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Shawn Emerson, an agronomy consultant at Ethos Club and Leisure-GSI Executive Search, views building a budget as a process, requiring adjustments and flexibility.
With an extensive background in agronomy, from being the former director of agronomy at Desert Mountain Club for 25 years and a golf course superintendent for more than 35 years, he believes economic skills are vital ones, ensuring superintendents keep their jobs.
“It’s a matter of how you manage money. It can be as important or even be more important than compared to managing turf,” Emerson says. “Managing turf is the given. Managing economics is the change — or the change agent.”
About six years into his career, Emerson learned how to deliver the message of the budget, rather than just focusing on the numbers. This includes explaining both sides of the coin: business and financial. In his current position at Ethos Club and Leisure-GSI Executive, a consulting firm offering services to private clubs, he keeps both sides in mind.
“It depends on where you sit in your own personal or club cash flow, what’s available, are we looking short term or long term and can we afford the long term?”
Basing his budget on past experiences and records, Emerson strives to be exactly $1 under budget. “People want a consistent straight line. Most accountants or CEOs don’t want peaks and valleys,” he adds. “They just want a steady line, so my goal is to come up with a budget where at the end of the year I’m $1 under.”
Viewing budgets as living entities, he emphasizes the importance of accounting for changes because of uncontrollable factors like weather and trying other solutions before making cuts.
In 2021, Arizona Biltmore Golf Club, a Tom Lehman-designed course in Phoenix, needed to fill a $30,000 gap in its budget. With Emerson’s advice, the club recorded 30,000 rounds, increasing the rounds fee by $3 instead of making cuts elsewhere.
“A budget is a holistic approach to management,” Emerson says. “You can’t just look down one narrow column.”
When it comes to approaching budgets, Emerson thinks of them as a process, not an exercise where superintendents and directors are just “going through the motions.”
“Why are you lifting weights? Or why are you eating better?” he asks. “You’re doing it to get better end results and that, to me, is a process. An exercise, well, you’re just writing numbers down, but you have to have a goal, you have to have an objective.”
To execute a plan, he recommends including feasible objectives and viewing a budget as more than a spreadsheet and numbers.
“I think I looked at processes more than I looked at numbers, and I know what each process cost me,” he says. “so I build a budget based on my processes — not on my numbers.”
Adriana Gasiewski is Golf Course Industry’s editorial assistant.
