Many of us are feeling burnt out from what has been, as one golf professional described it, “like fitting 18 months of golf in 12 months”. Many of us in the role of employer found it more difficult to recruit talent to cover shifts and meet the new demand from customers and club members. This certainly brings a new set of challenges for PGA Professionals and the golf industry as a whole. With this amount of business for golf facilities comes significant threats to those of us who “make the business of golf work” including golf professionals, managers and agronomic professionals.
Top employers have been savvy enough to give raises where they were due. Others haven’t caught on yet and may soon lose their key talent if they don’t show how much they value those who make the front-line golfer experience what it is. This is your opportunity to show proof of how much value you bring to the business and facility, but to do that you’ve got to “Do Your Work”.
“Do Your Work” on Your Compensation
Would you like to be paid more? (I know it is yes.) If you’re going to get a raise, how will that happen? Will it be because of luck, or because of consistent delivery of excellence (or close to it) in the key areas “that matter” to the decision and negotiation and that you can actually control (or have influence over.)
For the compensation question, it would seem these are the areas YOU can have influence over including:
- Complete the Compensation Profile (at least once a year, and anytime after your compensation package “situation” has changed). It takes 20% of the time the old Compensation Survey took to complete too!
- The more unique your career path is, the more it matters.
- The more rural your facility is, the more it matters (because we have less facilities to compare yours with.)
- The opposite is also true, the more metropolitan (due to costs of housing, commuting time costs, and much more.)
- The more unique your facility is, the more it matters.
- The more unique your career goals are, the more it matters.
- Work with me to create a comp report YOU CAN USE. Thanks to some collaboration and suggestions by longtime Section professionals and leaders, I have been able to create an effective compensation report that fully considers the bullet points above regarding compensation. These bullets and a few others are really the questions that define a particular facility and/or their golf professional’s “neighborhood.” My comp report seeks to collaborate with the lead professional(s) at the facility on accurately defining that neighborhood based on tangible and intangible factors. And, with greater participation in the Compensation Profile, I have access to reporting that allows me to build better, more relevant comp reports based on the right “neighborhood” for the given facility/golf professional.
- If you’re interested in getting a comp report of this nature from me, here’s what I’ll be looking for:
- Are you the highest ranking PGA at your facility? (If not, how can we work with that person to help everyone at your facility?)
- Have you (and your staff, if applicable,) completed your comp profile?
- Which position to study first?
- What is the “right neighborhood” for you?
- What is the due date? More time is better!
“Do Your Work” on Work/Life Balance
Customers and members can still be “served at the desired level” while golf professionals find some semblance of work/life balance. Think about ways this could work. Talk with your peers at similar facilities and talk with me about innovating new concepts and new looks for golf shop hours, coverage and similar. I once heard Marcus King, PGA CCE, General Manager at Sahalee say something brilliant about work/life balance. He said, “I don’t want to put my golf professional staff in a place where they are overworked…working more than 50 hours a week on a regular basis, to the point where they have nothing left in the tank for our members. That cost in service and likely staff turnover is not good for business at a private club.” With that in mind, some smart, innovative golf professionals and their club leadership are:
- Reconsidering golf shop hours based on actual member check-in and shopping traffic vs “traditional shop hours.” In some cases, shops are going to 7 am – 6 pm on normal operations days vs the typical 7 am – 8 pm mid-season (saving 2 hours a day)
- Cross-training outside staff to be able to manage “early and late players, cart fees, etc.” via credit card and/or member charges (so golf shop doesn’t have to open)
- Offering full-time assistants options to get two full days off a week in season (5 x 10 hrs) and even three off out of season (4 x 10 hrs or similar.) This is a recruiting and/or a retention concept to get talent.
- Survey your customer or membership base to find out what their top 3-5 priorities are…and be prepared to respond, change your program(s) as needed, and then provide the context to “manage change” and educate your customers or members on why it is beneficial to them.
- What concept(s) is the right one for you and your facility?
Just as I mentioned in the Foreword Press article for August 2021 (Where to Focus Yourself to Be Most Effective), you don’t have to feel like you have no “input” on the way your career is going. You do in the areas that are in your “Locus of Control.” You do have significant influence over how your compensation story moves ahead from here based on your commitment to focus on what you can control and the “things that matter” in your unique compensation equation.
I welcome the chance to assist you with this and more in the coming months if you trust me with the opportunity.
Hope to see you around the Section sometime soon,
Monte Koch, PGA Certified Professional/Player Development | Career Consultant
PGA Career Services | PGA of America
Serving PGA professionals, employers in the Pacific NW & Rocky Mountain PGA Sections
Email: Mkoch@pgahq.com Cell: 206/335-5260
Lea Hill, WA | My LinkedIn | My Professional Blog
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