If you’ve been tuning in this week, you will know that I have been sharing with our readers, some of the groundbreaking, “golf business saving” content from my upcoming book.

So far we’ve looked at how you can use my “paint by numbers” formula in your golf business to:

1. Get your cashflow (in and out) in great shape…fast.
2. Positively differentiate your golf business from all of the others and give yourself a distinctly unfair advantage in the marketplace.
3. Attract all of the new business you could ever want…and on your terms! (We’re definitely NOT talking about 2 for 1s or desperate giveaways here!)

In Step 5 of 7 in my new book Golf Business Turnaround-the 7 Essential Steps to Success, available here from Monday 25th January, I take you step by step through a system that will set up your golf business to run like clockwork to produce all of the profit and/or business you need with a positively awe inspiring formula for managing your day to day operations.

In what is essentially a step by step blueprint for saving and turning around a struggling golf business, I will reveal many of the advanced techniques and strategies I use with paying clients; and apply the kind of thinking and business innovation that has attracted clients both at home and abroad to seek out our help here at hole18.

“Operations” or the day to day running of their golf business is what gives most owners and managers the biggest headache. The minutiae of running a busy (or not so busy) golf facility can easily become a massive burden even for the most level headed and organised managers. If we pile business worries about cashflow and survival on to that its no wonder that many people cave in.

In Step 5 we do the equivalent of playing some soothing music, giving you a shoulder massage, pouring you a stiff drink and letting you put your feet up…yes this is where your role suddenly becomes very, very clear and you start to instinctively know what to do and when to do it.

More importantly, by filling in the blanks in this section (not literally of course, there is a little more to it than that!) you will build yourself a business operation that swishes along gracefully making all of the money you Read more

Marketing is a critical business process that many Golf Clubs do very badly or not at all in some cases. With many clubs, marketing always means print advertising and indeed when speaking to some clubs, it becomes apparent that they actually refer to print advertising as “marketing”, as if this is the only way to attract customers!

During the late summer of 2009 I saw a lot of golf club adverts appearing in local papers around the country. The culprits shall remain nameless, but almost to a man they were the most desperate adverts I have ever seen…you could almost smell the fear as green fees were slashed, catering was given away and hard one reputations were ruined overnight. These were mainly adverts to try to attract the “last of the summer wine” in the form of visitors who hadn’t materialised for one reason or another. I really felt for the club managers who found themselves in the dire straits that produced this kind of desperate action. The result I would imagine in most cases was a loss on the deal, because even if they did drum up some last minute bookings they would be for small groups and they had already given all of the profit away in the advert.

Another common sight was the advert, again in local papers, again with a nice picture of the 10^th, but this time offering (in some cases it looked like begging) extremely favourable terms on membership fees for new members. It might have been waiving the joining fee or giving the membership for the remainder of 2009 (this was in late summer!) away with 2010 membership or sometimes both. In a few really bad cases I saw Read more

What a strange (non) word “uniqueness” is, don’t you think? but I hear it used often. The suffix “ness” implies a scale, a measurement or a way of comparing things in an incremental way; like green-ness, red-ness or loveliness. Unique-ness shouldn’t be (and probably isn’t!) a proper word, because there shouldn’t be any way of measuring how unique you are, should there?; surely if you are unique you are simply, well…unique?

Well a lot of my clients fire that one at me because you see, they are all in the same business, namely …golf, and I keep telling them that they have to “define” their uniqueness. This is where the confusion arises, but I do that intentionally…confusion makes them think a bit harder! They invariably tell me that they have a golf course or courses and that due to that; they sell golf. They then usually (not always) go on to tell me that golf is golf is golf and…(they sometimes add the suffix…STUPID) as  a result, they cannot differentiate themselves from other golf providers. Of course I try not to take it too personally, but I usually tell them to have a re-think about that last statement.

You see, every business has competition, and guess what? Read more