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I wrote about the “trend” of superintendents advancing from turf boss to big boss nearly a decade ago. For many reasons — including a desire to promote from within and to provide a seamless transition — this trend continues. With this advancement comes not just a new title, but more responsibility since the bucks literally stop with you.
“The transition to a broader leadership role has certainly come with its fair share of lessons and challenges, especially around budgeting and navigating the financial realities of running a club as a whole, not just one department,” says Rob Wright, chief operating officer of The Pulpit Club in Caledon, Ontario.
Wright moved up from the turf and maintenance building to the main clubhouse in late 2024 after more than 25 years leading the agronomy department at the private club just north of Toronto. The Pulpit features two distinct courses perennially ranked in Canada’s top 25. It’s a property the GCSAA Class A superintendent knows more intimately than anyone since his father, Ken Wright, was the grow-in superintendent in 1992 when architects Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry designed the two courses. “Since I was 5 years old, not a day has gone by where I haven’t had either a golf club or a mower in my hand,” Wright told me.
Though his days of mowing grass are behind him, what has not changed with this promotion is his hands-on leadership style. “That’s how I will always be,” Wright says, “because I’m not the type of guy to sit at the computer and run financial numbers all day. There is a time for that — and you have to do that — but, first and foremost, for me, being the face of the company with my team is far more important.”
Assuming the COO role was not in Wright’s long-term plans, but when Rob Roxborough, The Pulpit Club’s general manager since 2020, announced his resignation at the end of the 2024 season — to spearhead the opening of Cabot St. Lucia, an opportunity he could not refuse — it was a fait accompli.
“Like almost every superintendent that came into a general manager/chief operating officer role before me, it was not planned or forecasted,” says Wright, a self-described workaholic. “Over the years, people have asked me if I would ever transition to one of these leadership positions and my answer was always no because I love the outdoors and being hands-on.”
Budgeting 101
Navigating the financial realities of an entire club versus a single department is a challenge, but with proper training, and by relying on your team, it’s manageable. What made the increased financial burden easier for Wright — and is common for most superintendents who make this leap to upper management — is greenkeepers already are integrated with most departments and they usually manage the biggest budgets.
“I budgeted well for the maintenance department, so it wasn’t a big learning curve,” says Wright, who learned budgeting by watching his father and simply by doing it. “Ultimately, when you’re in the outdoor maintenance department, you have the biggest budget for the club anyway. … You have the biggest expenses with no revenue. If you can budget that aspect, when you transition to the clubhouse, you just have to work with your core teams and rely on their expertise in their respective departments.”
Digging deeper into and learning other features of the budgeting software is another aspect of Wright’s recent role change. “I’m now dealing directly with Jonas Club Software on a more granular level,” he says. “Previously, I only used this software on a really macroscopic level. Now, I’m pulling ledgers and I’m pulling membership reports and I’m looking at rounds analysis … all things that you wouldn’t necessarily study as a superintendent.”
A balancing act
Another lesson learned for Wright is that as a superintendent you looked out for the best interests of the golf course, making the best decisions with that in mind, but you weren’t usually looking at the bigger picture of how that decision might affect the club by asking questions like, “Where are the finances for it?” and “Is it a fit in the capital budget?”
“You have to consider all departments now and that’s been a bit of a balancing act for me,” he adds.
Trust your people
Approaching his one-year anniversary on the new job, Wright is still figuring out how to navigate some financial systems and how some of the budgeting software works. The learning is ongoing, but relying on his team’s knowledge has helped ease this new financial load.
“I don’t have to understand everything on a granular scale,” he explains. "If you have the right people running their departments, there is no need to micromanage them. They are in their jobs for a reason and you’re going to throw guidance to them if there are areas that need improvement — especially when it comes to forecasting and projections — and also helping with staffing and waging orientation. But, for example, I don’t need to know every supply that the cook orders and all the food, but I do want to make sure that they’re budgeting them properly.”
Finding the time
Wright admits that, beyond budgeting, the biggest challenge with the new role is time management. With a lot more meetings, his time is no longer his time. “It’s not uncommon for me to tell somebody the time, and then I’m an hour behind,” he says. “It pains me from that perspective because I feel like I’m letting that person down when I’m not showing up at the time that we set.”
Wright discovered a tool called PLAUD — note-taking AI software — that is a game-changer when it comes to managing his hours and his days. “I have it with me at all times,” he says. “It's attached to my phone and it records all of my conversations. It then pulls all of those conversations, puts them into a template that I like, and at the end of every day, it comes up on my screen and analyzes all of them and gives me actionable items. I allocate at least two hours every morning to analyze my conversations from the day before.”
David McPherson is a Waterloo, Ontario-based author and frequent Golf Course Industry contributor.
