By: Steve Eubanks
Golf Business
July / August 2024

Since the late 1980s, Whitney Crouse, the Co-founder and CEO of Bobby Jones Links, has been on a quest to discover the secret to excellent service in the golf industry. In his four decades working in golf, Crouse knew excellent service when he saw it, but he always struggled with how to do it, too. Like everyone else, he saw the corporate mission statements hanging on the walls and heard the canned speeches and slogans on values and priorities and putting the customer first. Those were ubiquitous throughout the 90s and early 2000s.

But the core question remained: Why could you go to one club, be treated like a long-lost friend, visit another club a few miles away, and feel like you were in the checkout line at Dollar General?  

“When you’re in the golf management business and want to build your company, you must differentiate our company somehow. We chose service,” Crouse said. “The big questions has always been, how do you do that, and how do you sustain it.”

Simply asking the question often elicits eye rolls, especially from those in the industry who work 100 hours a week only to field complaints about everything from greens speeds to the price of a sleeve of Titleists. For generations, course owners have struggled with how to provide better service than the competition within the constraints of their budgets and without working their employees to the point of exhaustion and cynicism. Like everyone in the industry, they’ve also struggled with whether or not those efforts have any meaningful effect on the bottom line.  

Crouse knows this. He was among them. But when his management company assumed the name of one of the game’s most legendary icons, he knew that the moniker came with a responsibility.

“When we became Bobby Jones Links - and it has been such a blessing and an honor to have that name - we had to ask, how do we honor the name and also create a competitive advantage?” Crouse said. “We also asked ourselves, how do we solve the problem of elevating service in golf where you have seasonal employees on the lower end of the pay and experience scale?”

Crouse did it by looking at an industry with a labor pool similar to that of golf: fast food.  

“We engaged an expert,  Ryan Magnon, the senior manager of hospitality and service at Chick-fil-A. He’d worked at Ritz Carlton as well,” Crouse said. “Our question to him was, “How do we change the service culture at our clubs?”

It’s easier at the Ritz where the customer is higher end, and the Ritz can increase staffing and offer benefits and rewards packages that aren’t available at Motel 6. But at Chick-fil-A, you see an entirely different service level from the same 16- to 18-year-old labor pool they have at the Dinkel Burger across the street. You hear ‘my pleasure’ at every touch point, and you’ve got friendly, accommodating people in a pristine environment at Chick-fil-A, but not across the street.

“Chick-fil-A created a culture where the service is genuine,” Crouse said. “So, we paid Ryan handsomely to show us how to do it. That was through many meetings, first learning how they do it, and then adapting it to our business.”

What Crouse and this team at Bobby Jones Links learned was that Chick-fil-A doesn’t have a magic wand or pixie dust. The key is setting specific standards and procedures—everything from tucking in your shirt and making sure your belt buckle and shirt buttons align to insisting on eye contact and saying, “Thank you” and “My pleasure” after every interaction.

Then, you have to measure those standards, reinforce them daily, and reward them with recognition, promotion, and compensation.  

“At Bobby Jones Links, we now have 17 service standards, developed with the help of our employees,” Crouse said. “They’re on a card every employee is given. We have five core values and one core mission. They’re not on the wall. They’re part of what we all do. They have to permeate everything.

“Of course, the hardest part is making it sustainable.”

The big problem in making cultural shifts toward customer service in golf is that, in many cases, operators are dealing with either H2B visa holders or high school kids who think it’s more important to look cool than it is to learn a life lesson.  

“Plus, we deal with clubs that don’t have a lot of funds, so we understand that there is a ceiling to what we can do,” Crouse said. “But we can do things better there than they’ve been done in the past.

“Our initiative falls under the responsibility of the  ‘Bobby Jones Leadership Center,’ our service training platform. It includes an extensive orientation and training program, both video and in person. When we sign a new club (to a management contract), we send the entire leadership team to the site. Then, every morning, we have a huddle at our Club Support Center in Atlanta and in almost every department at our clubs, maybe for five minutes. We discuss something done well or share a funny story; we congratulate someone who’s been promoted and discuss what’s happening that day.

“Each night, an email goes out to all 3,000 employees with the next day’s service standard. Then, we recognize service performance with what we call ‘Cloverleaf’ and ‘Grand Slam’ performance awards. They get a certificate and cash bonus, and publicly, we recognize them.

“We all crave praise. We’re now building out the systems to create and support that.”  

Cultural shifts are incredibly difficult and detail-oriented. Hall of Fame basketball coach John Wooden would always begin his freshman team orientations with a 30-minute lesson on how to put on your socks. “Tug and snug, gentlemen. Tug. And. Snug,” Wooden would say. After some weird looks, he would explain, “Wrinkles lead to friction. Friction creates blisters. Blisters put players on the bench. Players on the bench lose games.”

Getting a 17-year-old high school junior to keep his shirt tail tucked in, his belt on straight, and his hat on forward can seem akin to splitting the atom. However, demanding those standards improves the operation and ultimately improves the life of the young person from whom those standards are demanded.    

“We haven’t mastered this yet, and I’m not sure we ever will,” Crouse said. “Anybody who says they have it mastered is lying to you because you’re dealing with human beings, not machines. But we have certainly moved the needle because it is our focus.

“There are 400 to 500 elite private clubs that do this very well because they have the large staffs and significant financial resources to make it a priority. What we’re doing is fitting some of what they do into the 13,000-plus other courses.

“So, can you offer excellent service levels at any club?” Crouse asked rhetorically. “Yes, you can, but it takes a sustained commitment that many owners may not want to do or have the resources to do.”