How do you book a golf lesson?

Choose a scenario.
Scenario 1: You’re out playing golf on the weekend and you yet again mysteriously lose your swing and are hitting it everywhere, including off the property of the golf course. You go into the Proshop and want to try and book a lesson. The attendant takes your name and number and informs you that a Golf Professional will call you. For the next two to three days you play the inevitable game of phone tag before finally booking the lesson for the next week.
Scenario 2: You’re out playing golf on the weekend and you yet again mysteriously lose your swing and are hitting it everywhere, including off the property of the golf course. You go home get on the internet, go to your instructor’s Smarter Lessons site and book a lesson for Wednesday.
Scenario 2 sounds a lot better to me and a lot more convenient. It also will make it easier for me as a Golf Professional to manage my lesson schedule; I won’t have to spend an hour or so each day trying to phone and arrange all of the lessons and or play phone tag.
Well scenario 2 will become reality soon. The Canadian PGA recently announced that it has reached an agreement with Smarter Lessons (Expand Technologies) to provide a great member benefit to the 3,500 members of the Canadian PGA. Smarter Lessons will become the Official On-Line lesson scheduler for the Canadian PGA.
Smarter Lessons is a simple to use web-based solution that provides Instructors with real-time scheduling and customer service by allowing students to schedule lessons via the Internet 24-hours a day, 7-days a week - including private lessons, groups and clinics.
What a great way to improve your lesson business.

Canadian PGA Embraces Tech

The Canadian Professional Golfer's Asociation has embraced technology, or at least has started to. Starting today CPGA member Bryn Parry will be hosting a blog on the CPGA website entitled "Bryn Parry-The Year on Tour". The blog can be found at http://www.cpga.com/blog/index.aspx.

Bryn is a CPGA member who earned his Nationwide Tour membership status last fall after progressing through all three stages of the PGA Tour Qualifying School. The CPGA is very proud to have such a great player as Bryn as a member and hopefully this blog will allow CPGA members, both current and prospective, to get an idea of what life is like out on the touring curcuit of professional golf.

It can be a very challenging road, one which I shared with Bryn and many others for two years on the Canadian Tour. The blog will be a great use of technology to educate people about the Canadian PGA. The timing could not be better either. Bryn has just come off his best finish of the year at the Henrico County Open losing in a four-way playoff. Another participant in the playoff was Chris Baryla, another Canadian. Golf fans have long complained about the apparent lack of television coverage that Canadian players like Mike Weir recieve on the American golf telecasts. Maybe this is will be the way to follow our favourite Canadian Players, an alternative to conventional television.

Think Different

The golf industry has to start thinking differently.

The golf industry is a very exciting yet frustrating industry to be a part of in these times of constant technology changes. It amazes me how many golf businesses, and yes they should at least be thought of as businesses continue to bury their heads in the sand and do not embrace technological advancements.

There are still a great number of golf courses using the standard cash registers that were utilized in the 60's, 70's , and 80's says Dave Cowan a golf industry consultant marketing manager for the NGCOA.

Information is the key to improving your business. Information, not just about your expenses and revenues, but about your customers is vital. You have to know who you're customers are, where they are coming from, what they are buying and how often they are buying at a minimum. Too often I see golf courses making decisions based on not only a lack of information but even worse on completely erroneous anecdotal information provided by the front line people who think they know their customers. Courses make major capital investments in areas of their operation whoch they feel their customers want to see improved. The major capital outlay is handled well sometimes and sometimes not handled well. But alot of the time the investment is made in an area that the customer, the reason you are in business, does not care about. The cusotmers would like improvements in other areas.

Golf Courses have to at a minumum have a POS system to track purchases of their customers. This will provide vital feedback for what is selling and what is not and who you're best customers are.

There are numerous good POS systems out there many which integrate the POS with an Electronic Tee Sheet, and accounting software as well. One of the best is Jencess, a Canadian company. It gives you a complete online suite of products to run your entire golf business.

If golf course operators would like to see their bottom line imrpove, the first thought shouldn't be where can we cut expenses. Rather it maybe should be where can we INTELLIGENTLY invest in technology to provide accurate, timely and productive information to help us improve our decision making