By David Gould, Staff Editor
Golf operators can tour their property and check turf conditions as needed. They can visit the grill room and assess how well diners are enjoying their meals. Shop merchandising can be evaluated visually and by reading sales reports. Feedback on the latest wedding or banquet is never in short supply.
Then there’s the instruction program.
Is it what Winston Churchill might have called “a riddle wrapped in a mystery”? There’s certainly a challenge for management in judging how much or how little their instruction operation is contributing to the business. To address it, the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA) teamed with Proponent Group on a research project. It was a survey, in the field during December 2024, seeking relevant performance metrics along with judgements and opinions.
The CEO of the NGCOA, Jay Karen, spearheaded the project along with current president Cathy Harbin—herself a veteran teaching professional. The questionnaire was comprised of 18 multiple-choice questions and a total of 109 executives from NGCOA member courses filled it out.
Self-identifying by title, 39 percent said they were the owner of the facility, 33 percent said they were general manager and 19 percent gave their title as director of golf or head professional. About 9 percent checked “other.”
Responses to the survey question about facility type showed 9 percent as private clubs, 61 percent as privately owned daily fee (or semi-private), 22 percent as municipal and about 8 percent in the resort category.
Two of the 18 questions were to garner information about the personal experience of the survey-taker, as it relates to instruction and its perceived value. We asked, “In the course of your golf career, have you ever done any teaching?” While 35 percent said they hadn’t, 46 percent said “Yes, quite a bit” while another 19 percent answered “Yes, some.”
The second question about the survey-takers’ personal experiences was this: “Is there an instructor who did a lot to improve your skills and enhance your enjoyment of the game?” The responses came back overwhelmingly in the affirmative, with 68 percent answering yes.
People in the golf industry who specialize in instruction feel the percentage of golfers who take lessons or attend clinics is unreasonably low and could readily be increased via well-chosen programming and overall promotion of skill-sharpening.
The idea of recognizing golfer improvement and touting those who are making progress is considered vital by some, though not by many. The one exception is hole-in-one celebrations, which—despite the luck element—are ultra-common and highly varied. A survey question addressing this asked: “If a golfer makes a hole-in-one at your golf course, how is it publicized?” and four response specific options were offered.
A fifth option, “Other,” let respondents type in an answer beyond the basic four. Enthusiasm for providing write-in answers about how an ace-shooter gets recognized was truly striking. Of the 109 survey-takers, no fewer than 57 took the time to give a customized response.
The following question asked, “Do you give awards for ‘most improved’ golfer (either a single golfer or multiple golfers in various categories)?” The response to this was 13 percent yes, 87 percent no. So, there’s energy for honoring the ace, but not for saluting actual improvement.
The ever-growing bank of industry data one could file under “BVGI”—Proponent Group’s catch-all phrase for research into the Business Value of Golf Instruction—gets an intriguing reinforcement from the answers to our simply stated question, “Do lesson-takers spend more money at your facility than non-lesson takers?” The overall ‘Yes’ answer was selected by 41 percent—which in and of itself is notably high. Among those who elsewhere in the survey questionnaire had described instruction as “a cornerstone of our success,” a full 73 percent answered yes to the higher-spend question.
That “cornerstone” cohort is particularly interesting to study, via the statistical technique of filtering out their answers and comparing them to the answers provided by the full response group.
For example, we asked: “Is it a priority for your management to actively identify and execute on opportunities to grow the number of golfers taking instruction at your facility?” While the full respondent group seemed, at other points in the survey, to be expressing indifference to the value of lesson-taking and lesson-takers, a very solid 49 percent of them said “Yes, we focus on adding golfers through instruction all the time.” Among the “cornerstone” respondents, that “yes, all the time” response was selected by a resounding 90 percent.
We asked: “How much have you invested in capital dollars in your golf learning and practice facilities over the past five years?” Participants were asked to include teaching bays, simulators, ball-flight tracking technology, range expansion, and short-game area upgrades in their calculations. Spending of $100,000 or more was reported by 24 percent of all survey-takers, while that level of investment was reported by 43 percent of the instruction-leveraging respondents. Likewise, the “no investment” option was checked by 25 percent of all respondents but only by 7 percent of the “cornerstone” respondents.
“Follow the money” is good advice in all aspects of life and commerce. The survey asked: “What were the gross instruction revenues generated at your facility in 2023 including private lessons, camps, clinics, golf schools, etc.” (Participants were told to report total spend for instruction, not just the facility’s shares.) A little over 60 percent of “cornerstone” facilities—that track instruction revenue, which was most of them—reported $100,000-plus in annual golfer spending on instruction. Looking at the full respondent group—specifically, the 87 percent who said they track this category—we see only 26 percent reporting $100,000-plus in golfer outlays on teaching.
As a rule, what the “cornerstone” group expressed stood in contrast to what the full survey pool provided. But there are exceptions to that rule, as shown in what the two groups said when asked this question about the gathering of consumer data: “When someone who doesn’t play your course begins taking instruction at your facility, does that golfer’s name and contact information get routinely entered in your player database, under ‘prospect’ or something similar?”
The ‘Yes’ answer was chosen by 50 percent of the filter group and 48 percent of all respondents, with the ‘No’ answer coming in at 50 and 52 percent, respectively. This shows that course managers who consider instruction a big contributor to their business success don’t do much more than the average manager to harvest contact info from lesson-takers for addition to the funnel for green-fee sales.
“What gets measured gets managed” is a truism often used by business guru Peter Drucker—it’s a piece of wisdom that could be brought to golf instruction in a beneficial way. In certain corners of golf’s multi-course operator sector, this has begun to happen.
