The Pellucid Perspective - February 2024 - 2

THE FUTURE
STATE
Data-driven
Decisions Coming
to Golf Operations:
Ready or Not...
By Jim Koppenhaver
I
toyed with the idea of putting a gratuitous mention of AI in
the headline, given where we are in the " hype cycle " and ubiquitous
claim that it will be a game-changer in every industry
and application, but decided against it choosing to address the
more immediate and practical application of information and insights
for the average golf owner/operator. The good news is that
the rising tide of buzz around AI is lifting all boats as it relates to
figuring out how to unlock, organize, compile and reveal insights
hidden in your PoS system for the past decade (at least) to make
your operation more successful and win in your local marketplace.
Historically, our industry has lagged in developing data-driven
businesses by the combination of a lack of tools (by the technology
providers) and pioneers (too few operators demanding better
from their technology).
I sense a sea change coming on both
fronts enabled by all the AI hype out there.
Let's work our way backwards from the " promise of AI " to
revolutionize our golf course operations business to what has to
be successfully built and implemented to get there. The recent
Golf Business Conference had a keynote speaker addressing the
promise of AI and how he and his company had applied it, primarily
as a marketing and advertising agency, across a range of
applications. One of the things the speaker got right (IMO) was
that AI is grounded in massive training sets of data and, with
those, there are nearly limitless possibilities for regenerative, nonhuman
work. What was missing is the current chasm between
the data we collect and its quality to drive an AI model. Since I
live in the world of concrete, tangible examples, let's look at one.
Question by an owner/operator to AI in '24: " How many new
customers do I need this year to generate $100K of additional
revenue and how do I efficiently acquire them? " This requires
supporting data on two dimensions:
* What has been the average value of new customers in
their first year over the past 2-3 years?
* How have those new customers come to us and what
has been the investment in that acquisition vehicle?
Anyone else immediately see the challenge here based on what
you know or your technology can tell you to support those two
2 The Pellucid PersPecTive
questions? This illustrates that we have to first build the information
architecture and data strategy that will deliver the massive
training data set to power your AI. There are others out there
who share Pellucid's worldview (and practical approach) on this
and with whom we're collaboratively working to offer thought
leadership and best-applied practices:
* You'll need a data strategy in '24 " - This was a focal
point of a GBC joint presentation this year by
Metolius and Club Caddie (full disclosure, they're a
sponsor of the Perspective but this is an unsolicited
" Jim's opinion " on the subject). I liked the fact that
they presented two approaches and, interestingly, each
of the principals presented the alternative business
model to theirs. That is, Club Caddie is attempting to
be a single technology, integrated and comprehensive
across financials, customer-facing apps (tee times, play
apps etc.) and CRM (outbound emails, event triggers
etc.) which Ross Liggett outlined the pros and cons.
Jason Pearsall then did the similar upside/downside of
the " buy separately, integrate in the cloud " approach
which is the Metolius way. The key takeaway however
was that you're managing more disparate tools now
than ever before, they often don't " talk to each other "
and the insights from each only provide one part of the
puzzle to improving your business or plugging holes as
they arise
*
" Who will be the Accenture of golf? " This is the subject
of a recent Apparation IT Matters podcast by CEO
Mike Dickoff and it follows an earlier podcast outlining
why golf course owner/operators will increasingly need
help figuring out either what to buy for technology
tools or how to wire what they have together (or both).
Having come from a tangential background to Mike's
outside golf, there is a large and sophisticated industry
of " system integrators " who aren't the manufacturers of
the technology tools but are conversant across a range of
them and come in to help wire them together initially
for large companies
February 2024
The Pellucid Perspective - February 2024

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