Golf Tournaments 
I know we are speaking to the choir when we say that golf tournaments are often the life blood of many golf course operations. Your food and beverage team also loves them, the banquets that follow often result in a extra dollars on your servers and cooks pay checks. This is great for them and also valuable for staff retention.
Building Teams
When we work with a new (to us) golf course we typically build the team from the golf operation out. What this often means is the team in golf operations performs all kinds of duties beyond what a typical Inside or Outside golf shop team member might do. This includes tasks that might be considered more relevant to food and beverage:
- Setting up banquet tables
- Cleaning and setting up satellite bars
- Removing and recycling beer cans/ garbage from carts
- Removing, cleaning and re-stocking golf cart coolers
- Beverage cart washing, refueling, stocking
- Dishwashing (sometimes)
- General building clean-up
These jobs become some of the ones that can be preformed by any staff member, regardless of department.
Gratuities
Because of how we build the team when we start with a club, we will often change the gratuity (tip) policy. We always pay out 100% of the tip pool from each event, however the change is how we divide it. Our tip out for events always include the golf operations team who do some of the work for an event. This is no different then including a server who works the day before an event doing set-up but may not work the day of an event. Golf staff are included in the gratuity, the same as anyone who does work for an event from the food and beverage side.
As we stated, many clubs rely on golf tournaments, but they are a lot of extra work for the team (in all departments). All staff that help you successfully pull off the event deserve to share in the gratuities.
It’s too bad we couldn’t ‘auto-grat’ green fees and cart fees from events. It would make it a lot easier to retain and keep the great people we have at each golf course. But we do our best to share with everyone that helps in an events successful execution!
We, Jeff and Tara Ciecko of CK Golf write two blogs, one is our 19th Hole Blog where we share personal experiences and the other an Industry Blog where we comment on general business and internet marketing best practices, sales strategies and give golf industry related opinions. We have owned CK Golf for 9 years and provide marketing, social media and business services to the golf and other industries. As of August 2016 our life and our business will be ‘location independent’. Our 19th Hole Blog is about the places we visit and the things we do. If you have any questions or comments, or happen to be in the same location as us please reach out and contact us anytime.
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