Tough questions remain

A pivotal time in my career arrived when enough experiences, successes and failures converged to confirm that big changes are necessary if the game of economy golf plans on sustaining itself much longer.

I recently had to choose either working today’s traditional superintendent role or take what I have learned and be a part of helping others make better choices for the game. Selfishly, most of us don’t put enough thought into how we “do” golf today and its impact on the next generations.

I’m inspired to write because of the unfortunate result of hundreds of doors that have closed over the last few decades. Once they are gone, you rarely hear of what factors led those golf properties to their failure. And if you do get any details, they are often sugarcoated excuses to protect and cover up the true shortcomings and collective embarrassment of individuals directly involved.

If I didn’t love the game so much, I wouldn’t waste your time with any of this; I’d be off making far more money doing something I would probably dislike.

I have burned plenty of rubber in the golf industry, mostly around the Idaho block over the last 14 years of my quarter century in the business — and I have enjoyed every moment of it. As much as bouncing around can be hard on your family and checkbook, I have gained a much deeper understanding of how we traditionally operate day to day at most levels, specifically on the economy side of things. It’s clear to me that the majority of our golf properties need a serious overhaul physically, financially, educationally and, most of all, philosophically to make the golf business a sustainable and thriving endeavor. It’s amazing how flagrant and inefficient we can be with the overall business plan in the game.

Most of us agree that we seek the best playing conditions for as cheap as possible. I’m going to examine a few major reasons why we have such a tough time creating a sustainable system. By emotional design and longtime cultured tradition, we do it in a costly and inefficient way. Perhaps you’ll finally be able to say you’re not alone in some of this thought.

Structural considerations

When will developers and designers start being held accountable for building or renovating new golf properties that are truly operationally sustainable? No, I’m not talking about the birds and the bees when I use the word sustainable in this case. We are already making great strides on the environmental end.

Spend a minute assuming the role of a developer who wants to maximize profit with the sale of lots surrounding the perimeter of a new or established course. What is the typical developer approach? Hire a big-name golf designer to paint a jaw-dropping rendering of the next toughest course with the sole intention of increasing the per-lot price through marketing by building it with four more flower beds, 10 more bunkers, seven more forced carries and more overall beauty than the last golf development built down the road.

When this development has been finished, are you fortunate enough to have enough staff to groom the excessive bunker acreage? How many expensive, diesel-sucking, maintenance-demanding pieces of equipment are required to groom your large turf surface where, by tradition, we feel like we need five or more HOCs like the Tour is showing up next weekend?

With current labor challenges, can you still easily retain the 10 to 25 employees necessary to maintain this elaborate landscape? Did anyone ask the designer if the maintenance facility built to maintain this design, which acts as the beating heart of the daily operation, is sufficient enough to keep the pretty picture in top shape for years to come?

Once the lots are all sold, the designer and the developer leave with fat pockets to enjoy yet another real estate victory. And the operator, membership or HOA is left with this maintenance pig by design and little forecast to what this all means financially. Guess what typically happens over the course of 20 to 40 years? No master plan or capital savings is built. The course reaches a tipping point, and everyone responsible for making those big decisions through the years blames the superintendent for the poor course conditions.

Look at the average golf maintenance facility grounds. It’s generally a garbage show of old, used, broken equipment and parts, poor or no shelter for that expensive equipment, and fertilizer and plant protectants all over the place. Somehow, we have been convinced — or convinced ourselves — that this poor existence at the heart of our property is OK. “That’s just how it is.”

When will prospective home buyers start asking questions like how much that fancy golf course will cost them to keep up in HOA dues once the developer is finished making millions and happily passes it along to them? When will the majority of seasoned golfers be able to better associate the cost of a round versus the cost of doing business that sustains that property fairly?

Not everybody can afford a sports car

If you are, fortunately, part of a well-resourced property where you feel little of this relates to you, then I encourage you to wonder what percentage of the current players or members who support your club today likely grew to love and enjoy the game because an average, low-budget operation was available to them early in their golf careers. I wouldn’t be writing this article if a cheap green fee wasn’t available back in the 1980s, because my parents could never afford a country club membership.

We must understand how important the cheaper, more relaxed golf properties that we know and love positively affect and help sustain the success of the high-end properties. Economy golf courses are the breeding grounds of the game and must be protected for the greater good of the game.

Most people agree that driving a Ferrari is an expensive activity because of how the car is built and the performance it provides. If we don’t start evolving and gearing economy golf with that in mind, we may never operate within our means.

What is someone loaded with cash looking for besides ticket price when visiting the lot to purchase a vehicle? What kind of mileage will you get out of a car? How well-built and safe is it? How often and costly is routine maintenance? Can I bring it to any mechanic or am I stuck with dealer prices because it has special needs that require special tools? Can I do the maintenance on my own?

Turns out most golf developers and golfers emotionally built a Ferrari because the money was available initially from real estate sales. But they won’t admit or even realize they have been treating them like a Chevy Malibu because that is the level of resources they have always been willing to provide. We all want to look good and go fast, but most of us can’t afford it. Clubs suffering financially today have been driving the wrong car.

Let’s say somebody gives you a Bugatti Chiron, a supercar worth more than $3 million. If maintained correctly, it can cost you $30,000 to $100,000 a year in service, parts and rubber. Sure, the car was free. But can you afford that annual maintenance cost? The smartest thing would be to give it back or sell it immediately to someone who can afford to drive it.

It’s easy to understand that the daily balance of financial resources coming in compared to a fair and sustainable cost of operation going out is why it has always been tough for many properties to put away any capital savings. Those of us who have been working in this business for years know how innocently cheap and uneducated golfers have been about their physical surroundings, but we have done almost nothing about it as industry leaders to help educate and re-culture.

Sound solutions

We must exaggerate in the other direction if we plan on devising a good balance of results and sound solutions for all this to work and make sense.

Imagine building a golf course on average natural grade and terrain — which, to be fair, most designers are doing a far better job of in today’s designs. There will be no bunkers, no extra water features other than the irrigation pond, no artificial landscape or flower beds and no trees inside the out-of-bounds lines. There will be only two cuts of turf (a ¾-inch to 1-inch playing surface and the greens cut), and golfers will hit off nice artificial tee mats recessed into the rough grade so a mower can pass over them easily.

Greens are near-perfect because a minimal staff is not distracted by the excessive maintenance demands of the removed physical features, as turf employees are now constantly focused on the most important surfaces. For the first time in our maintenance history, the staff spends the rest of the day maintaining and tuning a buried multimillion-dollar investment (the irrigation system) and extending its useful life by several more years. The product of this routine tuning, especially in high-drought zones of the West, where we are lucky to be irrigating a nonessential activity in the first place, is that playability reaches a new level of consistency because we finally have sufficient time to focus on applying water as precisely as possible.

Let’s return to the hundreds of clubs that have failed over the last few decades. If they were built and managed in the exaggerated way described above, how many do you think would still be open today? This seems like a design and management model for future municipal properties supported by the local taxpayers, or for public facilities that want to provide a consistent product and turn a fair profit.

For the better of your club’s financial health, if $10 per 9 holes is all your players are willing to shell out, design and manage it to cost $7 to maintain. Eventually, we successfully culture the greater golfing group into seeking and enjoying simpler design plans, enjoying great greens and cold beer that match the amount they are willing to put forward. The cool part is that we now put $3 profit back in the bank for capital savings and profit. A golf property is financially sustainable.

It should be pretty simple. When a designer paints a picture, that picture should have an annual, sustainable cost of maintenance associated with it. That cost needs to be comfortably less than the average total revenue the local players are willing to give it.

Tradition hurts

Tradition, I believe, represents the root of most of golf’s shortcomings over the last 100 years.

Golf is an old and traditional game. That’s something we love about golf, but it also produces extreme stubbornness when change is necessary. Many golf courses in the past three decades were built by current or former golf professionals who loved the game as much as the rest of us but lacked a maintenance background. How often do upper management or the bigger players at clubs consider investing in renovating bunkers before asking the superintendent about the more important foundational assets like the staff, irrigation system or mowing equipment?

Superintendents are responsible for maximizing and spending 60 to 75 percent of the entire operating budget. Sadly, I still feel they have little influence or say within their organization. Clubs still ignorantly rely on so many staff members to make decisions on big-money topics for which they have little education or direct experience, while others on the team who do remain tight-lipped due to hierarchy.

Who is qualified to make decisions on what type and quantity of resources are needed for any given property? Maybe the club needs to ask an experienced superintendent what a successful capital plan should look like to mirror their proprietary conditioning demands. This will produce an accurate outlook of existence where you can base real numbers and build fair budgets.

Comparing yourself to other properties or clubs when it comes to how to price yourself, how to manage and how to irrigate is a cancer. The only way this would be fair is if your property was a carbon copy. If this is the route you think is wise, you better make sure your property requires less input to produce the same result — otherwise, you will only get worse as time goes by and eventually fail.

Many golfers have been walking into clubs knowing that the plan makes no good business sense but they just motor on like it’s no big deal. How many board members ride through their terms knowing that the club is struggling and needs to spend some money to address major capital challenges like replacing an irrigation system, but choose not to because they are worried about being politically and socially tagged as part of the group that cost everyone a bunch more in dues? Natural emotion and selfishness are clearly embedded into the fabric of most golf.

Do some basic timeline math. Thousands of courses built during the 1990s are reaching that 30-year mark where irrigation systems, equipment packages, bunkers, cart paths and facilities are getting tired and reaching their service lifetimes.

If anyone is scratching their head about why we’re having troubles filling jobs in the industry, I can help you: Aside from OK compensation for what we accomplish, we are now working with limited staff and property tools that are also physically weak. The only way for most superintendents to combat these shortcomings is by donating more of their personal time past an already- 10-hour workday to get through it.

Paying me well to work with poor tools still yields inconsistent results. Paying me so-so to work with great tools doesn’t help me build a retirement fund. Paying me well to work with satisfactory tools allows me to succeed — and you keep me happy in my position for years. Well-educated, hard-working staff that remain in any work environment for years is a huge benefit to any club.

Since the Great Recession, there are still a few that lead their day by saying, “We just have to do more with less.” I think it's time to administer some good ol’ butt kicking for those preserving and pushing that mentality so they can continue to cover their shortcomings. I promise that you will be on your way to sending your club into a downward spiral with that line of thinking if you choose to do it for the 13th consecutive year.

We must put more effort into educating golfers and operators on how to calculate the cost of doing business by physically showing them the shortcomings of the turf care centers and exposing them to how inefficient the day can be without the right staff and equipment. And we must have the opportunity to safely express the benefits of providing our teams with stronger tools. If we don’t do these things, we’re facing the reality of more people walking away from the business. For many great superintendents of this era, it’s sadly becoming more and more undesirable of a career unless things evolve drastically.

Make sure a veteran superintendent is helping you make big physical and financial decisions going forward. A proven superintendent can share real stories that will help you develop sound decisions for your club.

Core thoughts to help sustain the game

As an industry and a group, we have become more selfish and not taking more time to expose the game by teaching new people how to play. I strongly believe that most people are hooked forever if given the chance to strike a ball purely just once. We don’t do a good enough job creating affordable and available environments in all of golf to increase that magical opportunity to the masses.

Considering how much personal time a typical assistant superintendent spends getting through the day helping provide the club pristine conditions at a minimal wage, I believe an assistant golf professional should be giving free golf lessons almost daily, after or within an eight-hour shift in the shop, to indefinitely preserve the next generation of players we desperately need to sustain our existence. It’s no different than the pilot who must put in so many hours before flying on his or her own. Now that new exciting facilities like Topgolf are trending and showing great success, there should be one small hitting bay where an inspiring golf pro should be giving quick five-minute tutorials to guests.

Education is everything, but we must be careful of what we absorb. Be cautious that any new information, services or products are not just money-driven and are not going to hurt your production or your club’s investment. One thing I find consistent is that most low-budget facilities in particular assume they can’t reach out for professional help because they have no money. If they do reach out to a professional with plenty of traditional credentials, how do they know they will be led down the right path? How long can you successfully operate a golf facility where nobody involved has any sound experience or education in golf turf management? What you assumed and thought was an easy thing to tackle will prove itself to be very difficult to yield the results you desired sooner than later. You will then be begging for help to save your club.

We need to do a better job of assessing our current existence and monitoring how everything around us affects how we perform. Experienced superintendents already do this, but most are afraid to ask for or change what they or their property really needs because it comes with an additional cost or breaks “tradition” too much. If we don’t stand up for what is right for us and the property, the groomed acreage continues to progressively deteriorate, and eventually good people lose their jobs and the course crashes. What a ridiculous outcome!

Who is at fault? Who are the individuals who superintendents are afraid of who probably shouldn’t be making big decisions anyway? If this is your existence and you choose what you think is the safe route at the time by remaining silent, know there is likely an expiration for you. At some point all the club’s shortcomings will add up and the finger will, unfortunately, be pointed at your chest.

We all need to come together and start administering what we have learned over the last 50 years to make the game and business flourish. We must get more creative in how we educate and expose the reality of our day to our clubs. If we keep moving down the same roads without capitalizing on what we have learned, we risk losing more golf properties for nothing.

What are some solutions besides obtaining and strengthening your staff?

• Clean up your irrigation system and understand how it works so it works better for you. Great irrigating practices always yield healthy turf. Poor irrigating directly affects everything around the golf course negatively and at a bigger cost than you may think.
• Determine the club’s true cost of doing business, including all capital savings that the majority agrees will provide a product level that satisfies the club mass.
• Determine how much average revenue the club can comfortably generate or will be willing to bring in collectively through rounds and dues.
• If the cost of doing business is more than what the club can bring in, it’s simple: Prioritize what management practices and, more important, what physical maintenance demands are not important, and remove them.
• Incorporate new technologies that can work well in your overall management plan.

Extremely impactful solutions and better management practices are here and can be implemented strategically over time. We must find comfort to think outside our current boxes and make better choices. Don’t be the last operator or superintendent left in a box.

Ben D. Wilmarth is a former Class A golf course superintendent living in the Northwest. He can be reached at wilmarthben@gmail.com.