Developing a good strategic plan is one thing, but implementing it is another. A club’s strategic plan will clearly define a club’s mission by identifying the four club aspects of:
- Who it serves
- What it must provide
- What quality level it must achieve
- What makes it unique
With specific goals identified to achieve the club’s mission, and with five or so specific action plans developed for achieving each goal, a strategic plan ends up with roughly 40 specific action plans. The challenge then becomes where does a board or manager start? Who implements action plans and where is the money to implement them? Everything costs money.
Invariably the plan is done to solve one or two major challenges facing a club. It could be a financial, membership, governance, facility or many other reasons whereby a board leadership needs to build consensus among its own members before asking an entire membership to approve an important change. So it’s usually very clear why a strategic plan is done and what are its immediate objectives.
When a strategic plan is completed and the membership input has prioritized what members want to tackle first, the club is ready for implementing the highest priority action plans. Strategic action plans, among other things, specify what needs to be done, provide a framework for doing them, determine who will do them, and how they will be financed. For example, take a club’s goal on improving its facilities. Under such a specific action plan could include such items as:
- Implementing a membership survey to learn what members want in facility improvements, and to know members’ willingness to pay for them.
- Developing an overall master plan for all foreseeable facility needs before trying to develop plans for a first phase project.
- Verifying a club’s ability to raise capital and/or borrow funds so the club’s financial capabilities are determined to guide the development of any recommended project.
In other words, a facility goal of “having high-quality club facilities to achieve a mission of service/facilities that creates great member experiences” is easy to pontificate but can be much more difficult to achieve. Effectively implementing a club’s specific action plans in a club’s own strategic plan is what we call “taking strategy off the shelf and making it become reality.”
MAKING THE PLAN BECOME REALITY
Strategic plans become reality when they are implemented and the action plans are completed. Most strategic action plans are interrelated so that a simple facility action plan can impact financial, dining, membership and management action plans in a strategic plan.
A strategic plan is implemented when the board and management are ready to activate it. Take any action plan whose time has come to be realized, what has to happen?
- The board has to agree to make it happen.
- The board has to allocate the necessary resources in funding and management support as well as the communications and education of members to support it.
- A person, committee or management (or all three) have to be charged with the responsibility to complete the task of implementation.
- Once determined how to best implement an action plan, the implementation plan should be presented to the board for its input, adjustments and approval.
- The implementation proceeds with the proper education of the entire membership so, if required, membership approval is achieved.
At this point in discussing how to make a strategic plan become a reality (i.e.; taking it off the shelf), a good example of this is a fine golf club that is experiencing a loss of its aging baby boomer members and that is attracting very few new members under age 50. The situation has been going on for the last 8 years, but now even in a growth economy, the next generation of members under age 50 are not joining. The club has discounted its initiation fee to only a few thousand, has introduced a plethora of membership categories with lower and lower dues and the membership decline continues. The problem is simple, a golf-only club today, unless it is Baltusrol Golf Club, Winged Foot Golf Club, Sand Hill Golf Club or an equal, is not what many of today’s under age 50 members want. Of course, people want to play golf, but today’s next generation of members predominately want a full-service country club. So for this club, and many like it, the older members want a golf club while the next generation of potential new members want a family-oriented country club.
The solution is simple to recognize but difficult to achieve. For this particular club the strategic plan states it must become family-friendly and the strategic plan identifies the best ways to achieve this. Now in becoming family-friendly, this does not equate to a drop in the quality of golf, it simply means adding the family-friendly aspects. Some of the added aspects are identified as low hanging fruit action plans in the strategic plan for the club to provide. This meant adding some family golf programs for beginners, adding babysitting for children, having a very casual dining area carved out of existing dining areas, add more outdoor dining with shade protection, offering more family-focused events like bingo and trivial pursuit. But while all the above low hanging fruit changes will help, without a major family-friendly game changer, this golf club will continue to decline.
In the strategic plan there is one 800-pound gorilla that would make the club family-friendly—adding a swimming pool. It would cost a million dollars and the club has borrowed to the hilt. The board knows about a solution which would easily attract 50 younger members to the club, but it seems to have no way to fund it.
The board and management recognized the problem and solved it in an innovative way because the strategic plan pointed out the problem and pointed out the solution. Find a way to build that swimming pool. As a side note to golf purists, having a swimming pool is not the end of having a great club as great golf clubs like Winged Foot Golf Club and Chicago Golf Club have a swimming pool.
The answer to the swimming pool problem for our subject club was simple, but ingenious: Propose the addition of a swimming pool based upon first getting 25 new members to sign-up on the condition the pool will be built, and use the new dues revenue to fund the debt service on a pool loan so existing club members didn’t have to pay a single extra dollar to have the pool. Did it work? Yes!
The above example is how a strategic plan is created and then used to save a club. Other action plans are implemented to achieve higher member satisfaction, attract more club usage, attract more members and to change declining clubs into rising clubs. And it all begins with having and continually following a strategic plan that shows how to achieve club success. So if your club has a strategic plan, take it down off the shelf, refresh it and then implement it.