Group News

Essential Business Planning to Thrive in 2025

Ian

Steve Bird, Foremost Golf Business Development Consultant and Education Lead highlights some simple steps that will stack the odds in your favour as we approach 2025.

The most successful businesses we work with all have one thing in common: they make a simple plan for the following year.

The cliché ‘work on the business, not in the business’ especially applies to a PGA professional. You have so many distractions in your day-to-day environment, it is impossible to see the wood from the trees unless you take a step back. Often the most obvious errors and opportunities reveal themselves when you do this.

Diarise some time away from the business to take stock of how it is performing, successes to build on, mistakes that have been made that shouldn’t be repeated and how to improve going forwards. Here are some key areas to focus on for 2025:

Cash Flow

How did you manage your finances in 2024? Were there any pinch points that you could plan for next year? We are coming off the back of 2 years with near 9-month winters, so it makes sense to plan for this going forwards and then anything more positive is a bonus. Every business needs to do a cash flow forecast for the following year to know what sales you need to do, how much stock that requires and what you can spend and when. Here at Foremost, we have a fantastic document that does this for you, ensuring there are no nasty surprises the following year.

Stock

This is an area many pro’s have struggled with over the last couple of years and need to adjust their plans now. Your till system is your best friend in helping to predict what you will need for 2025. Never go into pre-books without this data. Place your orders based on what you are likely to sell, not the numbers you need to do to get a ‘better deal’. It is only profit when it has sold so don’t take a risk! When it comes to shoes and bags in particular, make sure you factor in a percentage that you will inevitably have to special order in for customers and deduct this from the amount you pre-book.

It sounds so obvious, but it is an extremely common mistake to go into pre-books / stock rooms without this essential information. If you don’t have it, invariably you will get tempted into buying more than you need to ‘get a better deal’. Remember: the number one way pro’s lose margin is not buying at the wrong price….it is overstocking.

Example Category: shoes

How many pairs of shoes did you sell on average each year over the last 2 years?
Deduct 15% from this, for the number you will inevitably have to order in.
Do not pre-book any more pairs than this number.
This can be reduced even further if your retail group have any exclusive higher margin products or special buys planned.
Don’t just order full size runs in each shoe. According to FootJoy, in 2023 80% of shoes sold were between sizes 8 and 10. Therefore it makes sense to order a full size run in your bread and butter shoe, but concentrate on 8-10 in the other ranges.

Marketing

Retail turnover used to be governed by how big your shop was and how much stock was in it. Things have totally changed though: it is now governed by how well you market yourself. If you aren’t digitally communicating with your golfers when they aren’t at your facility, you can guarantee your competitors are. Obviously these communications need to regularly promote your services, choice and value, but also make sure you include fun local content. The objective should simply be this: when people think about golf, make sure they think about you.

Part of your planning should be to put together a basic marketing framework for 2025 that includes:

Key events the pro shop / golf club are running
Product campaigns your retail group have organised
Important dates (majors, Father/Mothers’ Day, Black Friday, etc…)

Foremost have developed a digital marketing calendar that enables our professionals to input and view all of this key information and also allows their ‘Marketing Editor’ in the office to view it and provide support for each event.

Staff

Are your team providing the same level of service as you and selling well when you’re not in the shop? If not, plan staff training and development for 2025. Many expect their staff to be performing to a very high standard, but don’t invest the time in them or give them the tools to be at that standard. There are a number of golf professionals that always seem to have brilliant staff around them. This is not a coincidence. It reflects the importance these pro’s place on developing their team. The stronger your staff are, the better the business will do and the less reliance on you to do everything.

Take Advice

If you are in a retail buying group, there is lots of support available to help you plan. Use this support: We’re here to help.

In conclusion, make sure you diarise time away from your business, so you can plan to capitalise on the strengths of this year and not repeat the mistakes. It will be one of the best uses of your time and will help make 2025 as strong as possible.