Analyzing Your Golf Business
The golf season for most of Canada and the Northern United States is winding down. This is the time of year when most golf courses begin their budgeting process for the coming year. If you are a public or semi-private golf course that accepts green fee or guest rounds of golf now is the time to start analyzing your green fee net yield (or average fee per round played).
What is Net Yield?
In most businesses net yield refers to the dollars left over after expenses. For golf courses we refer to net yield as green fee revenue divided by green fee rounds of golf. For example if you did $750,000 in green fee revenue and 20,000 paid green fee rounds of golf your net yield would be $37.50. Not bad eh! But not great if your rack rate (top posted green fee rate) is $89.00.
Bottom Up!
An effective way to look at your pricing, particularly if your net yield is less than 60% of your posted rate, is to look at increasing your lower rates to bring the average rate up. In the example above if you could move your average rate to $39.00 next year you will add $30,000 to your bottom line. You may leave your rack rate ($89.00) as posted but move your shoulder season, twilight, sunset and other rates up by $2.00. This may give you the average increase of $1.50 per round you need to increase your green fees by $30,000.
This is the time of year to review your rates, net yield and rounds of golf to figure out how you can grow your revenues. Spend some time on this and you will find some additional revenues for the next golf season!
We, Jeff & Tara Ciecko of CK Golf write two blogs, one is our 19th Hole Blog where we share personal experiences and the other a Biz Blog where we comment on general business and internet marketing best practices, golf course marketing and give golf industry related opinions. We have owned CK Golf for 8 years and provide marketing, social media and business services to the golf and other industries. Our 19th Hole Blog is about the places we visit and the things we do. When we say that we like or dislike something or have a good or bad experience this is our opinion and the truth as we see it, not something we have been paid for. If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact us anytime.
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