We’ve all been to a good course with poor service as well as a poor course with good service. At the former, we typically walk away feeling as if we haven’t received good value for money, even though we enjoyed the course itself. At the latter, we’re more inclined to walk away feeling as if our expectations were somehow exceeded.
Service makes a difference.
As a PGA professional, I’ve spent the better part of the past 16 years working in, around and on golf operations. It’s true, golf courses and their accompanying services, offerings and amenities are like snowflakes . . . no two are completely identical.
However different the course offerings may be from each other, at their core are a few critical components that separate a successful, proactive operation from a failing, reactive operation. One of these components is the team that is in place.
For a team to be effective, there needs to be leadership that has the ability to use all team members to deliver as much value to the customer as possible. Now I’ll be the first to admit some leaders are naturally good at this while others are ‘mis-cast’ into seniority roles.
Leadership ability aside, the right components of the team needs to be in place to maximise the chance of success. But with a heavily outsourced staff, those components normally don’t exist.
There is a huge breakdown in efficiency, teamwork and achieving a common goal when the golf shop is outsourced, food and beverage is outsourced, golf maintenance is outsourced, etc. The best-run operations in the world have a cohesive approach where everyone pitches in – everyone assists their fellow employee, with the common goal of providing great service to the customer (be it a member or guest).
From my experience, there isn’t any motivation for a contracted golf professional to help a contracted food and beverage caterer. Hence, the entire customer service tends to break down.
Increasingly over the past decade, clubs in New Zealand and Australia have gone down the path of outsourcing with little understanding of the damage this can do to the overall golf experience.
The best service-driven operations I have been a part of had an inherent sense of teamwork. They were led from the top, but the culture was understood throughout the entire staff. Not only was teamwork expected of us, we were trained on how to work together.
What I’m talking about is no different than a football coach drawing plays on a white board with Xs and Os. It’s about moving resources in the right place, at the right time, to perform. How could that coach possibly be expected to achieve the desired results if 30, 40 or more than 50 percent of his team on the field don’t directly work for him?
To put this into a real-life scenario, consider a morning at a course with heavy golfer arrivals. There could be a time when the golf staff becomes overwhelmed. We’ve all seen it before. Enter a member of the food and beverage team who can quickly lend a set of hands for five minutes and help steady the ship. On the flip side, when it pours with rain at 10am and 80 players come off the course, the golf staff can jump in and offer assistance in the restaurant.
This model works because everyone is on the same team, aligned with one common goal. The team members have a vested interest in helping their co-workers and there is a skilled manager in place who can oversee the entire process and call the shots.
But when the golf professional is contracted to populate part of a building, the food and beverage staff are contracted from a local restaurant or caterer, and the golf maintenance team is outsourced to a third party, there is no sense of teamwork and no motivation to work together.
In this scenario, the general manager is essentially trying to manage the multiple relationships while not having any control over the staff working at the course. This inevitably leads to two things happening – conflict and a failure to deliver great service.
Conflict comes from the high risk of breakdown in one or more relationships between the club and contractors. Failure to deliver great service is a result of the contracted labour not working together cohesively and not helping their co-workers to ensure the guest experience is as good as it can be.
With regard to golf clubs, the first step in determining if you have a problem with outsourced staff is to take your facility through a self-assessment. When business levels increase, do you see outsourced departments looking out for one another and the course as a whole? Or do you observe a food and beverage team struggling with their role while the golf staff leans on the counter and watches?
I’m not advocating for clubs to scrap a model that may be working for them. But the overwhelming number of clubs that choose to outsource the main components of their offering will run into the problems mentioned at some stage in their life cycle.
Bringing labour in-house does carry risks, but those risks are greatly reduced with a management team that has expertise in running a golf business. Too often I see club structures that follow the path of least resistance . . . outsource the critical components of the business and hire a generalist, not a specialist, to oversee them.
Ryan Brandeburg is a PGA member and formerly the director of golf at Kauri Cliffs and Cape Kidnappers. He has held a number of senior managerial and consultant roles in New Zealand and abroad. He is also the author of two books aimed at educating young golf professionals.
