| If I hear another reference to what a buyer’s market today’s golf business has become — i.e., “You’re never going to renovate a course for less money than you can right now” — I may just put elbow patches on my Ross tartan sports jacket. Sentiments like the one I quote above aren’t technically incorrect. It surely is a buyer’s market these days. With so few jobs and so many architects/contractors chasing them, it’s only natural that pricing will come down (or, to be more accurate, margins will come down). So be it. For the most part, the course designers and builders who do the best work, who provide the most value, still get the jobs they deserve. However, course superintendents and the clubs they represent need to take a step back and examine the process we have used in the golf industry, for decades, to ensure a quality job is delivered. Forget pricing. It’s the end-product that matters. When you’re standing on the tee of a newly renovated golf hole, accepting congratulations from your owner or green chairman re. how well it plays and drains, you want to be able to say, “This is exactly what we needed,” not, “Boy, we got this for next to nothing.” Because if you got it for next to nothing, you (or your successor) will probably be doing it over again, 10 years earlier than need be. Let me sum up the situation, and, for the sake of making things clear and simple, we’ll concentrate solely on the design aspect (as opposed to construction or design/build). There are so many architects vying for renovation jobs these days (forget new-builds; they are virtually non-existent), that a particular golf or country club looking to renovate will sometimes entertain dozens and dozens of proposals. This will naturally drive down the cost of the project. Everyone accepts that. However, to further separate the wheat from the chaff, an increasing number of clubs are requesting from course architects certain additions to the traditional renovation proposal package. Things like course assessments, program statements, concept plans, photo imaging, cost estimating, and even plans that venture into routing, grading or real estate layout, especially those projects overseas. Now, I don’t think these clubs are merely trying to get something for nothing. Most are trying to elicit good ideas on important aspects of the renovation or a project they know is coming down the pike. They’re also trying to determine which designer has more of those ideas, good ones. To an extent, this sort of free association does illustrate an architect’s approach, his imagination and creativity. There’s value in that. But here’s where I’m confused, or maybe just old-fashioned. Since when did it become appropriate to ask for those services before you hire someone? And how can architects be expected to confidently and competently deliver these plans without performing the most important aspect of the planning process, research? Can you honestly draw up course analysis or create a grading plan for a property you know only from a site visit or two? More often than not, these extras — provided all too readily by architects who are all too eager to be employed — are done almost blindly. They shouldn’t be done as part of the proposal process, without proper input from the club or requisite knowledge of the site. All too often, the architect is guessing at solutions, and that perverts the process. It’s not a sustainable way to execute course design and renovation work. I’ve been in this business for 40 years, and I will go to the mat on this one. When you have time and money, you naturally go through this process that has been honed over the course of decades to produce the best, most informed solutions possible. Cost cutting will always be with us in bad times, but we can’t let it eat away at the processes we rely upon, all of us, to produce optimum results. There’s an interesting adjunct to this phenomenon. We’ve had several clubs call us recently; they’ve pulled some money together and want to do something pronto, before the snow flies. It’s almost as if they’ve called, out of the blue, and said, “Here’s the project and the price. We want to start tomorrow. You want this or not?” I’m not saying they’re trying to cheat or bully anyone. I’m not even saying we refused the work (!). But the input-gathering, the research, that is inherent to the design process is inherent for a really good reason: It’s vital to the process, and more and more I see that process subverted in the name of savings. We’ve got a project going on right now that fits this bill. The club called about a month ago and wanted immediate action, and they didn’t have time or money for the proper planning. We’re constructing off the initial concept (and estimated costs) we provided, but there are literally day-to-day changes in the work because we never had time to sort out the site details. Bottom line, the work will get done — but the extra time and labor consumed by the changes will, in the end, cost considerably more than what the club budgeted. Had they invested even a fraction of that money for plans, we would have easily vetted the problems and likely discovered further opportunities to value-engineer. Now, I mentioned I’ve been in this business a long time, but I am no arch-traditionalist. In fact, some of you may have read my columns from earlier this year suggesting that the Master Plan process is dead, or dying, or in need of a serious makeover. To be clear, we at Lohmann Golf Designs promote what we call the Cost Benefit Action Plan (CBAP) because it does the best job of 1) drawing clients out on their specific design priorities; 2) attaching long-term savings to long-term design/agronomic goals; and 3) following a defined, proven process. But we wouldn’t dream of doing a CBAP (or a Master Plan) for a club we didn’t know intimately. That’s the point. When architects are bidding on a job, unless they’re members of the club or they have spent a month on site gathering information, they can’t possibly know enough to offer up meaningful ideas re. course assessments, concept plans or relevant cost-estimating. It’s wrong that they are asked to provide these plans prior to being hired, especially if they are used as primary criteria for candidate selection. But you know what’s even more wrong? The idea that those plans might ultimately be acted upon. |
