_Sept/triedandtrue.jpg "Tried and True")
By Steve Eubanks
For more than three decades, Morton Golf’s approach to management has been redefining golf and retail operations
The first impression isn’t much. When you pull into the parking lot of Haggin Oaks Golf Complex, just a well-struck short-iron from four car dealerships and a Holiday Inn Express on Auburn Avenue in Sacramento, the first thing you see is netting to keep errant tee shots away from the Capital City Freeway. Then you notice a series of low-slung block buildings, white and clean but with all the architectural charm of an elementary school. Carts are staged out front, and the range, also surrounded by nets, sits off to the left. A man in blue jeans rolls putts on a green nearby.
It’s a typical municipal course, not unlike what you’d find in a thousand cities in America.
Then you step inside and everything changes. It’s like you’ve fallen through golf’s looking glass and landed in an alternate reality, one where a public-access course anticipates your every need and has more amenities, more inventory, more entertainment options and more avenues of customer service than any private club you’ve ever visited—and many businesses outside of golf.
The Mad Hatter in charge of this public golf wonderland is a jovial 75-year-old master professional named Ken Morton, Sr., a staple of the PGA of America education system for more than three decades and the kind of avuncular old pro that you feel like you’ve known for years the second you meet him. He’s also the most successful municipal golf operator in the nation, as well as a pioneer in merchandising, customer service, data-mining and staff management.
Along with his sons, Ken, Jr., and Tom, former Haggin Oaks general manager Terry Daubert and golf professional Mike Woods, Morton has formed Morton Golf Management, which leases all of Sacramento’s courses (90 holes at four different facilities) along with a retail, instruction and club-fitting operation unlike anything in the country.
Morton, who can still be found most days between the pro shop and Mackenzie’s Sports Bar and Grill at Haggin Oaks, has been at the same facility since 1958, when he started working part-time for Tommy LoPresti, who was the original pro when the course opened in 1932. The two became partners in 1971, and in 1991 when LoPresti retired, Morton, who had instituted some of the most radical ideas in the industry, took over the contract from the city.
“During all that time, I was, without knowing it, building a business culture,” Morton recounts. “In the 1990s, I realized, after teaching and training in the PGA development programs and working with the Stanford Research Institute, that it’s easy to go through the Harvard Business criteria and understand all the pieces in a successful business, but it’s much harder to figure out how all those pieces fit into your organization.”
Through a half-century of experience and being exposed to some of the most brilliant thinkers in business, Morton created an environment and structure that is more closely akin to a Morgan Stanley brokerage house than your average golf management company.
“We try to educate and train our people to be self-sustaining, to build their own clientele and their own businesses within the business,” Morton says. “Over time, we’ve determined what an entry-level golf pro should do in lessons and sales. So we sit down with that professional and build a budget by pay period, and we track where they are relative to that budget every two weeks. Our job [as managers] is to teach them how to operate their own little business.”
To illustrate his point, Morton offers the example of a Class-A professional who works as both a teacher and club-fitter and makes $60,000 a year. The way Morton sees it, that person can generate $400,000 to $600,000 in sales for clubs and $20,000 to $30,000 in golf lessons if he or she is taught how to build and manage a clientele—that is, how to turn a customer into a client, and then turn a client into a partner who refers others. Morton and his senior managers give all of their professionals a budget that all agree to ahead of time, and if they miss it, they meet with staff to correct the problems.
“We also have a customer relationship management department to help them develop their own marketing programs, direct mail, email and social media outreach programs, where we track sales by salesperson, by teaching pro, by vendor and by customer,” Morton adds. “What they buy, who they bought it from, how frequently they buy and how much they spend. We do a lot of data-mining to make sure our people can keep in close contact with their clients and their clients’ needs.”
Each employee, whether it’s a salesperson in the Haggin Oaks Super Shop (most of whom have experience at places like Nordstrom’s and Neiman Marcus), a club-fitter (all of whom have been trained at the Ping, Callaway, Taylor Made and Titleist centers in Carlsbad, California), a catering manager or a teaching pro, has an entrepreneurial incentive within Morton Golf. “It’s very people-driven, but also very training driven,” Morton notes.
This approach is typical at brokerage houses, resort timeshare offices and in some of the more successful automotive operations in the country. Rick Hendrick, whose automobile empire includes Toyota, Chevrolet, Honda, Mini and Fiat dealerships throughout the Southeast as well as the largest and most successful presence in NASCAR, has a similar employee/employer structure. Not only each dealer, but also each sales and support person is empowered to be an entrepreneur with quantifiable goals that are measured regularly.
“When you look at some operations, golf instructors, for example, are set up as independent contractors,” Morton says. “Unfortunately, in most cases, that’s illegal. The minute someone in the golf shop books a lesson, that professional is no longer an independent contractor. So, we set it up where the teaching professional is a staff member with the benefits of building their own business but also with our marketing and support efforts as well as our staff booking lessons.”
The revenue split varies, but Morton believes it should never skew greater than 60 percent to the professional and 40 percent to the club. “Everyone is vested in the success of the player development business at that point,” he notes.
Indeed, Morton’s operational strategy has produced results that are nothing short of astonishing. “When we took over food and beverage here (at Haggin Oaks) in the 1990s, the F&B sales were $450,000,” Morton explains. “Today, they’re $2.2 million. We’ll do about $250,000 in club-fitting a year and a half-million in lessons. Then, we’ll do about $10 million in retail and another $1 million in catering.”
All before selling the first green or cart fee.
At any given moment, Haggin Oaks will employ between 16 and 18 professionals, a ridiculous number until you see the extent of the operations. “It takes a lot of people to do that sort of volume in lessons and club-fitting in addition to the retail sales we generate from that,” Morton says.
Logic would suggest that this entrepreneurial atmosphere breeds competition within the staff, an atmosphere that could turn toxic if one person is perceived to have swiped a sale or a lesson from another. But Morton dismisses that notion, suggesting that scenario only occurs when you have more people than you have business.
“We’ve been very careful not to hire new people until they are needed,” he explains. “We also structure walk-ins much the way you would at a car dealership, where the salespeople simply take the next person up. Between that and the fact that retail people and teaching professionals tend to specialize—some handling groups, others specializing in juniors, that sort of thing—it becomes quite easy. The negative competitive environment that you think might exist really doesn’t.”
The reason for that, Morton believes, goes back to the beginning: to the culture he has spent a half-century creating. “It starts with why we’re here,” he says. “We decided that our mission is to enrich lives one customer at a time.”
In fact, the word “golf” isn’t mentioned anywhere in Morton’s mission statement because he contends that what his company does goes beyond the game. “This is where people have their recreation, their special time away from work. Our job is to enrich their lives and exceed their expectations when it comes to making them happy.”
It’s evident in many ways. For instance, the grill only serves Starbucks coffee and the best brands of beverages you can buy. “We only buy the best because we recognize the value in quality,” Morton says. “You will only be served the best meats, the freshest vegetables and the best breads in the area.”
But it’s all done without pretense. The grillroom, while inviting, is golf-centric with a sports-bar feel, very much what a municipal golf customer would want.
That’s the genius to Morton’s model: quality without pretense, service without over-sell and an experience that far exceeds what you expect when you get out of your car in the parking lot.
It’s a concept that Morton could have taken on the road long ago. The hiring and training programs, the marketing expertise and infrastructure, the experience and level of detail he has perfected within the city of Sacramento would translate to hundreds of clubs, public and private, around the country. But Morton is quite content with where he is and what he’s doing.
“I’ve been here almost 60 years and my original partner was here in 1932,” he says. “I understand that the environment you create when you’re here— close, hands-on—is much different from the environment you create when you’re managing from a distance.”
Even so, Morton Golf continues to innovate without venturing far from its Northern California roots. Morton was among the first to embrace FootGolf as an alternative revenue source and set up the driving range as a separate business, open 24 hours a day with the busiest times coming after sundown.
“It’s not like we’re fancy,” Morton says. “We just make a concerted effort to grow the business outside of green fees and carts. And, as I’ve learned over many years, your business grows based on the quality of the people you bring on, the training and guidance you give them, and the culture you create that allows them to grow and thrive.”
Steve Eubanks is an Atlanta-based freelance writer and New York Times bestselling author.