Every private club must recruit and retain a dues-paying base sufficient to cover its fixed costs, a process that includes replacing the roughly five percent of members who resign each year. In the previous article, Bill McMahon, Sr. focused on how to deal with controllable
Q: What is the ideal size for a club board? A: Many clubs are saddled with overly large boards, as those tend to be the standard of the day when their by-laws were written many years ago. Too many governors, which we’ll describe as anything more
In many ways it is back to the future for private clubs. When the first clubs were organized in the U.S. in the mid to late 1800s, one of the prime motivations was to offer a healthy respite away from increasingly congested cities. The industrial
Defining dining success for private clubs is simpler than most of us would guess: The club is one of the members’ favorite places to eat. That’s it! Not a place with the best gourmet food or the fanciest décor; but a place that has consistently
Private clubs are at a very pivotal time as the next generations of Boomers, Generation X and Millennials take their place on the club stage. The great recession of 2008 and 2009 is now behind us, but its residual impact, some six years later, is
Simple Business Goal: Providing and marketing a high-quality club product that members value, join and use so revenues exceed expenses and club success is achieved. The balancing act is determining what to provide and at what quality level so members value and buy into the
Making the right moves to prosper from the changes that will take place in the future can be very beneficial; the reverse is also true—placing the wrong bets can be costly. In the 1990s, a lot of smart people invested big money in golf because
The notion of the family being an essential part of the private club scene is not new. Many country clubs have had to replace their pools in recent years because they were 50 years old, so that most essential element of family activity has been
All too many clubs have misread the signals. Faced with declining participation or a lack of prospective members, they responded by reducing services, cutting the initiation fee or opening up to non-members. Rather than hear a clarion call for evolving and adapting, they acted as
Membership in a private club is meant to be an enriching experience. Through their keen focus on member enjoyment and satisfaction, clubs exist to fill a variety of important tangible and intangible desires and emotions. They are a home away from home where members and