Sometimes the Results Come After You Leave

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This is Part 5 of my series, How to Leave Something the Right Way.

One of the strange things about leaving a job is that you don’t always get to see whether the things you started actually worked.

You make a decision.

You change a system.

You put a plan in place.

Then sometimes you leave before the results show up.

That happened to me at the golf course I managed in Michigan.

I was only there for about 15 months, but I had a pretty clear idea of something I wanted to change.

I wanted our tee sheet to work harder for us.

A Tee Time Is Inventory

One thing I’ve learned in the golf business is that a tee time is perishable inventory.

If a tee time goes unused today, I can’t put it back on the shelf and sell it tomorrow.

It’s gone.

That means we have to think carefully about who has access to our tee sheet, when they have access, and how much revenue each part of the tee sheet can produce.

At the Michigan course, one of the membership benefits was the ability to play seven days a week.

I made a change.

We limited the times when members could play as part of their membership benefits.

They could still play outside those times, but they would have to pay an additional fee.

At the same time, I opened more of our tee sheet to public play.

The idea wasn’t to punish our members.

The idea was to create a better balance.

Members still received value from their membership.

But our most valuable tee times had a better opportunity to generate revenue.

I believed that over time, we could improve the value of every round we sold.

Then I left.

I Didn’t Get to See the Finish

Unfortunately, the golf course had a difficult winter and spring.

That matters.

Golf is an outdoor business, and sometimes Mother Nature doesn’t care about your business plan.

So the course started the year playing catch-up.

By the time I left, I didn’t really know how everything would turn out.

Would the changes work?

Would public golfers fill more of those tee times?

Would the additional member fees make a difference?

Would average green fee increase?

I had my theory.

But theories are easy.

Results are harder.

Then I Got to See the Numbers

After I left, I still had access to some of the course analytics for a while.

So, naturally, I looked.

The numbers weren’t perfect.

And I think that’s important to say.

Through the period I was able to see, total rounds were 14,075, down 8.1% from the previous year.

If I wanted to make myself look good, I could conveniently leave that part out.

I’m not going to.

But look underneath that number.

Total green-fee revenue was about $674,120, up 6.3%.

Average green fee was $51.26, up 20.4%.

Unique customers were also up 2.2%.

Fewer rounds.

More green-fee revenue.

A substantially higher average green fee.

That caught my attention.

More Rounds Isn’t Always the Answer

Golf operators talk about rounds all the time.

How many rounds did we do?

Are rounds up?

Are rounds down?

Rounds matter.

But rounds aren’t the whole business.

If you increase rounds while discounting heavily and filling your best tee times with low-value inventory, you can be very busy without becoming much healthier financially.

What I wanted was a better balance.

Yes, I wanted golfers on the course.

But I also wanted each available tee time to have more value.

That’s why we changed the membership playing windows.

That’s why we opened the tee sheet.

And that’s why seeing that 20.4% increase in average green fee meant something to me.

The overall story wasn’t finished.

Rounds were still behind.

The course still had work to do.

But the economics underneath those rounds were moving in the direction I had hoped.

I Wasn’t There Anymore

Here’s the funny part.

None of that revenue belonged to me.

I wasn’t getting a bonus from it.

I wasn’t sitting in the GM office anymore.

Someone else was running the golf course.

And I was in Florida starting another chapter of my life.

But seeing those numbers still made me happy.

Because something I had helped put into motion was still working after I left.

That’s a different kind of satisfaction.

Earlier in this series, I wrote about leaving something better than you found it.

Maybe this is another part of that idea.

Sometimes you plant something and don’t get to sit underneath the tree.

Sometimes somebody else gets the shade.

That’s okay.

Let the Next Person Keep Building

I don’t know what the final numbers will look like.

Maybe they’ll catch last year’s rounds.

Maybe they’ll beat them.

Maybe they won’t.

That’s their story now.

And I genuinely hope they do well.

What I got was something smaller but still meaningful.

I got a glimpse.

For a little while after I left, I was able to look back through the numbers and see that an idea we put into practice was producing something.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

But enough that I could recognize it.

That’s one of the lessons I’m taking with me.

You don’t always get to finish the work you start.

You don’t always get credit for what happens afterward.

And you shouldn’t need either one.

Do good work while it’s yours.

Build something that can keep working without you.

Then let the next person take it from there.

Sometimes the results come after you leave.

And sometimes that’s enough.