The path leading to recognition for all Ryan Bender has brought to club management included a cross-country journey and a move from an oil field to the kitchen.
While many club managers have interesting back stories for what led them into the field, few can match the combination of distance traveled and professional pivoting that lies behind Ryan Bender’s Rising Star recognition as food & beverage director of The Country Club of Virginia (CCV) in Richmond, Va.
Bender was raised in Alaska, in a family where multiple generations had pursued careers as engineers and accountants. With his natural inclination for numbers—“Math was in my gene pool”—Bender also enrolled in college to study engineering.
“Three things then happened to make me learn pretty quickly that I might want to do something else,” Bender says. “I took a cooking class as an elective, got a job as a short-order cook in a local bingo hall, and moved in with a new roommate who had a once-a-week tradition of randomly turning to a page in “The Joy of Cooking” to learn how to make a new dish, so I joined him.”
The collective joy he derived from those experiences prompted Bender to shift his educational direction to pursue an associate’s degree in culinary arts and a bachelor’s in hospitality management at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.. He then
got his first exposure to working in clubs through a temporary service, and while the pay paled greatly in comparison to work he had done on an oil field in Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic Circle as a multi-year summer job, Bender was undeterred and set a new course for his career that, not surprisingly, also focused on finding a much warmer working climate in Florida.
Valuable Lessons
That opportunity came initially with Woodfield Country Club in Boca Raton, Fla., where Bender started as a food-and-beverage supervisor in 2011. He credits Woodfield’s general manager, Eben Molloy, with providing a valuable lesson by stressing the importance of being results-oriented and paying attention to details.
Bender spent seven enjoyable years at Woodfield, earning a promotion to food & beverage director.
While happy with his role there, when a chance to go to The Country Club of Virginia arose in 2018, he felt ready and eager to take on the challenges that would be presented by directing F&B for the club’s nearly 8,000 members and its wide range of dining operations that are spread over two very distinct campuses.
He also saw an opportunity to learn more about leadership and thinking strategically from CCV General Manager Phil Kiester, an Excellence in Club Management® (ECM) honoree in 2020 and CMAA Fellow, and to work with assistant general manager Anne Stryhn, who earned Rising Star recognition in 2017.
While Bender would have the same title at CCV that he had at Woodfield, his duties and contributions to the club’s success would quickly extend well beyond the food-and-beverage realm. In addition to directing impressive increases over six years in F&B revenues (77%), meals served (59%) and the overall growth of the department to over $11 million with
16 dining venues, 250 employees and 32 managers and supervisors, Bender has served as management’s primary capital-planning liaison to the CCV board and club committees in a number of settings. In that role he developed a dynamic capital project modeling tool to compare components of the club’s four distinct master plans, conduct “what if” modeling and
make ROI cost-allocation decisions. He is currently leading the planning and implementation of a major renovation and expansion project for CCV’s James River clubhouse (see rendering below).
“What makes a rising star the Rising Star is demonstration of executive skills, [and] Ryan’s performance as an executive at CCV is what makes him stand out,” Kiester wrote in nominating Bender for ECM recognition. He then delineated how Bender has displayed executive skills and qualities in 10 areas: change agent, communications champion, culture advocate, service ambassador, financial results expert, relationship and network building, strategist, talent and team developer, technology enabler and thought leader (see “Ideas and Achievements” box, pg. 28, for specifics of Bender’s accomplishments in several of these realms).
His achievements as a thought leader also speak to how Bender’s contributions to the advancement of excellence in club management extend well beyond the CCV properties. He has developed break-even and labor-cost analysis programs that he teaches
at the Business Management Institute program for the Club Management Association of America and the Management Development Programme for the Club Management Association of Europe. Partnering with Ben Lorenzen of Champions Run in Omaha, Neb., Bender has also developed and expanded the “Innovation Club” newsletter-sharing program, to help spread details about good and proven ideas for improving operations and enhancing member experiences to a network that now includes over 160 clubs from several countries.
The overriding objective for any initiative he leads, Bender says, is to “ultimately translate any strategic decision or insight into action” and align everyone in pursuit of clear and common objectives. “I’m a big believer that at the end of the day you attain results by getting everyone in a unit or organization to work for an end goal,” he says. “Growing your perspectives, making new observations and coming to important conclusions lose their value if they don’t ultimately translate into something experienced by the end user.
“Sometimes it may seem that it’s hard to get everyone to be action- and results-oriented. But I’ve found that investing in training and development is its own form of hospitality. The team benefits by growing and being even more prepared to make the most of their own careers, and the members benefit by getting a better experience.”