With the continuing challenges posed by the nation’s struggling economy and the vast array of changes occurring in the world surrounding clubs, it is critical to recognize that strategic planning is an ongoing process that helps to ensure the continued health of a private club. In fact, in challenging times, it can be the lifeline that restores a club to a positive outlook.
Working through a strategic planning process enables your club to address potential issues before they become crises. Instead of continually putting out brush fires, you can anticipate problems and work to address them before they become serious. Planning enables you to take advantage of opportunities you might otherwise miss if you were focused solely on day-to-day operations. A club which engages in strategic and long-range planning should be better positioned to develop and maintain a facility that satisfies the needs of its members.
Many clubs have already developed plans that are in the process of being implemented. For any who have not done so, a quick summary of the planning steps typically followed is summarized in the sidebar on page XX.
However, as noted, planning is a continuous process. The club’s long-range planning committee is often a permanent, or standing, committee with responsibility for not only developing a plan that meets the future needs of the club, but also evaluating the implementation of that plan and recommending adjustments as needed.
Frank Vain, President of The McMahon Group, summarizes the outlook for many clubs in today’s changing world: “It is more important than ever that a club develop a roadmap to guide its future. Clubs are in a protracted battle for market share and only those with the best positioning and best maintained facilities will win. Many club boards continue to be mired in minutia and operational detail when they should be focusing on high level strategic issues. The strategic plan will direct their energies toward the areas where they can have real impact while also clarifying for management the type of experience that the club should be providing to its members. Unfortunately, only about half the clubs in the country have a strategic plan in place and only about half of these update it with any regularity.”
Perhaps your vision for your club’s future is on its way to becoming reality. Your strategic plan is in place, and you have organized the club’s volunteer and professional leadership to take responsibility for the plan’s implementation. Assignments and deadlines have been established, and the work is proceeding.
To maintain the momentum, a club needs to establish a mechanism to monitor the plan. Questions to be addressed might include:
- Are the club’s mission, vision, directions and goals still appropriate?
- Is the plan driving the club in the right direction?
- Are the strategic actions being accomplished on schedule?
- What happens after strategic actions are achieved?
Set Up a Monitoring and Review Process
The first step in putting a monitoring procedure in place is to identify a member of the Long-Range Planning Committee who will assist the general manager with the review process. Together, they will need to develop procedures that are based on a clear set of indicators and which provide for:
- Frequent assessment of how well the plan is being implemented.
- Periodic, in-depth reassessment of the entire plan, including mission, goals and strategies
Look at the Plan Frequently
Based on reports prepared by the staff, the general manager should regularly report to the board on how well implementation is going. The report should outline how accomplishments compare to scheduled achievement of strategic actions. This process is similar to the comparison of periodic financial statements to the club’s budget. In fact, the McMahon Group recommends using the strategic plan as the basis for the board’s monthly meeting agenda, which can help the board stay current on the plan’s implementation and address new strategic issues as they arise, rather than waiting until the year-end review.
The strategic plan will also serve as a reference point in a great number of board decisions. For example, if the board is voting on whether to allocate funds for renovation of the golf course, that action and those funds should be factored into the strategic plan. Is the project in line with the plan? If not, can the club afford to complete the project when it has already budgeted funds to fulfill other strategic objectives?
If the answer to either question is no, the club should carefully weigh the impact on operations of postponing the work versus the longer-term impact of not following the plan. For a golf club that relies heavily on its green and cart fees, the choice may be to postpone one of the strategic objectives in favor of stabilizing an important revenue stream.
Carefully consider new ideas or issues that arise in light of existing commitments covered in the plan. You will need to separate those activities and projects that could be good for the club from those that are essential or constitute an emergency. Good ideas can always be tabled and revisited at a later date.
Reassess the Plan Annually
Different clubs and organizations develop different mechanisms for updating their strategic plans. The important thing is that your club should have such a mechanism. The details of the mechanism are much less important than the fact that you have procedures in place for reviewing and updating your strategic plan on a regular basis. Without such a mechanism, your plan will not remain synchronized with the club’s operational direction, and will become obsolete after a year or two.
Remember that change goes against the grain of many organizations. Most clubs are fully occupied with day-to-day operations, and without pressure to maintain the strategic plan as a living document, it will get buried under the weight of everyday concerns.
The Facilitator Again
The question of whether to use a facilitator or outside consultant is often addressed in the upfront development of the plan. Factors to consider in that decision are summarized in the sidebar on page XX. You may or may not want to have the facilitator assist with a subsequent plan review. You have a lot of ground to cover, so efficiency will be key to productivity. Unless a leader of the group is experienced or has been trained in advance to lead the session, you will usually accomplish far more if a facilitator is present to keep the group focused than if you operate alone, both to help guide the discussion and to provide greater objectivity in the review process. Leadership of the club, both volunteer and staff, may be less likely to acknowledge the importance of a club’s strengths or weaknesses and to recognize the need to address them in the strategic plan, even though they may be key to achieving success.
Planning consultant, Tarun Kapoor, Managing Director of Kapoor and Kapoor Hospitality, reports that consultants are often called in to help when there are disagreements between factions and/or the board has become dysfunctional. A consultant can help identify the reason or suggest effective ways to address the problems, helping to create an alliance between the board and the club’s management. “But don’t bring in a consultant when you have a dysfunctional board: it will take six months to gain the trust of everyone in the group. Rather, call in a consultant when you have a good, progressive board or president to put protocols in place and create an alliance between the board and manager for the best strategic planning,” Kapoor suggests.
Who Should Participate?
The original strategic planning committee members should help reassess the plan, if possible. Most clubs have a mechanism for rotating committee and board terms so that all the seats do not turn over at the same time. However, you should expect that there will be some new faces who will bring fresh perspectives to the deliberations. Kapoor notes that club volunteers will often focus on fixing problems or addressing immediate needs of the club. However, it is critical that the process address what the club will need long-term and include perspectives that focus on the future.
The Agenda
The entire strategic plan should be reviewed as part of the re-assessment, starting with the club’s mission, even if it is unlikely to need revision. Next, reexamine the club’s vision. Is it still what everyone wants for the club in the next few years? Most likely it will be, although unforeseen circumstances or new information or insights may cause the group to decide to alter the vision.
Next, take another look at the external threats and opportunities and the club’s internal strengths and weaknesses. Have things changed? Has any threat or opportunity been eliminated? Are there any threats or opportunities to add?
What about your club’s strengths? Are there any new ones to add? Are any that are currently listed no longer true? Have any of the club’s weaknesses been overcome? Are there new ones? The club should consider a periodic re-assessment of member input, often done through a follow up survey. “The more you know about your customer, product and competitors, the easier it is to be successful during bad as well as good economic times,” notes Dr. Raymond Ferreira, of The Ferreira Company. “Clubs also need to understand the demographic and psychographic makeup of its candidates for membership and how to balance the wishes of the long-term members with the desires of newer, younger members. The national average age for a new regular member (not for a junior or legacy member) has been in the 45-46 year age range for the last three decades. That has been the Baby Boomer for the last decade and a half, but individuals in that age range are now Generation Xers. Their needs, wants and desires are different compared to the previous generation.”
After a focused look at the club’s external and internal environments, it is time to revisit your club’s broad directions and goals. If there has been a significant change in your vision or external or internal situation, there will almost certainly be changes in directions and goals. In any event, look at them all carefully to see if they are still the most appropriate ones for your club’s future as you see it now.
Finally, the committee will look carefully at the strategic actions in the plan. Which have already been accomplished? Now is the time to revise your list of strategic actions if necessary. You may decide to replace completed actions with new ones that are in keeping with your updated vision, situation, directions, and goals.
Ensure that uncompleted strategic actions are adjusted so they can be completed. If the appropriate adjustments are not possible, you may simply have to drop a strategic action, and replace it with one that the club can accomplish.
“The key metric for clubs is to monitor member satisfaction,” adds Frank Vain. “That is the true measurement of the impact that the strategic plan is having on the member experience. It is also the one over which the board and management have the greatest control.” He notes that a very simple and effective process to follow is to:
(1) Do baseline member attitudinal research and have the board and general manager work together to develop a strategic plan;
(2) Conduct an annual satisfaction survey to see if the members are happier and more satisfied than in the past;
(3) Incorporate the results of the annual survey into the strategic planning update review that the board conducts each year; and
(4) On a separate track, continually monitor the vital signs of the organization, such as financial results, money in the bank and membership levels.
The more experienced your board and planning committee become at working with the strategic plan, the better will be your sense of what makes an achievable strategic action. Remember that a change in the plan does not mean a lack of success; it probably means your process is a healthy one, and you are responding to changing circumstances.
The periodic revisions you make in the strategic plan should drive the preparation of the annual operating budget. By linking the two, you will create a system of checks and balances between operational funding and the club’s overall goals and objectives.
The Strategic Plan and Your Future
Once the club has been through a complete cycle with its strategic plan, you will likely see real advantages to operating with one. While one never knows what will happen, your strategic plan allows your club, to the extent possible, to chart its own course, rather than simply respond to external and internal crises. And your strategic plan will change over time as things change and you revisit it regularly.
The Ferreira Company suggests that the real value of a strategic plan is to help the club:
- Retain membership through happier, more satisfied users
- Attract candidates for members
- Demonstrate to members that their opinions are valued
- Encourage member involvement so they feel a sense of “ownership”
- Differentiate your club from the competition
- Increase club usage
- Enhance revenues and financial stability
With fewer crises and more of your club’s projects coming to fruition, members should have a sense of confidence in their leaders and pride in their club’s facilities, programs and services. Those elements, taken together, ensure a financially stable operation that provides maximum service to a club’s members.
Key Steps in the Planning Process
Strategic planning is about envisioning, and, by its nature, is generally a comprehensive process that involves a commitment of time and multiple phases. While there are various models to follow for the planning process, they generally include the following key steps:
1. Identify a planning committee that will have responsibility for overseeing the process and gathering broad-based input on critical issues for the club. The committee approach usually helps the club to distill the many perspectives it will receive. It needs to be a group of committed individuals who understand the club’s culture and membership needs.
2. Ask the members for input, to assess where the club stands and plan for future developments. The most popular methods of gathering research regarding members’ perceptions of facilities and services include focus groups and surveys. Professional help in this area can be invaluable. Also take note of any member complaints and evaluate perceptions and feedback from guest surveys, if available.
3. Look at the world around the club: review information on private club trends and the outlook for the industry overall, as well as the outlook for the local economy and issues affecting the community in which the club is located.
4. Based on the review of external trends and internal feedback, identify critical factors in the internal and external environments and what they mean for the club.
5. Review and agree on the club’s mission statement and a vision of the future you want for the club. The vision should be a reflection of what you want the club to be as it evolves over time; it should inspire both members and staff. The mission statement should answer the questions of who the club is and why you exist, describing the club’s basic purpose.
6. Identify the key issues for the club’s future, strategic priorities for the next 5-10 years, and action steps to implement the strategic priorities.
7. Once the plan has been developed, it should be review and approved by the board and presented to the club’s membership prior to implementation.
8. On an ongoing basis, assess the success of the club in implementing the plan goals and any changes in the internal and external factors which would cause the club to amend the plan.
Further details on the planning process are outlined in NCA’s Guide to Strategic Planning, available at www.nationalclub.org.
Does Your Club Need a Strategic Planning Consultant?
Many organizations that have done strategic planning answer “yes.” Some clubs find that bringing in an outside facilitator to help with the strategic planning process offers a number of distinct advantages:
- Most facilitators are well-versed in group process, strategic analysis, conflict resolution, board and leadership development, questionnaire design, and performance measures, all of which are important to the strategic planning process.
- A facilitator can help develop an awareness of the importance of strategic planning.
- A facilitator lends credibility to the club’s planning process.
- Most facilitators have worked with numerous organizations and may have a good understanding of many of the issues that are likely to arise in your club.
- A facilitator is indispensable if the committee is to complete its work in the time allotted. One of the greatest strengths of a facilitator is helping a planning committee “stay on task” and meet its own deadlines.
- A facilitator can provide the discipline needed to help the committee stay focused on the issue at hand during discussions.
- A facilitator can provide the objectivity and support that enables committee members to work through divisive issues.
- In an unbiased way, a facilitator can help clarify to the group any comments of a participant that may be unclear.
- A facilitator can help ensure that the views of all committee members are heard.
Involving someone with a thorough knowledge of planning issues at the outset helps your committee get a more productive start. A consultant can also help the club analyze objectively how it compares to other clubs in the area, so the club can differentiate its offerings and broaden its membership appeal.
Planning Tips for the Board Chair and General Manager
The attitudes, skills and efforts of these two individuals are key to the success of the club’s strategic planning process. The board chair and the general manager should be partners in developing the strategic plan. Here are a few tips to help the board chair and general manager lead a successful strategic planning process:
- Work together. Do not assume the other knows what you are thinking or planning. It may help to schedule regular conversations throughout the process. If issues arise, the facilitator may have some helpful advice to offer.
- Become familiar with the strategic planning process. There is a great deal of literature on the subject, from a variety of perspectives—business, industry, nonprofit organizations, etc. Read the literature, and share it with those involved in the process.
- Contact other clubs who have gone through the experience of strategic planning and learn as much as you can from their experience. Ask what the other club would do differently, if it had the process to do over.
- Work to include all who will have responsibility for carrying out the strategic plan. This usually means staff. The more you can help them to invest in the process, the more committed they will be to its fulfillment.