EPISODE 108

Derek Once that’s done and the GM’s hired and announced –  we talk about drinking through a fire hose – I can’t imagine the quantity of operational information they’re going to take in around how we do it. How we do this, how we order, how we hire, et cetera, but it’s the visionary GMs that we’ve met with or had the opportunity to talk to or work with that spend those 90 days figuring out who we are as a club. So that, as I’m understanding and get up to speed on how we do it today, I have the opportunity only for this one time to run it through this lens of, well, does how we do it make sense based on who we are? It’s not unusual for a GM, like you said, who’s been there for 15 years, especially one who’s announced their retirement, who’s starting to wind down and ready for that successor. They’re COOs, they make things happen, and they fall into a rhythm, and things that work well, they keep doing. But I don’t know how often one steps back and says, I know this is the way we’ve always done it, but is this the way we should be doing it?

Tucker I think our experience with corporate clients in a past world has really helped me understand the importance of this. When we saw CEO transitions or COO transitions, they moved forward. It became really interesting because we worked with one that I thought was really great, and he came in, and he spent the first 90 days just observing. At the end of the 90 days, he gave a, I don’t know if it was a half-hour or 45-minute, keynote-type situation to the company. So that would be like the general manager coming back to the entire membership and saying, Here’s what I’ve found in 90 days, and here’s what I want to work on moving forward to improve this club. That’s something I haven’t seen yet in club world, treating this as though we can improve, we can be kind of, like I said, vulnerable, being a little humble, and say, you know, we can be better than we are today. That’s what I would really love to see a general manager come do because they have the opportunity to do that. You don’t have anyone to offend. You have no political background on that. You don’t really know the membership at that point. But to show them that you’re really driving change, but not just changing for change sake, but changing for a specific reason, I think is really important.

Derek We often look at the lens internally of what’s going well, what can we do better, and what are the things that we can do to achieve that better? But how do you define what better is? Operationally, better might be more efficient. It might be doing something in less hours, less waste, and more profit, all those sorts of table stakes things. But I imagine all of the low-hanging fruit that a new GM walking in and really experiencing things for the first time with eyes wide open, and that first impression, the opportunity for all of the things that they see that everybody else who’s been doing it day to day takes for granted, because that’s the way we’ve always done it. What an amazing opportunity. I’m not a GM, and I haven’t been one, but I have to imagine with the good ones that’s the lens that they’re coming in here with anyway.

Tucker So if a board is vetting a GM candidate beforehand, because I’ve heard this before, where they go, well, why don’t you just come with solutions? I’ve hired you. You know what’s going on. Why don’t you just come with solutions? Why would you wait 90 days to start solving those problems?

Derek Great question. Short of that general manager having to wrap up their obligations at their previous job, maybe they’re limited in what they can do, but that doesn’t limit what the board can do. The board should have clarity on who we are. I mean, let’s just assume, give them credit that they’ve done the hard work of defining who they are, who they’re for, what the future of this club looks like, so that when they actually vetted and chose that GM to lead them, they chose somebody who they believe will pick up that vision and not just carry it forward, but lead it. So the board can step back and do what the proper role of a board is in supporting that general manager in leading the organization towards that vision.

Tucker What I think the big challenge with boards is to understand that the problem isn’t always the problem. And the problem that we’re talking about could be a symptom of a deeper problem. The general manager’s job in those first 90 days is to dig into what the symptoms are and what the problems are. A member is not going to know all the ins and outs of the operational side of things. And that’s what really becomes this giving someone a chance to sink their teeth in and really understand it and really dig into it, and really figure out what my culture is like from a working side. What are our staff’s expectations? What kind of training do we give people? That’s stuff that just can’t be learned unless you’re on site, working through all of these different things and having conversations with different people. I’ve talked to another GM who started their tenure at a club where they said, I just met with members, staff members, and other groups of people for 90 days. I just spent a ton of time talking to people to understand. To get the full scope of it is not too dissimilar to what we do when we try to get to know a club. It’s more conversational. It’s more about getting to understand what someone means by what they say, not necessarily exactly what they say. And that’s what I think boards need to be patient about. And it can become really hard. I’ve hired someone. I want them to solve the problem today. But if a general manager is going to last a long time, they need to understand the full scope of what they’re getting into and how they can support it and improve it.

Derek I was looking back at the article that we co-authored before we got on here. There was a great line in here that says, culture reveals itself through behavior, not through policy. And so while we can share with this new general manager what the club’s policies are, they need those first 90 days to understand what the current culture is, not just to understand who we are, what our values are, what our spirit’s like, but I think to see where we’re not only aligned and again, what’s already working well, but to start looking at where we are misaligned. Imagine them consuming member satisfaction surveys. And there are complaints about food and beverage. And so the solution, the instant solution, is to change the menu and swap out the burger for a different burger. But to your point, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was, if you had asked and dug in and understood the behavior, it’s the behavior of that specific culture of that club, what they were actually missing was the experience. The club was focused on serving food so fast because they thought that the customers, the members, wanted it fast. What they ended up missing was the engagement and the interaction and the charm and the fact that I didn’t come here for fast food. I came here for a meal, for an experience, to enjoy my time here. And so that diagnosis had been wrong, but through fresh eyes, like you said, by getting past that initial problem, which was a symptom, they were able to dig a bit deeper by witnessing the actual behavior of the membership and the staff.

Tucker There’s a really great book called Alchemy that our office has read, and that gets into the problem that you’re identifying might not always be the problem. And I think that’s really what I get into with the first 90 days of a general manager. Because in that book, they go through a study around trains in Europe, and people say, Do you want your train to be faster? Or do you just want your train to be more hospitable to you? And they found that to make the train faster, it costs billions and billions of dollars to redo the entire network. But just to make the train have Wi-Fi and to have the seats have more cushions on them costs a couple of thousand dollars. And so that difference of making people’s experience better isn’t always what they tell you. They don’t always get to what the nuance is. And that’s what I think is really important. But if you’ve given someone 90 days and you’re on the board, what should you be paying attention to? If you’re saying, Did we make the right hire? Did we do the right thing? Is our general manager helping us move forward? What types of things should they be looking at, in which you can say, yes, that is the right way to go about the first 90 days?

Derek That’s a great question. I would love to kind of be a fly on the wall in that board or the executive committee meeting, who’s talking about that and gathering that list of guidance for that GM to pass that off. There are two sides to it. One side is how do we look at our culture, assuming we’ve established who we are, what we’re for, our values, etc. Understanding and watching how the new general manager absorbs those and embraces those, maybe even challenges those, and says, Hey, I know you guys keep saying that you’re all about this. But when I see two sides, when I see how you guys treat each other or act around here, or (B) externally, when I how you’re expressing your brand in the market and to potential members, there’s some places where I see really strong synergies where you’re doing a really great job, but I also see some areas where you are not telling the right story or the story is getting lost or you’re not telling a story at all. And I think if that board is doing their job and has a really strong grasp of those two things, then to watch and make sure that the GM’s also identifying both the inward and the external are two immediate pieces that I think I would be paying attention to.

Tucker When I get into that transitional phase, if I were a board member, the success mark I would say is whether they are having lots and lots of conversations. And if they are clearly meeting with a million people and talking about a lot of things, that’s what I would think is really important – getting really ingrained into what we’re all about here and how that all works. And then two, if you came out of those 90 days with a priority list of things that you need, what you think we should work on in the short term and the long term. So, having two separate lists that are short-term, this is what we are going to work on this season, and this is what we think we can do to improve our baseline for experience. How do we raise the bar? That is our floor for how good the experience can be here. And long-term, here are the things that I believe operationally will make this club a special place to be. And how do I bring that to the board and have them understand that? It’s a two-way street. It takes a GM who wants to do all of those things and is really excited about change and wants to improve the operations. And then it takes the board to embrace that change and to be comfortable with being told you’re not the greatest club in the world, and being comfortable with things that you might have thought were perfect, that might be better if you just open your opportunity on it. And I think that that can become really difficult.

Derek I had the opportunity to talk with a member at a club who led the executive search committee that found, vetted, and hired their brand new GM. And we were talking casually, and I asked him how it went, and he basically said, It went good. I’m exhausted. I will never do that again. I hope I never have to go through that. Man, that was a lot of work. I had no idea how much work that was going to be to really make sure I was doing right by my club. I’m curious if that person, who’s maybe also on the board, is exhausted now. He’s done his work, he’s done his job. And now they’ve brought in a GM who’s not a first-time GM, so there’s a risk that that person might assume that because this GM, we’ve vetted them, we’ve hired them, we believe in them, they’ve said all the right things, we’ve hired them, and now they’re coming in, that we can just kind of step off, fade away, and assume they’re going to do the right thing because they’ve done this before. And frankly, I haven’t been a part of the club that’s hired a new GM before. So I’m going to assume that they know what’s going on. What happens then? What happens or what are the risks when a club treats this moment as routine or takes for granted that the GM knows what they’re doing versus being a little bit more strategic? Climbing to the top of Everest is only halfway; you gotta get back down. So I would say hiring that GM is halfway. Now let’s get him onboarded.

Tucker The visual I always use with clubs in general is a moving walkway. Have you ever been to an airport, moving walkway, going one way? But clubs are going the opposite way on a moving walkway. That’s just how it works. And what happens is if you just stand still, you end up going backwards slowly. And that relevance goes away. And if you just walk, then you’re going to maintain where you’re at. If you run, you’re going to take and make a lot out of it. And so when it comes to a general manager transition, if you’re telling them, don’t worry about it, here’s how we do things, do not rock the boat type of situation, you really risk relevance. Is that right for us? Is that how we’ve always done it? Is that actually the right way to do it as we look forward? Then the second part is that you risk the opportunity cost. Think about what could be done versus what you guys always do. If you’re not even opening the door to what could be done, that’s opportunity costs. You’re costing your club the opportunity to be a better club. And I would say most board members don’t want to do that. They don’t think in terms like that. But I think that when you go to a general manager who has a ton of experience or doesn’t have a ton of experience, I think it matters more on how you set the tone for what your expectations are in those first 90 days. And so if your expectation is that we want you to get up to speed so that you can keep running things the way they’ve always been run, that’s going to result in a lack of relevance moving forward. Because if a facility has been run the same way for 50 years, I can guarantee you there’s at least one small thing, even if it’s minor, that is probably not relevant anymore. And so that’s basically what you’re offering, and then you’re also setting the culture for that GM moving forward, in which it’s that we don’t improve, we maintain. And that becomes really dangerous because if that GM is there for 15 years, you move on to the next GM, and maybe they’re there for fifteen more years, and so you have 30 years of just doing things the same way, while technology and memberships and expectations and everything else are changing. And to say that your culture is to maintain is almost to say that we don’t care about the next generation.

Derek Everybody has their own kind of mini agenda. The golfers are coming in saying, Hey, we would love to do this or when are we going to get that irrigation done? Now I’ve got fresh ears. The old GM wasn’t listening to me. I’m going to make sure I plead my case to renovate the bar and renovate to restaurant. And so he’s handling all this. And of course, they hired somebody who was awesome. So he’s dealing with it very diplomatically. But you said this right out of the gate. What if the board gives this person time? What if they give them the first 90 days to diagnose, and to identify the things that need to change, but maybe also at the same time to reaffirm some of the things about us that are great, that we can then make sure we continue to lean into? Not just to come in because we’re broken, but to come because we actually have some nice momentum, and we are walking on that walkway, and to help us pick up the pace a little bit. If we swamped them without letting them diagnose, it’s going to be hard for them to give them the space to prescribe something that’s going to help us in the long-term versus just continuing to make short-term personal preference decisions.

Tucker I agree that the sentiment is most often, but not always, the case that a club is struggling. That’s why the GM moves on. It could be because of retirement. It could be because of a lot of different things. They could have family differences. They might just not be a good fit, and that’s totally fine, too. But to say there’s always this forward momentum if a GM does it right. And what I think the critical piece of 90 days is, is to ensure that there is forward momentum after that transition. Whether you had it before or not, as long as those 90 days pass and you have a direction, here’s what we’re going to work on to be better, and this aligns with who we are, that to me would be a win.

Derek And that means it’s a two-way conversation. It’s not the GM coming in and the board saying, This is what you’re going to do. This is who we are, et cetera. You said it before, which I think is brilliant. It’s being vulnerable and open to challenge and exploration, and to be open to the perspective from this new person who’s going to see us. They may have seen us from the outside. They may have learned about us during their vetting or during the interview process. But now we’re actually bringing them in, opening everything, opening the closets, the books to really truly use that as a once in a very long time opportunity to be vulnerable and to let that person in to allow them to then make those strategic decisions. It’s not unlike when we’re working with a club, and they’ve hired us to come in, and we’re starting to work through our discovery and strategy process. You can’t make a strategic direction with your expertise if the club that we’re working with isn’t vulnerable enough to share with you what the actual challenges are. Sometimes it’s an opportunity, but most times it’s one of five problems or issues that we see, and for us to properly diagnose it so that you can make a strategic direction means that they have to be vulnerable to say, Yeah, we’re not perfect and I don’t know what the solution is. That’s why we’re talking to you, but we think there’s an opportunity for us to do better here. That vulnerability is hard, though, especially if there is a loud voice in the room, or on the board, or on that committee. We have to diagnose that same thing.

Tucker I think that a GM’s job is not easy at all. I mean, you have 300 bosses, that’s the hardest part. And the really good GMs recognize that that’s not the case, but it feels like that all the time. And it feels like I have to listen to all of these people because they’re paying my salary, and this is how this all works. But when you step out of that, and you look at the club as an entity, and you say, I’m trying to do the best for this organization, not the best for that member, not for this member, or not the best for this group of members. Like you said, the Saturday morning golf group. I’m not doing the best for them. I’m doing my best for everybody. And what that means is that some people aren’t going to be happy with the decisions that get made. Some people aren’t going to like that we switched from paper towels to towels in the bathroom. And some people are going to say, That’s a no-brainer. Of course, we should do that. And what happens with the GM is that as long as they make decisions that are tied to direction and who we are and what we aspire to be as a club, then you’re in the right place and your heart’s in the right place and what you’re doing is strategic and right versus the people who just listen to the guy who is the most upset in the boardroom because he thought that he was going to get a Himalayan putting green and now he doesn’t have one and there’s now a new tennis court that’s really upsetting and all this other stuff. And so it’s a really hard job. I think that when I get into a bunch of jobs I don’t want to have, a general manager is one of them. But it’s not because I don’t think they have a lot of power, and they don’t have a lot of opportunity. I just think that they are pressured in a lot of different ways. It’s a great job. It’s a cool job. I really liked the GMs that I’ve met and worked with. But it’s a hard one.

Derek In a couple of months, this new GM that I’m talking about, maybe we’ll invite him on the podcast and talk about that first 90-day experience and what they learned, and do a follow-up on this conversation and get an inside perspective. I think that could be helpful to our listeners.

Tucker Thanks for the conversation, Derek. It’s a great article. If anyone hasn’t read it, it’s like you said, in Boardroom Magazine. I think it’s called The Importance of the First 90 Days, New GM, New Direction. So there’s a great article in there. It’s split between you and the team at KK&W. They give their expertise on all of the finding and hiring of general managers, and kind of how that whole process works, and what they look for in a great general manager when they’re looking for opportunities. It’s a perspective that we can’t really provide, but it’s really, really helpful.

Derek Awesome. We will see you guys, or you’ll listen to us next time. Thanks for joining. 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.