Speakers: Rowland Cole, PGA Member, General Manager at Coyote Lakes Golf Club. Eric Lohman, PGA Member, General Manager at Monarch Beach Golf Links. Ryan Szydlowski, PGA Member, Director of Golf at Desert Willow Golf Resort. Mike Woods, PGA Member, Director of Golf at Haggin Oaks Golf Complex. Steve Leonard, VP of the Southwest Section PGA, General Manager at Talking Stick Golf Club
Eric Lohman: For us in the hospitality industry who work with resorts, hotels, we know that the STR Report is very instrumental in how these resorts are run and how they recognize their success and failures and compare themselves to the competitive set. Golf is no different. So to those golf courses in our competitive set that aren't already taking advantage of this, we recommend that they start and they look into this opportunity because it's really important, on a macro level, that we're all doing the right things, pushing our industry forward and making sure that we're capturing as much revenue as possible.
Ryan Szydlowski: I would encourage everyone to view PGA benchmarking as the second wave of our Growth of the Game Initiatives. Who doesn't love the PGA Junior League, Get Golf Ready PGA Reach and PGA Hope. Those initiatives are all clearly working, moving the needle, we've got record rounds played. Now We have an opportunity to benchmark and grow our utilization by just understanding how we stand within our competitive set. You can share that information with everyone on your team, make sure everyone's rowing in the same direction and when you capitalize on the additional demand by maximizing your revenue, now you can put money back into your facility course renovations, clubhouse renovations, staffing levels, training opportunities, whatever those upgrades might be, those will keep guests playing more and more golf.
Rowland Cole: The owner of Coyote Lakes has always been very private and reluctant to share rounds and data information. So when we took that leap, when I persuaded him to try Sagacity and see what kind of impact it would have on our tee sheet and our revenue per available round, we did it on a trial basis. And I would say at that time I had talked to Scott Scherger at Gold Canyon and both of us noticed the same thing that the revenue per available round was going up and we both attributed that to participating, with Sagacity and that dynamic pricing tool.
Rowland Cole: today, when we talk about sharing this information, it's no longer an issue.
Mike Woods: You know, in the old days there was a lot of guessing going on. We were hoping we knew what our competition was doing and as far as the data, we were really guessing on performance from our competitors and also spending enormous amounts of time with the data at our facilities mining that data, pulling that data out in the way that we thought was useful. But now with the benchmarking were we're able to get that data really just instantly and exactly the data we want and it allows us to really focus on these key performance indicators. So that we're putting our energy towards the things that really matter. The result of that is that we are just more profitable at the end of the day. Who knew that we would be practicing this for a good three or four years and practicing how to set the right pricing and design our strategy for our golf course for pricing before Covid hit. So when Covid hit and demand just went through the roof, we were really ready, literally the first day we were ready to get our pricing in the proper place so that we could be as profitable as possible. And of course the result of that has been certainly it has improved our income at our facility and for me personally, but in addition to that it's allowed us to reinvest back in the property, a lot of capital improvements that we have been pushing back. We've really been able to knock those out and we're still knocking those out and I think it's going to set us up in a position for the future to continue to be successful.
Steve Leonard: participate in the benchmark program. That's my advice. I've used it for many years. It is such a great tool. It's one of the rare things you'll find in business where the benefits that you get out of it far outweigh the little effort it takes to participate or to start the program. And it will allow you to make decisions that you never could make before because now you have the information to make it. And what it will allow you to do is to create revenue strategies, pricing strategies to drive that top line revenue that will make you so valuable to the owner of the facility. And especially if the owner of that facility is yourself. You want to use this tool. You want to use this report to make the best decisions that you can make for your facility. So I highly recommend you use this report. You participate completely in the program and you really dig into it and get the full value out of it. You'll find that it's something that you've been missing and you wish you had years and years ago.
