Category: podcast

Episode: Why Every Strategic Plan Has a Calibration Window, and What Happens When You Miss It Median initiation fees rose seventy-two percent between 2019 and 2022 in many markets, yet clubs across the country are still using pre-pandemic strategic plans to justify eight-figure capital projects. A strategic plan is not a document — it is […]

Episode: Don’t Hire Without the Mandate — Why the Four-to-Seven-Goal Framework Determines Whether Your Next GM Succeeds or Fails The average private club GM tenure is three to four years — and in most cases, the departure has nothing to do with the candidate. Boards conduct six-month searches, sign contracts, hold receptions, and send press […]

Episode: Mission and Vision Are Dead — Why Purpose and Core Values Are Replacing the Old Strategic Planning Framework Walk into the boardroom of almost any private club in America and you’ll find two framed documents that nobody at the club can quote — not the board president, not the GM, not the membership chair. […]

Episode: The Construction Communication Vacuum — Why Silence During Renovation Costs More Than the Renovation On an eighteen-to-thirty-month renovation, members are paying full dues, often plus a capital assessment, while losing access to spaces they use daily — and most clubs respond to that sustained pressure with a paragraph at the bottom of the monthly […]

Episode: The Two Plans Every Club Needs — Why the Strategic Plan Has to Come Before the Master Plan Clubs routinely commit twenty-five million dollars or more to renovation campaigns built on assumptions no one has tested, agreed on, or written down. The strategic plan and the master plan are not interchangeable documents — they […]

Wildfire, Insurance, and the Clubhouses Nobody Wants to Rebuild A meaningful number of golf clubhouses across the American West, the Carolinas, and increasingly places nobody used to worry about are now functionally uninsurable at the coverage levels their boards assume they have — the policies still get renewed, the signatures still get made, but the […]

Episode: The Empty Wing — What Abandoned Spaces Reveal About a Club’s Past and Future Walk through enough old clubhouses and you’ll find it within the first ten minutes: the wing the GM gestures at vaguely before moving on, the room with a brass plaque announcing a function that hasn’t existed in fifteen years, the […]

Why Punch Lists Destroy Clubhouse Projects and How to Manage the Closeout Phase On a thirty-million-dollar clubhouse renovation, the punch list alone can run three hundred to five hundred items — and that’s not a sign of bad construction, it’s the nature of finishing a technically dense building at this level of quality. Yet the […]

The Simplest Test for Whether Your Clubhouse Actually Works Most private clubs in America can deliver one of three essential drink experiences their membership needs. A handful deliver two. Almost none deliver all three — and the gap between one and three is the difference between a venue members visit for occasions and a building […]

Episode: The Award Submission Tells On You — What the Clubhouse of the Year Entry Actually Reveals About Your Project Golf Inc.’s Clubhouse of the Year competition has been running for thirty years, and the cumulative archive of winners represents one of the only longitudinal records of how clubhouse design has evolved in America. The […]