EPISODE 86

Tom You bet. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Derek Kind of a fun small world moment when Tom and I met a couple of years ago, maybe a year and a half or two years ago, when we realized that the president of a club who we were working with in Florida on a rebrand called Lemon Bay, that that gentleman was a member at one of the clubs that Tom used to be a GM at. And I think you knew his son too. So it was a fun, small world connection between your time at Oakmont and Lemon Bay in Florida. 

Tom Oddly enough, I was in Pittsburgh yesterday, and a waitress said she knew I had worked at Oakmont. We were at Sewickley Heights Golf Club, which we’re doing a GM search for, and she said, Do you know Tom O’Shane? I go, Yes. And she’s like, I spend half my time here, and then I go to Lake Nona. I knew Mr. O’Shane from Oakmont, but then I knew him from Lake Nona. I was like, Small world. So, yeah, Mr. O’Shane is such a good guy. It’s easy to tell why people remember him because he’s such a dynamic person and such a good person. 

Derek He’s doing an awesome job down there in Lemon Bay, too. 

Tom He really is. 

Derek You’ve done a ton of things in your career, according to my research by my crack research team. You’ve spent something like 25 years as a club manager, as a GM, before ultimately transitioning into your role that you’ve been in now with KK&W for about a dozen years, I think. So from our perspective, you have a really unique point of view from both sides of that hiring equation. You’ve been on the club side, you’ve probably been recruited yourself, and now you’re doing that work on behalf of clubs. Give us a little bit of background on you, your role, and KK&W’s specialty. I think you can tell us what your company does better than I can. 

Tom  Well, personally, I got started in the industry shining shoes, and I think I started at Country in 1986. And then I eventually left. I was the interim GM for a period of time. And then right when I was about to become the GM, I was offered the job at Oakmont. But during that time, I had done basically every job under the roof of the club. So from washing dishes to housekeeping to waiting tables, all those things. I became an assistant manager, I think, in 1995. After that, I went on to Oakmont, and then I was there for 10 years. We did a lot of fun stuff there. Great club, great team, great city. And then, actually Kurt Keebler, my partner, recruited me to a real estate community that had just gone through bankruptcy, and he said, It’s a bit messy. But this is something where you could really impact this club and get it back on good footing. And so we built a great club, and I did that for a few years, and then joined KK&W in 2014, or at that time, Kopplin and Kuebler, with no expectation that they would eventually add my name and make me a partner. And then in 2019, I became managing partner. But, yeah, we have grown. When I joined Dick and Kurt, there was five of us. Now there are 34 of us. We were in a couple of cities. Now we’re in nine cities, and we opened an office last year in the UK. We’re opening an office this year in New Zealand and Australia. So we’ve grown very organically, though we’ve never set out to be the biggest. We always just set out to be the best and be thoughtful about what we could do. The thing I love about our company is this is all Dick, Kurt and I have ever done. We all grew up in the club industry. We’re passionate about it. So we’re protective of it. So we’re protective of it from who we work with. We are protective of it from who we place because it’s really important to us that everybody, like you said, the members want to be successful. And you want to have good members, you want to have good employees. For us, we want to work with good clients and we want to place great leaders. So that’s kind of how we operate. But we do searches, like you said, from any direct reports to the general manager and the general manager. We do about a hundred GM searches a year, and then we do another hundred chefs, CFOs, controllers, anybody that would report to the general manager. We also do a tremendous amount of consulting. Most of our consulting is in food and beverage. Food and beverage is just that one thing at every club. No matter how great the club is, there’s always membership angst about timing and consistency. My medium rare is this color, and the club’s medium rare is this color. You can never be perfect. I remember doing an externship at the Ritz in Cleveland when I was in hospitality school, and the manager said, Tom, hospitality is an imperfect business. As soon as you figure that out, the better off you’ll be. He said, So what great hospitality organizations do is they learn right away that we’re gonna make mistakes every day, but how are we gonna recover from them? And I remember him saying that great hospitality organizations recover incredibly well and win their customers, win their members, back when they do make a mistake. I like the Ritz from a process procedure structure standpoint, but I knew it didn’t fit me. But I did learn a tremendous amount just about how they look at customers. They taught me about the feedback loop. Nothing happened to a customer that wasn’t addressed in 72 hours. I carried that into my career as well. So there was a lot I learned there. But, yeah, we do a lot of food and beverage, a lot of agronomy, and a lot of governance training. One of the things about boards is that every three years, you could have a full new board, potentially based on the governance of the club. So we go in and we coach up new board members to make sure they know, this is your role. This is the GM’s role. This is a department head’s role because, at the end of the day, these are successful, smart people, and it’s kind of hard for them to take a step back and allow the trained professionals to run the club. I feel like Kurt did 150 on his own last year, but we probably did somewhere between 150 and 200 governance retreats or some sort of governance work with clubs to just make sure they’re staying on track. And if we get managers who call us on a personal level, they’re either struggling with things operationally. It’s either food and beverage, or golf course, or it’s governance. I’ve got a president who comes into my office every day and kind of asks me what I’m doing. The micro management can be a bit much. So that’s really what we do. At the end of the day, we’ve grown because we want to be able to be kind of a one-stop shop for managers that need things, boards that need things, committees, things like that. And it will be 30 in April. Dick always thought he would just do 10 or 15 GM searches a year when he started and things have really changed. 

Tucker Let’s start with the talent, because I’m interested in that aspect of it, before we get into more of the consulting areas. But the biggest challenge we see with a lot of clubs that we work with is that talent piece, not necessarily always Executive talent, but who feeds up to them and all of those other things. With your experience, has that always been a challenge for this industry, or was it in the last five years, with maybe COVID and other things like that, that kind of finding and retaining and attracting talent has been a challenge? 

Tom When I started hiring, and when I started managing people, so 1995 until 2014, hiring’s always been difficult. But it is the most difficult now than it’s ever been, both at the top level and at the bottom level. We’ve lost just under 2 million hospitality folks since COVID, who have gotten out of the industry from burnout, or there was early retirement, and they took it. A lot of people got furloughed. I had hundreds of calls with big box hospitality, Montage, Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, and Omni. And they said, Listen, I moved four times for this company. Every three years, I moved across the country with my family, and then things got bad, and they furloughed me. So I’m either going to get into another part of hospitality, like clubs, or I’m just going to go into something that’s more stable. It’s a very hard industry. But I think it’s the hardest now, I think, because one, a big chunk of our population used to be high school kids and college kids who would work the summers and the peak seasons. Now these young people, I have a 20 and 23-year-old, so I could say this, have no interest in jobs where they’re taking care of someone else. They want a job where they can take pictures of stuff and post. They’re very centric, and I say that lightheartedly, but it’s really impacting our ability to get people into the industry. There’s got to be a lot more focus in the future on getting into the high schools and teaching these young people about the upside of the club space and hospitality, because they don’t see it as a future. They used to just see it as a summer or high school job. Now they’re just not interested because taking care of someone else doesn’t sound that interesting. 

Tucker I think that’s interesting when you talk about the generational change. We see generational change on the member side all the time. I feel like that’s what everyone wants to talk about. But the generational differences between the staff and the talent that comes into the clubs are just totally different from one type of generation to the next. And so when you go into that setting, what are clubs that are doing it really well doing that allow them to get access to these great talent pools or have people that maybe in this next generation aren’t very interested in this, but maybe for this club, they might be interested. What are you seeing that stands out? 

Tom Well, first and foremost, one of the things that’s been very exciting about the industry is finally, like Joel Livinggood, Carmen Massuri, Brett Morris, Matt Lambert, and Marcy, until we brought her into the company, they’re hyper-focused on the employee areas. I used to literally have board meetings in the employee lunchroom just to show my board how bad it was. They would literally go, Is there a point to this? I’m like, yes, I just want you to sit here and have a meeting where the employees eat lunch and see how all the deliveries come in and how the exhaust from the trucks wafts into the cafeteria. And money is being spent in a big way right now. Other than simulators, clubs are spending the most money right now on making sure their employee areas are good, from cubicles all the way down to the lunchroom, to the restrooms. One of the things I love that Carmen did was he built his lunchroom. It’s in the basement, but he cut in windows. So when they’re sitting there eating, they’re not looking at the dock, they’re looking at the golf course. Just those small nuances really make a difference. But right now, the employers that are killing it are the ones that are very thoughtful about the employee life cycle. They’re very thoughtful about, okay, what kind of people do we want? Where can we find those? Once we find them, who’s part of the hiring team that selects them? How do we orient them in a powerful way? The big gap in the hospitality industry is from orientation to what I call culturalization. We’re going to tell you how great we are and how we do things here. But culturalization starts the moment they meet the long-tenured employee, and they either say, Yeah, that’s exactly how we do it or, We don’t do it that way and just follow me. And then if there’s a gap in what you tell them at orientation to actually how it’s performed on the floor, that’s when culturalization can go the wrong way. I figured that out kind of late in my career, but I was like, this is the gap in the industry. We can sit up here, have a great orientation for a day, give them some mugs and some Turvis tumblers and t-shirts. But when they start the next day, if the employee that they’re integrating with isn’t living that culture that you were talking about during orientation, then the slow decline begins. But they’ve been doing a much better job of making sure there’s no gap between orientation, culturalization, and then really focusing on retention, really focusing and giving reviews. The younger generation that’s in the workforce now, Sherm says that they want four times the amount of feedback that a baby boomer does. So think about that. And one of the things that’s always kind of mystifying to us is when we go into clubs, we want a great member experience. And first thing I always say is, What’s your HR team like? And they’re like, We don’t have one. And I’m like, Okay, all right. So, how do we build a member experience? It’s not bricks and mortar, it’s people. And if you don’t have a person or two who’s focused every day on recruiting, but also making sure that the people that you have are happy to be there. I do talks all the time where I ask managers, How many of you do exit interviews? They all raise their hand. But if I ask them, How many of you meet with your staff quarterly and just see how they’re doing, almost none of them do because they just don’t have the budget. That’s one of the budget items. Most new managers, when they get into clubs, if they don’t have great data so they can make data-driven decisions versus emotion, or an HR person, so that they can make sure they have the best and brightest staff, they usually try to drive that pretty quickly within the first six months. And then continuing education. These young kids I teach at BMI One, and I’m getting kind of the young managers that are just coming into the industry. When I was growing up, I wanted to get to an Oakmont, or go to a Medina, or go to Wing Foot. These young people don’t care what club they work for. It’s not about the logo for them. It’s about what the manager’s reputation looks like. Do they put people into the industry? Do they advance them? Do they invest money in them? And that’s a big change. I was mentored kind of like my dad parented me, just quietly, and you just kind of picked up things by osmosis. But I think now young people want to know they are going to work for a boss who’s got a strategy on how to develop them as a leader. And they can say, year one, year two, year three, year three, you’re either going to go move out and be an assistant manager somewhere else, or you’re going to get a job here. But I’ll have you ready, and I’ll leverage my network to get you there. So the good ones are being very thoughtful about every stage of that teammate’s life cycle, making sure that they’re getting developed. I think that’s super important. I will say this, the big box hospitality has a great structure built into developing their managers. 

Tucker So is it less about the amenities and the service levels that you’ve come to be known for, and maybe the compensation, and more about how people can see that path for themselves in an organization, or does the reputation of the club still matter a lot when you’re talking about talent? 

Tom Absolutely. But I think reputation now isn’t just reputation for services, golf, big tournaments, whatever it is. There’s an internal reputation as well, and they’re all mingling. Obviously, if you can work for a great leader, like Joel Livinggood at Interlochen, who has championships, who has great facilities, that is on the cutting edge of programming, then it’s a win, win, win. But I think for young people that want to become managers in the industry, they’re looking more at the internal stuff first, and I think the other stuff is kind of the tools that you use to kind of get them over the top to get them hired. 

Tucker That almost gives the smaller clubs with less of a historic reputation a chance to get really good talent. That is to say, you don’t have to have 100 years of championship golf in order to get the best talent in the world. You need to build a system that props talent up, and celebrates them, and gives them a path moving forward in order to build that competitive edge. 

Tom They want collegiality. They want a flat organization. The days of just going and getting a job out of college or without asking a lot of questions are over. I watch managers’ faces. The managers who aren’t on top of that teammate life cycle, when they’re interviewing potential interns, they can’t answer the questions because they’re not used to someone asking a lot of questions. They’re used to just saying, here’s the job. Here’s what it pays. We’re this club, do you want it or not? Now, people, the kids are very thoughtful. They’re asking, Tell me a little bit about the person who had the position before me. Tell me about the rest of the team, the tenure. Tell me a little bit about my work-life balance. That used to be if you walked in and talked to a manager or asked a manager about work-life balance, they were like, Uh, this person doesn’t want to work. Those days are over. 

Tucker Yeah. 

Tom I think clubs are getting very thoughtful. I know there are some key managers in the country who are focusing on the fact that sometimes you have to work your people six days a week because it’s peak season. But how do you do that and give them something back? So I call it kind of the one thing concept where they’re figuring out, okay, if I have to work you six days this week, what can I do during the week that would help you feel a little better about that? Well, I want to be able to run home and get my kids off the bus. Okay. You could do that. Just tell your supervisor, go do that, and come back. I want to go work out. If I work six days, lunch and dinner, I really can’t work out. Can I leave in the middle of the day? That’s a lot of work for the HR and the club business. But if you don’t connect those things for people, they’re not going to give you that sixth day. And quite honestly, I don’t know how the industry, especially smaller clubs, can exist without a little bit of overtime in that sixth day in certain pockets of the season. 

Derek You’re speaking our language when you said it’s not about the logo when it comes to the team and the staff, that the logo is not the brand of an organization. And you said it perfectly. From our perspective, coming from a branding service specialty, the club’s brand in a word is its reputation. And so we think about all of the things in your listing, so many of them that go into building that reputation. And you’ve elaborated really nicely, especially on the retaining side of that. If we go all the way back to the attracting side, I don’t know if candidates are going on various job application boards and just filling out and sending mass emails, or as much as you’re finding candidates, especially at that executive level, and you’re pursuing people who you think would be a good fit, how do those individuals differentiate themselves to make themselves attractive to you? How do they build their own brand to make themselves stand out from the other candidates? 

Tom When you’re younger, it’s just really getting your foot in the door and showing your personality and allowing yourself to be successful. I think that if you’re applying to be a general manager, your differentiation usually comes around your ability to build a team. That used to be maybe third or fourth in the list of skill sets. Right now, team building and mentoring is the number one skill set that many boards are looking for when they’re hiring a manager. They want somebody who can build and retain staff, but also develop staff, because they realize if you get somebody good in, you’ve got to keep them. So that’s one of the big skills. They have to be able to come into an organization and know that they’re going to be told every day less about the good things, more about the bad things. I always say that if feedback is water on your fire, you might not be built for this industry. But if it’s gasoline on your fire, if it fuels you to do better and fix things, then you’re going to do just fine. I think you have to be a little bit competitive. I think most club jobs have competitors in the area, if not other clubs, restaurants, fitness facilities, all those kinds of things. I think have to have a little of that competitiveness and let that show in the interview process. I think those are the big things. Self-awareness is another big one. I think one of the things that great managers have today is they know what they know and they know they don’t know. The earlier in your career as a manager that you can realize that you’re surrounded by brilliant people that want to help you because they love the club that they belong to and you’re the leader of it, the faster you’re going to have all these advocates that can fill in your gaps that you have. You have a lot of skills as a general manager, but you probably don’t have access. There’s no other job I can think of where you have access to so many smart people who are there having fun and want to see you succeed. So you have to be able to tap into that. When I was a younger manager, I was like, keep away from the board, keep away from the committees, I’ll just run things. But as I got older and matured, I realized it’s really important that you tap into that talent. 

Tucker It’s interesting that you said that comment about competition. When we look at competition, I would echo that the best clubs, let’s say food and beverage, they’re not looking at what other clubs are doing and saying, Oh, we can be just as good or better than that club down the street. They’re looking at what are all the restaurants around us. What are other options for the membership? Where else are they going in the hospitality market that we can do better? I think that’s key for someone to understand is that the club market isn’t just kind of siloed in its own place, and there’s nothing about that. You get talent from restaurants that come over to clubs and kind of bring a new perspective, or hotels, or any of those other places, and there is really a lot of competition within this market anyway. 

Tom Clubs that have been super successful with their big capital projects have gone away from using the same old club. They’re using restaurant designers and hotel designers and different things to make it. That’s always the challenge. You want to make it look awesome and homey, but you also have to make sure it can hold up to everything getting moved in and out 10 times. So it’s one of those things. You know, great managers really do a nice job of connecting with the staff and connecting with the members when they’re doing design work. And that’s a big step. I was at a club recently that the members love. Literally, we had tears from employees saying that this is not going to be functional because they weren’t asking the right questions of the staff about the kitchen design, the back office design, things like that. Luckily, we were able to have that conversation, and they were able to fix the drawings before things got too far. But that’s really important when you are building those things. Just a little side note there. So getting back to your original question, composure. You have to be very composed, and that comes from feedback. You have to understand that you’re going to get people coming at you every day. Composure is a big thing. Connection, you have to be able to connect with people. I’ve sat in thousands of interviews, and I’m always amazed when great managers are applying for jobs and they don’t make eye contact. A person asked them a question, and they never looked at the person who asked the question, and I’m sitting at the other end of the table, just sweating, like, Make eye contact. 

Tucker Be a human, yeah. 

Tom Yeah. You have to have charisma. You know, it’s all about gravitas, but charisma is important. Back when I was growing up in the industry, if you needed money, if you were going to explain something to the membership, the president spoke to the membership. But that changed 15 years ago. The person who’s up selling capital projects, who’s asking for more money for employers, that person’s the general manager. You can be an introvert. I know if you’re an introvert, it is hard to get up and have that charisma. But you have to be able to flip that switch on and have enough charisma to get people, one, your team, behind you, but also for your members to believe in your North Star, what’s important. So charisma is a big one. And that can be trained. You could train people to be able to speak in a powerful way. Obviously, you all know about that. But during an interview, trying to really make sure you show that charisma, that’s very important. I’ve had so many managers leave an interview and say, I think I crushed it. And I’m like, I don’t think you crushed it. Most of the time, it’s the people who are like, That was terrible. I’m like, No, that was awesome. It’s quite funny how it works, but confidence is important. I always say, please don’t say, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’ll figure it out and get back to you. That doesn’t work in an interview because you might not be coming back. So you’ve got to make sure you do your prep work. Be confident in what you say. Don’t lie. It’s just like I used to tell my young managers when I was a GM, Don’t lie. It’s okay to say you don’t know, but that’s in daily life and management to a member. In an interview, to say you don’t know if it’s something that should be pretty obvious, that’s going to be a big mark against you. So do your homework. Make sure you understand the things that are most important to the club, their culture, their history, those kinds of things. Credibility, you get your credibility through the CMAA. You get your credibility through educating yourselves. The best managers in the country are just constant learners. And most of them get to a point where they’ve learned all the club stuff, and then they start being ravenous about getting other leadership training so that they continue to be the best. You know, Joel, Carmen, Marcy, and I share books and talk about all the books we’re reading. We all probably go through at least 20 books a year, leadership books and things to kind of keep our fire burning. So that’s really important. Clarity and who you are, how you lead, and then consistency. The number one thing employees want is a consistent leader. So not a hot and cold leader, which you get a lot of in the hospitality industry. They want somebody who can make decisions and be consistent as their leader. So those are just some of the things I kind of preach and think are important for managers to have to differentiate themselves. If they focus on those things, I think they have a level of gravitas and leadership and credibility behind them that make them a great candidate. 

Derek On the club side, for clubs who don’t have the benefit of having a reputation like Interlochen, they’re younger or they’re building that reputation, or maybe they’re even coming out of some sort of transition and rebuilding that reputation, what should they be thinking about with respect to the brand, their brand, that could help them either build or rebuild that reputation to make their recruiting efforts more successful, make them more attractive in the eyes of a prospective GM or leader? 

Tom I always tell the story about always doing an exercise with my teams when I’d go to a club. I’d pop up the Nike logo and the Apple logo and they’d all bark it out. And then I’d always get to the club logo, just to see what they’d say. When I did that at Mediterra, there were literally crickets. Like they couldn’t tell me when they saw the logo, what it meant. And I remember my president, Carl Dill, who was a leadership coach for Fortune 500 companies. And part of the reason I went to work at Mediterra was that he promised to take me through this process that he did with a lot of VPs and big companies around the world. And he did, and I learned a lot. But he was like, You’re telling me you popped up this logo and nobody could say anything. I go, Crickets. I said, Carl, they literally didn’t know what to say. I was like, Community? I was kind of throwing a hint, you know, We’re a community golf course. I guess a couple of people were like, I think of, you know, people, old people, golfing, maybe. I’m like, Oh God. So I tell that story because if you don’t understand what your brand is, what your North star is, you’re not going anywhere. The Mediterra is a big club. But it didn’t have clarity. The members knew why it was awesome, but the employees didn’t. The employees would say, Well, we love the members. I’m like, Okay. And the members would say, Well, we love our employees. Okay. But bringing them together and making sure everyone understood what made us, because we’re in a super competitive area and we’ve got a hundred clubs right outside our doorstep, what differentiates us? And building that out helped us. Employees all want a North Star. They know every day they’re coming in to do certain things, but they want to know what the big goal is. What’s the big goal? And for us, it was like, well, we’re going to start by saying we’re going to be the best club in Southwest Florida. And then, by the time I’m gone and Carmen takes over, I hope you’re one of the top clubs in the country. And they’ve done that. And those little North Star moments really helped. Even at Oakmont, everyone understood what made it special. But connecting the dots for the employees – what part do I play in the brand and in the future? How important am I to the greatness of Oakmont? In my opinion, it’s slightly different than what you said at the beginning. It’s the employees first, always. And then it’s the members. Because if you don’t have great employees, members are always big on, we need somebody who can drive a great member experience. Well, one, define what a great member experience is. That’s a great question, because they never can do it. But they put it in every survey. We need a better member experience. What does that look like? They’re like, No, I don’t know. And if you don’t tell me what it is, I can’t manage to it, and I can’t hire to it. So it’s one of those things. But brand is so important. I’m a huge brand person because I think it gives the club an understanding of who they are, where they want to go, how they can get there, and what part everybody plays in making sure they get there. 

Tucker I think that that last piece connects back to what we’ve talked about earlier, where smaller clubs, or maybe those who have less access to resources, kind of have a level playing field when it comes to some of those things. In past generations, clubs didn’t really work on their brand. It was more of an organic thing. It just kind of grows over time and it is what it is. We can’t do much about it. But now, where we see our work shifting, is that a lot of clubs are investing in that, similar to how they would need to invest in the ways that they build internal systems and internal ways to prop up HR platforms and things like that. So for me, it’s interesting when you kind of pair this. There is an opportunity for a lot of clubs, whether they’re big, small, famous, not famous, new, young, old, however you want to look at that, as there is something you can do to even get the best talent. It’s not just a hope that you’re the best club in the area. You can still tell your own unique story that will attract somebody. And that’s where we think that there’s a really big opportunity for a lot of these clubs. But for the people who are looking, whether they’re potential GMs, they’re board members that are looking for advice from you, or the KK&W team, what can they do to learn more about KK&W? 

Tom Very simply, just go to our website, which is www.kk&w.com. Everything’s there, access to us. We all keep our cell phones on. At the end of the day, we probably get 100 to 200 calls from managers or some level of manager in a club a week. And it’s really important to us that when we have a relationship with a club or a candidate, even if we never place them, it’s important to us, and we’re really on top of calling people back. I think the industry knows that about us, so that’s important. But go to our website. All of our services are listed there. Our team is very robust. I really believe we have some of the best leaders in the industry. And as our expansions are taking place in Europe and New Zealand and Australia, I’m excited about the folks that are over there that are really starting to prop up the brand overseas. 

Derek Thanks, Tom. Really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us. This is an awesome conversation. I have a couple of quotes I’m going to pull out of this that I’m going to send to you for your approval, or I’m just going to start using them because you said them so well. 

Tom Have at it.

Derek You’re awesome. Thank you. Really appreciate your time. 

Tom You bet. Thanks, guys. 

Tucker Thanks, Tom. 

Derek Sussner is a branding firm specializing in helping companies make a meaningful mark, guiding marketing leaders who are working to make their brand communicate better, stand out, and engage audiences to grow their business. For more on Sussner, visit Sussner.com.