By Lloyd Sherman
In an article published by Tom Blakeman on November 18, 2024 (https://hsvgazette.com/hsv-golf-problem-2025-budget-and-fee-schedule/), Tom offered up some information and suggestions on how to fix our failing golf program. As usual, his input fell on deaf ears.
Well, here is more information that will most likely also fall on deaf ears. We have eight community courses. Seven (7) of those have 18 holes and one (1) has 27 holes. Let’s use a 10-hour day instead of a 12-hour day as most public courses do, and tee-off times every eight (8) minutes. Given this conservative scenario, each course has 75 tee times available each and every playable day. 75 tee times X 4 players = 300 total rounds available each and every day per course. For the sake of this discussion, let’s not include the extra 9 holes at Isabella and just use eight (8) in our calculation: 8 courses X 300 rounds per day = 2,400 total rounds available each and every playable day. Now, let’s apply this calculation against actual rounds played and actual playable days for the last 10 years.
As you can clearly see, our course utilization hovers right around 30%, and has for the last 10 years. We still don’t know where 2024 will end up, but it will go down from where it is right now.
It doesn’t take a mathematician to see what part of our issue is that we have a huge excess capacity. Over the past 10 years, what has been done to fix this issue? For the most part, nothing! The tracking we see today, doesn’t go far enough in breaking down rounds played, revenues received, etc. by category (e.g. annuals, members, non-members, employees, free). Without these metrics, one can only guess which category(s) are driving revenues down, so solutions can be applied on a priority basis.
On several occasions I have suggested to the POA that what the Village needs in a GM is somebody with a proven track record of generating programs to increase revenues. Instead, we seem to look for “city manager” types, who can run operations. The problem there is that those who have that type of aptitude are accustomed to using Other People’s Money (OPM), which is what we currently have here in the Village. The only way we have attempted to solve our revenue issue is to increase fees and assessments. This approach will eventually lead to pricing yourself out of the market. There are some metrics now showing up that indicate we may be at, or very close, to that point.
A good GM knows how to balance staff resources to work not only on maintaining the current operations, but can create out-of-the-box solutions to positively impact the revenue stream. One of the supporting programs that would drive increased revenue generation is to change the comp plans of top amenity driven managers to have a focus on increased revenue generation (e.g. not assessment or due driven). The GM comp plan should also be designed to drive new revenue generation.
So, what is your best guess as to what avenue the Board will take next? My money is on an internal replacement. If that doesn’t happen, then we will likely see yet another resource that has an operations management background, and won’t be a true General Manager. Proof that the replacement will be internal can be found in the latest golf department moves. We will never solve our revenue problem in golf or other amenities if all we do is shift internal resources around.
I hope I am wrong, but fear that I won’t be and we as property owners will continue to see the origination of new fees that are dreamt up and continued increases in fees and assessments.
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So sad. Everyone here in HSV suffers because of a total failure to properly manage golf here over the last 10-20 years. Golf should be generating surplus cash flow to go towards road maintenance, sewer and water plants, even employee salaries and benefits. But instead we lose millions every single year. That is millions coming out of the pockets of each and every property owner – whether they play golf or not. What ever happened to the concept of ‘fiduciary responsibility’ which is supposed to be the primary function of our Boards of Directors?