or the most pressing at that time?

Derek The people who I think we see that do this the best start by asking questions. They start by what we call in our business, the assumption reversal. We assume that this is the problem. What if it’s not? What if the opposite? Or what if I don’t actually know what the problem is? And what if we can step back and take a beat and ask some questions? You would say, ask why three times or five times, but to keep pulling back and trying to get to that core problem. Some people are able to self-diagnose or take that step, but it’s so hard. Like I said, when you’re so close to it, if people are solution-oriented or problem solvers, they’re jumping to the tactic, they’re jumping to the end, and doing that. Going slow to go fast is another term that we’ll use when going back and making sure that we’re getting clarity. So I think the people that we see doing this the most successfully are starting by asking a series of questions. And if they aren’t able to answer those questions, that’s where they’re then looking for the guidance to have somebody help them discover the answers to those questions.

Tucker And I think it’s people defining the challenge or just defining what’s not working, rather than defining what they think they should do about it. And it’s kind of the same idea. But this idea of not what we think we need, but what is driving the tension that we’re feeling right now. And not defining that in a solution-based way. Some people will say, Well, what’s our problem? Our problem is that our website isn’t as good as I think it should be. Well, that’s actually a solution-based definition because you are saying the website is the problem, not what is actually not happening that would move our organization forward. So that’s really hard for a lot of people. And when they go through their career, and they’re very solution-oriented in their career, or they’ve solved a problem that feels like it could be the same, they jump to here’s what I did at X. Here’s what we did at my company when we worked through this problem. So it has to work here. It’s just a different animal. And I think that that becomes really hard, to your point, around slowing down. And so, how do you create that separation? How do you create this idea of not jumping to solutions quite yet, without necessarily derailing the momentum or trying not to undermine the confidence of everybody in the room? If someone says, Here’s the solution, I have it, without necessarily saying you’re wrong because they might be right, but to say, How do we know we’re solving the right problem?

Derek Part of it is getting clarity on what the big, giant goal is. What is the reason? What are we working towards? We need a new website. Why? Because we’re trying to attract new members or because we’re trying to shift the perception of people who visit our website, think about us. We might talk about it in terms of vision. What is the club’s future that they’ve created, that they defined, that they’re working towards? And then asking those questions makes a lot more sense. And I don’t know that that derails it. I can see somebody rolling their eyes and going, Oh, mission, vision, values again. I’m fatigued about talking about these things. But the people who do it right and have that vision really clear about who we are and where we are going, it makes these conversations not only more successful, but it brings clarity. It helps you put a roadmap together. It helps you actually get consensus and alignment, which can be incredibly energizing for a group of people that are currently struggling with a battle of ideas on how we are going to solve a problem, to say, Let’s pause on the problem first. And let’s focus for a second on where we are trying to go. Then let’s come back to how we get there.

Tucker An example is we were working with a club on their food and beverage work, and they were trying to reinvent their food and beverage to figure that all out. Well, this club isn’t considered a family club. It is not something that needs to work for every generation, from all of the older people down to the kids. It doesn’t need to do that. And there was a survey that had gone out a year ago or something like that. And they said, You know, my kid doesn’t like the food here. And their initial reaction was, We need to make our kids’ menu better. But the true answer was, well, we’re not a club where your kids should necessarily be here. Like that’s not who we are. We’re trying to create an environment in which that isn’t necessarily our priority to try to figure that out. But it’s so natural for clubs to just react to how can I make everyone happy all the time, versus who are we, what makes this place special, and how can I make sure that all the decisions we make reflect that. And that’s just not in the nature of many people trying to satisfy everyone.

Derek It goes right back to that person who sits on the board who’s been incredibly successful in their organization and their business that serves hundreds of thousands of people, who’s trying to make hundreds of thousands of people happy, versus just saying, How do we make the 300 people right here happy? And we know who they are, and either we know what they want, or we can find out. And because we know what our vision is and what it is we’re building, because we know who we’re building that for, then a kids’ menu or a playground either makes sense, or it doesn’t. And at least you can make an objective decision and not battle over that type of thing that boards could be focusing on, such as bigger, more important things.

Tucker So, getting back to the whole idea, what does it say about a leadership team or a long-range planning committee when they resist stepping back and defining the challenge before they actually solve it? What says to you, Okay, here’s what I read into that. If an RFP goes out and they say, We need a new logo, and you say, Well, what is your challenge? And they say. Don’t worry about it. We just need a logo. What do you read from that?

Derek Stubborn, short-sighted. What’s the definition of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different solution? I’m jumping to some adjectives. But it’s like a persistent problem that I have in my golf swing that I go to the range, and I grind it out, and I’m working on all of the myriad of things that I think I’m going to fix it, and sometimes I think I did. And then I go play again, and then the exact same thing shows up. And when I finally maybe swallow my pride a little bit, and I go take a lesson, sure enough, the pro who’s trained in exactly this scenario, who’s an expert in his perspective or her perspective, will usually, within three swings, actually get to the root, to the core. And then give me the tools to now start working on what’s actually going to help and gives me that clarity of vision towards that process. So I think a person’s ability to self-diagnose is really, really hard.

Tucker I read into a situation of a leadership team, a long-range planning team comes to us with a fully baked out solution, which isn’t uncommon to say we have a solution, and here’s how we got to finding that solution. That’s absolutely fine. I’m not talking about that situation. But when you get to we need a new logo, like the example I threw at you, and you say why, and they say because ours is dated and we want one, and you say, well, why is that a challenge? And they say, This is just what we want. To me, that reads as personal preference to the committee. There is someone or a group of people on the committee that got together and said, We want this because I like X and I want it to be like this. And I don’t like what we have today, and I’m just going to make this happen. There is no general thought around what makes this important for the club moving forward, rather than why I want to do it. That becomes really dangerous in its own right, because there’s a group of people that will listen to that and go, Gosh, you’re right. We shouldn’t be doing that. There’s another group of people that listen to that and go, Well, it’s my club. So I get to do that stuff. And that’s the challenge with club work. That’s the challenge with helping clubs and organizations that are based in community move forward for the betterment of the community, not necessarily for one person, even though you might be very involved in the club. Maybe it’s an equity-based club where you do have ownership in the club, and there are all of those other things. You need to think about it in terms of what is best for this organization and what gives us the best right to be successful for the long-term. You’re building an institution. You are not building an experience for you next year. You’re building something that outlives you, that outlives the next generation, that keeps moving forward. Ideally, people look back and say, those people made good decisions for the next people because they understood what made this place special rather than what made them specifically happy.

Derek The logo example is good because it’s tangible. People can associate that. Most of the people that we’ve run into, most of the clubs that we’ve talked with, have gone down the exact road that you just painted. A couple members thought the logo was tired. They took it upon themselves to have it redesigned. They reintroduced it to the club. Almost all of those were unsuccessful or had limited success and big backlash. Because when they said, Why did you redo this? Their answer was because I wanted something better. Which is valid. Or it might be because I wanted the logo that I wear to be something that I liked better than what we have. Well, that’s subjective now. Now, the whole process that you just described is completely subjective and lacks any of the objective strategic guidelines around answering what does that logo stand for? What’s the story that it should be telling? What’s this story of us, of our club? And it’s right back into personal preference. And again, I’m trying not to be too critical because I think that this is human nature. Of course, a member of their club wants to love the logo. They want to wear the merch. They want to proudly represent the club that they’re part of, but there are ways to make sure that those decisions are rooted in something that’s going to help those tactical decisions be a little bit more objective and therefore much more successful long-term.

Tucker You may have a gut reaction of what the solution is, but without being able to define the challenge and define the issue that it’s solving, it won’t be adopted by everyone who needs to believe in it, needs to move it forward, needs to embrace it. For it to be fully successful, you can’t just define the solution. You have to define the challenge that it’s overcoming. That becomes a critical part of any kind of transformation, whether that’s a digital transformation, whether that’s an amenity transformation, or whether it’s a club-wide transformation. We’re making big investments for the next chapter of our club. What does that mean for us? What does that mean for me today? What does that mean for the next generation? All of these other things. And then those solutions can layer in on that thing. So I think that it’s hard to say that everyone’s wrong without really giving them the benefit of the doubt, but they do have to do some of the hard work of defining the challenge.

Derek So if I’m at a club, I’m a member at a club, and I realize we have an opportunity. We’re considering substantial financial investments in something at our club. And before we do that, I would like to make sure that our club and our leadership have the foundational guidelines in place that will make the decisions that we’re about to embark on easier. And because I see that, in my corporate world, I’ve been through a brand transformation, an organizational transformation. So I’ve been asked, as part of my club, on behalf of my club, to help the committee put together an RFP that will help us find a partner. What should I, either as the GM who is leading this or as the member who’s putting this RFP together or starting that process, what are one or two things that they should be or could be thinking about that will help them in the route that they’re going?

Tucker Well, if you’ve defined the problem, you’ve defined the challenge, you’ve defined what you need to accomplish or why. Your point is, we have an investment, we’re making a massive investment. To get into why we are doing this, what is the ultimate point, and what will happen to our club when we do make these investments, and why would you need help? What do you need help with? Not what should I do for you, but what do you need help with? And how can that be layered into an RFP? I’m not necessarily saying you don’t do RFPs if it’s important for your process and your governance model to do those things. Something I would love to see if an RFB came across my desk, and they’re normally five or six pages long, or however you think about it, I’d love for them not to define the solution. I’d love for them not to ask here’s what I want you to bid on. What I’d love for them to do is talk about approach. What I’d love is for them to talk about here is the challenge, here are the issues, here’s all the information you need to know to properly give me what we should do, rather than just giving me, here’s what I think you should do. Because if you tell me what you think we should do and you send that out to five or six different people, they’re going to come back with a bunch of different things. There’s going to be one person who comes back with, Oh, I think you should redesign everything and do a social media push. There’ll be a different person that come back and says, You don’t need to do any of that stuff. All you need is new messaging and to relay out your website. And then there’ll be a third person who says, You know what we really need is a membership campaign. And this is what that means. That makes it really hard for some people. But if you read through those RFPs, do they understand what we’re trying to solve? Do they understand what it means, and how do I approach that? I obviously would recommend working with us and going through our process because it starts with the diagnosing of what the real opportunity is at the club, rather than saying, Here’s what we are going to do about that. First, we go, what does that mean for you? And what does it mean for this club, given the history, given the ideas, given the market, given everything that we can do, what should we do? And that can be relieving for a lot of people, but others, to your point, want to just solve it. Let’s just solve it. If I solve something, that makes it worth it for me. If I had my way, I’d say you’ve defined your problem, and you’ve defined what is really, really unique about your club, and you’re not defining your solution yet.

Derek I agree. And I would add to that in this perfect world, which comes from the benefit of knowing what we know in how the clubs that do these transformations successfully, how they approach it, this may be pie in the sky. But if I was at a club and I was the member who was leading the committee, I might actually go to three firms and ask them if they were to write my RFP for me, how would they start? Basically describe to me what your first step would be, helping me clarify that I’m actually clear on the self-diagnosis that I’ve started with. If they’re experts, they’re not going to solve it on that call because they haven’t diagnosed it yet. But to really, truly understand the processes that somebody would take you through and to hear them, are they jumping to tactics, which is this professional service that they’re experts in, or are they starting with making sure that they are helping you get clarity first so that those tactics are more successful? Get them to write the RFP for you in some sense.

Tucker It becomes really difficult because a lot of clubs work with strategic consultants. And I’m not going to throw strategic consultants’ names out or anything, but most of those strategic consultants will answer the question of what facilities do you need, and how do you get members. And that seems like an easy answer. Oh, okay, we need these facilities, and we need to do these things to get new members in the door. But what they don’t answer is, what makes this place really different? What makes this place special? What makes this place worth belonging to for a specific person rather than, we just need anybody in the door? And I think that that becomes less of a financial conversation and more of a positioning conversation around what type of club are we? Not necessarily if we’re a country club or a social club or a city club or any of those types of clubs. I mean, what do we believe here that attracts a certain type of person that the club across the street doesn’t attract, that doesn’t do that? And that’s more than a facilities conversation. And so I feel for a lot of these clubs because they go through what our industry would say is a strategic approach, where they walk through what facilities they should have based on member satisfaction, based on what other clubs are doing. But that’s not really strategic. That’s reactive. That’s optimizing your current club for whatever is going on today. That is hard to say that we don’t know what’s going on. And so it’s not necessarily a part of this conversation. But I can see how it’s really difficult for people who run these projects to feel like they haven’t really solved the problem, even though they might have paid a strategic consultant a lot of money to talk about their facilities. It’s a little demoralizing. At most clubs that we’ve worked with, after they’ve gone through our entire project, they go, I wish we would have done this before we did any of the other things we did because we answer questions that don’t get answered but should be answered far, far earlier, before you put any kind of vote together on if you should redo the golf course. If you put a vote together on whether you need to have new dining facilities, those are solutions without defining what actually needs to be done at this club. And I think that makes it really hard.

Derek It’s re-channeling that emotion, that passion that the members have who are working on this and leading this. It’s channeling that to the right place, not to the solution right out of the gate, but channeling it to that clarity, dismissing that energy, but actually ramping into it, leaning into it, but putting it into the right places and the right focus.

Tucker One thing you took away from this conversation. Go for it.

Derek If a club continues to focus on tactics, they’re going to continue to have the same problems, and they’re going to continue to be disappointed in why that tactical solution didn’t solve the problem the way that they hoped it would.

Tucker For me, it’s going way back and defining your direction of the club, defining the things that make you different, defining all of that. While it feels overwhelming and large, it is something that every club should do because it will save them time. It will save them money. I know every club wants to say, How do we not spend all of our members’ money all the time? It’s by not doing the things that you’re talking about. It’s about not just doing initiatives because you want to do initiatives, but doing initiatives because it layers up to what makes this place different, what makes things special. And this initiative that we’re choosing will deepen that difference, that will deepen what makes us special, that will deepen members’ connection and longevity to this place. And I think that a lot of people see strategic work as sometimes an unnecessary expense. For me, although I’m biased because I do it for a living, it is one of those things that will save you so much money down the road that the value it provides you is just overwhelming. And the example is immense because we see it all the time. I see clubs that invest in a rackets facility to never actually have them be used. I see them invest in a new restaurant for people to not even like or go there ever. That is not the way to build a meaningful community, but it’s what people do. And it’s really hard because they haven’t defined what the true direction and problem that they’re not solving is.

Derek So instead of a request for a proposal on the self-diagnosed tactics that we think will solve our problems, it should be more like request for clarity.

Tucker Or request for proposed approach, not here’s what we want to do, but here’s what we think that you should start with. I think that if any club works with a consultant or a firm or anyone, and they’re not going through a phased engagement in which that firm is making you sign off on all of this work before they even do the first piece, that is where I’d go big red flag because that means that they already have signed off on a solution that they haven’t even defined or worked on yet. When we see a proposal, every single time we put on top where it says, here’s our approach based on the things that you want to get done. But we’re not asking you to agree to anything other than our very first step, which is the diagnosis phase, which says, here’s your problem, here is what we think, and here is the solution that we think will solve that problem. Anyone who’s asking you to sign off on a huge bill of work without even doing their due diligence first is just giving you what you want, not necessarily moving you forward in a meaningful way

Derek Start with clarity.

Tucker Till next time.

Derek This conversation comes back to something we see all the time. Clubs that jump to solutions before they’ve defined the problem. A new website, a new logo, a facilities upgrade, those might be the right answers. But if you haven’t done the work of understanding what’s actually driving the tension, you’re spending time and money on tactics that may never solve the thing you’re trying to fix. The takeaway is simple. Start with clarity. Define what makes your club different and where you’re going, and let those answers guide the investments, not the other way around. Because the clubs that get this right don’t just save money, they make decisions that deepen what makes their club worth belonging to. 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 like frameworks, perspectives, and ideas on identity, belonging, member experience, and club culture. Weekly insights right 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.