EPISODE 102

Tucker They’re just kind of viewing it and using the facilities on the outside. And most clubs treat onboarding as a form of orientation. Typically, it includes facility tours, and here are the rules, and here’s the dress code, and making sure that you understand everything, and this idea of how do you create an exceptional form of onboarding? The overarching question for today’s conversation is, when does onboarding actually create belonging for clubs? The three main questions that we’re going to roll through today, I want to just preface this with the idea that I felt like some of these were obvious, but I think the conversation is going to be really great. So let’s get into the first one. If new members can describe a facility perfectly after 90 days but can’t articulate what makes the club culturally distinct, has onboarding been successful, in your opinion?

Derek It seems obvious, but it’s not. We know that many clubs take the tactical approach of marketing their physical amenities to attract potential members. There’s a club that we worked with that I remember the first conversation we had, he was a member running their committee. And as we were talking about the work that we were going to do, I just said, Tell me a little bit about your club. And this person had been a member for seven years and was on the board of directors and was leading a branding initiative. And the first thing he referenced was the architect of their golf course. He literally said, Well, we’re a Tilly. We are a Tillinghast. And so for that first introduction to me, who was a complete outsider, that person never mentioned the type of people that are there, the type of people that they want to be, didn’t mention anything around culture or values or anything, he just talked about the golf course.

Tucker Well, I think of it as taking it out of the club world, and I think of that as like college. Most people, when they go to college, there’s college orientation. And that is the summer before your freshman year, you normally go to college orientation, and sometimes college orientation happens, and you go back home. So then you have a little bit of a gap between when you actually start college and when you’re not. The example I would give is when you are considered a college student. When you pay your first tuition payment? Do you do it after your first semester of classes? Do you do it when you stop thinking about going home every weekend because you’ve never been away from home or something like that? And I think that’s where it becomes interesting if you put that in the club sense of are they considered onboarded when they just understand where to check in for their golf round? Or are they considered onboarded when they feel like it’s a part of their identity? A college kid isn’t a college kid until they’re like, No, I am a college kid, and it feels right. And to say it, they’re not scared someone’s going to call them out on that. I feel the same way with a club member.

Derek I grew up with friends who went through that onboarding process for six months or however many months, and then came back home and decided not to go to that college and said, You know what, I know I’d signed up, I’ve enrolled, I went through the orientation and, yep, that place isn’t for me at all. Which is great because, on both sides, this is now somebody who’s not going to drop out or transfer later. You identify early in that process. But it’s a great question. When do you put on that school or that club’s logo and really truly go, Yep, this is me, I’m part of this. So, back to the question, I think getting to that place where people can self-identify as this is the right group for me and this is my community of people, then that’s something that will keep them there. And when people get to the point where, when you ask them about their club, they start talking about the type of people that are members there, I think then those people have been onboarded successfully because they stopped leading with the golf course and the amenities.

Tucker So what are the one or two most important elements, in your opinion, that new members should understand within those first three months or however long that onboarding process is?

Derek The obvious one, I’m just going to get this, this isn’t even one of the two. This is like the point five of the answer, because you mentioned it. There are the really tactical, logistical things around how we act here, what our expectations are as a club, and how we dress. I think as a new member, especially if they’ve never been a member of another club, there’s often anxiety around just a lack of understanding of how should I dress for this event? I guess it’s part of the rules, but it’s the expectations of how do we act here? How do we talk here? What’s the vibe here? And just having a clear understanding. Even as a guest of a club, instead of going to the club to get to play golf at this incredible place with a buddy of mine who’s a member somewhere, oftentimes my sensation as I’m going there isn’t, Oh my God, I can’t wait to play this course. It’s more of a tenseness of, I hope I don’t say the wrong thing or step in the wrong place or act the wrong way or dress inappropriately. So I think when you can get members like super comfortable, super quickly, to where that’s just second nature, that would be one. I’m not going to count it as one of mine. It’s a 0.5 because it just seems super tactical.

Tucker My first one, if I only got two to pick from, my first one is the club’s vision. If a member, after 90 days, can’t articulate where the club is going, and I don’t say vision as we envision a club where everyone’s good friends, that’s not a vision to me, but a vision that articulates what we are trying to invest in. Where are we going? What are we building? What are the items that you can look forward to? What makes people really excited about the future here? If a member can say that, that is perfect, because to me, that shifts a member from a renter to an owner, and they are now investing emotionally and financially in the future of the club, rather than just saying, I know everybody here. That’s great. You go, I know what we are trying to do here. And that makes me so much more valuable to the club. I think of times where we’ve had conversations with members who might have been at a membership for a year or two, and they still don’t vote on things. They don’t for board members, and you go, Well, why aren’t you voting? And they go, I don’t feel like I can because I don’t know what I’m voting for. I don’t know what these people are trying to accomplish. That, to me, is a signal of, well, you haven’t been properly onboarded. So you still feel like a renter. You still feel a facility user rather than an owner and an investor in this group.

Derek You nailed what my number one was. If you can get to where a person has clarity on why a club is making the decisions that it’s making, with some reassurance that there’s some objective guideline behind this, rather than just personal preferences of current committees or current board members who are going turn over in a couple of years anyway, that’s vision to me, however you want to call it, whether it’s a vision or a mission or however a board or a club operates, but for me to not be able to say, I don’t know what this club wants to be. I don’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. I’ve heard rumors about a Himalayan putting green. I’ve heard rumors about reinventing one of the restaurants. Well, who’s going to decide that and why? And you’re exactly right. When a board puts up three or five candidates that you, as a board member, get to choose from, if those board members don’t have the ability to speak to why they want to be on the board in a way that supports the vision or what it is that the club is working towards, then what are we electing? Is it about popularity because I know this person, and I didn’t know this person? What’s the agenda, and what’s this club doing? I don’t know how many clubs are doing this successfully.

Tucker And you go, what are we voting for? And then we can have a whole other conversation on boards. But this idea around what we’re voting for, more often than not, club boards try to get you to vote for them because of their professional experience, which doesn’t really matter if you don’t know what they’re going to use it for. I’ve seen multiple times where someone’s like, well, I want to be on the board because I’m a restaurateur. That’s great. What are you going to do about that? I don’t understand if that’s going to actually help the club go to where it should go or not. And I think it’s funny how skewed that gets. What is your second one? You had 0.5, and then you had one. What is your second one?

Derek My second one is making sure that the new member has complete clarity on who the club is for. The new member who is an excited, emotionally invested new member is going to recruit additional members. They are going to talk to their friends, to their colleagues, or to people that they identify that they would like to also be part of this community. And if they’ve been onboarded correctly, they’re able then to identify, not just because somebody’s their friend, but because that friend would be the right fit in this. Whatever that set of guidelines is, but to have clarity on who we are for. We’re not just going out and recruiting anybody and everybody that has the means and the finances. But when you start going through that process, there’s that stat. I think it came from the McMahon group, which says something like 80 or 85% of new member referrals come from members in their first three years of membership. So I would say a key point was to make absolutely sure that those new onboarded members know who it is that this club is for and looking for more of.

Tucker I like that.

Derek What was yours?

Tucker Mine is that they can clearly explain what differentiates the club from others in the area. If I’m a new member, and say you’re talking to other people, I will have someone to be able to go up to a new member randomly and go, I see you’re a member of this club. Do you know anything about this other club? And you would be able to easily say, Oh yeah, this is more of what they’re all about and this is what we’re all about. It’s just a difference in whichever one fits best. I think too many members don’t know what the answer is to that. I’ve actually come across members locally and say, Oh, you’re a member at Minneapolis Golf Club. Is that any different than the Club at Golden Valley? Do you know any of that? And for them to just be like, Yeah, they have different golf courses. Like they have different designers for their golf course. That’s not a good conversation around why I want to join a club or have the ability to communicate that. So to be able to really articulate that difference that’s broader than just the facilities can make me feel like, yeah, that person is totally invested in what’s going on here because they get it.

Derek I love that. And I would say that what that differentiator is that they should be able to communicate is the culture. Oak Ridge Country Club, Minneapolis Golf Club, and the Club at Golden Valley all have name-brand 100-year-old turn-of-the-century golf courses. They all have pools. They all have restaurants. They all have clubhouses. The amenities are the same. Even the cost of entry might be the same or comparable. So then the next differentiator that people will say is, well, it’s convenient. It’s close to my house. It is close to my office. Now you have a certain target market, but they still draw from the same market. And then after that, what it usually goes to is, well, a friend of mine referred me, or I joined because of this person, and I like this person, and they brought me in. Well, that’s the culture, that’s the community, that’s the people. Going all the way back, they’ve been successfully onboarded where they can really understand the culture and then be able to articulate that, maybe not in a perfect language, but at least enough to say if somebody says hey why did you join that club or why do you stay at that club or what’s that club like, they can speak to that in a way that differentiates them from those other two or three clubs besides location and amenities.

Tucker The third question, overarchingly, is when does onboarding actually end? And I thought that that was a really interesting way to look at it. Do you have an answer to when onboarding ends?

Derek I’d be curious to know if there’s any data, whether it’s from the private club industry, the corporate industry, or from HR professionals who could speak to how long it takes. Like, what is the timeline of a successful onboarding process from step one, you walk in the door, you sign the paper, you fill out the forms, to where they go, okay, now we’ve successfully done this. I’ve got two answers to this. The tactical answer is, at a minimum, it’s gotta take a year. I think it takes 12 month, it takes a full season, maybe even 18 months for a cycle of season for a member to experience off season, on season, the holidays, golf season, and to make sure that they’re meeting members and part of the community besides the one that brought them in or maybe onboarded them initially to where they truly have a pulse of what’s happening at the club, what the club’s like.

Tucker I think it’s more closely aligned to maybe the first part of your speech around the idea of when does onboarding end? I don’t believe it’s a timeline. I believe that it’s a moment in which you believe that they’ve checked enough boxes, meaning they can easily articulate where we’re going as a club. They can easily articulate what makes this club special, from its culture to who belongs here. There are a couple of things that I’d put on that list. And I’ll get into this in a little bit, but this idea of, I believe memberships are being asked the wrong questions at end-of-the-year surveys. Your end-of-the-year survey should understand where everyone sits, not necessarily if they were satisfied or not. I think satisfaction is really important and should be a part of that. But to me, your end-of-year survey should be about keeping up with people. It’s like, okay, so Derek answered the question like this. We know that he’s at this level of onboarding. He hasn’t quite finished this. He doesn’t really get where we’re going as a club based on his answer here. We need to move him. We need to figure out a way to get him more understanding around that. That, to me, is really good onboarding. Is that you feel like I’m working with you at your own pace, everyone’s going to work at their own pace. I’d also say, how much of the membership do you know? If your answer is less than 25% of the memberships, there’s no way you’re onboarded. It’s a private club. I mean, so if you don’t know 50% of the membership, and maybe there’s a thousand people. So you’re like, well, I’m not gonna know more than 500 people. That’s a lot of people. But at some of these clubs that are three, four, 500 people, to not even know 25% of them is not enough onboarding. So for me, it’s more about hitting objectives and knowing different things about people rather than a specific timeline, but I could make the argument, if you were to say it has to be timeline-oriented, it’d be two years for me. You have to go through everything twice in order to understand all of those things. If you were going to look at that, I would look at the first year as your kind of rookie year, and then your second year is more of your Sophomore slump, and then you’re going to come back third year ready to rip. You know all the traditions, you know what you’re gonna get into, and I feel like that’s a good timeline.

Derek My philosophical answer to the philosophical question is that I don’t think onboarding ever ends. The club continues to evolve. Your club is not the same today as it was five years ago before COVID, or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Your membership’s not the same. You might have some members who have been here that whole time, but the future of the club, for a variety of levels, is continuing to evolve, whether you’re actively doing something about it or not. And I think to be continuing to reinforce the culture of who we are, who we’re for, especially if that evolves over time, that we’re communicating so that all members, even long-standing members, know that we are continuing to have them as stewards. We spoke with a club recently. And they’re going through some changes, and they’re trying to get a percentage of membership on board and supporting the things that they’re doing. And somebody that we were talking to said, Well, that section of membership, I’m not worried about them. They’re already advocates, they’re already fans. We don’t have to pay any attention to them. We need to pay attention to the people who are upset or have questions. And I think that’s a miss. I think you can make those advocates that you think, oh, they’re fine, they’ll love this club, they’ll support anything that we do – I think leaning into those people as the advocates and as the leaders inside that membership will help you bring along people who are questioning or concerned or frustrated. So my philosophical answer is I don’t think onboarding actually ever truly ends.

Tucker Well, you say that it’s a stat. The McMahon group has the stat. They are smarter people than I am. So I don’t know the number, but the most member referrals come from members within four years. Is that right? It’s like that four-year mark is when you go, I am the most engaged at this point. I really want the club to grow. I feel like it’s a big part of my investment. I’ve put a lot of money into it recently, so I feel more emotionally attached to it. The question that I have is, at what point do you stop being a new member? We just got off a call this week, where somebody who was a part of a committee that we’re working with, who had only been a member for two years, and we were working on the core identity of who are we? What makes us special? Where are we going? All of these great things. And one person on this committee of eight was a two-year tenured member. That person got destroyed by the membership when they came out as a part of this committee because they hadn’t been members long enough to know all of those things. And so then I sit here, and I go, is that the members’ fault that you don’t think they know enough about your club, or is it your fault because you didn’t onboard them properly, and they don’t know anything about your club? I would make the argument that after two or three years, you should know what this club is and have a really good sense of where it’s going and all these other things. I think I get a little too frustrated with members who are saying, Well, I’ve been a member here for five years, or I’ve been a member for 10 years, so I know what’s right. And I could make the argument that that’s what you would say because you want to feel better than somebody who’s coming in and they have a different opinion than you. That’s not a good way. That’s almost, you don’t understand, but you’re actually giving me red flags when you say that kind of stuff about your club in general.

Derek A hundred percent. And in some ways, in some scenarios, our perspective is that it’s the opposite. That long-tenured member who is saying to the new member, you don’t know, you haven’t been here long enough. You haven’t been here as long as I have. Therefore, your knowledge of the club isn’t deep enough, and frankly, you’re not as valuable a member as I am because of my longevity. In some cases, when it comes to a club who’s looking to continue to evolve for the long-term health of its future, I could say to that long-tenured member, you are actually not the person whose voice is most important right now because we’re not looking to attract more of you, of the type of people who you are in your stage of life, in your stage of membership. It’s that member who’s been here for two years. That’s the future of our organization. And for you to disregard them, you have your own reasons, whether it’s logical, subjective, or emotional. Two sides. For long-standing members not to acknowledge and recognize and value the opinion of the new member is so short-sighted when it comes to the long-term health of the organization. But I understand the human nature of why they do that, like protecting their legacy and their longevity and not seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak.

Tucker That’s interesting. I’m starting to understand. You work with clubs for a long time, and you don’t really see the forest through the trees, and I’m starting to zoom out a little bit in this conversation. I go, why do they do that? Why do members do that? Why do they not understand that? And I’m starting to understand that when older members see newer members coming in, I know it’s a defense mechanism, right? You don’t want to admit that you’re not the most important person here anymore, which is totally fair. I also think it’s partly because most of these members come from really good business backgrounds. They’re really successful people, most of them. Most of these people are. They treat private club membership as if you’re joining an organization. Like you’ve only been here for one year, you don’t know how our business works. That’s not how it works. This isn’t how this works. But I could see where they rationalize it in their head by saying, you don’t get how people use the facilities here, even though that changes every single year. That’s the hard part, that there’s this kind of argument around rationalizing longevity, and I totally get that, but it’s interesting.

Derek If the opinion of the member of two years isn’t aligned with the larger sort of cultural vision of the community and the club, then either A, you did a terrible job onboarding them and not making it clear to them who they are, or you brought in a wrong fit member who you shouldn’t have let in in the first place for whatever reason. So then whose fault is that? Think of every time you’ve joined a new organization, the wide-eyed learning and the observations that somebody makes in that first 90 days or two years, in this example, compared to the things that the 10-year, 20-year, 30-year member doesn’t see anymore because they take it for granted. Now you get into the, well, because that’s the way we’ve always done it mindset, which is a burst nail in the coffin of irrelevance. A spiral to irrelevance.

Tucker When I went through these questions, and I was thinking about this conversation, I was talking to you before we started recording, and I said, Hey, I was going for a walk, or I was thinking about this, and I was kind of talking out loud, and I had all these ideas or whatnot. There were three main things that I came out of my prep that said, so what do exceptional clubs do? So, if all of these are like what is wrong, what are the bad things, what are all those other things? I go, well, what are the three things that exceptional clubs could do? And there are three, so just let me kind of harp on for one second. The first one is that I think exceptional clubs do a state-of-the-club type of event every year. To begin the season they open it with a town hall, they open it with something that is an open forum, where the president and the GM have kind of like a fireside chat situation or just like, hey, we’re going to talk about everything we’ve invested in, everything we’re working on, everything that we’re doing moving forward and everything we are really excited about for this next season and seasons coming up. And just to say, we begin this season with this sense of like, where are we at? And where are we at financially? Where are we at operationally? Just to give people a snapshot. This does two things for me. One, this gives people a sense of transparency. Like, oh, I understand what’s going on. Two, it gives them an open understanding around what is driving leadership. And I think that a lot of people don’t really consider this. They go, you know, we’re a golf club. Who cares? As long as the golf is still open, as long as we still have pin flags on the greens, that’s totally fine. But the reality is, is that you are paying dues. You’re paying into something. You should understand where that’s going and what you want to spend it on. And those conversations are more fun than maybe talking about in a HOA, necessarily, to understand what’s coming up, what is there to look forward to, I think, could be a really exciting thing for most members to join.

Derek Number one was a state of the company. Was there a two and a three?

Tucker Two was I think that they should extend their onboarding timeline and build out a roadmap – the steps that say we have done this successfully. For most people, it’s one week. I think it needs to be at least one year, maybe two years, where you have certain gates where you’re saying, hey, by this time we should get this from you. By this time, we should do this. And then number three, my third thing I think exceptional clubs do is they have a better surveying approach. They do a much better job of understanding their membership from an emotional standpoint. We asked open-ended questions about the club’s direction and its identity. Who are we? Where are we going? And the answers to those questions give us an understanding of what levels of tenured membership understand our direction properly and agree with it. They probably track the satisfaction, but then they also pair that to where we’re going in the future sense, so that they’re not just looking at the past, they’re looking at the future. And I think that’s really, really important to identify where are we getting lost? There are many times where we do our discovery work, where we do surveying and interviewing with a club who’s lost its identity. They just don’t know who they are anymore. And it comes out where we do this map across tenured, and we go, Oh my gosh, everyone from 2007 to 2014, for example, those people all believe this, and these other people all believe this, and to get that really good understanding and go, why is that? It’s, oh, well, we might’ve dropped the price right then. So we brought in the wrong members, and those members believe that we should be investing like this. Whatever it is, it’s so interesting when you can actually dig into where you think the club should go. And that is a 100% noting art for a club to say, and that is the problem. Like that’s the problem. The symptom of not being able to approve our Himalayan putting green, that’s just the symptom over here. That’s not the problem that we need to get this approved. The problem is we have a divided membership on where we’re going. And that comes out by understanding and asking questions, and actually making surveys a little bit less easy to pass. I think clubs give themselves a little bit of an easy time by going, did you like your season? Did you have fun this year? And if they get a yes, then it’s like, okay, check the box, we’re good. They’re not asking the hard questions in those surveys. They’re not getting information that actually helps them be better.

Derek I think exceptional clubs, when they are asking for comments besides did you like it or didn’t you, when a member does add a comment or asks a question, they answer it. They talk to that member and make sure that, whether it’s a suggestion or a philosophical question, a gripe, whatever, that if you have 300 members and 15 of them are actually writing a question or a comment, the exceptional clubs are strengthening their culture by talking with those people in some way, shape, or form. Not that you’re saying yes to whatever they’re asking for or whatever, but you’re helping them personally understand who we are, why we did that, and you have the rationale. And when you said extending the onboarding, your second one, we used to do a lot of work with a national fitness organization. And we did some work with their HR department. And the one thing that they did as an exceptional organization was defined for them the life cycle of an employee. And it’s not a straight line, it’s a circle. They come in here, they learn, and they go to this level of maturity where they become advocates, and then they start training the new. And they had a very clear defined life cycle with tools and messaging to support their members or their staff, or their team at each one of these points. How amazing would that be for an exceptional club to adopt a model like that? And I’m sure that some of them do. And then back to the state of the company, exceptional clubs are not overlooking the opportunity to bring that community together, to nurture that community so that it’s not a transactional place. You’ve been onboarded, and by onboarding, you’re like, here’s the keys to your locker, have at it, and you learn your own way, and you meet people organically as you go. And it’s totally up to you to figure out who’s running for the board, what their platform is, what the board’s directive or vision is anyway. And if you don’t do that, the risk of not creating that community is that this place just becomes a transaction. It’s a place where I go to eat once in a while. So I make my minimum, and it’s a place that I want to play golf. And for some clubs, that’s totally fine. But I think the exceptional ones are really creating that sense of community.

Tucker Takeaways, because I’m sure we’ve gone over our mark like we always do. And we’ll figure out how to make it shorter next time. For me, the biggest takeaway of this is that exceptional clubs think of orientation as logistics. Logistics mean orientation. Onboarding is about belonging. And if we can onboard people properly, they feel like they belong here, and they understand the difference between who we are and what makes it special and where we’re going. But it also determines whether a new member becomes just a facility user or a steward of the club. And that becomes a really, really, really big deal when you want to make an impact on all the great things your club wants to do.

Derek Lot of takeaways. I think the one that’s really kind of sitting with me that I am going to need to keep thinking about is the value of the voice that comes from a long tenured member versus a new member. And not to disregard what either one of those people are saying, but to take the time to understand the perspective that each one of them comes from so that you, as club leadership, can hone in on what the true core heart, soul, spirit is. That’s the true line that connects them both. That the new member’s voice should not be disregarded because they’re ne Because if their voice is disregarded, then you haven’t done your job of onboarding them properly, just like you shouldn’t disregard the perspective of the legacy member while still taking with a grain of salt that the club that they joined isn’t the same club that it is today. It’s a lot of work, it’s a tough job, but the exceptional clubs are exceptional because they’re finding a way to do this.

Tucker I really like the member flywheel thing that you were talking about. I very much enjoy it. Like we onboard members. That framework feels like it needs to be thought through and implemented. That’s really interesting.

Derek All right, until next time, everybody. 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.