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Golf Business Turnaround,
Growth and Profit
The road to turning a struggling golf business around can be a complicated
one; and it is important to have a clear strategy in your head before you
start. However, when we focus too hard on mere survival, it’s all too easy to
take our eye off the ball and forget that we will quickly need to move into
growth mode to maximise the benefits of the survival strategies we put in
place…Failure to do this can often result in a big slide backwards just when
you need it least.
In my view there are 7 key stages in any turnaround project:
Golf
Business
Survival
To shed some light on the gloom within the
industry John Quinn, author of Golf Business
Turnaround has produced a new
Golf Club Survival advisory report.
This report is FREE and contains essential Tools,
Strategies and Advice to help Golf Clubs not
only survive the current downward trend in the
industry, but to start to put strategies into action to
accelerate the recovery process and move quickly
into growth and profit mode.
In this FREE report you will:
Learn the 5 things that golf clubs
MUST do to survive.
Learn the essential strategies for releasing cash,
retaining your top employees, and for retaining your
valuable members and clients.
Have access to unique business tools to help you
navigate your way through hard times and come
out the other end stronger and better equipped to
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Learn how the current financial climate can actually be
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You can get your FREE copy of
John’s Golf Club Business Survival Report at
www.golfbusinessturnaround.com
•
Fire-fighting; this is actually 2 stages rolled into one and includes saving
money and making money. Traditionally this stage has focussed only
on saving cash and cutting; and of course that is an admirable objective
for any business in trouble. However, I think it’s vital to keep one eye
on boosting income at this stage also. The trouble is that it’s very
difficult to keep everyone motivated when all around seems to be
heading in the wrong direction. Most of all we MUST keep our
customers motivated; so the business has to maintain an air of positivity.
• Defining what makes you Unique; in the midst of the turmoil we must
be ready to find the time to be strategic as well as hands on in the
fire-fighting role. One fantastic way to keep everybody geed up is to
take the time at this stage to re-define what makes this business great;
why will customers come to us instead of the course down the road?
• Marketing; one of the first budgets to go when times get tough is the
marketing budget and I for one don’t really have any great issue
with this even though it seems instinctively wrong...why? because in my
experience that budget has usually been spent extremely un-wisely
if the business is in trouble. I instead advocate a pared down, hands on
approach to re-building the marketing effort and it starts with
marketing what makes you special; not what you’ve already got.
•
Operational Excellence; in this new approach to marketing, honesty and
transparency are absolutely key to future success and we must gear
up to deliver what we have promised in our marketing and that means
putting in place some strong plans and strategies about how we are
going to manage Money, People and Innovation in the future and this
is where a bullet proof Operational Plan comes into play. However, this
plan won’t look like any you’ve had before.
•
Waste; in every golf business there is phenomenal waste, up to 30%
in even average situations. In failing businesses this can be much higher
and for all intents and purposes it is completely invisible to the business
owners and managers; it’s almost as if someone put a sheet over it.
Forget benchmarking with similar facilities to make yourself feel better,
you need to eradicate this waste as quickly as possible; after all it goes
straight to the bottom line…fast.
•
Continuous Improvement; its easy easy easy to slip back almost
immediately; so to make sure that doesn’t happen, there must be a new
culture that aims for continuous, measurable improvement. With such
a plan in place, your previous pre-conceptions about growth and profit
will be shattered; with lateral thinking you can break out of the
constraints “you think” you are under as a result of location, facilities,
customer base etc.
John Quinn
John is the MD of Hole18 Ltd and the author of Golf Business Turnaround
the 7 essential steps to success.
www.golfindustrycentral.com.au