Simply stated, a strategic plan is a tool that enables a club to take the fewest number of steps to get from where they are today to where they are headed. It is a process all businesses should use to determine who they are, whom they want to be, and how they are going to be most successful in achieving their goals. Perhaps the most apparent reason to engage in strategic planning is that it provides direction and focus by way of a written document.
Having a clearly articulated mission and vision enables a club to develop a strategic plan that is a literal roadmap for success. Stephen Covey, the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” taught us that success is best achieved when we “begin with the end in mind.” It is a process of envisioning and defining your final destination, and then charting the best pathway to get there. The Cheshire Cat extolled his wisdom upon Alice, of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” when she was wandering in Wonderland and was confounded by a fork in her path, saying to her; “if you don’t know where you’re going any path will take you there.” Alice’s confusion about which path to take for our purpose is a metaphor for not knowing her “end in mind”—and a club wandering due to not having a strategic plan.
An essential component (and many times the greatest obstacle) to achieving success when determining an “end in mind” at a club that is governed by a volunteer board of directors is for all the stakeholders involved to agree on and actively support the same destination. Experience shows that many times this is harder than first thought, with the best of club managers likening this process to that of herding cats.
Strategic planning requires the strategy of engaging in and then implementing a strategic management process. This process begins with generating data to understand what is most important to club members as a collective group and then knowing how satisfied they are in the most important areas. It is also essential to understand why members initially joined the club and why they remain members today. This is where the importance of data comes into play when attempting to bring everyone together collectively, all agreeing on a single end in mind (a.k.a. your club’s mission and vision).
So where is the data for clubs to use to help clear the clutter of personal opinions, preferences and agendas that so often clogs the discussions in private club boardrooms?
Data is Key
Some great quotes regarding strategic management are from Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape: “If we have data, let’s look at the data. If all we have are opinions, then let’s go with mine” and “In God we trust—all others bring data.”
There is data all around us. Clubs are beehives of members’ usage activity on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Almost all private clubs today use computer software systems, including new geofencing, beacon and even facial recognition technologies. These platforms enable clubs to know how often, when and where their members are when on campus and what amenities they frequent most. Point of sales systems track member amenity and program use and spending behaviors for the aggregate membership and segment individual family member use by gender and age. Clubs also collect immediate member feedback via club apps-push texts or quick tablet questionnaires in chit portfolios. There is copious data available to club management and boards. If harnessed appropriately, this data would provide the foundation for answering the strategic questions of what is most important today: how the club is performing, what will be most important in the future, and how to prepare the club to remain relevant to members and guarantee success going forward.
Member satisfaction surveys have been a valuable tool for decades and the technology for collecting this data has evolved over the years rendering them a more reliable resource for clubs when they are seeking an understanding of both member importance and satisfaction within all areas of the member experience. Member surveys have evolved both behaviorally and financially over time with how the data is interpreted and when weighted against other clubs, providing industry trends and benchmarked norms—and most importantly, when interpreted by industry professionals with the experience to know how the data best relates to a particular club.
Not all data is useful strategically by itself. Reports that depict snapshots of daily food and beverage usage or daily and weekly tee sheets and court reservations are essential control tools for management to use to ensure the club is operating to budget and on plan, but in and by themselves cannot be useful when plotting a club’s strategic path forward. Only when these snapshots of daily activity are categorized and organized over time, does it become useful as a viable tool to predict and plan for your club’s future. This data must be harnessed, classified and interpreted similarly over many seasons of operations in order to become a reliable indicator of your members’ wants and needs and behaviors. Only then can clubs use the data as a foundation to plan future facility and programming improvements aimed at sustaining your club’s vitality for the long term.
Business and Strategic Intelligence
Business and strategic intelligence are the latest terminologies that define the strategic management process private club boards and management have adopted today when developing and implementing strategic plans for their clubs. Business intelligence relies on the use of data to make informed decisions. It is the strategic management process where an understanding of who your club is and where it must go to remain relevant to its members and become sustainable well into the future is developed. But it is not just the data that drives the ultimate intelligence. Strategic intelligence comes from combining the data with human knowledge and expertise. It is these analytics that provides an understanding of how the convergence of data and member behavior over time become indicators of likely future trends.
The private club industry’s premier software providers are making significant headway in attempting to bundle all the excellent snapshot data they collect, transforming it into meaningful long-view reports clubs can use for strategic analysis. Unfortunately, none of them today can boast that their software provides all the data for the business intelligence private clubs need when developing a strategic plan with their reports. This may not be their fault. Private clubs all have their idiosyncrasies in how they prefer to manage and operate their clubs. Thus, they have different demands on how they want the software to function. Again, imagine software engineers attempting to develop software that is applicable to all clubs is like trying to herd cats.
While some software providers are ahead of others, it won’t be until club managers come together with software engineers to collaboratively envision and define a “business intelligence end in mind” that is strategically applicable for most private clubs. While clubs do like to operate differently, there is a fairly standard template for clubs when developing strategic plans. It shouldn’t be too much longer for the industry to have a viable solution. Until then, clubs will continue to rely upon the snapshot data reports they have available to them and additionally rely upon the professional statistical acumen of chief financial officers to interpret the available data into long-view dashboards and graphs that are useful when developing the strategic intelligence necessary to build today’s strategic plans.