NGCOA Leadership and Other Wankers

Re-Printed With Permission from Confessions of a Golf Pro Round Two - Desperately Seeking Green Fees

Chapter Two?

Hi Jerry Sawyer here, PGA, Professional and Club Manager:

I had been to a few National Golf Course Owners Association, (NGCOA) conventions in the US and to be honest, they were all crap. Nowhere near as well run as their Canadian counter parts or the Asian Pacific Golf Summit, but now that I am a course owner and the event is in my own back yard so to speak, I thought I’d give it one more try. You never know what you might learn? 

Sadly, all I really learned was how out of touch they are from reality. They are so far behind the curve on everything, they ought to relocate the NGCOA offices from Charleston to Bedrock.

You’d think, for example, that the keynote speaker at a Golf Business event would be a golf marketing legend like Andrew Wood, or an industry guru like JJ Keegan A lot of real information, a lot of contrary ideas the golf industry should be listening to, so you can bet neither of them were on the agenda.

No instead they pay some asshole motivational guru who’s also a former basketball coach, and just wrote his first book, (with the help of a ghost writer,) $15,000 so we can listen to him tell us that if we want to go for 3-point shots, it’s all about teamwork. Shoot me now, and the event is only getting started. 

Now I am no marketing genius, but I’ve read nine or ten of Wood’s books on golf marketing and several of Keegan’s (who by the way, between them have written more books on the golf business than the entire twenty year speaker line up of the NGCOA, combined) so I’m a lot smarter than most. 

I go to the NGCOA seminar on social media marketing, run by some lady calling herself the Marketing Witch of some course in Wichita, Kansas, built by a farmer with too few cows I suspect. The audience of about forty, sixty something guys and a couple of their wives, are hanging on her every word, maybe impressed she can name five different social media outlets in a single sentence because the truth is, the speaker and her audience knows less than my dog!

She talks about Twitter

I ask her and the forty other people in the room if they have ever even heard a rumor about anyone in the golf business making money from Twitter? The room is dead silent because no one ever has. If it were not for Donald Trump, Twitter would have been dead years ago. 

She ignores me and switches to Pinterest where she shows a bunch of pictures of famous golf courses like Pebble Beach, Cypress Point and Augusta National that are not even on the same planet as the shit hole, I run. 

I point out that 92% of Pinterest users are women and coincidently 92% of our daily fee traffic is men.

Don’t you want more women? She asks incredulously.

“No” I boldly say to a hushed whispering audience and heads turning to the back of the room, where is sit. “I want more fat, middle-aged guys, who hit range balls, take carts, buy gloves, drink beer and eat burgers when they are done. There are ten million of them with clubs in their garage, who did not play a single round last year. And if anyone in a leadership position in the golf industry had a clue, they’d ditch the minority programs that play well in the press and go get these guys playing again.  “And,” I take a quick breath as I’m on a roll now” if I did, want women, I wouldn’t waste my time posting pictures of Pebble Beach on Pinterest. I’d run Facebook ads targeting women.”

She stares at me like I just broke her broomstick in two and there is an uncomfortable silence while she tries unsuccessfully, I fear, to process the truth of what I’ve just said.

Then she moves boldly on, like the 600 into the valley of death, and tells us all about how to build our fan base on Facebook. That part at least would have been good info five years ago, but the world has moved on. Meanwhile, the NGCOA and its’ list of speakers who “haven’t a clue” about what changes are happening in the real world, has not. 

I ask her what’s the point of building a Facebook fanbase when Facebook only show your posts to 1% of our fans? Yes, Uno, meaning if you have 1,000 fans just 10 see your average post!

“Who told you that?” she challenged.

“Facebook,” I said, “They told everyone and they also said that at some point they have already decided they won’t show your posts to any of your fans, unless you pay!”

“Well it’s the first I have heard of it,” she said indignantly. 

I roll my eyes, this is old news, but I drop it as I am not trying to be an asshole. I just don’t want the owners in the room leaving with a whole bunch of worthless ideas and outdated information that wastes their precious time and money. I’m an owner too, these are my people!

The next speaker has obviously paid to be on stage. He could have bored a monk to death with his monotone presentation and second-rate slide show on the values of different types of grass. 

Watching it grow would have been more entertaining. 

On the plus side, at least this grass sponsor seems unlikely to sell NGCOA member’s tee sheet data to an airline. Or rip them off for millions in bogus credit card fees. But you never know, their sponsorship history is shadier than Bernie Madoff’s tax returns. 

Meanwhile, their mumper of CEO, (look it up on Google, it’s a great word and so apt) runs around the world speaking in places like England and Australia on the future of the golf industry. Good job he only goes to countries ten years behind America, which itself is ten years behind the real word when it comes to the golf industry. But I wonder who’s paying for those $10,000 business-class airline tickets because I sure as hell know the people in the UK and Australia are not. Asking for a friend, who’s still, a dues paying NGCOA member, at least for now. I bet his next job is with the PGA, first-class travel only, there.

I am out after only three presentations; I can’t face the next two speakers. The first is some wanker from a BIG management company talking about principle centered leadership as they shaft their clients daily with preferred vendor programs that are nothing more than a bribe. Advertising campaigns, where the client pays to advertise the management company. Plus three to one ratio on branding, in favor of the management company wherever their logo goes up against the clubs. There are African dictators with less kickbacks and more integrity than this lot. 

The second speaker is someone I know and have shared beer with on occasion. He’s a prominent NGCOA member talking about the need for embracing change, who’s course went under nine months ago and is now trying to sell real estate for a living. Not sure that’s the kind of change most of the members are looking for?

Who chooses these speakers?

I head to my room, even though I live in town. I took one for tonight because the real value of these events is always at the bar, not the event itself. So, you might as well just go there and skip the actual event and hit the new bar at the Hyatt. Drinks are a bit pricey mind you, so stand near a rep with an expense account or anyone who works for a large industry organization.  See you at the bar ....