Fairchild Golf Company

Fairchild Golf: The brand or image of your course isn't a tool that should be used to promote our company, your courses profitability is the only image we need.

Fairchild Golf and Fairchild Publicity provide a monthly blogs and newsletters with our opinions directly to your own in box by dropping us your email address. Your email will not be submitted to anyone or any company and we provide you with a theory's on the golf industry and how we can make it better. To get our monthly blog and newsletter, send us an email to Marketing@FairchildGolf.com.

July 2007 Blog - An original idea for golf course management

The only point of this edition is to discuss the thought process I had while working to create my company that help me continue the development of my company.

When I first decided to create my management company, Fairchild Golf, I shared the idea with a few people and quickly became frustrated. Fairchild Golf was created because after having worked to create and develop golf courses and golf course communities for a few years, I couldn't understand why 3rd party managers don't share in the risk. There are plenty of management companies out there including, Troon Golf, Club Corp, OB Sports, Kemper, etc that do a good job. The problem is in the fact that regardless of how successful they are at creating a positive GOP, they still make their standard management fee. This is not to say that golf course management companies don't provide a benefit, they do. It is just that I always felt that there could be a lot more out there and that there was a different business model that provided a benefit to the golf course owner.

Anyway, I decided to create my company and I started working towards creating the marketing tools that would hopefully help us get our name out there and pick up a couple of contracts. As I started to create these tools I shared with family and friends some of the tools that I had created. I thought of the different tools that I would use and how they would inspire the golf course owner to want to use my product. I worked to create what I thought would be an icon and how it would hopefully become a primal brand. All of this was great as I got some nice initial positive feedback and everyone seemed to understand where I was headed. As I kept going though, I decided to send the info out to some contacts I had developed from years working within the industry, as well as some of those I had come into contact with when I was running a land development company. It was then that I realized I wasn't getting my point across. I couldn't understand why and I wondered if we could be successful if they didn't understand what Fairchild Golf Company was about.

Then a moment came that helped me understand what it was all about. I had left out one of the three most important people in my life, my wife from any discussions about my company. I had done it on purpose because if my wife is anything, she is brutally honest. We went out to dinner one night and started talking about the company I was working on. The good part is that my wife has been involved in golf for longer than I have and she has been very successful. As I tried to explain to her the reason why I wanted to create this company and why I was certain it would be a success. I realized I was having a very hard time getting her to understand why. That is when it hit me. I was having a hard time explaining it because it is an original idea.

There are plenty of companies and people who have followed the tried and true route, but if you come up with an original idea you have to work very hard to help people understand it.

http://www.fairchildgolf.com/

June 2007 Blog - Break the marketing mold if you want a successful golf course.

If you were able to change your habits, would you?

The question you really need to ask yourself is if you decided to break the mold would you still do it even if it meant that you might fail, as well as succeed?

Last month I pointed out a great article that I read about ripping up the rules and some people who reached greatness in doing so. I enjoyed this article because it truly (in my mind) focused on doing it a little bit different and still reaching new heights. You can ready these blogs and get a better feel for what we do by logging onto http://www.fairchildgolf.com/, but the real point is to get your people to do it better.

With this posting I wanted to take it a little further and try to convince you or your managers to break the mold and create great marketing, not just for golf operations, but for any revenue dependent business. Fairchild Golf was created to not only manage golf courses better than anyone has done it before, but also to do it differently. We wanted to break the mold and create a company dependent on the revenue and profit we generate for our partners. Besides being a golf course management company, we have also managed land development and homebuilding operations throughout the Western United States both private and public builders. The great thing is that the successes we have had in golf course management have been a direct result of successes we have had in land development, or the create of . Not only have we broken the mold in almost everything we have ever done, we have done so with an incredible amount of success.

The reason I bring up all of the information about my company is that there is a manager who has worked for me for a little over a year and I really believe there is a lot of hope and opportunity to be one of the most successful managers in the industry. But the problem is that he follows the playbook like there is only one way to manage golf courses. The simple rule is that if you can't manage to break the model that surrounds the golf industry than you can't succeed. A simple case in point was a week or so ago I asked him to think about ways to promote our new model homes and use the golf course as a tool we needed to get more traffic. It is important to note that the traffic wasn't for the golf course, it was for the models so we might sell some of the homes we have. After three days of thinking about it, he came back to me with the idea of giving anyone who toured a model home a 25% discount on a round of golf. Don't get me wrong, I am happy that he was willing to give up a little bit of money to get more traffic, but who in the industry hasn't offered a 25% discount in the past. The regular golfer or "joe public" doesn't care about such a minimal discount. The problem lies in the fact that every golf course in almost every town has offered that discount. There is no uniqueness to the offer, you were creating a brand. He simply stayed with a level of discount that someone has used before and felt it was good effort because he wasn't going out on a limb.

The difference between a promotion with little effort and breaking the mold is the difference between creating success and just accepting the results. Sometimes the guy who just accepts the results will get lucky and be successful, but I will put my company on the line every time that we will be the most successful of the two in the end. To that end, the promotion we went with gave anyone who toured the models a free round of golf, as well as a discount rate on three other players so they could fill out a foursome. The first thought that most golf managers have about a promotion like this is that you just gave away a round of golf because they don't realize that what you have really done is create additional traffic for your club. Very rarely do they think about the possible increases in revenue that is out there with this promotion. You won't always create a perfect promotion, but the goal here was to create more traffic and how else do you do than by encouraging them to bring others.

Anyone can just stand there and watch the revenue come through the door, but the truly great golf managers go out and get it.

Fairchild Golf Company

(p) 714.881.3342 Fairchild@FairchildGolf.com (f) 714.921.4059

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