I tried to avoid as much as possible the endless stream of presidential candidate debates that were conducted this past winter on cable TV, but sometimes they were unavoidable, especially since my wife has become something of a political junkie. Every time I hear a politician describing how government can fix some problem or other, I cringe. “Good grief,” I am apt to say to the television, “hasn’t government fixed enough things already?”
I recently returned from my annual golf outing, in which an old friend and I escape the small businesses we run for five days of warm sunshine, cold beer, and, oh yes, golf. This year we played at two courses, one of which was owned by the county and the other by a private company.
As I’m sure you know, one of the occupational hazards of owning your own business is that you can’t help but notice what other businesses are doing wrong. Not surprisingly, it seemed as though all the complaints we had were with the government-operated course, to the point that we often wished they had a suggestion box. Seeing as they did not, and gave us no other indication that they were interested in our observations, I thought I would offer them to you instead.
1. Scrap the automated phone system. When you call the county golf course on the phone, you get: “To reserve a tee time, press one, to change a tee time, press two, to cancel a tee time, press three,” and so on. The funny thing is that no matter what you want to do with a tee time, you’re going to end up talking to the same guy in the pro shop. It’s not like this little place is being inundated with phone calls, but even if it were, there is no good excuse for these highly annoying menus. If somebody is trying to spend money at your business, the least you can do is answer the damn phone.
2. Don’t allow crabby employees to deal with the public, or better yet, get rid of them altogether. When I finally did reach the guy in the pro shop, I asked him if I could get a two o’clock tee time. He let out an exasperated sigh, then snapped, “What day?” He didn’t add “idiot” at the end, but he might as well have. Now personally I would assume that anyone who names a time without a date is probably talking about the day we’re in right now, but maybe that’s just me. In any event, it’s not good practice to address customers as though they are idiots, even the ones who are.
3. Don’t make stupid rules. The county course offers a discount to county residents. I own a residence in the county, on which I pay plenty of taxes, but they won’t give me a discount because I don’t have a local driver’s license. What exactly does driving a car have to do with playing golf? They don’t have an answer to that question, nor do they feel any need to come up with one.
4. Put customer convenience ahead of your own. Speaking of stupid rules, the club has a policy, strictly enforced, that golf carts must be returned by sunset. I realize that the employees want to get home for dinner (sound familiar?), but how long do you suppose that most golfers are actually going to play in the dark? It would be nice to let people finish up the hole they’re playing, especially considering that they already paid for it.
5. Don’t let customers see employees sitting around doing nothing. At swank country clubs there is often an official “starter” who controls the flow of players onto the course. Smaller operations generally regard such a position as a frill, but this little county course had an employee whose sole function was to sit there and have somebody hand him a receipt every 20 minutes or so. When customers see an employee doing nothing they assume, correctly, that they are paying for that person one way or another, and they wonder how that person might be used to their benefit.
6. Clean up the place. One of the things an underemployed person could do is help pick up. I don’t know to what extent most customers consciously notice the cleanliness of the establishments they patronize, but I can tell you for sure that they notice the degree of un-cleanliness. When we rented a golf cart from the county course, it still had trash in it from the previous occupants. What’s worse, there was trash on the course, in plain sight of the above-mentioned starter and several other employees. That sort of thing leaves an impression with people, and not the one you want. I am of the belief, but the way, that cleaning and straightening up is not beneath anyone in any organization.
I could go on with my list of suggestions all day, but I’ll cut to the chase. Here is the most important one, and the most difficult to explain.
7. Don’t create an adversarial relationship with your customers. Both golf courses employed a “ranger,” a guy who drives around the whole course periodically in a golf cart to keep an eye on things, what you might call a troubleshooter. At the privately owned course, the ranger mostly concerns himself with keeping play moving along smoothly. If he sees you standing around waiting too long for the people in front of you, he’ll ask those people to let you play through, or ask two pairs if they would mind joining up to make a foursome. At the county course, the only thing I have ever seen the ranger do is scold people for driving their carts off the proscribed path.
You may think I’m being petty, and indeed I am, but the example I gave you is symptomatic of a serious problem. Attitude may be hard to measure, but it is a key ingredient in the success of any business, and the attitude of the employees generally reflects the attitude of the owner, in this case the county government.
Some owners want to wring as much as possible from customers, and they naturally expect that customers will do the same thing to them. They spend their time and energy trying to win the never-ending struggle against their own clientele.
The alternative approach is to give the customers as much as possible, and trust them to recognize the value they receive. As a consumer, which type of business would you choose to patronize?
But I digress. As you may recall, my column this month is not about running a business, or about playing golf. It’s about politics. If the government can’t run a small local golf course even half as well as a private company can, what would make anyone think that it could do a good job managing something as complicated as, say, the health care industry?
Most government employees have little if any incentive to be efficient. In many cases it’s just the reverse, the more you waste the more you get allocated for next year. Nor are they motivated by fear (unlike the rest of us), as there is never a competitor breathing down their neck.
I would be a lot more interested in a politician who wanted to move portions of the government into the private sector (the post office comes to mind). You see, there is one difference between the two golf courses that I neglected to mention. The government-run course charged $41 to play a round of golf at off-peak hours. The privately owned course charged $21.
I rest my case.
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