What golf clubs need to do to beat lockdown bogey
• Clubs that have embraced the ‘hospitality’ ethos are likely to ride out the coronavirus storm
After discussing content and timings with the Business Day sports editor, he closed the call with a “goodbye”, adding the wish that I “stay negative”.
Golfers dream of being under par, but with Covid-19 stalking the semirough, this concept has a highly unpleasant alternative meaning.
I am still looking for answers about whether the cure, in closing down the world’s economy, will not prove to be worse than the disease itself. The choice has been made and now we must live through it as best we can.
In golf, it is like playing a game and making a quadruple bogey (4 over par on one hole), but needing to limit the damage, play on and complete the round.
Golfers, due to the game’s extended playing time, need to be in the moment and play one hole at a time. They must avoid thinking ahead; however tempting this might be — all very similar to only crossing bridges when you get to them.
Extending this scenario into a business context, venues must keep playing and those that have built up some fat will have the chance to resume trading effectively once the storm has passed. Those without this type of contingency funding or backup will really struggle.
The same challenges apply to golf in its broadest sense.
The Golfer’s Club might be one of the largest high-street golf equipment retailers in Southern Africa, but the group operates under the same rules as everyone else. As CEO Jason Rowe told me — very few retail businesses can survive 21 days without generating any direct retail revenues.
I am sure the Edcon board would echo this as would, at the other end of the business spectrum, every informal trader under lockdown.
However, survive is what we must do or, despite the precautions, the virus will have won by dint of the decisions made to combat it.
At a golf club level, the loss of trade will be serious for marginal clubs, or at which the business model is unbalanced, which applies to many.
The public tends to see golf as a “rich” sport, and all clubs as gilded temples occupied by the game’s super-rich acolytes, but the truth is far more prosaic.
Many clubs are nonprofit organisations and structured to balance their books at the end of each financial year, reinvest any surplus in capital improvements and move on.
To compound the difficulties, the golf business has been slow to understand that it is in the “hospitality” space, with golf as part of a broader menu.
Those facilities that have embraced the hospitality ethos and understand it, will have a more balanced and broaderbased business model. After the crisis, they will be likely to have facilities full of members and patrons as soon as the curfews are relaxed, even if the golf course rounds count still takes a while to normalise.
Some venues “think” they understand hospitality. This grey area came into sharp focus earlier in 2020 while visiting a golf estate, where I had previously been a homeowner for a number of years.
BUSINESS ERROR
The newly appointed golf GM was very proud to share the news of all the developments and changes and especially pleased in explaining the turnaround at the estate, which he described as now being a “customer-centric, lifestyle venue”. They say that pride comes before a fall, so what transpired after the meeting, when I decided on the R99 lunch special, in one of the restaurant areas, should have come as no real surprise.
The special included a glass of wine or a beer with the choice of lunch item.
I do not drink alcohol and asked for a soft drink instead — it is less expensive, though the deal with the supplier might not have factored in nondrinkers, which in this health-conscious age, is a tactical business error in itself.
I was told that this substitution would not be possible. My lunch companion thus drank two glasses of wine and I paid for a cold drink.
Would Red Rum still have been considered the great racehorse he was, if he had fallen as spectacularly in the Grand National as this club did, in hospitality terms, at the very first hurdle?
These types of service misses and gaffes highlight the gulf that must be crossed by the golf business to rewire incumbent staff or employ specialists to get itself into true hospitality mode.
While the golf-centric trading mode makes many clubs subsistence-level concerns, they offer much to the country in social, employment and economic terms.
Their survival will require the unequivocal loyalty of their members, matched by the support of suppliers at the end of this period to hope to get them back into red numbers on the golf business leader board.