EPISODE 96

Tucker Let’s make it easy for you. I want to start with the recent part of your career. So you’ve had a remarkable career. You’ve done a lot of great things. But when you shifted more towards the partner side of club life and the other side of that fence, rather than in-house, tell us about your current role with Stone Group Architects and just what your focus looks like today.

Skip It was really interesting because I had 10 years with H. Chambers out of Baltimore as executive vice president, helping them with their facility planning and strategic planning. And I joined Stone Group for multiple reasons. Number one, our core values, my personal core values, and the core values of our company, aligned. And so that to me was really important. The other thing that was important is Stone Group is a disabled veteran-owned company. The majority of our work is within the federal government. We do a lot of VA work. We always say we take care of people who have served us as a country. And so I found that really interesting. And Todd Stone, the owner, wanted to bring club work into his portfolio of work. He had worked on a couple of clubs, and he really got interested in it. And he also found it may be a way of expanding the knowledge of his designers and giving them new challenges, versus just working in hospitals and working with the Guard or in a multi-family. You know, clubs are a much different animal than everything else. You have to be commercial, but yet you have to feel like somebody’s home. So there were a lot of challenges there. So it was my job to come in and kind of teach clubdom to architects and interior people who have never been exposed to it. And so with my background of 30-plus years in management and then working with Chambers, which is an award-winning company, it was an opportunity maybe to start something new. I am a small principal within the firm. I did buy into the firm a little bit, so I have a little skin in the game. And we’re really trying to look at things a little bit different. And sometimes people think that you’ve only done federal work or municipality work. Well, I can tell you this, after sitting through as many club board meetings and committee meetings and working with members, working with the federal government, working with a church, really isn’t any different. You still have all the hoops to jump through, and it’s how you connect with people. I find it pretty challenging. We’re really new in the business as far as the club. We’re a 12-year-old company. We employ about six veterans, and so we kind of preach that. And again, my biggest draw was that my personal list of values matched the values of Stone Group. And I thought that was just a good thing. And it was a new challenge. So I’m up for new challenges.

Tucker You had mentioned the balance of how clubs are kind of broad and trying to build something for everybody, but at the same time, you have to build something that’s like a home. Which is a great way of thinking about it. We had this conversation with a client a week ago, where we said that we’re not building you a corporate brand. This isn’t for everybody. This is for a very small, in their case, 300-person community, where it’s very intimate. It’s for a specific group. As you’ve shifted from the GMC, guiding culture strategy, member engagement, for one club, to then working at Chambers, and now in the architectural world, and zooming out a little bit and seeing clubs, not necessarily so intimately, but across a big industry-wide, how has your perspective changed? How has that shifted from seeing one club that you’re working on to looking at all of the clubs and the challenges that happen across the industry?

Skip Actually, in my career in clubs, I worked in 10 different clubs over my 30-plus-year career, from a nine-hole golf course in Galls, New York, to a 36-hole golf course in St. Louis, to one of the premier older courses, Fox Chapel in Pittsburgh. So, when you think about that career and you look at the clubs, yeah, they all kind of have their individuality, but really it comes down to one thing. And people have to understand this, that you’re in the experiential business. Clubs are an experience. And if people are trying to look at a club from a dollars-and-cents perspective, it doesn’t work. And so your job as GM or as a consultant is to kind of learn their culture, understand some of their traditions and their history, and then make it work. Just understand one thing: you’re there to make them feel good about their club. It’s really not that hard. And so my views haven’t changed. My perspective hasn’t changed. But I think what has changed is knowing that if you have a sound foundation in the business, you can just about do it anywhere. If you’re a consultant and you have a strong foundation of understanding the business of the club, understanding how you’re playing with members and their lives, and it becomes just family, it makes it easier. I think back to your original question. I don’t know if my perspective has changed, but I think using my knowledge has helped me with a deeper understanding of how to work with folks. I don’t know if that makes sense or not. I think that’s what I’m trying to say.

Derek When you said it’s how it feels, and you get into member engagement, continuing to engage your current members to attract more members that fit with that culture and the values, our perspective on that is that what’s going to attract them is your reputation. What’s going to keep them is how you walk the walk and treat them. Culture in action is almost how we would describe it. And to us, part of that then, in building that reputation and maintaining that reputation, falls underneath what we think of as branding. Not logo design or tagline design, but the act of building, nurturing, maintaining, and expressing what it is that’s special at that specific club. It’s engaging with and enhancing how members feel when they’re there. Coming back now to the architecture side, when you think of architecture and space and facility design, literally bricks and mortar, how can branding and that sort of expression and storytelling reinforce or help or be affected by or influence that literal building of projects?

Skip Well, first of all, I want to make sure everybody knows, I’m not an architect, even though I stayed at the Holiday Inn last night. Okay, I’m NOT an architect. I’m a facility planner. Sometimes I’m an architect’s nightmare, to be quite honest, because I look at things from a very operational, through the staff’s eyes, who’s producing this, and the members’ eyes of who’s using it. You said something earlier about alignment. I think, first of all, clubs have to understand what their identity is. They might tell you what it is, but we have to really understand what their identity is, who they are, what they are, and how do you find that out? And this is where I get in trouble with architects and interior designers. Clubs aren’t buildings. Clubs are programs, services, and operations. And then you need a facility to facilitate the other ones. You have to have strong programs and strong services. Why? Well, that is what members join. The engagement part, and you want to engage your members throughout their life cycle of membership, and it changes in each individual’s life cycle. So we want to make sure that we have strong programs, strong services, and good operations. Then we bring in the facilities to help really tie it all together. Then with the architects, we can say, okay, now how do we take all of this information and make this club them? How do we help with that? But that really is part of the brand of what you said earlier. I worked at a club here in Madison, Wisconsin, for 14 years, Nakoma Golf Club. We had a tagline before the industry finally understood they were an experiential business. We called it the Nakoma Experience. We were an 18-hole golf course. We were almost, at the time, 80 years old. We were founded in 1924. It went belly up. It came back in 1944. All of this history, but it was just the Nakoma Experience. And what was that? Well, it wasn’t one thing. It was creating that experience for each member when they came to the club. And so that’s kind of the way I look at it. When you talk about brand, it was all about, and we said it earlier, how they felt. Well, our job was just to make members feel good. We actually had a line, as the Ritz-Carlton has the line for their staff, ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. That is what they do. For the clubs that I worked for, we used to say, We’re not in the club business. We’re in the business of making our members feel good. We use the club as the tool. So it was all about that. How we align that was our brand. Our brand was how we made people feel. Now you have to take that, and how does that tie into everything else you do, from messaging to if you want to say your logo and your tagline to what the facility is and how that is, that all ties in together as we look at it from an outside perspective as a consultant.

Tucker And you get into how we feel and being really specific around that, too. I think that’s a big challenge for a lot of clubs. Because I know plenty of clubs that I’ve talked to, and you go, How do you want members to feel? And they just say, Good. That’s probably not going to help you when it comes to facility planning, when it comes to making sure that you’re creating that really unique experience that really fits one member of this group. I come back to this 300-person group or 600-person group. We’re not creating a consumer brand that is good for millions of people. This is for one type of group that we’re trying to solve. As you help boards and committees connect the dots between their long-term vision, I’ll call it vision, but it’s who we want to be when we grow up, and the spaces and all of that. How do you see that changing over time? Do you see clubs becoming smarter with that? Has that always been a problem within the industry, where people don’t necessarily think about who they want to be when they grow up?

Skip Think of the club as an old battleship and how many miles it takes to turn that battleship. One of the real successful clubs had the agility to understand that and how to kind of move the needle a little bit when you have to. You can go into almost any club founded in the early 20’s and two words always come up in their articles of incorporation – fellowship and friendship. So it’s been built on that. So when you start looking at tradition and history, the best example I can give you about a long-term club with more history, more tradition than anyone else, but yet can still make those changes, Augusta National. You talk about tradition. No one has better tradition than Augusta. Nobody. But you look at their facilities over the years, and you look at how things have changed. People don’t realize how they’ve changed. They’ve been able to do that. The really good clubs do that. The really smart managers understand that it’s incrementally that we change things and we can move the needle to get there. But when you look at a club that’s been built on tradition and history, people want to just grab that and hold onto it. I literally grew up in the business, Tucker. I was 21 years old when I started in clubs as a manager – until I was 53. You think about it. I literally grew up in the club. And so I’m a great traditionalist, and I enjoy the history we have, but you never let that stop you from doing these little changes. Probably when you start talking about how clubs have changed, or the resistance to change, or maybe they hold on to it so tight, some good stuff came out of Covid for clubs. Membership got healthy, but clubs had to be challenged, and all of a sudden, they had to do things differently. And so I think that helped. From an architectural and design standpoint, I think society has changed. Where we talked about dining is casual, informal, now we talk about ultra-casual, family casual, adult casual. You hardly ever hear that other word anymore.  So as society changes, as membership changes, if you’re not staying in tune with your membership and how that changes, then it also makes it hard. You still have a bunch of boomers running the club. And I’m a young boomer at 66, if you think about that. But they’re still kind of running the clubs. The industry is getting younger. The managers are getting younger. The guys running these clubs are getting younger, maybe not getting younger. They say the same, I’ve gotten older. Maybe that’s a better way to put it. But when you think about that, I think clubs have to realize that that’s kind of what’s going on. So I don’t know if I really answered the question, but I think sometimes it’s just not easy to get your arms around that answer. I think clubs are tradition, are history, and then how we go about it makes a difference. And I think clubs just have to look at it from their programs and their services, to their facilities.

Tucker I love the idea. You said at the very beginning of that that clubs are like a battleship. I love that analogy. I might have to save that for when I get really frustrated with some board. But there’s this conversation around being a battleship, if you want to meet something about where it’s going to be in 10 years, you’ve got to start turning now because you are going to take a really long time to get to where you want to be. And I think that a lot of clubs think it’s as easy as saying, Why don’t we have the next generation just assimilate into what we already do. And it’s not that easy, in my opinion. Your Augusta National is a great example, too. It’s to say that experience today is not the same as it was 10 years ago. There are pieces and parts that highlight tradition, and pieces and parts that highlight this kind of who we are and what we’re all about. But if you go there, they’re not going to have certain rules that they had 10 years ago, because everything changes and everything moves, and you’ve got to move with that.

Skip And when it comes to rules and regulations, I think that’s society. I think that’s one of the things that Augusta has held on to. They don’t call them fans. They call them patrons. Everything’s marked with their logo. All the sandwiches, all the sodas, you name it. It is all Master’s.  And so there are certain rules. I mean, think about the tradition. You buy a chair, you stick it in the ground on a green, and you can walk away, but your chair is there when you come back. That’s tradition. But I think when clubs look at it, as Dick Copeland once said, you always have to remember, you wear a name tag, they carry the bag tag. They’re the member. However, you have to understand that these people really are making decisions more or less based on their emotions and the people around them than on business decisions. A club is a business. It’s just a different business. And so they don’t quite understand that. So your challenge with boards is, I used to bring solutions, not the solutions, but solutions to them. Ladies and gentlemen, you asked me to bring you some thoughts and ideas. Here are three ways we can handle it. What way do you want to go? They go around the table, and the president comes back to me, Skip, which way should we go? I don’t care. You pick. It’s your club. Now they didn’t know that I didn’t care which three. Because I picked the three. I can make all three work. It’s just at what level do you want, and at what cost? So I think when you’re working with clubs, and I had that mentality when I worked as a consultant, I hate that word, but when I work as a partner with that board or that manager, I look at it from that standpoint. I’ve got to feed them their ideas. I’m going to incrementally get them to think differently until we get to at least a direction that’s where they have to be. And I think it starts in the very beginning. And then to really understand who they are as a current club, and then where they think they should be. And then once you have all that, then that whole branding, that whole thought process of bringing it all together, to start to communicate both internally and externally who you are. Internally to your members, to your staff, externally to the community around that club. And I think that’s the challenge for any of us who help consult with clubs.

Derek We have come to understand that change is hard. People don’t like change. Augusta is such a great example, but not every club can do or afford what Augusta can do, or they don’t have the reputation that Augusta has. I mean, they are literally the pinnacle, right? So if I was going to restate what you just said, if we’re talking with a board, and we’re starting to slowly turn that battleship, the way that we get them to start to acknowledge that we need to start turning the ship is by first being really crystal clear on who we are and where we ultimately want to go so that when we’re actually looking at a new clubhouse, a substantial financial seven-figure or more investment, the decision on whether or not to hire my company or not can become a financial hurdle. And to build a 10, 20, or 100 million dollar clubhouse. I loved what you said, our brand is not our facility. It’s not our clubhouse. However, our member expectations are changing. The types of members we have are getting younger. The way they want to experience our club is different than it was 10, 20, or even 30 years ago when this current clubhouse was changed. So, managing now for you on the outside, knowing how hard it is to steer that board, is there a success story or something that you would say to a GM now who’s inside the club who’s going through this process to say here’s one or two things that you can start to do to steer your board, not only to help them get on board, but also to reassure them and get excited about the direction the battleship is heading?

Skip First, you have to sell yourself to the manager. Then you have to sell yourself to the committee. Once you get the committee on board, then you have to sell yourself to the board. Now you’re back working on what you want to be and how you have to go with the committee, and then you sell it to the committee, and then you have to take it back to the board, and then you get the board online with all the communication to happen, and then what do you have to do? You’ve got to go to those 300 members and sell a 30-million-dollar project where you’re trying to tell them, well, it’s going to cost you each x to do that. The challenge is there. Now, if you look at it from a smaller perspective, and you do it incrementally as a manager, the first thing I ask when I sit down with them is, Tell me about your current programs and services, and tell me how your members like them. Are they happy? And if they tell me yes, I’ve got something to work with. If they tell me no, I said we’d better clean that up first because until we have their trust, we’re not going to get anywhere. I think clubs do two things really poorly. I think governance is always gonna be an issue because boards change. You talk about leaving it for the next generation. Managers kind of come and go by boards at times. So it’s really hard to think that way. And then, when it comes to dollars and cents, none of them want to be the president or the board that had to put that Scarlet A out in front of everybody, that assessment. That’s a dirty word. Since COVID, just look at the expense of doing these things. They’ve jumped 30 to 40%. Construction costs are just astronomical. I just had to put a new hot water heater in my house. Ten years ago, I put one in, and it was $1,200. This one was $2,800. I mean, it’s a hard thing sometimes for those boards to get around it. And again, they make emotional decisions. One of the things we try to do is I have a model that shows four circles of how boards need to make decisions, so they can get away from making emotional decisions, and they can make business decisions.

Derek I think you just answered 12 questions that I had all queued up to take through with you in a really nice, more succinct way than I would have been able to ask them. I’m not a GM, and I wouldn’t be cut out to be a manager. But what you’re describing to be a leader like that in a club, to steer that board, to spend that money, to not want to send that assessment out, but know what’s right for the club, really takes a bold human being, a person who’s confident enough to know when to bring in the consultant, how to stay positive, how to stay engaged knowing that what they’re doing now is ultimately, you know, all those examples you shared, you said what do they all have in common. And they have the financial resources. But even the B Clubs that you mentioned still can do some tremendous things with the financial resources that they have if they are bold enough to do things beyond just the way that they’ve always been doing them.

Skip They have to have the courage to try to do things. And let’s understand one thing. This isn’t life or death, for the most part, right? So you make a mistake, you fail, you go on, you try again. A function didn’t work, okay, maybe we try it another way. Stealing ideas from club to club is… the same thing that might work at Club A isn’t going to work at Club B, but there’s a part of what they did at Club A that you can work in Club B. Nakoma was a small club. We were a fairly large membership, over 500 in all categories. Only had 88 spots. We’re on 108 acres. They had a swimming pool, four tennis courts, and the golf course. Short, then the low golf course. I had an in-house florist. I had a shuttle system that we had that we would take members down to Camp Randall or the Cole Center. We were three miles away. We did certain functions that really allowed us to do that, to engage members. We had Cheeseburger in Paradise in February. Having the company come in, and you think you’re down on a beach, and members are coming in in winter clothes, they go into the locker room, they change, and they come out in flip-flops and shorts. Those kinds of things are what clubs needed, what I needed to do at the time, to make the club successful. But it was all about how they felt. So when you start thinking about managers and boards, they have to be willing to take a little bit of risk. And the boards have a fiduciary responsibility to keep members happy, to keep things moving forward. And so you have to take some risks, but they have to be calculated. And then you don’t have to bite off the whole apple. Take it in pieces. Every club should be successful if they find those one or two things that members like. And then you work that way. It’s that internal niche marketing that you do to the different demographics. A club is now is a multicultural, multi-generational organization. Think about that. It’s both from an interior, from your membership, but also from your staff. You have almost five generations of staff, five generations of members, not counting kids. But how do you bring that all together? It’s one piece at a time. It’s a little bit here, a little bit there. To keep the balance of what you said earlier, Tucker, is how do you keep all these different thoughts and ideas? But then that’s where your traditions and your histories come in. If you build on a few things that everybody can do, and then you give everybody a little piece of the pie, you can keep members happy. But managers and boards bury their heads from 08 to 12, not taking care of their facilities, dig a deeper hole, not being read. There was a book out called Bounce, where the premise of the book is, are you going to do the hard things when it’s tough to do so when things get well, you’re catching the ball, or when things get good, you are chasing the ball. I always try to catch the ball.

Tucker I think I could have a conversation with you for hours and hours and hours, and Derek won’t let me because we have a time stamp on this podcast. But it sounds like we’re going to have to bring you back on. And I might have to have a couple of, as you would call them, bottles or cups of hops the next time we talk, because I think that would be fantastic. But to wrap all of this up, if a GM or a board member or a committee member is listening, how can they learn more about you? They probably know a lot about you. You’ve been very involved in the CMAA and leadership around clubs and all of that. But where can they go today to search you out, talk to you, maybe have a conversation too?

Skip They could go to the Stone Group web page, stonegrouparcs.com. If they are clients of yours, they can reach me through you gentlemen. Most club managers can get a hold of me. I’m still a member of CMAA. So I’m still there. Board presidents and committee members, again, our website is good. My email address is skipa@stonegrouparch.com, and anytime somebody needs some help, feel free to reach out. Hopefully, I answered some of your questions, and I didn’t pontificate in Alpine too many, too long. I love the business. I grew up in the business, and I really appreciate the two of you taking the time. In the past, we’ve done some things together. I know in the future we’re going to do some things together, and I appreciate everything that you’re doing in trying to elevate the understanding of brand and texture of what the industry could be with your knowledge from outside bringing in. So thank you for what you do that way.

Derek Appreciate it, Skip. I enjoyed the heck out of this conversation, and I hope it inspires anybody who’s listening to this, club leaders, to think about their brand as a holistic experience, the sense of place, that emotional connection, the story you’re telling, and the way that somebody feels every time they walk through your facility through that front door. We will catch you all next time here on Brands Made Meaningful. Thanks again. Thanks for listening. Sussner is a branding firm dedicated to helping make a meaningful mark, guiding member organizations into the next chapter of their story. Learn more at sussner.com.