Hello golf stakeholders:

As the season gears up in earnest across the entire US, we’ve been significantly handicapped by 3 successive months of less-than-stellar (even normal?) weather so we’ve got some ground to make up during the upcoming core months. That dovetails nicely with Jim’s lead story that upping our game collectively on Customer Relationship Management is a key to retaining COVID gains and/or fighting off unfavorable weather. He suggests that it should be treated like a deferred CapEx expense in that it requires a meaningful (and persistent) investment and we’ve historically under-funded our marketing and relationship building “muscle” in both tools and execution.

Stuart’s article this month highlights the crucial yet challenging task of the PGA Professional and provides a perspective on the balance between COVID “operations burnout” and recent comments by PGA officials toward better work-life-balance (work smarter, not harder). This month's By-the-Numbers section tracks the critical Utilization Rate figure for April which was up for a 2^nd consecutive month with rounds demand handily beating double-digit-down weather performance. We've already compiled the May rounds "preview" enabled by our Golf Market Research Center (GMRC) subscribers and it continues to be encouraging suggesting we’ll get a 3^rd consecutive “up” on Utilization, even as May weather again disappointed. If you want to know those numbers on a regular basis, you can either participate in GMRC (course operators) or sign up for a Publications Membership (everyone else). We’re likely the only industry publication that won’t weigh in on the PGA TOUR vs. LIV; we stick to the industry operations side and leave the media circus topics to everyone else.