EPISODE 101

Jake So I guess that’s the best way to explain it. You’re putting stuff like merchandising-wise, knowing if it’s cold, if it’s warm, certain spots of your shop, different signage that they might see for different tournaments coming up. So you’re always trying to stay as many steps ahead as you can in front of your members, just so they really embrace that country club lifestyle.

Tucker When I was new to the club space, I was naive. And I always thought that a club pro or the head golf pro has to be focused on golf. But as I’ve moved through that experience, it’s clear that what you guys do is really, really hone in on making a member not only satisfied, but really excited to do something. I mean, you talk about tournaments, you talk about all of those interesting things you guys put together, league nights, things like that. For you, as you’ve gone through your career, what of those have been the most challenging? Cause I’m assuming you got into it because of your love for the game, and that has now shifted to more like how do we make people excited about playing that game and keep going, maybe outside of the technical aspects of golf?

Jake Well definitely. Obviously, first of all, you gotta have the right staff. The right staff in place and being able to help them succeed, which in turn shows that member an even better experience. Getting into golf, right out of college, I didn’t play college golf. But I knew I’d love golf. I was into business a lot. So that’s where joining  Golden Valley in 2010, I kind of saw that opportunity where owning a golf shop and running the golf operations, you’re kinda putting two to two together. So I was really intrigued with that, and I was thankful enough to take that over in 2022.

Derek How common is that in private clubs now? How often does the club, from your perspective, run the shop, own the shop, versus the pro run the shop as their business?

Jake It’s very rare and and this is why. You have assistant pros that are making a minimum amount of salary, and for them to take a job to move up to a head pro and then take on a golf shop operation for merchandise-wise is very scary. Sometimes they’re not able to do that to find the money to buy the initial what you need to put into stock. So I think that’s why a lot of clubs take that over, because it’s not really a burden to the pro, but I just don’t think they want that. And it’s obviously a risk, you know, for the pro coming in, whether you have a bad rainy season, or there are all these other factors that could affect how your sales go throughout the season.

Derek As you approach deciding what goes into the shop – what brands, what merchandise, what items – what are some of the things that factor into those choices and decisions?

Jake Well, I guess the first thing that members don’t realize is that we buy six months in advance. So you have a spring buying season, then you have a fall buying season. Obviously, you know, in September, October, I’m buying for next spring. And then once we go to the PGA show in January, I’m buying for the fall. So we’re always seeing the product six months ahead. As for what we buy, it’s all on your clientele. If you have the membership which I have here, which love to buy – they love to see trendy stuff, the new stuff, the high-end fashion. So that’s where I kinda stay when I’m buying for the golf shop.

Derek Obviously, the revenue is important for that to be profitable. That’s part of your business. But how do you think about merchandise as a tool to help build pride throughout not only the membership, but the staff? So when members carry their bags or wear logoed apparel out in the world, it’s more than just a cool new shirt. It’s an opportunity for a member to represent their club. Do you think of it that way?

Jake I do, definitely. And that’s why ninety five percent of my merchandise in here is logoed with our brand. The greatest part was obviously when we rebranded, got the new logo, and I’ve had every member walk in and say, Hey, I need something with the new logo. So they’re excited, they want to show that off, they want to show it to their friends, and when their guests come, showing that they have a brand new logo, they’re ready. They’ve been here for a long time. It was good. It was really good with the new facelift of the new name and the new logo that came into effect. I started at a good time here, taking over the shop.

Tucker When you worked through that change, for those who might be listening to this, and they might be going through a change like that, what really stood out as kind of things to watch out for, knowing that you’re rolling out new stuff, but you still had some old stuff in the shop that kind of had to be worked through, right? And there are always going to be members who don’t like the new things. Like that is just natural. So how did you deal with that when you think about membership kind of changing over to anything that looks different or new?

Jake What we really did was we took all the old logo off the floor. So there really wasn’t an option because we didn’t want to create – I like buying this logo still, I like buying this. I mean, with my vendors, I said delete that logo, because obviously, if you send in a big order and they put the wrong logo on it, you’re upside down again. So we deleted it from the vendors. So anytime a member would come in and say, I want the logo, well, you get the new logo. So that was a little tough for some of them, but it wasn’t too many. As for getting rid of the old merchandise, just like every season, you’re always going to have excess merchandise, and different sales tactics to get rid of it.

Derek When a brand gets updated, we would see success, say right out of the gate, a 75 to 80 per cent support and acceptance rate from the membership. But change is hard. So, especially members that have been members for a long time, older members, sometimes they see that change as a threat to their membership, and the club that they’ve joined and been a member of for so long is now changing. And that change could be like literal within the change of the golf course, the change of the membership, but even just that cosmetic visual representation of that logo is a challenge for some people, but sometimes it just takes a beat. So I’m curious if some of those people who maybe right out of the gates weren’t happy about the change or were resistant about the change have seen how 80% of the membership has reacted to the updated brand, and have they turned the page and come along and now embrace it and buy it?

Jake Yeah, most definitely. So we’ve seen that with, and I don’t want to say our older members, but it’s our tenured members that have been here a long time. But obviously, we went through a little shift in where our membership has become a lot newer, a lot younger. And they really didn’t know the old logo, so it didn’t make any sense to them anyway. So they were all on board for that. But for our older members, I mean, obviously, change is tough, but they see the club excelling, they see it becoming vibrant, it’s shinier, put it that way. They don’t want to come into a country club where it’s dull, as it’s obviously with their clubhouse being built in 2002. So I think it was great timing for it all to happen.

Tucker When we get to work with you guys, your team and our team work together on tournaments. So tournaments for us are a really unique angle at talking about member experience. Because you guys have six tournaments across the season and working through those, they also speak to a little bit different people. I know you guys have a breakfast opener at the beginning of the season that is a little bit more friendly and casual, to things that are more member-member or member-guests that are more serious. Talk through that a little bit about having different types of tournaments for the different areas of the membership to kind of give everyone a chance to compete in their own way, but also have kind of a sense of pride and joy.

Jake Just to kind of walk through our opener. So we have our women’s opener and men’s opener. It’s just more of a gathering. It’s our first big tournament that we run. We’d love to have them have a little breakfast, go out and play some golf, and come on back. Usually, it falls on the Kentucky Derby – for the men’s one, it does. The women’s is a couple days before. Then we try to kind of bring that into the tournament, as well as a little bit of the Kentucky Derby. So it keeps members around. It’s a fun day. Moving into June, we have our member-member events for the Tilly for the men and women. They just like their match play, and usually they’re in the same flight every year against the other teams. So they’re always taking each other on, and they never want to be out of this tournament. So they always plan their whole summer accordingly. They know when this tournament is, but that’s how they plan their summer out is basically the Tillinghast Cup. And that obviously leads us into our great member-guest, which is Golden Days, which has been around since 1965. Having a wait list of over 30 teams every time is very unique, and I’m glad the members support the tournaments here. They want to play in them. But the member-guest is the main one where we try to take it over the top with having a three-day event, so they almost feel the member is showing this guest, this is my daily life here at the club. Obviously, it’s a little exceled, but it piques interest in that guest to say, Hey, maybe I want this. Maybe I should join here. So that’s always a good little seller. And then later in the fall, we run into our club championship, which is always great. A little friendly competition, which you’re starting to get in August, September. The greens are getting a little quicker. Grass is a little taller. It’s a tough golf course. And then we finish it up with another member-member, which is always great for late September. It’s just fun to get everyone together. And then we finish with the Iron Man, which we rolled out with a hat with our tournament logo on it. Even though I had the same hat as last year, I brought it back again. I said, if you didn’t get one last year, if you weren’t able to play or if you need a new one, if it’s faded out a little bit, grab another one. So they were jumping over these hats, which half of these guys don’t even wear hats. But they loved to see the logo, and they wanted to wear it around for that day, and just be part of the event. It was great.

Tucker When we worked through those, and talking about the story of how all those six kind of come together, and they’re different in their own ways, we did opt with your team to say, let’s build out unique logos for each one of these and and kind of have that opportunity. For you, what were the pros and the cons to being able to say, Hey, we’re going to have a completely different logo? It doesn’t look anything like your club’s logo. Let’s say, for like the Tilly, the Tillinghast Cup, that is a completely unique thing. What are the benefits to doing that? I mean, a lot of clubs that we’ve worked with have opted not to go that direction. What would you say builds that sense of pride and joy in that specific tournament?

Jake Well, obviously the the first pro of it is the marketing material that you can send out. You know, your flyers – everything that you send out, you throw the tournament logo on it. We see it in our locker room. It just gets some excited. We do that a month before, so the members know, hey, I gotta get ready for this thing and go from there. Some of the cons of it, they always want something with that logo as like a tee gift, where you struggle each year to try to find something unique. Because you can’t always do hats, I’m sorry to say. It’s tough to do a shirt because all of a sudden, you’re throwing more work on my staff to go find everybody’s sizing. And if you’ve got a hundred and twenty players in there, there’s a lot more logistics. But we’ve done different valuable bags, obviously the hats, we’ve thrown it on poker chips, and just small things to give that unique touch during the tournament to say, Hey, I got to play in Tilly this year.

Derek I think the average person, me included, beforehand, thinks of a tournament as a golf event. You know, you show up, the course is set up, and you play and naively take for granted all the work that somebody like you and your team is doing a year or months and months in advance, not just to get the course ready, not just to hope that the weather is nice, but all these little touches, like you said. Merchandise is great, but it’s what the merchandise provides to the member. A $30 hat is that sense of belonging that I played in this tournament, or I identify with The Iron Man, whether they won or not. All these little moments of connection that you’re actually providing and all the hospitality that goes behind it, based on your experience, if club leaders, GM, board, committee members, if they understand the role of a golf professional isn’t just coordinating and executing tournaments and events, but actually providing member experiences that are enhancing loyalty and are, especially in those member-guests, attracting potential future members too.

Jake Oh definitely. And that just brings it right to greeting the member, greeting the guests, the small talk, finding something that you might have in common, just to continue that conversation a little bit longer. I think members love that. So it’s showing that you care is all it is. The members begin to trust you, they start buying more things, they ask your opinion on things, they’ll complain to you for everything, but that’s fine within the club. We just talk to whoever we need to, but that’s the way it is in private life.

Tucker And you get back to that. It is interesting that you don’t want to necessarily jump out of the gates, but when you say if they’re happy, they will buy more. That is generally true. They don’t need any of this stuff, right? Everything is a want. And so if you can make them want it even more, then that will drive that excitement and that goal. And to have six tournaments a year, you have to make each one of those special, or else they become not interesting. And so I think that’s the big challenge with a lot of clubs in your scenario right now –  especially the clubs that are fixed seasons. Where with you guys, your season is really like May to I guess it’s finishing up in October. But to really say, like we have this much time to try to get a member to spend the most time we possibly can at the club. And we do that through tournaments, we do that through engagement, we do that through leagues and all of that other stuff. What in your experience over the last couple of decades working in this industry has been the biggest impact when you say, God, you know, when I do this, it seems like every type of member loves that, or when I do X, it makes them just go crazy, and I can always see that as success?

Jake I think just giving them something other than the golf aspect of it. I get it. We all want to go play golf. We all want to shoot well. My ladies’ events, we theme them. So everything’s themed, so they might come in a different outfit, but they feel like they’re part of that event. The men don’t jump on themes, but that’s why a lot of those tournament logos have really helped. So it’s more, like you said, you’re wearing that hat around, or you have something from the event. You almost create jealousy within the membership, going, Hey, how come I’m not in that event, or how come I didn’t play in that event? So that’s something to help kind of drive and and kind of go back to the merchandise part. I mean, everybody has 20 golf polos. They don’t need another golf polo, and they don’t need another blue shirt. But if you have somebody in the shop that says, Hey, you look really good in that, and I think you need the latest and greatest polo, which, if you go to some of the lines, they keep their same polo for 15 years. So if you have the right staff in place to just show some interest and say, Hey, this would look great on you or your wife. Let’s bring it home for her and see how it goes. And if it doesn’t work, you bring it back. What’s the worst that can hurt?

Derek Is there a, I don’t know, call it a hack, but is there like one thing that every club should be doing when it comes to either that little member interaction or a guest interaction, just one little subtle thing that from your perspective you would say, I don’t know why every club doesn’t put an engraved bag tag on every guest that comes, or do their homework and look ahead of time, or learn how to remember a guest name. What are one or two really seemingly simple or obvious things to you that enhance that experience that maybe you go as a guest to some other club and they’re not doing those things?

Jake Right. Well, obviously, travelling. I love to go to different private clubs and just kinda say, Hey, what are they doing better than I’m doing? And I take that back. Take it back here to the club to try to implement it within my staff. You can make sure they have a bag tag, you can make sure they’re greeted, you can make sure they get maybe something afterwards. But I think it’s just more of, as a golf pro, being present, being available. There’s nothing better than a member coming with two, three guests, and you’re standing there and you’re greeting them and their guests. Because you gotta remember, with a lot of these guests, they’re only going to play here once every two to three years. So you’re giving them that extra time where you’re just available to them. And what would you like? What do you need? Do you need a locker? Do you need this? Like I said, stay one or two steps ahead.

Derek Some clubs, private clubs, seem to treat their guests in a way that lets those guests know that they’re guests. And other private clubs treat their guests as if they were members, like members for a day. Does that philosophy come from the top? Does that come from the pro? Does that come from the vision of the club? Are they doing that intentionally?

Jake Yeah, that would come from the top, depending on how we want to greet these guests. But as we do in my golf shop, we treat every guest like they could be a member. It’s a potential sale to bring them in as a member of the club. Because I’ve been to a few where you kinda walk in, the cart kid kind of looks at you funny, and you throw your bag on a cart, and you stumble into the golf shop, and the guy behind the counter just kind of looks at you funny because he knows you don’t belong. You try to throw a little small talk at him, but he’s just not having it. That’s not how I run my operation, I’ll be honest with you. So it’s that friendliness, and like I said, every guest could be a member in the future.

Tucker How much of that is trained, and how much of that is getting the right people?

Jake I wish it would be that easy that that person would call my office and say, Hey, I want to work for you. But yes, there’s a lot of training to it. But where I’m at, you lead by example. Never the one to sit in my office, I’m out there in the bag room, running down the range, running around, just to kind of show my staff and to let them know, hey, we’re here to support you to help these members have a better experience.

Derek I’m thinking of young golf pros, whether they work for you or just somebody that happens to be listening who’s coming up in the industry, what’s one piece of advice you’d give to one of those people who are looking to elevate their role to help them understand that what they do is more than just say running events or selling merchandise, but driving that member connection and member loyalty? What’s something that they could be thinking about?

Jake You mean other than working 80 hours a week and being there every day?

Derek For minimum wage.

Jake Minimum wage for, you know, as long as ten years. I would say communication within the whole clubhouse. You know, being able to have a relationship with your F and B, have a relationship with your green and grounds, that can only better the experience. Don’t just walk by your concierge. Maybe say, Hi, how are you doing? How’s your day? So that way, when you send a phone call down to her or him, they’re just as friendly, and they know, Hey, I’ll take care of this member from here, I’ll take it from here. So it’s knowing that person that you can delegate the responsibility to and know that they’ll do just as good of a job.

Tucker We’ve been to clubs before where you can tell that they are siloed, where it’s like I leave the golf area and I go to the food and beverage area, and it is clear that they are on different pages around what the experience should be. And what it sounds like is if we’re all on the same page, then that should feel pretty seamless. You should feel like you are at this club, no matter where you’re at in the club, versus being like, no, I’m in the dining area, and that’s a very different atmosphere and the way that I’m treated there versus if I walk into the pro shop. How important is it that those are seamless? Where the experience feels very similar across those.

Jake Well, it brings me to an example. Here I got a group on number twelve. They call in and say, Hey, it’s getting a little late. We missed the halfway shack. Can we get a few beverages? I have a good relationship with my bartender. I call him. He says, Sure, I’ll put it together. I said, Hey, I’ll have one of my staff run it out. You know, all of a sudden, there we go. We’re helping as a team to create a better experience for that member and their group. I’ll be honest. Being an assistant here for twelve years, you gotta know your surroundings. You gotta know other departments. You gotta know who to talk to when you go down to F and B or down to Green and Grounds. If you have a question that a member is asking you, you can have a response very quickly.

Derek I think my one takeaway from today’s conversation is that my perception that all head golf pros are scratch golfers maybe isn’t quite the case because you’re not playing three hundred rounds of golf a year.

Jake Like I said, you get in my position, you just try to make eighty, right? That’s the golf pro right there. You break eighty, you’re doing just fine.

Derek All right, let’s take this to wrap. Jake, appreciate you joining us today and sharing your insights. What you and your team are doing is creating a place at The Club at Golden Valley where members just don’t play golf. It’s a place where they belong. And for people listening to this podcast, that’s what these conversations are about. It’s not just about what clubs build or the amenities or their offerings. It’s about how those things, how the tournaments, how those merchandise items make people feel and how thoughtful leaders like Jake turn everyday moments into lasting connections. We will see you next time. 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.