EPISODE 103

Kevin I really enjoyed it. I followed my brother into the culinary arts and went to the Culinary Institute of America, and got a degree there. And before you know it, I’d moved from working in the kitchen to working in front of the house as an assistant manager and then general manager. And I’ve been blessed to work at a lot of great clubs around the country, from the University of Kansas, where I started as a general manager at an alumni club. Through to St. Louis, a university club, to KansaCity for a short while, back to St. Louis at Belle Reve Country Club, moved to Florida at the Loxahatchee Club, up to Atlanta at Atlanta Athletic Club, finished my management career down here at a little beach club in Palm Beach, and decided to leave the club industry after more than 35 years – not leave the industry, but leave the general manager role and kind of take my expertise and operational expertise and bring it to the consulting side. I thought it was just a good time to do it. It was kind of right about the time COVID had hit and finished up. And, quite frankly, the governance models at clubs were getting a little screwy with more governors involved in operations and that kind of thing. It seemed like everybody became an expert during COVID, and everybody wanted to be helpful. And everyone was very helpful. So I got to a point, and I was at the age and desire, and I talked to my wife, and I said, you know, it’s probably time to step back and do a little something different. What I found moving into the consulting role was that I actually knew more than I thought I knew. It was like, it’s funny what those 35-plus years of experience bring, and going into boardrooms and going to committee meetings and those kinds of things and talking about strategic planning and master planning and those kinds of things. The questions that were being asked of me were like throwing an underhanded pitch to Babe Ruth. It was like, Oh my God, I can’t believe you don’t know the answer to this. And it made me feel very good. It was like gosh, I guess I do know a lot about private clubs in the private club industry. So it’s been very rewarding. I do want to shout out to CMAA, Club Management Association of America, because when I started in the club industry as a young assistant manager, I had a culinary degree, but little else. And I joined CMAA when I was very young and kind of went through all the programs that I could and learned everything I could. And that association really meant a lot to me, and it helped me in my career to grow and get an education. I wouldn’t be here today without that. And then to give back, I served on that board, as you said, and became president of that organization. So kudos to them for everything they’ve done for my career.

Derek Does your wife and your family continue to reap the benefits of your culinary prowess?

Kevin From time to time, yes. I get in the kitchen from time to time. I find that my favorite thing to make is a reservation.

Derek Help us understand your role at Peacock & Lewis. We know them. I know of them as an architecture firm, a master at interior design and construction, master planning, and engineering. In your role as director of club consulting, what are you doing day to day?

Kevin Thank you. That’s a great question, because it’s a role that a lot of architecture firms do not have. And when Brian Idle, our CEO, approached me about coming to work for Peacock & Lewis, he didn’t have any title in mind. He really didn’t have a job description in mind. Peacock & Lewis became a very, very busy firm. 95% of the business we do is club-related. It’s related to city clubs, country clubs, yacht clubs, anything with the name club in it. It’s what we do as far as architecture, interior design, and engineering. And Brian, as a CEO, had gotten very, very busy and was doing a lot of things. And he said, well, I want you to come on board with me because I know your background. I know your expertise. I’ve known you for 20 years or so, and I need you to help me. I’m an architect. I love architecture, and doing it is what he told me. He said, but I need you to help me do everything that’s not architecture. So, I came on board to assist him with that. And it’s really a value add to the client. Because I come on board and bring an operator’s perspective along with our architects, our interior design team, and our engineering team. Now we also have an operational expertise. I can work with clubs and club committees. I’ve worked with club committees and boards all my life. I know how to interact with those individuals and work with them. Club general managers and chefs often really enjoy seeing me when I come into a club and say, Oh my god, wait. Finally, we got somebody who gets it. Somebody understands us. And not to say that Peacock & Lewis architects do not understand food and beverage, because they do. But again, from a trust and reliability standpoint, chefs and general managers really like interacting with me. I can help elevate their voice in a committee room or in a boardroom as to what their needs and wants are when it comes to renovating or even building new facilities.

Tucker Right. And you being that kind of bridge between the two expertise, that expertise of maybe architecture, then balancing that with the expertise of operating a private club. It’s not as easy as just walking into a building. It isn’t just a building at a club, right? So when we look at that, talk a little bit about what you’ve seen now that you kind of get this industry lens, because you work with multiple clubs, and you can see it across things. What do you think the biggest disconnect is between how clubs think about their facilities and maybe what actually drives member satisfaction and belonging? What makes a club special rather than just being a building?

Kevin Well, clubs are nothing without people. And that is both the members and the staff, and they’re equally important, and they have that symbiotic relationship that makes a club what it is. Clubs have characters as members, and clubs also have characters on their staff, which is kind of fun. They’ve got long-term employees, but that’s what makes a club. But in today’s world, clubs have become much, much more than what they were when I grew up working at St. Joel Country Club. We had golf, tennis, swimming, and dining. And that was a country club. And now clubs have expanded to really fill the role as, literally, that home away from home for 11 or 12 months out of the year, whether you’re up North or down South. Clubs have expanded their roles. Now you cannot really have a country club without fitness. Fitness has grown tremendously in the last 10 to 15 years in private clubs and continues to grow. We see that one of the leading growth areas in clubs today is expanding fitness centers into performance and longevity centers. It’s not just about being fit. It’s about how we extend our life, how we change our lifestyle, and how clubs fit into that. The other thing clubs have done is become much more family-oriented. Again, growing up in clubs from an employee standpoint, we would see clubs being what we would say family tolerant or children tolerant, if you would. Children could be at the club, at the club pool, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and take tennis lessons and golf lessons. Oh, and then if you want to bring them to Mother’s Day brunch or Easter, that’s fine. But the rest of it, we don’t want to see them. And now people join clubs today at the average age of 42 years old. Most of those individuals have two children or more, and they are joining country clubs, not only for themselves as the adults, but they’re joining equally to give their children an experience. That socialization experience that adults enjoy, children also enjoy that, and they’re providing that with everything that’s not just golf, tennis, and swimming, but expanding those fitness facilities, expanding children’s camps. More and more clubs are hiring youth coordinators to have programs year-round, a place where kids can go and do homework after school, and mix that in with fun and social games, and that kind of thing. So clubs have really developed into that, and they’ve developed into 11 and 12-month operations whereby members go to the club much more often, and when they’re at the club, they spend more time there than they’ve ever spent before. So we’re finding clubs becoming an indispensable part of people’s lives.

Tucker When you think of the club culture, in general, what you’re saying is that the club culture has really shifted. And I even see that when we think of prospective members, they think about a club differently. Do you ever think that it hurts the club industry about how certain people think about how it used to be?

Kevin Sometimes we see difficulty with club members, and it’s those club members who joined clubs 30 years ago, 40 years ago, or less. You go back a hundred years ago or up until 20 or 30 years ago, clubs were designed for that older baby boom kind of generation, whereby it was the guy who would play golf, the husband would play golf, and would go to the club on Saturday and spend the day – play golf and go to the men’s grill and have a few drinks or whatever. Maybe meet his wife there for dinner in the evening. Those days are gone. But some of those members who are 65, 75 years and older, still see that as their club. And that’s the way they continue to use the club today. So getting that mindset to change is a little bit of a challenge, but it’s evolving, and they see it in their own club. There are more children around. There are more families around. There are more people around. The club is being used by members, completely different than what it was many, many years ago. Some people long for those old days, but you know, those old days are gone. So we’ve got to be more, in some cases, even tolerant of what’s happening around us.

Derek With the goal of providing these social experiences, and from an operation standpoint for the club to provide this to members in a really natural, authentic and seamless way, how are you able to leverage your deep experience in operations, workflow, productivity, and the day-to-day running of a club to help make sure that all the planning that goes into these major design projects bring a better social experience?

Kevin Well, it’s definitely tying all those things together. In today’s world, the survey data shows us that members today are joining as much for that socialization experience as they are anything else. Surveys from 20 years ago will show that members are joining clubs for golf. And that’s transitioned over the years. Now they’re kind of neck and neck, and it’s socialization, and some surveys are even out distancing why people join in conjunction with golf. So socialization is a vital part of it. So social spaces are very, very important. And in today’s world, bringing people to the club and keeping them at the club is more than just having, like the old days, you had a formal dining room and a grill. Seems like every club had a formal dining room and a grill, and that was their name, right? It was a grill or a formal dining room. And now clubs have branded restaurants within the club, and they’ve expanded the restaurants and food offerings within a club so that members don’t get bored with the same offerings. And we bring that to the table and bring that expertise. And oftentimes we’ll show members in new clubs that we’re going into what those industry trends are. We use some survey data from our friends at GGA who’ve done extensive surveys throughout the United States on how clubs are spending their money or their capital dollars and how they intend to spend dollars in the future. Right at the top of the list, the top four things are golf, food, and beverage. Indoor dining is number one, golf courses are number two, outdoor dining is number three, and golf practice facilities are number four in how clubs are spending money. And then we get into fitness, swimming, pickleball, and all those other things. But that’s what’s happening in the world today. And we bring that to the table when we talk to members. The other thing that’s important to find out is what members want, and that’s through a survey process so that data can help drive decisions. But oftentimes we find ourselves as the architects, master planners, and educators as well because oftentimes members only know what they know. Some members only know their club, or they only know their club and maybe one or two others in their community, but they don’t see what’s happening in clubs nationwide as a whole. So we bring that to them both from a data perspective, and then also graphically in showing them photographs of completed projects and what’s happening around the country and talk to them about how those experiences have enhanced the member value as well as member experience. Since COVID, members are using the clubs like crazy. They’re using clubs like never before. It’s not that there are more members necessarily in clubs, it’s just that those members at those clubs have found that their clubs provide such great value and such great socialization, and, quite frankly, management teams have done a much better job on their food and beverage and on their golf upkeep and their programs, facilities and amenities that members want to be at those clubs.

Tucker I want to dive into food and beverage, but before I let Derek do that, because that’s exactly where he wants to go.

Kevin He’s an eater. He likes to eat.

Tucker I would love to get your perspective on that – asking your current membership what they want versus helping them get to a space. I’ve seen so many clubs who have a facility today, and we walk through it, and we talk to them, and they go, We built this clubhouse without any kind of understanding of who we were going to be versus who we were at that point. And almost like the facility was made for today, but it’s not really made for tomorrow. How do you help clubs do that, where their current membership might say they want this, but we need to also balance the fact that things are changing, and you will need this or something else in the future that your membership just isn’t aware of today?

Kevin That is through the visualization. That is through showing photographs of what’s out there and what other clubs are doing and what’s trending in the food and beverage side of things. These are my statistics and nobody else’s, and you know what they say about statistics – 87% of them are made up on the spot. Clubs usually trend about five years behind, like the general population of things that are going on out there, from food and beverage trends to technology, to all kinds of things. But I think since COVID, we’ve ratcheted it up because clubs have found that we can make decisions faster. During COVID, we found out we had to make decisions faster. We had to make decisions overnight. We had to make policy changes. We had to do a lot of things. And today’s membership, I believe, sees change happening more quickly. So they’re more accepting of change. And again, practically speaking, a group under 65 is a little bit more susceptible to change. So changes happen.

Derek All right, let’s dig in. Let’s dig into the FMB. Not every member plays golf, not everybody plays pickleball, but every member cares about the food. It’s got to be the heart and soul of a club. So, when a club is planning a clubhouse, either renovation or a new build, a new design, new facilities, whether they’re doing this themselves or they’re coming at it, what are some examples of where you’ve helped kind of put them in the right direction where they otherwise might’ve been going wrong with their kitchen planning? Again, with that social experience in mind.

Kevin Gosh, there are so many, and we like to think here at Peacock & Lewis that we create those improvements with every client with whom we work. Now, granted, there are some general managers and COOs out there more adept at food and beverage and do a better job at food and beverage than others, but we believe we can bring that expertise and show them. As I mentioned before, a lot of clubs are now switching from formal dining and grill dining to branded restaurants. So they have their elevated dining experience. We may not call it formal, but their elevated dining experience is now named for the course designer, or a historical aspect of the club, or something like that. And the menus and designs and branding all focus around that, but they’re casual dining. And then we’ve introduced ultra casual dining, which clubs never really had before, other than a cool snack bar. So we helped them think through those concepts. We work with the team, the chef, and the food and beverage manager on what possibilities there may be for how we can reinvent what the club is all about. And oftentimes, we see when clubs come up with a brand new experience, a brand new dining experience, food and beverage revenues will increase 50, 60, 70% because now members are using the club more often because they have more variety within their own facility. We look at kitchen designs, and it’s interesting. There are a lot of great food service designers out there. Oftentimes, and I speak from my own experience, I remember I was doing a kitchen or a club at some point, and the kitchen designer came to me and said, Well, show me the menu that you want to produce, and I’ll design the kitchen around it. That’s a joke at a club, right? I mean, show me the menu. This isn’t Del Frisco Steakhouse, where you don’t change the menu, or it’s not Ruth’s Chris where you don’t change the menu in 50 years. It’s a club, and you change the menu all the time. So you have to have equipment and technology that is related to equipment that fits a vast amount of possibilities for food and beverage. And that’s where the chef and the food and beverage managers and us, even as architects and consultants, can get involved and challenge those food and beverage designers and say, Hey, wait, you need to work with us on this. So that’s some of the value that we can help bring to that. A lot of times in clubs, and it’s just the way they are, Oh, gee, we’ve got a restaurateur or two who are members of the club. Let’s put them on the house committee, or let’s put him on the building committee, because they’re going to show us how to build a kitchen. That’s all well and good, and they could be very successful people, and we can learn a lot from them, but they can also learn a lot from us. And that’s where, again, we could come in and challenge a little bit and say, You know, we are not a restaurant with a single theme. We are a club – we have to have the best lasagna. We have to have the best tacos. We have to have the best fresh fish. We have to have the best steaks. We have to have the best pizza. We have to have the best of everything that’s in all these restaurants in our five-mile radius that all our members go to. And consequently, we have to have the equipment that makes all those things possible.

Derek You have to do all of that without profit being a thing. Like you said, it’s not like Ruth’s Chris necessarily, where, at least my understanding is, in a large majority of clubs, food and beverage is a loss leader. It’s part of the experience, not necessarily something that makes money for operations.

Kevin We have these debates with different people in the industry and different leaders, and I don’t want to get into all the personalities and different ones, but there are surveys that say those with the largest subsidy in food and beverage have the highest member satisfaction. When food and beverages and amenity have a higher member satisfaction, it makes sense. If you go to your club and they have a tremendous happy hour where you can make your dinner out of the happy hour, and the drinks are five bucks, yeah, I’m going to be pretty happy, right? But you’re paying for it in your dues. Nothing’s free in clubs. Members don’t realize that they all want something free. And I always joke, well, it’s really not free. It’s just prepaid. It’s all built in somewhere, but you do have to provide that. I think that’s one thing as a younger general manager that I wish I would have learned and recognized earlier on, and that was you do need to have a few more loss leaders, or you do need to have a better happy hour. You do you need to do some things on the front end to provide that member experience and build that socialization to bring people in. I often say, you know, it’s better to trade dollars than to lose dollars.

Tucker You’re talking a lot about the functional side of food and beverage, and how that differs from a restaurant down the street. And I think that that’s a big thing. We’ve been on those conversations with restaurateurs who come to us and say, well, this is how I do it here. And we have to sit in those conversations with whoever’s on the other side, listening to them. And I feel bad for them just generally, because it’s difficult for someone who doesn’t necessarily understand what makes a club special and really unique, isn’t that it just offers food, it’s that it offers such a wide variety to make people satisfied across all of these things. But I would go back to that flip side when you said clubs are really leaning into something that’s unique for them, or elevated dining that is unique to their club or their history, or things like that. Maybe even branding them in a really unique way. When you see that shift from what I would call the classic grill room approach of the past to now we’re going to build something that you can only get here, how is that differentiated from clubs? Like, say a club versus a club across the street, if we have different experiences, if we all don’t just have standard grill rooms, does that make a bigger impact on our membership?

Kevin We sure hope it does. And each membership is going to be a little bit different, a little bit unique, and we’ve seen clubs, and they’re out there, and they’ve tried the we’re going to build an Italian restaurant, we’re going to have the best Italian pastas, and we’re going to make our own pastas. Well, that’s great. Then, if you need to flip the theme three or four or five years down the line, you can do that. And you need to have the flexibility to do that, and that’s another area where Peacock & Lewis look. When we come in and help design clubs, whether it’s kitchens and restaurants or fitness centers, whatever it may be, we’ve got to keep in mind what the future holds and how easily we can make transformations in the future so that we don’t just start from scratch.

Derek One of the things that Tucker and I talk about is return on experience versus straight-up return on investment. And you already mentioned earlier some of the demographic differences between what the generation of members who joined 30 years ago are looking for in value, compared to the ones that are joining today. So when you’re working with clubs or navigating a board or a committee on what investments will help shape their facilities, how do you help balance the needs and wants of the 42-year-olds versus the 72-year-olds?

Kevin Well, that’s an important process as we go through. And as I mentioned earlier, surveys are an important part of it. But hand in hand with the survey are focus groups. And we like to, again, work with GGA, our partners in developing focus groups to hear from members, what they like. And when we get in a room with a focus group of about 20 or 25 people, we like to have a wide variety of members in that room. We don’t isolate it by just the 35-year-olds or just the 60-year-olds. We like the 65-year-old to hear what the 35-year-old has to say. We like those people to interact with each other so that they can hopefully identify with each other on how they use the club, and how they’d like to see the club utilized in the future. They’re not always going to agree, no question about it. But at least they can hear different viewpoints. That helps form the framework for questions that we ask in surveys, so that when those surveys go out, and the results come back, we can break those down by demographic groups. I’ll find out what their wants and needs are, what they like most about the club that they have now, and what they’d like to see in the future. GGA breaks it down by the newer members versus those who’ve been here a long time. So we can see it. Oftentimes, it’s that newer, oftentimes younger member who is setting the trend for what the future is like. There’s not exactly a revolution in clubs. I like to say there’s more of an evolution. But that’s why master planning is so important, as you look out for five years or seven years or whatever it may be. The senior or more experienced member can see where the club is trending. Okay, I see what we’re doing. We’re focusing on swimming and kids’ activities and all those things here, but we are putting some money into the golf course, and we’re doing some of those things. But over the next five to seven years, our master plan has us going in this direction. They can see that, but it’s not happening overnight. So they’re not totally turned off by it. And then the newer, younger member who wants to see those changes says, well, I joined this club for X, and now they’re making improvements and changes and that kind of thing. And I can see over the next 5 to 7 years that I’m going to be getting more of my wants and needs met over a period of time.

Tucker How important is it for members to understand the where we’re going as a club type of a conversation rather than just seeing the five-year plan? How important is it that the five-year plan is led in with here is who we are, or here is who we are going to be over the next couple of years? Do you think that’s super important for people to understand?

Kevin I think it’s very important for people to understand. It’s important for prospective new members to understand what differentiates you from, again, whether it’s a club down the street or a club across town, what differentiates you from those individuals? And it’s not just the club you’re joining today, but what is that club for the future? So, whether that’s a new member who’s okay, the initiation fee is $25,000 or $125,000, and here’s what your dues are, and here are what your capital fees are. But you want to look at it and say, well, we’ve laid this out, and we have not only a master plan, but we’ve got a financial plan to go with this. And here’s what we anticipate those being over the next five years. I think it gives great comfort to a new member coming in, so that they’ve got an idea. Now, everybody knows it can fluctuate a little bit here or there, but I believe it also gives the current member an opportunity to look towards the future and say, yes, this club continues to meet my needs, and our family can continue to afford it. And we want to be here. Now, there’s always the bottom 10 or 15% or whatever in a club who are struggling to hang on, and they may not be able to afford it. But it lays out that future for them where they can say, you know, as a family, we can afford the club today. We can afford to club next year. We can maybe afford the club for two years, but maybe five years down the road, we’re going to have to change our lifestyle and either cut back on vacations or cut back on something so that we can enjoy the club more, or we need to cut the club out of our lifestyle. But wouldn’t you like to make those decisions yourself over a long period of time, rather than just having something sprung on you, like, okay, the board’s come forward and there’s a $50,000 assessment to redo the club.

Tucker You’ve had such a great experience across the GMs, architects, and designers, and you’ve worked with all of these great people and have such great perspectives. So in your opinion, what separates a club project from just being a good investment to being really transformational and saying, hey, this is going to be something that really sets the stage for who we are going to be moving forward? What do you think really drives that?

Kevin Well, it’s something that whenever we do projects and look at master plans, we have to include as much as we can for everyone. We have to look at socialization spaces, the food and beverage and dining aspects, and we have to include golf and that kind of thing. We need to include pool and tennis. Pickleball is strong right now. Padel is up and coming. Padel’s kind of an interesting thing. That’s the fastest-growing sport around the rest of the world, not necessarily here, but it is growing. And we’re introducing that to members right now, saying this may not be something for you now, but it’s something to look at in the future. Again, future trends. So we lay those out there so that people know what’s going on. But from a transformative aspect, again, oftentimes it’s that food and beverage of completely changing things around as to what your club is – indoor or outdoor dining, how we form that together. During COVID, we all found out that we like the outdoors more than we thought we did. We didn’t realize we liked being outdoors so much, but gosh, we really enjoyed being outdoors. We find that indoor outdoors has really been as much transformative as anything else in making sure that there are great socialization spaces in the rackets area, in the golf simulator area, wherever it may be. So you can turn on and turn off food and beverage outlets when you have different functions in different areas of the club, even to the extent of having food trucks on the driving range during peak times and those kinds of things. Transformation is not just facilities, but it’s also programming. I was at a club a few years ago, and the club had put in a fair number of simulators. And I was talking to people in the focus groups about the simulators and how they utilize them. To a person in a focus group, it was, well, we really don’t use those very much. You know, simulators aren’t getting very much use. My next follow-up question will be like, Well, what kind of programming do you have for those simulators? What has your golf shop staff done to educate you and bring you in and give complimentary training and all that kind of stuff? And everybody looked at each other. It’s like, Oh, we’ve never had any of that. That’s never taken place. Talk about trends, transformative programming has to be a transformative aspect of what happens at the club as well, to match the facilities and amenities that are there.

Tucker Right. Just having a building isn’t going to be enough.

Kevin That’s not going to do it.

Tucker If you don’t show people how to use it or give them an opportunity to really use that space properly, it’s just not going to be anything more than the fitness club down the street. I can join Lifetime Fitness, and that would be just fine.

Kevin I’m fortunate enough to belong to a club down here in Jupiter, and we had two bocce ball courts, and they’re right next to the clubhouse, prime, prime real estate, right next to the clubhouse. And for the first three years we were members, four years, nobody was ever using the bocce courts. They hardly ever got used. And then finally, I think a member said, well, let’s try and get some bocce teams going and kind of put together a little something. Well, then the club hired a new food and beverage manager. And this young, dynamic guy comes on board. He’s like, I think that bocce’s really got some possibilities. What do you think? And I was talking to him about it. I said, I’ve seen it in the club industry and other clubs I’ve been to and other clubs I’ve visited. A great bocce league, getting people involved, is going to drive beverage. It’s going to drive food sales. It’s going to drive these things on certain nights when you have those things. They took the bocce in-house and, oh my God, now we’ve got 150 people playing bocce on the nights that we’re open for bocce tournaments from five o’clock to eight o’clock, the restaurant is jammed, they put a bar cart out at the beverage area, and they’re selling drinks. It’s transformed because somebody took responsibility, and somebody said we can make this happen. Again, it goes back to the program. The facilities were there, and nobody did anything with them. It’s all about the program.

Derek Last question. You’ve had this incredible vantage point over your awesome career, managing, seeing clubs from the inside, seeing how they’ve evolved over these decades. What makes you the most optimistic? I mean, the last five years have been a huge boom with COVID. Clubs seem to be very healthy. It seems to be, like you said, if they were five years behind, now they’re catching up. Are you optimistic about the future of private clubs?

Kevin I’m terribly optimistic about private clubs. And I’m glad you asked that. In the late nineties, again, I’m old enough to be around during the late nineties when we were building golf courses left and right, and all of a sudden we were overbuilt, and we had a recession, and things happened, and there was a little bit of a leveling of the playing field. And now, more golf courses are being built again. There are a lot more vanity golf courses being built. That’s these ultra-wealthy individuals going out building their own private clubs, their own playground, but that’s kind of off the table. That’s separate. What I’m optimistic about in the private club industry right now is that these individuals growing up in clubs are becoming much more family-oriented. So the 10 and 12 and 14 and 16 year olds who are now growing up in clubs and are seeing a club in a whole new way are making the club a lifestyle experience that when they matriculate through college, and they go on, they’re going to want that experience for themselves and their families like never before. And that’s going to help perpetuate clubs into the future. You know, we talked about the baby boom generation, and we had a little decline in the birth rates. The average age of people joining clubs is 42. So every year right now, we’ve got more 42-year-olds aging into the marketplace. So we got more customers for clubs for the next five to seven years. We’re building that next client base, we’re building the next club member by doing such a great job, by being so family-centric and making clubs indispensable in members’ lives. That’s what it’s all about. You’ve got to be indispensable.

Tucker Thanks, Kevin. This is a great conversation. If I would be allowed to, Derek won’t let me, but I’d talk all day. I think this is a fantastic kind of learning moment for those who have just seen that evolution across the years, but also that future sentiment makes me really excited. But the biggest thing that I’m taking away from this is that the facilities that you make, even if they’re the most beautiful facilities in the world, that raises the floor for your club’s potential. But how you raise the ceiling and how you really reach the full potential of a club is by how you use that space. And what is the programming? And how do you make a space more social? And how do you make it so it feels like our club, not just any club? And I think that your experience, but also just your candor today, was really great. I thank you for that.

Kevin Well, maybe next time you’ll get me to open up just a little bit more.

Derek We’ll talk more about Kansas next time.

Kevin Let’s do that.

Derek If today’s conversation resonated with any of you listening, please share this episode with another club leader who’s thinking about design projects or renovations. And please go look up Kevin and Peacock & Lewis. Thanks for listening today. 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.