A basic management philosophy I tend to follow, especially when you have limited resources is something I call “The Domino Effect”. In a nutshell, what is the one thing I can focus on that will have the biggest flow-on impact for the rest of my operation?

As an industry, our No. 1 KPI should be HOW MANY NEW GOLFERS DID WE INTRODUCE TO THE GAME OF GOLF.

If we put maximum effort into this area, the rest of the “issues” would pretty much take care of themselves. We have some very good programs available from many of the governing organisations, but I don’t believe we have quite gotten the correct marketing entry point and/or target market dialled in yet.

The Pipeline

In Sales as a good starting point you always focus on increasing leads. The more leads you have coming into the pipeline on one end you will see stronger output of everything else we need out the other end. ie members, administrators, elite players, social players etc.  I think we tend to start too late in this process and forget about the big part of the market that are the low lying fruit or new leads.

So many people out there want to try the game, but don’t because we haven’t marketed to them in the correct mediums, so they end up trying some other activity because they were attracted to it from the better marketing that was used.

Our industry’s marketing as a whole tends to “preach to the choir” and in many cases focuses too much on current members and players that are already involved in the game. There is also too great an emphasis on the elite player compared to the effort given toward new players.

Retention is a very integral part of the process for long term growth, but well leave that for another story.

This Spring/Summer issue (No 9) is full of a variety of great stories on new golfer and participation programs- ideas that fit under the banner Grow the Game. I hope it sparks some ideas that you will be able to incorporate into your particular operations.

Finally, I was fortunate enough to spend a few days in Melbourne attending the recent GMA National Conference. If you didn’t attend you really did miss one of the best golf conferences in recent times. It was very well planned, great speakers, and the new shortened format was perfect. Well done to the GMA for raising the bar for our industry! We have a full wrap up of the event in this issue.