Adam Lawrence investigates how the role of golf club managers and secretaries has developed, and how the skills needed to do the jobhave changed

It is only relatively recently that managing a golf club has become regarded as a career choice in its own right.

For much of golf’s history, club managers – or secretaries, as they were most often called in traditional clubs – were typically men (almost always men in fact!) who had served their time in another profession, perhaps one that required them to retire at a comparatively young age, and who came to club management as a second career.

Many of these were ex-military, and the former army officer turned secretary of a good golf club is a well-worn stereotype of British golf. When golf was largely a game of the upper classes, and the key tasks of the club manager were ensuring that potential new members were the right sort of chap, this stereotype made sense. The skills of command and control learned in the military suited the way such clubs were run, and the fact that a senior-ish officer was himself likely to be the right sort of chap didn’t hurt either.

At a humbler level, many clubs to this day do not have professional management. The club secretary is often an honorary role, part of the committee, and, of the paid staff, the head greenkeeper and club professional are the most senior. In between these extremes, though, the golf business has changed dramatically. The decline in membership that has affected many golf clubs over the last few years has put this issue into stark focus. No longer can a club and its managers sit contentedly, knowing that a full membership and long waiting list means revenue is basically secured at the start of a year. Now, a much more aggressive approach to sales and marketing, as well as a far more rigorous focus on cost management, is the order of the day.

It is surprising how recently golf courses have come to view themselves as part of the hospitality industry. Troon Golf, the world’s largest course management firm, which started operating only in 1990, really pioneered this view: founder Dana Garmany says he specifically set up the company to replicate the business practices of hotel management firms.

In the proprietary course sector across the world, this viewpoint has become commonplace, and golf operators are borrowing freely from hotel, restaurant and other hospitality businesses. In the member-owned club sector, though, the move has been rather slower, at least in Britain and Europe (where equity clubs represent threequarters of all golf facilities). Elsewhere the story is somewhat different.

Many of the lessons the global hospitality industry has learned about marketing, pricing and demand management are applicable to golf. Airlines are the leaders in this regard: anyone who has booked a plane ticket recently will have some idea of the complexity of pricing models used in the travel business.

Golf need not be so complex, but it is, equally, not as simple as cutting prices to boost demand. Economists have long known that luxury goods – and golf must be seen in this light – are unusual in the way demand for them reacts to shifts in price (price elasticity). Put simply, many luxury goods attract higher demand when the price is higher – because wealthy purchasers value that which is more expensive more highly. The developer of a high end golf club that is currently in construction said exactly this to this writer only recently: when your customers are the wealthy, cutting your price can be a mistake as it lowers the perceived value of the product in their eyes.

This applies to golf in spades. Many clubs and courses, reasoning that an empty tee time is valueless to them, have started offering rock bottom deals for play at off-peak times, often using web-based routes to market such as Groupon. Such marketing techniques seem alluring at first glance: any revenue is an improvement on none, and, hopefully, a proportion of the new customers will return, paying if not full, at least a higher price. Unfortunately, the results have not matched these expectations: golfers in the market for £20 rounds are unlikely to return and pay £40 at a later date – they will just return to the £20 courses they have played before.

American golf and country clubs, because of their generally much larger scale than their British and European counterparts, have led the way in embracing a more professional, hospitality-focused style of management. The Club Managers Association of America, for example, has been offering its certified club manager qualification for almost fifty years, and the leadership of most established US golf clubs has been trained and accredited in this way. Leaders of the largest American clubs are akin to chief executives of substantial businesses, and are trained and remunerated accordingly.

In Europe, the Association of Golf Club Secretaries, founded in 1933, known as the Golf Club Managers’ Association since 2007, and the newer Club Managers Association of Europe (which is affiliated to the CMAA), fly the flag for education and training of club leadership.

Nonetheless, despite the efforts of these various bodies, it is clear there is some way to go before club management is as professionalised as many in the industry would like. A recent survey by the Club Managers Association of Europe revealed that 48 per cent of managers polled have no industry-specific qualification. Changing this statistic is the challenge for the industry as a whole.