Golf Operations budget

[Lawrence Largent]

Could anyone give me a ballpark figure on what kind of budget you should have for just a golf club with a small grillroom.  Bermuda fairways  , tees, and A1A4 greens.  The course is located in East Tennessee with year around play. If you would like to know more information just let me know. 

[Trey Stiles]

Very Broad Question .... Let's start with one of my favorite quotes from my other passion , Auto Racing.

" Speed Cost Money , How Fast Do You Want to Go ? "

Over the last few years , I've operated a small town semi private for as low as $ 500,000 and a Mid Level daily fee for $ 2,000,000. For a mid level deal with no water cost , leased carts , leased maint. equipment , modest CH with small grill , in a 12 month season , you should be able to do a good ( not great ) job on $ 1,250,000 give or take a couple of hundred grand. ( Yes , that's a big spread )

In the golf operations biz , this question comes up all the time ... What I've found is that is often in the client's best interest to spend a day with a consultant discussing what he / she is looking for ... The consultant can then build several models for the client ... On an existing facility with an income history , you can often build a model to meet a specific objective.

[John Moore II]

It all depends on your market. I mean, if you can get by with using a pull behind gang mower to cut the fairway (they do a pretty good job if you don't have wildly contoured, bumpy fairways) and a 8ft pull behind deck mower (we call them bushhogs where I'm from) for the rough, you can have a pretty small maintenance budget and smallish staff. Now if the market dictates you be in better condition than that, you will have to budget for more. That, to me, is the main thing to look at. Your carts should be self-sustianing at worst from their revenue, your proshop should be self-sustaining from merch. sales and the grill should support itself through sales there. Clubhouse overhead should be generally small.

Really you need to figure out what your target number of rounds played and total fee per round should be. If its 25000 rounds at $50 (including cart) a round, you have $1250000 to work with that has to support the operation. That is the place to start. Then you start to add in projected pro shop merchandise revenue, F&B revenue and also staff costs for the shop and grill, lease/buy payment for the cart fleet (all you cart haters shut up, the man has to have carts) plus general overhead costs. Also have to figure in cost of range equipment and range revenue (I'm putting these together off top of my head, thats why its pretty disjointed)

What is the whole deal here? Are you taking over as GM in a place that has been run into the dirt? Are you considering buying the place? Like Trey said, this is a very broad question that can have any number of right answers depending on the current operation, market, etc.