I look at my career and I’ve always had semi visions of where I’ve wanted to land at certain points but I’ve never actually landed there. I’ve always morphed and moved in a slightly different field again. Early days I just loved the game and was very set on wanting to coach.

I did that first at Kingston Beach in Tasmania after completing my traineeship at Country Club Casino in Launceston. I moved to North Adelaide Golf Course first as the golf professional but Adelaide City Council were very good with professional development and put me through an Emerging Leaders program so towards the end of my time there was more of a management element.

To be honest, when I left North Adelaide I could have thrown it all in the bin. My shift to Royal Adelaide was very much a left-field move for me. I applied for the position as Golf Operations Manager but I wasn’t sure that was exactly what I wanted to do.

At that point I was thinking more down the General Manager’s path as a career option. The club is very supportive of professional development so I locked in to do my Diploma in Golf Management through the PGA IGI as soon as I moved here.

All that study was done self-paced online which is just perfect. The online structure means you can jump in and do two hours of a night-time or go in early and do an hour before you go to work, or whatever it might be. It’s certainly not easy – it’s still a fair lump of time to get it done – but the flexible arrangement certainly makes it more appealing.

What that did was to fill a hole between what we covered in our traineeship 15-20 years ago versus what the guys cover now through the Membership Pathway Program. For me, a lot of that was around the financial side of things, risk management and HR. When we did our traineeship, the program was a little bit heavier on the coaching and the pure management of a pro shop from a retail perspective. Whereas now I see the focus of the program being a lot broader and a lot more inclusive and covers all those other areas of the business.

I feel like I’ve managed to get advanced status in each stream which gives you the ability to provide really rounded thoughts and opinions on all aspects of a golf club’s operations. I can sit in a management meeting and have a valid opinion on some other areas of the business as well. It enables you to see the club in a far more holistic light. I’m not just looking at it from a pro shop perspective, or a tee time management perspective or something like that. You’re able to see how that fits within the greater scope of the whole club and everything working together.

If more PGA members work into management positions and develop those skills that’s going to create some great general managers. They won’t just bring a financial background or a HR background, they will bring a very rounded approach to what they’re doing.

I’m really lucky that I still do some coaching and I’m reasonably heavily involved in coaching programs. Overall, it’s the variety that motivates me and excites me every day. I’m part of the admin team, I head up the operations team, I’ve got a hand in lots of different areas of the club and lots of different events, and then the pro shop and the business side of things. It’s amazing to look at your day and see where it goes but you generally work on so many different areas of the business which all lead back to member satisfaction and member engagement.

I genuinely feel golf facilities need to become more family friendly. We talk a lot about time and I think the time taken is relative to who it involves. It’s hard to get five hours or six hours alone time and solo whilst the family might be doing something else. I just feel clubs need to be more understanding of that and more welcoming of that. If we can provide greater opportunities for the rest of someone’s family – or at least make the clubs more welcoming for spouses and kids and whatnot – then I think we go a long way to being able to retain players.

When we talk about players being committed to the game, we’ve got to still provide some flexibility and look at that age bracket where we do lose a lot of players and how we can best fit into their lifestyles. That might be clubs providing more than just golf where they can. It may be that little bit of diversification where is there space. A couple of tennis courts. A gym. A swimming pool. A creche. That sort of stuff that just makes it that bit easier to justify.

Losing players once you’ve done so much hard work to get them in is such a shame. It’s very rarely because they’ve fallen out of love with the game, or because they’ve had an injury and it prevents them from playing like they do with other sports. It genuinely comes back to time and involvement, and again, I find time is only part of the reason. There are other factors to that and if you can provide something more than just golf, then time becomes less of a factor.