Sean Palmer, PGAChief Operating Officer/General Manager,The Union League of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania)
Sean Palmer’s experience with measuring and benchmarking golf facility data goes back to his days as PGA of America Assistant Golf Professional at Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. And as his career has progressed to serving as the Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of The Union League of Philadelphia – with its eight locations, including three golf facilities – so has Palmer’s ability to collect and interpret data across multiple areas of the club’s sprawling operations.
It started with a simple Excel spreadsheet that tracked each day’s weather, member and guest rounds, and golf shop sales at Merion. At The Union League, Palmer expanded his toolkit to become a bespoke measurement system that includes data from services like ForeTees, Jonas, Whoosh, Pacesetter and SevenRooms. Now he and his staff collect multiple data points from each person who steps on one of The Union League’s properties, which are fed into custom dashboards using a data mining program called Qiik – and a splash of AI – to organize the data for better decision-making and reporting on the club’s more than 4,700 members.
“These dashboards give us insight on every single member: how they behave, where they live, how much they spend, where they like to play golf, what their dining habits are,” says Palmer, the 2026 PGA of America Golf Executive of the Year. “If you had to do that all manually from reports in multiple different programs, it would take forever. The juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze.
“But because we have all the data organized and automated, we get further and faster results, and that gives us incredible insights.”
The result for The Union League’s golf staff is profound, as the time previously spent running reports and interpreting the results can now be spent interacting with members and guests. For Palmer and his management team, there’s also an almost clairvoyant clarity to the decision-making process across departments.
For example, when The Union League was considering buying the 18-hole course that became its Liberty Hill location, the biggest question was whether there was a big enough pool of prospective members for the property in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania. Palmer was able to pull the data to see how many members lived within a comfortable distance of the location, what their spending habits were and whether they tended to play golf locally during the summer.
“The question was whether there was enough critical mass to justify the transaction of buying the facility and expanding our operations,” Palmer says. “And the question was answered before we ever made the transaction because we could tell exactly what our market was, so we went forward and have seen it succeed. Right away, our measurements validated a big decision. If you’re looking for operational growth, you have to know how to attract the right customers, and the data is incredibly insightful for that.”
Palmer also created his own system to score The Union League’s members, similar to the Net Promoter Score system. Based on members’ buying, playing and transaction behavior, the club sorts members into two groups: Givers and Takers.
“Givers are essentially your net promoters in the best sense: They buy in the golf shop, they take lessons, they donate to the scholarship fund, they bring their daughter’s wedding to the club,” Palmer says. “The Takers play 200 rounds a year, have a cup of soup after their rounds and buy their golf balls at Costco. That helps us know which members will be good leaders and stewards of the club on the board and committees, which is in the best interest of the club and you as a PGA of America Golf Professional.”
Data also backed The Union League’s bold move to offer complimentary lessons to members by subsidizing the PGA of America Coaches at the club’s facilities. Looking at a year of the program’s impact at the club’s Torresdale location, Palmer’s data showed that full golf members who took more than five free lessons in a year had the following characteristics:
• Spent 96 percent more on food & beverage
• Engaged in 36 percent more club activities
• Spent 120 percent more in the golf shop
• Dropped between 2 and 4.5 strokes on their handicap index in the first year
• Played nearly eight rounds more than the average
Oh, and 100 percent of those members who took five or more free lessons renewed their full golf memberships for the next season.
“There’s a different psychology behind subsidized lessons where members feel they’re getting a lot of value, but I needed to prove that it wasn’t just good for the consumer,” Palmer says. “In private clubs, I’m in the dues business first, not the golf business. By building relationships and creating demand through instruction, we create low attrition and a way to hook members on the game of golf – which is an easy choice to drive dues.
“It just fits the mission of a PGA of America Golf Professional to have a good handle on their specific business by knowing what their key performance indicators are and what data to actually look at. There can be paralysis by analysis. But if you narrow it down and identify what moves the business forward, that’s where you’re going to find success.”
Mike Woods, PGAVice President/General Manager,Haggin Oaks Golf Complex,Sacramento, California
Haggin Oaks Golf Complex in Sacramento is aptly named from a business standpoint – it is truly complex. Two 18-hole municipal golf courses, one of the busiest ranges in the country, the trend-setting Haggin Oaks Golf Super Shop and a food & beverage operation that includes quick dining options as well as banquets and parties.
It’s a dizzying array of areas to manage, and measuring and benchmarking key data on each department makes it easier to see the forest for the trees at Haggin Oaks.
“When you’re a PGA of America Golf Professional and your responsibility is the profitability of the golf facility, showing key metrics on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis is essential in demonstrating how financially profitable your organization is,” says VP/GM Mike Woods, a PGA of America Certified Professional in Golf Operations. “You should absolutely be looking to tie that into your own personal performance and how you’re compensated.
“If you’re not tying in these key metrics and showing your ownership what you do to take those metrics to drive additional business, you’re leaving yourself open to criticism and maybe not getting the credit you deserve.”
For Woods, those key metrics include RevPAT (revenue per available tee time) along with total revenue, along with what he calls “inventory sessions” and conversions – essentially how many prospective golfers visit HagginOaks.com to look at online tee times, and how many actually book them.
“I’m looking at a report right now that shows we had 4,449 people go to our booking engine last week, and we had 520 bookings, so our conversion rate was 12 percent – which is a little lower than our normal 14-15 percent,” Woods says.
Because Haggin Oaks has tracked conversions for years, Woods’ team knows what to do with this sort of data.
“We’re about eight years into doing this every week, so you can really start to pick up on trends and where you’re headed, whether you’re trending in a positive or negative direction,” Woods says.
“In this case, I’ll dive a little deeper into what could be causing a dip in tee times, and it could be anything from weather to what’s going on that week with holidays. But if you’re diligent, you’ll see what are real trends and if we need to look at our marketing efforts, course conditions or the ease of using the booking engine.
The same level of precision goes into evaluating data on Haggin Oaks’ many PGA of America Assistant Golf Professionals as coaches and as retailers and clubfitters in the facility’s Super Shop. The facility measures golfer satisfaction, sales per hour, close rate and average customer spend. The results help Woods and facility leadership reward top performers and provide education to those who need a boost.
“Everything we do with our PGA of America Assistant Golf Professionals is incentive-based: It’s how they grow and improve their business and income with us,” Woods says. “We really want to create win-win relationships where, as they grow and get better at what they do, their income also grows.”
Woods advises his fellow PGA of America Golf Professionals to start tracking two or three key metrics that pertain to their job description, through research and by asking their PGA Career Consultant, then get into a rhythm of seeing how those numbers change from week to week. At the facility level, that’s how Haggin Oaks approaches decision-making on things from green fees to the pricing of coaching packages – and even food offerings.
The Haggins Oaks range has a full-time food trailer on site, and over the past few years it experimented with a number of different types of food, from sliders and tacos to pizza and ice cream. After crunching the numbers, the humble hot dog was found to be the sweet spot for hungry range rats.
“We tried so many different foods, and we found that the hot dog is still king for our customers,” Woods says. “So instead of going in all these different directions, we’ve come up with multiple types of gourmet hot dogs, and we sell a ton of them.
“If you’re not measuring item-level sales like that, you might miss the boat. You might decide to eliminate hot dogs altogether, or downgrade to a cheaper one, or follow a trend that seems hot in the broader world. But when you have the metrics and you know what’s popular with your actual customers, you can lean into it. So, when you look at our gourmet hot dogs, that’s a good example of how measuring and benchmarking can really shape your business.”
Maulana Dotch, PGAGeneral Manager,Hermann Park Golf Course,Houston, Texas
Like many PGA of America Golf Professionals who are called to a life in golf industry, PGA Certified Golf Professional Maulana Dotch doesn’t like calling attention to herself and her accomplishments. She is happy, however, to track the data and let the numbers tell the story of her success at Houston’s busy Hermann Park Golf Course.
As the municipal facility’s PGA of America General Manager, Dotch tracks a number of revenue streams and expense centers, from on-course play, food & beverage, rounds played and range balls purchased to payroll and maintenance. Keeping an eye on monthly goals keeps her on track throughout the year, while benchmarking year over year results gives her an idea of ongoing trends.
Dotch shares reports with municipal management and says it’s essential for PGA of America Golf Professionals at similar facilities to do the same.
“It’s funny because I don’t really want to brag or boast about anything, but numbers tell stories – and numbers don’t lie,” Dotch says. “It works to your benefit to measure your performance and to be able to show what you’re accomplishing. If you have the data and you’re on track, you’re able to sell yourself without doing a lot of boasting.”
Another benefit of year-over-year data for Dotch is using past benchmarks as a guide during an unusual stretch for Hermann Park. The facility was set to close in the summer of 2025 for a major renovation, only to have the project tabled at the last minute. The renovation is still in the plans, but the delay put a major dent in last year’s business.
“I planned on shutting down last year, so we canceled tournaments and events, had a big blowout sale in the golf shop – and then found out we weren’t actually closing down,” Dotch says. “Then I was trying to order a bunch of merchandise and rebook events we normally host. It definitely threw us off.”
Instead of guessing what 2026 orders and scheduling might be like in light of 2025’s stop-and-go season, Dotch went back to 2024 to set her budgets and goals. For example, Hermann Park actually say an uptick in rounds played last year as the facility saw a boost in daily play once regulars saw the course had remained open. But historically, the data helped Dotch plan for 57,000 rounds in 2026. Midway through the summer, Hermann Park was precisely on track for that many rounds.
Carefully measuring spending and revenue also helps Dotch with another current challenge at Hermann Park that is familiar to PGA of America Golf Professionals: rising costs. By tracking revenue and sales after price adjustments on green fees, merchandise and food & beverage, Dotch can spot if consumers are absorbing the higher prices or if they are hurting business.
“We had to go up twice last year on our menu items after being around the same price for years, once at the beginning of the year and once halfway through, and we’re at the point again where I might need to increase them,” Dotch says. “Same with range balls, same with some things in the golf shop. By tracking everything, I’m able to show my bosses that we’re eliminating any leaking, any holes in the budget, and that I’m managing the spending. Rounds might dip a little bit, but our revenue will be on track because the price increases and careful spending will balance out – and that looks good for us.”
Miles Blundell, PGAGeneral Manager,Streamsong Golf Resort,Bowling Green, Florida
Over the course of his career, PGA Master Professional Miles Blundell has learned how to rely upon multiple key performance indicators on the retail side of golf. Starting with dollars per round, dollars per shop square foot, margins, cost of goods sold – all the metrics that helped him win PGA Merchandiser of the Year honors for resort facilities at New York’s Turning Stone Resort Casino in 2015.
In his current role as General Manager at Streamsong Golf Resort in Bowling Green, Florida – site of the 2027 PGA Professional Championship – Blundell has sharpened his focus on the guest experience, tracking Net Promoter Scores and guest service metrics through TrueReview at the growing golf resort, which features five golf courses, including the new Bone Valley layout designed by David McLay Kidd.
“We track everything throughout the entire guest journey, from the valet experience when they arrive to housekeeping, food & beverage, golf course conditions, caddie experience and everything in between,” Blundell says. “We get rated on a scale of 0 to 10 on all of those areas. You’re judged on your promoters and your detractors, and it’s how we benchmark our performance – and when it comes to assessing our team, it’s something we use extensively.”
By comparing NPS data month over month and year over year, Streamsong is able to make strides toward a goal of continuous improvement. High-performing areas can be studied to understand what’s working, and underperforming areas can be reevaluated to get back on track. And, in the case of new amenities, past performance of existing amenities can be referenced to set expectations.
“The great thing about bringing on a new amenity, like our new Bone Valley golf course or the Cabins at Streamsong, is that NPS Scores allow us to benchmark a new offering against existing offerings,” Blundell explains. “Are the conditions on the course consistent with our other courses? Do the cabins offer a guest experience as good as our lodge rooms? It takes guessing out of the equation and allows us to create the premium experience that we deliver here.”
Blundell encourages all PGA of America Golf Professionals to look into NPS, regardless of facility type, to get direct feedback from your most avid customers. The result is a better product, and better career advancement for yourself and staff members.
“The ability to look at NPS data across the resort gives us a chance to recognize great performances – that’s one of the best parts of the system,” Blundell says. “You can reach out to hyper-performing department heads and give them the praise they deserve. When you’re at a large facility, where you can’t be in every department all the time, it’s a great way to get better and better every day.”
Joe Assell, PGAPresident and CEO,GOLFTEC,Englewood, Colorado
When GOLFTEC was founded in 1995 with its first location, it was an off-course golf coaching business. Upon opening its second location in 1996, it was on its way toward the future of golf business measurement and benchmarking.
“When we opened our second location in 1996, the beginning of benchmarking was just comparing the two against each other – tracking monthly sales, number of lessons given, golf clubs sold, pretty basic performance results,” remembers Joe Assell, PGA, GOLF TEC’s Co-Founder, President and CEO. “As we got to year two and year three and beyond, we were able to track against ourselves from the previous year. Those were the very early days, but that was the beginning of a really data-minded approach to how we manage the business.”
Today, with 262 locations around the country, roughly 1,200 coaches and 2 million lessons taught every year, GOLFTEC tracks a number of key performance indicators to keep a daily finger on the pulse of its coaching and clubfitting locations. Assell says that’s a necessity for a company with so many physical locations across a huge geographic area.
“GOLFTEC isn’t really a business where you’re ‘standing in the shop’ and you just kind of know what’s going on. We have to use data to run our business,” says Assell, the 2021 PGA of America Golf Executive of the Year. “Besides our proprietary coaching technology, running the business on data is really probably the No. 2 reason we’ve had the success we’ve had. It allows us to avoid mistakes, take some emotion out of decisions and have factual analysis. And, in many cases, it’s allowed us to see problems before they start, as we begin noticing some possibly negative trends.”
Assell says GOLFTEC has an in-house marketing insights group that constantly monitors the cost and performance of the company’s marketing and how it brings in new customers.
“That’s really the top of the funnel, where new customers pour from and everything starts,” Assell says. “Then later in the funnel we’re also analyzing our renewal rates on a daily basis. About half our business is people renewing every year, and we monitor that closely looking forward and backward.”
According to Assell, PGA of America Golf Coaches don’t need anything nearly as in-depth as the multiple layers of technology GOLFTEC uses to track its business. He suggests starting with a simple spreadsheet to keep track of how many lessons you’re giving and what types of lessons they are: full swing, short game, group lessons, clubfittings. After a year, you should begin to be able to benchmark your business against your past performance and decide if you want to get more granular.
“You’ll start to notice different trends when you’re tracking what happens every day – maybe differences on certain days of the week or months, different types of momentum that’s good or bad,” Assell says. “I’d keep it to no more than five, maybe a max of seven, important things, and your trends will become pretty apparent.”
The results can also be beneficial for your future career goals, as well.
“There’s a saying, ‘What gets measured gets done,’” adds Assell. “Measuring what you do as a PGA of America Golf Coach means you can intelligently talk about what you do.
“I think a candidate for a new position, or someone having an annual review at their current position, who can come in and prove their results and illustrate their success with data is going to be much more valuable to an employer than someone who can just speak about it anecdotally.”
Glenn Pulice, PGAGeneral Manager,Royal Oak (Michigan) Golf Center
You might think that a busy standalone golf range in an affluent suburban area that is open 359 days a year and offers 11 different types of group golf instruction, PGA Jr. League, mini-golf and an indoor Trackman-powered coaching studio would have all the bases covered. According to Glenn Pulice, PGA, the General Manager at Michigan’s Royal Oak Golf Center, he’s still learning how to optimize business at the 76-year-old facility – and data is the teacher.
“Measuring and benchmarking our data has really changed the way I look at the business,” says Pulice, the 2025 Michigan Section PGA of America Golf Professional of the Year. “You start seeing holes, as well as successes you can capitalize on. If you plan and forecast properly, everything flows. And the blips stick out like a sore thumb, which helps you figure out what caused them.”
Using point of sale data gathered through Club Prophet, Pulice runs daily data reports that post to spreadsheets and feed a dashboard that he relies upon for day-to-day operations, benchmarking against previous performance, as well as forecasting for possible upgrades in the future.
Royal Oak Golf Center has completed two major renovations over the past decade: One in 2017 where the facility added 33 heated tees with PowerTee technology, and a second four years ago when the main building was renovated and the range ball cleaning and processing equipment was updated. A third project is likely incoming, and Pulice is poring over the data dashboards and consumer surveys done with Players First to crystalize possibilities.
“Right now, we seem to have hit a plateau in golf balls hit, and I think we’re missing that next piece that will bring in even more customers,” Pulice says. “A traditional driving range like ours isn’t the model anymore, even though we’re a Golf Range Association of America Top 50 Range. We’re probably one of the few ranges this size that doesn’t have that technology piece where you can play simulated golf on the range and host leagues. Maybe that next piece includes selling liquor to make it more social. This is what the data is pointing us toward.
“The great thing is that when I talk with my owner, I have all this data in front of me when we’re talking about a big investment. It isn’t ‘I think this is a good idea,’ or ‘Other ranges are doing this.’ Instead, it’s ‘Here’s what our customers are actually telling us.’”
As the next steps take shape for Royal Oak Golf Center, Pulice is using technology to keep a close eye on consumer trends and labor in an area with dramatic weather swings from season to season. As such, he’s learned to compare Januarys to Januarys and Junes to Junes.
“We’re actually measuring price per ball, and we take that to the fourth decimal point,” Pulice explains. “Certain months have different prices per ball, and we’ll compare that year over year and by month. I’ve found that benchmarking by month makes the most sense for us. There’s a lot of noise you can’t control – weather, events in your area, if the city or county decides to do construction on the roads around you. On a monthly basis, you can filter that out.
“If you’re at a range, I’d say to measure your core business, which is selling range balls. Know your ball count on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. You’ll start seeing things you expected, and things you didn’t. You don’t have to be a math genius, and it will all start to make sense.”
Michael Heisterkamp, PGAGeneral Manager,Chagrin Valley Country Club,Moreland Hills, Ohio
Michael Heisterkamp, PGA, loves data. Not because he’s a numbers person. Instead, he likes to understand why people behave the way they do – and measuring and benchmarking data helps him find the answers.
Heisterkamp is in his 10th season as the General Manager at Chagrin Valley Country Club outside Cleveland, Ohio. Prior to that, he worked for several general managers in his time as a head golf professional at other private clubs. Heisterkamp found himself being challenged to justify the time and budget spent coaching, playing and traveling with members.
“I just knew, inherently, without any data, that teaching and playing golf with members and taking them on trips made them better members who did not leave the club,” says Heisterkamp, a two-time Northern Ohio Section PGA of America Golf Professional of the Year. “I was constantly being asked about anything that took golf professionals away from the day-to-day operational side of the business. So, I started documenting it so when someone asked ‘Why?’ I could say, ‘Because of this.’”
Heisterkamp compiled data that showed normal attrition at Midwestern private clubs was roughly 7 percent a year, or roughly 20 members at a club with 350 members. He compared that to his clubs, where he regularly played and traveled with members who took lessons – and discovered that only 2 percent of them had left.
“That just told me what I already knew, but I was able to show some data to back it up,” Heisterkamp says. “That led me to go deeper into measurement so I could understand more of the reason why people take the actions they do as club members instead of just listening to what they say.”
Today, Heisterkamp says PGA of America Golf Professionals have many more ways to measure and act upon data throughout a golf facility, and he makes use of several. Of particular interest to him is looking at the changing demographics of club membership and how that impacts what members are looking for from the experience.
“I suggest reaching out to experts in the field – PGA Career Consultants or other consultants – and they’ll all tell you that time is the most important thing to this next generation of people joining private clubs,” Heisterkamp says. “The average age of a new club member over the last decade has dropped by eight years, and they’re part of a married couple with 2.3 kids, which means they don’t have a lot of time – and you’re going to have to offer programming in compressed periods of time. It’s not just usage, it’s the quality of usage if you want to retain members.
“If you’re not aware of data and trends like this, and you’re just making sure the range balls are nice and the retired golfers can get their same tee times, you’re getting left behind.”
In addition to measuring data using sources like club surveys, Heisterkamp also gathers his own – and suggests other private club PGA of America Golf Professionals do the same. He offers the idea of starting a year-long pro-am tournament, in which members of the golf staff play rounds with three members. It’s a fun opportunity to play with members, but it also gives your staff a chance to gather information from members in an informal way. Track which golf professionals play with which members to avoid overlap.
“Make a goal of each golf staff member playing at least one round in this tournament each week,” Heisterkamp says. “You’ll have data from so many members, and it will come from the entire golf staff. You’ll build so many relationships, and you’ll have so much data with so many positive byproducts coming from it.”
