March 26, 2015

Eric Cogorno on Teaching: Offer a Free Specialized Clubfitting Event

eric-cogorno-15THIS IS A SPECIAL EDITION ON CLUBFITTING

Eric Cogorno is a PGA golf instructor and coach at Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Golf Club and the Dom DiJulia School of Golf in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Eric Cogorno on the importance of offering a free specialized clubfitting event:
In sort of a personal, direct way, the more I’ve learned about clubfitting, the more it’s helped me in my teaching knowledge base. When I first started teaching, I never checked anyone’s clubs. Now, when someone comes in, I’m checking their clubs right off the bat because I know how important they are to the student’s success. At Bethlehem Golf Club, we wanted a way to encourage golfers to take advantage of the benefits of clubfitting, while at the same time boosting our lesson business. Not a lot of places in our area have launch monitors where you can hit balls outside, so that’s an advantage for us. We came up with an idea using our FlightScope system. We try to do free one-day events with the FlightScope about twice a month from April through September, and each event has a theme. For example, one of our most popular events is Driver Optimization because, of course, everyone wants to hit their driver. Those fill up fast. Other topics have been iron distance, wedges, fairway woods and even ball fitting. We provide a free 20-30 minute session per player. It’s sort of a 50-50 mix of clubfitting and teaching. It’s definitely been good for my lesson business, and I love doing it.

Eric Cogorno on the business impact of offering a free specialized clubfitting event:
We limit each event to 20 people, and of those 20, typically three to five of them would come for private lessons. It’s been a pretty good turnover thus far. I charge $60 for a private lesson, and most will take three to four lessons on average. So if you figure four people come back for private lessons and they each take four lessons, you can be talking about each event generating $900 or more in lesson income. In reality, though, it reaches much farther. Of the four or so people who take private lessons, one or two tell somebody else about the session, and that they now hit their driver farther. The FlightScope event has been the best thing we’ve done here in terms of utilizing clubfitting to build our lesson business.

If you would like to email the author of this Best Practice directly, please email ecogorno@yahoo.com