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The budgeting process for golf course superintendents, even without a global pandemic hitting us early in 2020, was evolving in recent years. Pre-pandemic budget changes starting to occur included factors like rising wages combined with a dwindling labor pool, early order programs for our plant protectants, revenue challenges for many courses, and water restrictions across the continent, just to name a few.
But whatever changes were occurring for us a couple of years ago, those have all pretty much taken a back seat to our focus of managing our budgets through this insane, uncertain pandemic. As much as anything has changed for superintendents since March 2020, the budgeting process might be the part of the job most affected by the pandemic.
Perhaps the biggest change to the budgeting process for me and other superintendents I have talked to is simply how unpredictable the golf industry has become. Not just the unpredictability of revenue –which obviously we cannot control – but the uncertainty of prices, the availability of parts and products, and the future of that unpredictable revenue itself. Will play fall off? And, if so, when? Can we plan for a 2022 revenue that will be on par with 2021?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, golf rounds, for most, have soared. Play has increased and thus revenue has increased. But this growth has always felt somewhat tenuous. Not so much temporary, but certainly pandemic influenced at some level. This is not to say that much of the growth of the game we’ve seen since early 2020 and through 2021, cannot be sustained. But I think we all feel that some of that growth won’t last forever. At least a percentage of the increase goes hand in hand with the state of world. When the world ultimately returns to normal, what will rounds played look like? No one can answer this question with any degree of confidence.
Budgeting with this much uncertainty has been a challenge for all of us, none more than as we sit down to budget for 2022.
As I mentioned, things were actually changing for our budgets even before a world with COVID-19.
We simply manage golf courses differently than we did two decades ago, and, therefore, we budget differently. For many of us, less is more. We mow less area. We irrigate less area. We apply plant protectants to less area. And, of course, those plant protectants themselves, and the way they have changed and improved, has affected the way we spend. The plant protectant line item tends to be, outside of labor, the biggest line item many of us have in our annual budgets.
Early order programs were certainly the biggest change I had noticed in my budgeting process before the pandemic. The evolution and maturation of these programs has certainly affected the budget. Having a plant protectant program, buying early and in bulk, and thus getting better prices, was changing the way we budgeted.
So, when budgeting for 2022, I think we must look at our budgets with a couple of things in mind.
One, the pandemic itself, and the uncertainty of the continuation of increased pandemic play. Can we honestly forecast rounds played in 2022 to be as strong as they were this year? Arriving at a workable dollar number for a maintenance budget, in conjunction with projected revenue, will be as hard as it has ever been.
And two, we must take into consideration the changes that were already occurring to maintenance budgets before 2020. As mentioned, these changes included the labor situation, early order programs, water restrictions and the price of fuel, to name a few.
Forecasting those fuel prices has been a particular challenge for superintendents in recent years. The increased cost of fuel affects not only the fuel line item, but, of course, the delivery of other items to our courses as well, especially large items like sand and fertilizers.
One final consideration is the challenge of availability. As everyone reading this can attest to, the pandemic has greatly influenced not only the timing of getting products and parts, but even getting those products and parts at all.
The equipment repair line item needs particular consideration. Older equipment and finding parts for these older pieces has become a real issue. This may mean investing and budgeting more for newer equipment perhaps sooner than we had originally planned. I know for my own situation at my course, I simply can no longer find parts for a few of our pieces that date back to the late 1990s or early 2000s. These pieces will have to be phased out a bit sooner than we had intended.
Budgeting has become as unpredictable and challenging as anything a superintendent will do over the course of a single year. And, for the foreseeable future, that is unlikely to change. My best advice? Stay flexible, don’t try and predict too far into this uncertain future, and perhaps most importantly, expect the unexpected.
Sounds easy, right?
Ron Furlong is the superintendent at Avalon Golf Links in Burlington, Washington, and a frequent Golf Course Industry contributor.
