douge said: I don't disagree on much of your post. I do especially agree that if special processes are done for events and leagues they should be expensed to them, which has been my mentality for a long while.
The problem is that most public facilities is having is that golfers expectations are still the same, but still wanting their "so called" discount. Since when is the "discount" becoming the norm? Why don't we just put the discounted price out there, instead of running a "special" all the time? Some facilities have fallen into the trap of discounting, and golfers will wait until they get that "email" offering a discount and jump on it. Some facilities around here have been known to just discount.
As for being in a depression, I couldn't agree more. But to believe that you can balance a budget without making a modest attempt to raising revenues and just thinking making cuts is not right. This has been my position at every budget meeting for a long time.
While your thinking seems justified in your side of the argument you still have to understand there is two sides to every argument. How can you justify raising the cost of the outing if you actually lose the outing to a competitor in the process? Now not only did you lose the extra funds (lets just say $300) your line of thinking would of brought but you also lost the total funds you would of had (lets say $5,000) if you would of left it alone. the better way to approach this is to see if you can cut cost of hosting the event in the first place like using one less worker to run it or going with a generic product instead of a name item.
I say this because our last golf pro/general manager had the same line of thinking as your intentions state. We have another golf course 5 blocks down the road which would give great prices on golf tournaments taking away about 30% of our tournaments all because our guy would not cut prices of the tournament by $500. His statement was always that we do not want to give our course away like the goat ranch down the street. ours is worth more money due to the conditions we give. My side of the argument was always how many tournaments do we have to lose before we turn into the goat ranch. Every tournament we lost came directly out of my course budget since my department got whatever we had left over from paying bills to operate on. In five years of his line of thinking I lost all fairway and rough fertilizer applications, Primo application on my fairways, All of my weed control, two crew men vital to keeping the course in that better condition he was too proud to give away, need I continue?
In today's economy it is not an option to raise prices on everything, it is more a matter of becoming more efficient at what you do. The problem as I see it is that while our clubs expect us Superintendents to give them the same product while streamlining our budget, the rest of the clubs departments are not expected to do the same.
This last year our President took the reigns and found many ways to cut monthly bills, they found that by checking into the local cable companies they saved over $400 per month in our phone bill alone just by adding it to our cable provider. There was many other smaller ways they have now streamlined the operation which is saving us money which is now funneled back to me to start weed control and fertilizer applications.