Leading the Strategic Planning Process - Club Managers ...

Leading the Strategic Planning Process 129handicaps, thereby severely limiting the market for the club’s course as an “everydayhome course,” or if the difficulty creates an average round time of five hours,which is a full hour longer than the typical average round target of four hours. Inthis case, club managers, the board, and others must determine whether overallthe club’s golf course as a club strength or a weakness. Alternately, the listing couldappear in both places (as both a strength and a weakness), as long as the particularcontext was explained.Once complete, the internal assessment of strengths and weaknesses helpsestablish a bundle of distinctive competencies and qualities that the club is adeptat either doing or being, along with a set of issues that the club is not good at eitherdoing or being.In conducting this analysis, remember that strengths and weaknesses areinternal to the club.Opportunities and Threats. Opportunities and threats are external to the club. Anopportunity is something that the club could explore capitalizing on. A threat cancome from a competitor, or from government regulations, or from any other externalsituation that presents a challenge for the club.As with the determination of strengths and weaknesses, success in determiningopportunities and threats lies in careful analysis and judgment. Often, clubs arequick to dismiss a finding as insignificant, but few findings are insignificant. In fact,those clubs that are particularly successful in identifying opportunities and threatsare those that can identify emerging trends that go unnoticed by other clubs.A growing trend among seasoned strategy experts is to work through opportunitiesand threats before identifying strengths and weaknesses. These expertsbelieve that opportunities and threats from the outside drive the club’s internalstrengths and weaknesses, rather than the other way around.An opportunity based on competition may be that a neighboring club burnedto the ground, and present zoning only allows it to build back 50 percent of itspre-fire square footage. This creates an opportunity for a neighboring growthclub, because the rebuilt club may no longer have the capacity to handle its formermembership.A situational opportunity for a remote club may be that the state transportationdepartment has approved the construction of a new bridge, which will put theclub within 20 miles of the major population center of the area, as opposed to the40-mile journey that people in the populated area must currently take to reach theclub. Because of the new bridge, the club will become more geographically accessibleand thus potentially more desirable to a larger number of people—a clearopportunity for growth.Threats can be classified similarly. A threat from the competition may includeplans for a major new country club to be built within three miles of the club. Agovernmental threat may be a lowered blood-alcohol level requirement for DUIor DWI offenses. Such a mandate might then threaten the club’s beverage sales,and might also put the club at greater risk for alcohol liability and liquor-relatedlawsuits.