Brian Rogish is the PGA Director of Instruction at The Golf Club at Lansdowne in Landsdowne, Virginia.

Brian Rogish on the importance of determining if your facility needs a capital expense or a new team member:

I’ve been here for seven years and while we had good efficiency in the things we did, we didn’t really have enough bandwidth from our staff to handle our demand. We had a core of about 150 juniors in our Operation 36 programs along with more in our camps. We had also seen 35 Future 36 juniors (ages 3-6) enrolled in our programs. At the end of every year, we evaluate our entire business and look for ways to enhance and improve what we do. Technology is always a hot topic; however, it was clear to us that enhancing the greater good for our operation would be by adding a full-time staff member to our team. This staff member would allow us to expand our programs and add value to the curriculum.

Brian Rogish on the business impact of determining if your facility needs a capital expense or a new team member:

For the first time we hired a “Junior Golf Leader.” This has now helped streamline everything – as a third team member gives us more bandwidth to expand our reach and help more juniors. It also has allowed us, for the first time, to incorporate fitness into these programs, which was crucial for us as our core juniors from seven years ago have grown into competitive athletes at 16-years-old in high school. Especially with one of our core components being having our juniors compete in tournament play – up to 30 a year at our facility alone — another staffer helped make that happen. The additional bandwidth has also allowed the rest of us to add adult clinics and non-junior events that previously wouldn’t have been able to occur because of our lack of availability. By the end of 2022 we exceeded the 150 juniors in Op36 and doubled our camps. Technology is a great resource for us, but an addition of human capital has given us a higher ROI than the technology pieces we compared it against.

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