Clubs Made Meaningful

Private clubs like to think they are the ones setting the pace for the rest of the golf industry. Jay Karen, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association, is not willing to let that assumption stand.  Join Derek and Jay as they trade ideas in both directions, from gamified driving ranges to the AI agents that will soon be finding and booking tee times for the public. Jay gets specific about what commoditization costs a golf business, what a golf course owes the community living around it, and how to build a vision strong enough to survive the leadership turnover every club eventually faces.  Private clubs are not as far ahead as they think, and that might be the best thing that could happen to them.

Every club has a handful of spaces and traditions that carry more weight than everything else on the property. Almost none of them have decided if that weight deserves its own name. Join Derek and Tucker as they get into the discipline of building brand sub identities inside a club, from a grill room that becomes its own culture to a golf course that finally needs an identity of its own. They cover the test for knowing when an experience has earned its own name, the risk of branding something that was never actually different, and what a club owes the places its members already love. Some experiences are worth claiming. Naming one is where the real work begins.

Every missed event, every confused member, every call that should have been a click. That is the gap between what a club intends and what members actually experience.  Join Derek with Jason Lisi, founder and president of ClubLISI, who has spent more than two decades building websites and communications systems exclusively for private clubs. Jason is also a longtime club member himself, which means he feels the friction he is trying to eliminate. His guiding principle is simple: make the club as seamless online as the best experience your members had anywhere else that same day. This conversation gets into where clubs overcommunicate and where they go silent, why organizational inertia is the real obstacle to better technology, what it actually means to sit in the member's seat before you build anything, and why the gap between a $10 million golf course renovation and a $50,000 website says everything about how clubs think about who uses what. For more information, visit www.sussner.com#PrivateClub #ClubIndustry #LeadershipPodcast #Branding #BrandingStrategies #ClubsMadeMeaningful

Most club events are planned from the front end. Pick a date, book the entertainment, set the menu, and hope the feeling takes care of itself. Denny Corby works in the opposite direction. Join Derek with Denny Corby, entertainer, magician, and host of Private Club Radio, who has performed at hundreds of private clubs across the country. Before Denny does anything, he asks one question: what should people feel when they leave? Everything else gets built backwards from there. That discipline is the difference between an event members remember and one they attended. What makes Denny's perspective worth your time is that he is not observing clubs from the outside. He has stood a few feet from your members, in rooms he was actively trying to win over, with their guard down. He knows what a connected room feels like and he knows within minutes of walking in whether a club has it or not. For more information, visit www.sussner.com#PrivateClub #ClubIndustry #LeadershipPodcast #Branding #BrandingStrategies #ClubsMadeMeaningful

Clubs have something almost every other brand would want: an audience that already said yes. That advantage can quietly turn into a liability the moment it becomes a reason to stop asking whether a message is worth sending. Join Derek with Crosby Renwick, who spent 30 years in advertising sending messages that had to earn attention, and now sits on the board of Marrakesh Country Club. The clubs winning on communication aren't the ones sending more. They're the ones who know who they are, say it with restraint, and let every member know their message was written for them.  If your team is buried in emails that members keep asking about anyway, this is the episode to start with. For more information, visit www.sussner.com  #PrivateClub #ClubIndustry #LeadershipPodcast #Branding #BrandingStrategies #ClubsMadeMeaningful