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By Steve Eubanks
Davis Sezna is developing a new way of doing things at Heritage Golf Group
What’s the internal rate of return on hospitality? That question has, at some point or another, vexed everyone in the golf industry because the answer depends on your facility, your market and your locale.
Davis Sezna, CEO and managing partner at Heritage Golf Group, learned the answer to that question at a very early age. Sezna’s father owned an 18th-century hotel in Delaware with one of the area’s most popular restaurants.
“When I was 14, he told me I was going to be valeting cars,” Sezna recounts. “I said, ‘Dad, I don’t have a driver’s license.’ And he informed me that I’d just been promoted to a 16-year-old. Well, I learned pretty quickly that when I’d run out and get a car, I’d get a quarter. But on a February night when it’s 20 degrees, if I asked the servers who was checking out and [then] had their car out front, running and warm, I would get a dollar. That creative hospitality was four-times as valuable as simply doing the job.”
Indeed, that lesson—particularly the concept of being creative—has not only stayed with Sezna for decades, it has become the cornerstone of his management philosophy, one that led him to create one of the Mid-Atlantic’s premier restaurant and club management companies, the 1492 Hospitality Group, which served more than 100 private clubs and resorts. Sezna also spent five years as president of La Quinta Resorts and then as CEO of The Cliffs before moving to Heritage, which owns and manages 13 golf courses with more acquisitions coming soon.
“Clubs don’t have to be bizarre,” Sezna proclaims. “They don’t have to go to 15-inch holes and that sort of thing, but they do need to loosen up. It wasn’t too many years ago that you had to wear a coat and tie to the club for dinner, and had to be 16 to enter the men’s locker room. Everything was geared for grown-ups. That’s not the case anymore. Families need to be welcome. Individuals need to be welcome. It needs to be a big building with a bunch of fun stuff to do.”
In other words, you need the infrastructure and, more importantly, an abundance of programming to ensure every day at the facility is fun and that there’s always something going on. According to Sezna, those programs cannot be cookie-cutter. They must be tailored to the community.
For instance, at one of Heritage’s clubs in Virginia, Sezna found a couple of members who were retired Vaudeville performers, so he hired them to put on shows once a month. They’ve also identified yoga instructors, musicians, authors and “all kinds of interesting people” to come in and offer unique programs in their clubs.
In addition to programming, the key to success, in Sezna’s estimation, is utilizing the skill set of the experts on staff. “You have a director of agronomy who is an expert. You have a culinary director who is an expert. You have a director of finance who is an expert,” he explains. “So whether you’re trying to grow your lawn at home or attempting to host a dinner party for 12 at your house, why wouldn’t you utilize the experts at your club in your personal life?”
True to that ideal, in the Heritage model there are no golf shops in clubs. They’re “stores,” where one can buy everything from a johnnie-O pullover to a $20,000 John Deere tractor depending on what the market demands.
“I was told, for example, that in Sarasota we don’t have the retail sales numbers we do at other places because the older members don’t spend money on clothes for themselves,” Sezna says. “That might be true, but those same older members will spend tens of thousands of dollars taking their grandkids on a ski vacation. Why wouldn’t you have a grandkids’ corner in your stores where you have an older demographic? The member takes his grandkids to the store, points to the corner and says, ‘Pick out whatever you want.’ No matter what they say out loud, they’re always thinking ‘Nothing but the best for my grandchild.’”
According to Sezna, food options also have to reflect the environment. Too many clubs get stuck on the tried-and-true 19th-hole menu: pub food with a club sandwich and a chilidog thrown in to remind you that you’re at a golf course. “I remember when we took over Doral and the menu there was no different than what you would get in the Cincinnati Marriott,” he says. “How is it possible to be in Miami and not have incredible Cuban and South American food?”
The way Sezna sees it, those are the kinds of questions not enough operators ask today. “My whole philosophy is [this]: Every day we throw a party, and the better the party, the more people will come,” he says. “That’s in every department of every club we have. And that’s why I’m excited about golf and the opportunities that are out there to take these large parcels of land with big clubhouses in the middle of high demographic areas and do some very special things.”
Steve Eubanks is an Atlanta-based freelance writer and New York Times bestselling author.