New York might be the city that never sleeps, but some critics think golf is the business that never wakes up.
The median age of golfers is climbing.
The number of course closures is tracking upwards.
Meanwhile, participation numbers are sliding and Gen Xers and millennials aren’t flocking to the game.
Heck, even poor old Tiger Woods (yes, he’s officially old) is playing like a 6-handicapper.
But all is not lost, says Tom Barnhart, who foresees a paradigm shift in the way clubs can do business.
He thinks installing a new “revenue management strategy” is crucial to ensuring a better bottom line now, and in the future.
Barnhart is a man with a plan, and according to those in the know in golf circles, he is not only a revenue management guru, but a social media savant, a numbers guy par excellence, and a five-tool analytical expert.
What he is not is a geek who doesn’t know the difference between a six-iron and a selfie stick.
He’s a golf lifer who grew up in Pennsylvania, graduated with a degree in Professional Golf Management from Penn State, managed some of the top clubs in the Midwest, and was an award-winning general manager at Shaker Run Golf Club in Lebanon, Ohio. He became the second youngest to achieve PGA Master Pro status (2009), and during his club career, was a top seller of online tee times in the US.
He was also a welcome participant at the 2017 PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando in late January. That’s where Pro Shop Magazine found the owner and CEO of RevTechPlus sharing his knowledge with an audience of thirsty professionals and club owners.
The self-effacing Barnhart leans on a talented team of revenue managers using the latest state of the art technology to help manage any club’s tee times 24/7.
Before RevTechPlus, Barnhart was senior director of revenue management at a Midwest-based golf course management company. His new firm has increased online tee time sales for more than 100 courses in the U.S., and four in Canada: Elbow Springs in Calgary, Canoe Creek in Salmon Arm, B.C., Tall Timbers in Langley, B.C., and Muskoka Highlands Golf Club in cottage country in Ontario.
With the participating clubs, online tee time sales have increased (on average) by 225 per cent. What’s more, Barnhart says his firm promises a 100 per cent success rate. The company has increased ROI (return on investment) by 6 to 10 times (0.62 cents on every dollar being ‘new’ revenue) while simultaneously lowering costs.
If that sounds like manna from heaven for club owners caught in a downward revenue spiral, and struggling to tap into new social media opportunities, it is, says Barrie McWha, president of Premier Golf Associates Ltd., located in Sechelt, B.C. It provides golf course management services to a number of clients in the Pacific Northwest.
McWha says the ease in setting it up is its greatest selling tool.
“We provided some basic data and access to the point of sale system to Tom Barnhart and a week later it was live on the course website…no significant visual changes, just a pricing system that delivered.”
McWha is a lifetime member of the PGA of Canada and is now a RevTechPlus representative in Canada.
RevTechPlus takes an important asset (revenues) and manages it 24/7. It brings a whole lot of science and math to the game.
It’s all about taking the emotion out of the process, says Barnhart.
There’s dynamic pricing and revenue management in the golf business, but RevTechPlus has upped the ante, utilizing 15 different criteria to calculate prices and do updates every 15 minutes.
Explains McWha: “Under the traditional pricing model a course identifies its ‘rack rate’ and then, in the absence of dynamic pricing, will select the high rate time of day, and then start discounting in what they believe will be the periods of lower demand. With a revenue management system, as a time period starts to get booked up the price actually can increase.
“Golfers can select their time or their price, and occasionally they will be able to get both. In the traditional model, if price is the most important component in the decision making then they will always be playing in the late afternoon.”
There are plenty of do’s and don’t’s when it comes to managing revenue streams, and that includes filling tee sheets by using fewer resources and less effort, attracting more players and events, cutting the waste out of advertising budgets, and having more time to dedicate to running the facility, teaching, playing golf and growing the game.
McWha says Barnhart has simply come up with a better ‘mouse trap.’ He also likes the fact this is golf people helping other golf people get more business.
McWha helped implement the RevTechPlus plan at Canoe Creek (Salmon Arm, B.C.) and saw substantial increases (three times the bookings and dollars for the same period year over year) in a two-month trial.
Barnhart says his customers learn how to decipher, test and measure the very best revenue management strategies without guessing, or hoping that profits in 2017 can be higher even with industry projections of declining rounds.
Barnhart has other arrows in his quiver, including taking just five months to make a daily fee course in Ohio number one in online tee time sales.
He recognized something had to be done to change revenue generators (and do a cost analysis of costs as well) as a general manager. It was all about bringing science to a process that, for too long, simply left operators on their own to open their doors and hope golfers flooded in to fill their time sheets.
That wishing and hoping model is outdated, and changing. When Barnhart started to analyze spreadsheets, he decided to start up his own firm in 2012.
It was a hard slog at first for one major reason: his wife Mandy gave birth to quadruplets. That’s right, four, count ‘em four, new children. The blessed births (covered by the local and statewide press) might have stopped most new business leaders dead in their tracks. Barnhart admits he was a bit rattled to go from a father of one to the head of The Brady Bunch. But he was also determined to bring his new business model to life. And he brought some powerful business cred to the challenge.
Barnhart has managed more online inventory than any other person in the golf business, surpassing the $25-million mark which has earned him the name, the ‘Tee Time Wizard.’
Today, his firm hosts a talented team of 12 staffers, including revenue managers who analyze 15 different variables. A pulsating computer system dominates company headquarters in Franklin, Ohio, and updating all clients’ revenues means adjustments to tee times can occur every 15 minutes. That’s 96 updates per day, or 672 week.
A full statistical review of key revenue metrics includes: analytics, conversion rates, RevPATT (Revenue Per Available Tee Time), APR (average rate per round), utilization and yield management.
Other variables include: weather by hour, competitor rates, trade liquidation, and website analytics.
If this seems a little far out for tradition-bound mom & pop operations, in small towns across Canada, Barnhart says revenue analytics works for all – public, municipal, semi-private, high-end and affordable fee clubs.
McWha was introduced to and immediately booked a half-hour webinar. He was impressed with how Barnhart had simplified the system.
“What really got me though, was that I didn’t have to have all the technical skills in order to implement the system,” he said.
The next move was to try it out at a Canadian club.
McWha provided Barnhart with the database, access to Canoe Creek’s tee sheet and some basic historical information, and eight days later it was up and running. The results during its two-month test period convinced McWha that RevTechPlus was the best way to go.
What’s the future for revenue management?
Barnhart wants to move from just managing online tee times to managing all revenue generators. He also hates the word “discount,” and thinks courses should give the right tee-time to the right person. It’s all about creating a balanced price through analysis.
So far, Barnhart’s firm and his client list represent a niche market. While he admits that some owners are more engaged than others, it can’t be denied that RevTechPlus helps create more revenue – which is the X on the treasure map for any club.
While the firm provides different levels of service, the majority of clients take the full package, outsourcing it to RevTechPlus.
Barnhart foresees a time when millennials become owners of clubs and self-use what RevTechPlus provides.
While hotels have full teams of revenue managers, and are determined to maximize their most important resource, many (most) golf courses are still shaking off the dust and looking for ways to do a better job of ensuring survival.
When Tom and Mandy celebrated the miracle births of their two boys and two girls (Ashlynn, Christian, Dakota and Beau) on Sept. 23, 2012, at Kettering Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, the last thing on the father’s mind was that he and his wife had just produced the perfect mixed foursome.
Not only have the quadruplets thrived, so has RevTechPlus.
Barnhart jokes that raising quadruplets is “95 per cent easier that I thought it would be, but also 5 per cent harder than you can imagine.”
You might say the same thing about his other baby, RevTechPlus.
But offering clients a 100 per cent guarantee that can dramatically improve a club’s revenue management capabilities is a very strong sell tool.
New York might be the city that never sleeps, but breaking the old revenue management model can wake-up club owners to the possibility that turning a nice tidy profit can still be par for the course.
