Ten questions to ask about
your golf technology
None of these are about software. All of them are about money. Read them with your GM, your head pro, and whoever runs your membership, and ask each person separately. When two of them give different answers to the same question, you have found something.
How long would it take to tell me how many rounds you did last Tuesday morning, versus the Tuesday before?
3 = I can pull it up right now, it lives in a dashboard. 0 = We could not produce that comparison.
Which of your systems export clean data, and which ones is somebody copying out of by hand?
3 = Everything important exports and most of it moves on its own. 0 = Most reporting is retyped off screens.
How many hours a week does somebody on your staff spend rebuilding the same report?
3 = Under an hour, most of it is automated. 0 = More than eight, or nobody has counted.
When somebody books a tee time, where does their email address end up?
3 = It flows into our marketing list automatically, already segmented. 0 = I do not know.
An event inquiry arrives Saturday afternoon. What happens to it?
3 = Acknowledged, logged, and on a timed follow-up sequence. 0 = We may not catch all of them.
How many of your recurring members are on a card that is about to expire?
3 = The system flags it and recovery runs automatically. 0 = We do not track this.
When was a golfer last asked for a review at the moment they were happiest?
3 = An automated post-round request goes out every day. 0 = We have no process for asking.
If your GM left tomorrow, what would leave with them?
3 = Nothing critical, systems and processes are documented. 0 = Honestly, almost everything.
What is your booking system renewal date, and what did you agree to when you signed?
3 = I know the date and the terms, and we review before renewing. 0 = No idea, it auto-renews.
If you wanted to put AI to work on your business next year, what data would it run on?
3 = Our data is consolidated and would be usable today. 0 = I would not know where to start.
Nobody owns the space between your systems.
Your tee sheet vendor owns the tee sheet. Your POS vendor owns the POS. Every one of them does their job. The space between them, where the golfer's email address should have gone and where this Tuesday's rounds should be sitting next to last Tuesday's, belongs to nobody. So it belongs to whoever on staff has a spare hour, which means it belongs to nobody. Every question on the front of this page is a probe into one of those gaps.
Where facilities land
Three points a question, thirty available. Most operations score in the middle two bands.
If you fix only three things
These show up at almost every facility. Each is cheap, each is fast, and none of them requires replacing a system you already pay for. The order matters.
Capture the email at the booking
Every round becomes a relationship instead of a transaction. Nothing else in marketing works properly until this is true.
Days, not weeks
Ask for the review automatically
One timed message after every round. The cheapest lever on local search placement, and it compounds quietly for years.
Days, not weeks
Find your renewal dates
Costs nothing. Takes an afternoon. Puts you in the only negotiating position you get with a platform vendor all year.
One afternoon
Questions about your answers?
Michael DeLucia
Bantam Digital LLC. Twenty years of enterprise technology leadership, now applied to golf operations.
michael.delucia@bantam-digital.com
bantam-digital.com
bantam-digital.com
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