EPISODE 122

Jason There may be a computer center – that type of thing. I was a journalism major at Washington and Lee, and I just happened to have been forced to take typing by my mom when I was a freshman in high school. So I typed all my term papers. Everything I had to turn in, I typed because it’s just easier than writing. I graduated in 1988 and was going to go to law school. I did go to law school, and before I went, my parents said, Go out and find yourself a computer because you’ll probably need one because computers became a thing in 1988. And I didn’t know anything from anything. I only knew about the DOS computers I was working on in the computer center to just use WordPerfect and that type of thing. I sat down in front of a Mac, and within three minutes something had changed in me. The manager of this computer store kind of said, you know, I think you’d be interested in this. So I ended up buying a Mac, a SE laser printer, a little 9-inch black-and-white screen, and all that. I ended up going to law school and probably spent 1/3 of my mental energy on law and 2/3 on playing around with the computer, getting on this new thing called AOL, and then eventually getting onto the internet very, very early. I graduated from law school, and then decided to get another law degree, an LLM in taxation. That was at Villanova Law School. At Villanova, their internet efforts were really a pioneering group of professors, the UNIX guys from the library, and some students who were really doing the initial things on the internet with regard to the practice of law. So in 1992, 1993, I was on the Internet and saw the first 50 or so World Wide Web pages. I became super interested in it. But I had four and a half years of legal education. I decided to pass the bar in Pennsylvania and practice law. All the time, I was very much more interested in internet stuff and computer stuff than practicing law. After a brief, not terribly successful legal practice career, I went into some publishing because I was also a journalism major of tax law books. I’m going to work one day, I thought, at a web agency for lawyers run by a lawyer. That was a unicorn at that point – never heard of. And then, within three seconds, God said to me, Legal Internet Solutions, Incorporated. And hopefully you and your viewers will understand the acronym and make me laugh. My wife had a great job at the time. She said, If you want to start a business, start a business. We don’t have kids yet. So that was 28 years. I founded this agency, Legal Internet Solutions, Incorporated, and we did and do build a lot of marketing campaigns online for lawyers and law firms. Fast forward to 2005. My wife and I had become members of a pretty prominent city club in Philadelphia called the Union League of Philadelphia. At the time, it still had tentacles in the sort of old white guys, business club, social club type world. I was involved in the internet. Not many people in the club were involved in the internet at the time. So when the Union League needed their first real website – they had a website, but it was not usable, and it was basically a tiny brochure online – they asked us to bid on it. And we bid on it, and we were fortunate to be chosen. And that was 21 years ago, and we’ve built them four iterations of their site. And because they’re so prominent, they’re the number one city club in the United States, second only to Ocean Reef in revenues. Other clubs noticed that the Union League of Philadelphia had a bespoke, not out-of-the-box, like the other competition was doing, unique website. And we started attracting more clubs. And we took on a club here, took on a club there. After I started getting involved in the club conferences, National Club Association, the Club Management Association of America, I couldn’t really go to those club associations and that market with the name Legal Internet Solutions, Incorporated. Why is this law firm website developer coming? So I split it off as its own brand and its own business, its own EIN, and eventually it’s on a team, and that became Club LISI. And now we fully have one foot in the legal marketing world, and I’m very involved in that. We have a dozen people on that team, and one foot firmly in the club world. And we have a full brand for clubs, and we also do communication support beyond just building websites, both the public side and the member login side, and it’s been a terrific journey.

Derek I relate to so much of the story, the internet coming of age. I think you and I are probably of a similar age. I went to school for graphic design, and I remember in one of my design classes, one of our projects was to go to the computer lab, log in, sit down on one of those Macs, and then send the instructor an email. Like, that was the entire project. Between that and the sound of logging in to a website, that little squealy noise through the modem, man, that’s like such a distinct noise. I will never forget that.

Jason Remember, the modems were in baud. You know, the1200 baud modem, then the 2400 baud modem, then the 9600 baud modem.

Derek Thinking back to actually designing websites that could function at that speed, at that time compared to what’s today, that’s crazy. As you said, you are a club member. So you have this unique perspective of being on the member side and also serving the clubs professionally. As a member, what’s one thing that you think members notice about how a club shows up digitally? Whether that’s the website or in their day-to-day communications, what’s something that the club may not be realizing right away that you, as a member, because of your experience, can predict?

Jason Well, I will tell you one of the things that we always attempt to do in everything we build and every system that we set up for private clubs really comes from an idea of ease of use. But it really comes from an idea from Jeff McFadden, the pioneering GM, now CEO of the Union League of Philadelphia, and we’ve been members of the Union League just about the same amount of time as his tenure. He talks a lot about reducing friction. He talks about reducing friction in a member wanting to do something and then being able to do stuff. Okay. It should not be hard to sign up for the July lobster dinner. It should not be hard. It used to be difficult. Sometimes you would have to call in and make sure you got the right person and then make sure you gave all that information. Or sometimes you would send in a postcard. You’d send in a postcard to reserve for something like that, and there’s friction in that. And we think very much about reducing the friction. So you say, what do members notice that the clubs might need to understand? Really, it is that ease of use in every other aspect of their life. At this point, you can apply for a whole mortgage on your phone. The members, generally on the wealthier end of U. S. society, are used to things working, things being easy to access, things being seamless. There’s a ripple every once in a while, but seamless in doing things. And so their club – some people call it their third place, their fourth place, whatever you want to say – but those members are used to being able to click on something, reserve, change their reservation, that type of thing. We think a lot about that. And so the more members are used to the ease of use in other areas of their life, they want their club, on which they are spending a terrific amount of money, to have that same ease of use. And a lot of the systems that we seem to see when we go to clubs are clunky, like mid-90s technology. I really think that my affinity for the Mac and all Apple products since then – I have had almost every iPhone in the first 10, 15 years of there being iPhones. That ease of use – I’ve really taken that to heart because the Mac makes it easy. It makes it easy if you want to do something. It’s so much so that people younger than us don’t even notice that you used to have to do a Command-C prompt to run something in DOS, or some people had to put their computers together. And the Mac, you plunk it, you open it up, it starts up, and you work. Again, there’s a ripple every once in a while, but in general, that’s my philosophy. And the philosophy I’ve imparted on my great team to deliver really good member experience, as well as staff experience. It’s not merely just serving the members. We want the website and the facilities of the website to be easy to use by the administrative team behind the scenes. They shouldn’t have to think, oh, I need to do a workaround and create this four times because it’s different. And we think about how they work, and we build individually to each club.

Derek And I agree. Staff experience, member experience, a club’s brand – as far as I’m concerned, it’s 100% for the members, and it’s 100% for the staff. Thinking about those experiences, I think every club has great intentions with their communications plan, whether it’s emails or updates or what they share, when they share it, what the website content is both on like public facing and member login, the app. I think with all these awesome tools and all this technology, the club has the right intention, but sometimes there’s a gap between what they’ve intended to communicate versus how the member experiences all those communications. And I think that’s the gap that you guys live in. You shared a presentation that I think you gave to the NCA, and you were using food service as an example. And it pointed out really nicely that problem, that challenge, that thing that you guys have the ability to come in and solve. So I think the question would be, when you come into a new club relationship, and you’re aware that there may be something to clean up in that middle area, how do you start to look at how a club communicates to help you uncover and find what that solution might be that you provide?

Jason These days, in almost every case, before engaging, we are hired for a paid audit and assessment. In fact, we just completed one yesterday for a great club in Rhode Island that flew two members of my team up from their home locations, in real time and live, to look at what the membership director needs to deal with. Look at what the accounting staff needs to deal with, as well as look at it from a couple of members’ sides. Click here – how does this work? The assessment can’t really be done on a free basis because you’re only doing the surface things. What we really want to do is create a whole assessment and plan, objectively written, so that you don’t have to use us after that. We don’t write it toward us. We say, look, we’ve been in a lot of clubs. You’re doing this pretty well. These other things could use some improvement, and here’s why, and here is the effect it could have. So the assessment, and it’s not that expensive relative to the expense of making a mistake if you start off on the wrong foot, is an integral part to a lot of our engagements, because a lot of our engagements are pretty complex, and you want to have run over the blueprint before you build the house.

Derek Are clubs under-communicating or are they over-communicating, do you think?

Jason With membership or with us?

Derek With the membership. Going back to that member experience, are they sending too much information out or not enough?

Jason Oh, we see it all different. We see it all different. At the club we just spoke with this week, we had seen something like seven to 10 emails a week. And they were struggling with segmenting their lists because not everyone in a club really wants to know the upcoming ladies’ golf events for the next two months. And so they’re really working hard on now toning it down because if people just decide to hit unsubscribe and they don’t know that they can segment out their interests in this type of thing, they might miss the news that they want to engage with. Other clubs have trouble communicating enough because there’s so much friction in getting the information from this department and getting the information from this department, and then putting it in an email, in this clunky email system that’s built into these all-in-one systems, and then getting that email out. And the link is wrong, and that type of thing. So it can be both. There isn’t one answer to that. There are clubs that over-communicate. By over-communicate, I mean communicate the wrong things at the wrong time to the wrong members. I’m always in favor of a lot of communication and knowing what’s going on at the club. However, again, not everyone’s interested in the ladies’ golf events. So let’s not bomb their email box with that if they’re only interested in racquets events for seniors and that type of thing.

Derek I was talking with a marketing-like member slash marketing director at a club recently – basically a department of one, which is typical. One person in charge of probably three roles, and one of those roles is administering all this communication, and they were sharing some confidential stories of frustration around the quantity of information that they send out. And then inevitably a member still comes up and says, Hey, I wish I would have heard about that lobster dinner. I really would have liked to have gone to that. How come you didn’t tell me about that? And that person probably saw three or four emails and a flyer, and it was on the website. So, thinking about this department of one or two, when you sit down with them, or even their leadership, in understanding that gap between what they’re putting out and what they think they’re putting out. And they’re working hard. I mean, they’re working long hours, and they’re, like I said, communicating a ton of information. But then there’s the difference between what members actually see or receive, or it got buried, or they had to scroll too far over the events they weren’t interested in and missed it. There must be a communication strategy that you help guide that leadership team through to help that communication department do their job more effectively.

Jason Well, I will tell you one of the guides I had, and have, is the communications department at the Union League. They have seven, eight people in their communications department. That’s in the top fraction of 1% of private clubs. That’s a luxury. They have one person doing the social media full-time, W-2. What we want to do is sort of bring that kind of force to elevate and amplify what one person can do. I kind of refer to it as if you hire us, we’re going to make you look like a rock star because you get the most awesome set of tools. You get high-end graphics. You get people who know how to do email campaigns, people who know to do social, people who know how to write and write in a tone that matches your club. So that’s really our goal. The clubs that have multiple people in their communications department still many times need us. They probably don’t have people who are really good at building and maintaining websites or doing certain things. And we can come in, and we’re doing original coding, which we can do. But we really want to make that one overwhelmed person look like a rock star at a fraction of the cost of hiring even one or two full-time employees on the team. And then you can have all the tools, serve the membership, and also get some sleep every once in a while.

Derek I love that. It’s not a staffing problem. Let’s not solve this with more people necessarily. Let’s help the person that we have do their job better and more effectively by arming them with the right tools and the right guidance and the right support. Love that. Let’s pivot to the fix. Let’s look at what getting this right looks like. Back to that presentation of yours – one of the things that really stuck with me was how visibly this communication challenge or opportunity shows up around dining. The one touchpoint that every member uses – not every member plays golf or pickleball or tennis, but everybody eats. And when that communication around all of that is inconsistent or late or buried in other communications, members feel that pretty immediately. And that potentially then can even extend beyond the dining room. So when you’re doing that audit and when you are looking at club communications as a whole, describe whether it’s ones where you come in and you see other clubs, or the clubs that you’ve already worked with, are now running their communications really well. Give us a little glimpse of what that looks like, what people that are listening to this that are struggling with their communications,  what they could aspire to how great it could actually be run.

Jason One of the things I would say, especially in dining, think about dining outside of your club. People have spent millions of dollars working that interface and that technology. So it makes it seamless and frictionless to be able to sign up at El Vez – that’s a Philadelphia restaurant – sign up at El Vez for a table for four next Saturday. Click, boom, done. Think about that at your own club. Because you are running, in many cases, a restaurant. You’re running certainly a golf center. You’re probably running a racket center. You may be running a hotel. Just think of how easy it is outside to do that. And then sit in the seat of a member and say, Okay, let’s pretend I want to make a reservation at the main dining room two weeks from now, and I want to sit by the window with my friends. How many steps do I have to go through? Is it easy? Is it thought through? And so the idea here is to think about how easy it is to do things outside of your club, and translate that into inside the club. Of course, I’m biased. I think we think this through really, really well. But you have to sit there and just think how many clicks are you going to do? With every click, you lose somebody. I was a newspaper journalist all through college and a little bit after. And they used to say, with each paragraph, you lose people. So that’s why it’s called the inverted pyramid. You get the important stuff up front. And then if they only read two paragraphs deep, they pretty much have it. You don’t bury the lead. Same thing with clicks. Every click that you make someone do, you’re going to potentially lose them out of frustration, out of boredom, out of lack of ability to concentrate. A club makes its money through serving the members, certainly through dues, but it’s not merely dues. Dues don’t really cover the whole nut. In virtually any club, or any club that I know of, it’s food and beverage. It’s getting a tee time. It’s signing up for a rackets lesson. It’s doing something at the pool. So you want to make it easy because they’re customers. You want to make it easy on your customers.

Derek Well said. And then how about the staff? I mean, think about when it’s that easy for the customers and the member experience is elevated. Think about how much better that situation looks for the staff, not only the ones that are doing the communications, but just the people that are serving in that restaurant, that it was so much easier for the member to make that reservation.

Jason I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, and I’m sure it’s very rare, but some members are a little impatient with certain things. If they show up and their reservation is lost somehow, or they don’t get the table by the window that they wanted, it depends on their level of grace, but they might let the staff people have it. I signed up for this, and I’ve been a member for 20 years – all that type of thing. You don’t want to be that person, but if you were really looking forward to that event and it’s messed up, people are going to be unhappy. One of the things that we enjoy hearing from clubs is this thing that you’ve used technology and communication to help us refine, used to create 17, 18, 19 calls a day from people trying to sign up for something, and they call, and you have to call them back. Now they can do it online. They can also call if they want to call. But if they can do it online quickly, not have to hear the phone ring, hearing that really makes my heart sing. That the number of phone calls goes down and the number of member frustrations goes down. And so I think it just makes a better working environment all around.

Derek That environment sounds like a no-brainer to me. I’m thinking about clubs that you’ve worked with where the leadership was fully behind doing this evolving. Like we’ve talked about, the club industry tends to be quite a bit behind, especially from a technology standpoint. When you run into a team or a leadership that decides not to move ahead with this, why wouldn’t they do this? Is it because they’re looking at this as an expense instead of an investment?

Jason Several answers to that. Of course, there is the cost. In my mind, think of the relative cost. I hear of places, Oh, we’re going to redo our golf course. A five- to ten-million-dollar project for redoing the golf course. But you don’t want to put fifty thousand into it, and that’s just a number. It could be above, could be below. You don’t want to put 50,000 in? Your membership as a whole is 100%. How many are going to use that golf course? Could be 60%, but it’s probably more like 30 or 25% because not everybody in a club golfs. Virtually everybody is going to use the website or the app, virtually everyone. I will say, from when I started, I see less and less of that. A lot of places do value that type of thing and know that it does cost money. So, of course, cost, relative to other things, I think it’s very, very small. The other thing is ingrained workplace culture and structures. And if you are a put-upon membership director at a small club and you’re also in charge of the communications and you are also in charge of getting things over to accounting and you get 16, 17, 18 calls a day and you’re just managing, someone coming in and saying, Okay, we can make this easier, but it’s going to require a couple of changes in your workflow. It’s for the better. They don’t hear the it’s for the better part. It’s like, oh my gosh, I have to now learn this new thing, and it’s going to be over my head, and I don’t want to do this, and I don’t want to upset the apple cart. Many times, that’s in the accounting section, and we do not get involved at all in the accounting systems. But they have their system. It’s working. It may take 15 steps to do something that should take three, but they’re doing it, and they’ve been doing it for 25 years. Change is hard. Change is hard. I understand that. Some people are suited for change, and they’re always interested. Oh, I want to find something better. I want to make this a little bit better. There are a lot of people in the world, and this is no knock on them, who are just like, Okay, I really don’t want things to change. It may not be the best. But the pain of exploring, changing it, so my life will be easier, it’s just too much. I have other things, I have kids, I have to go home, all that different type of stuff. So I would say organizational inertia – this is the way we’ve always done it. I’m fearful of what the change might be. I’m kind of hearing that it might be better for me, but I don’t want my world to be messed up.

Derek If there’s a GM or marketing director or even a member who’s listening to this and nodding along and recognizing that their club needs to improve their communications, they need to update their technology, they need better tools, they should obviously call you. But is there a first step that they should do or can do internally that helps them so when they make that first call to you, you guys get off on the right momentum? Quicker, earlier, better?

Jason I would say that the first step is to really come to terms with and have a culture inside the club of being able to voice frustrations about how a certain thing is happening. I have in both of my companies a very open culture that if you don’t think something is going well, and even if it’s one of my decisions, let me hear it. Have that culture where people can say things. And then, from that culture, make a list of things that are just bothering you. Make a wish list of things that, boy, it sure would be nice. And then we can start talking about it. Preparing. We can also walk through that with you. If you don’t want to go through that whole problem, you can just call us, and we could start that process. But those are good ways to prepare.

Derek Less clicks. I want less clicks, both literally and metaphorically. Let’s make this easier. If somebody wants to talk to you or somebody on your team, where should they go? Should they go to clublisi.com?

Jason Clublisi.com, of course. I have people in business development who would be happy to start the conversation. I’m always available. I love talking about this. Some people claim I like it better than the legal side of things. But this is the culture in which I feel very comfortable. Reach out to us. We’re happy to start the conversation. And even if it is something that doesn’t happen tomorrow, in terms of an engagement, we’re happy to share kind of best practices, or you have a gripe about this, or I kind of want to use a different tee sheet than what these all-in-ones are forcing on me. Is there any alternative? Yeah, there are alternatives. We know this inside and out. So I’m happy to talk with people. And I really love the club world. Because they are in hospitality. And so, therefore, they’re hospitable, and they’re kind to talk with, and they’re people people, right? Newsflash, not all lawyers are. And I can say that because I am a lawyer. But they are people people, and it’s just a joy to work with them. And it’s even more of a joy to alleviate some problems they might be having.

Derek Awesome, Jason. Thank you so much for joining me today. Really enjoyed this conversation. Appreciate your time.

Jason Enjoyed talking with you, and again, thank you for inviting me.

Derek Less clicks, literally and metaphorically. That’s the simplest way to summarize what Jason brought to today’s conversation. Sit in your member’s seat and click through your own website. Try to make a dinner reservation, find what’s happening this weekend, register for an event, count the steps, and think about what that same member did on OpenTable or Amazon that same day. The gap you feel is real, and closing it starts with the systems behind how your club communicates, the infrastructure that’s underneath it. Get that right, and members feel it every time they check their phone, open an email, or decide whether to make a reservation. If this conversation sparked some thinking, I hope you will check out Clubs Made Meaningful Insights, our weekly email. Not a recap of the podcast, but original thinking on identity, belonging, member experience, and club culture. The kind of content you can bring to 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.