Setting the Stage for Unforgettable Live Events

Ready and Willing Members

Clubs should now feel empowered by their members’ willingness and even eagerness to try new things. Many clubs have taken inspiration from newly popular entertainment destinations such as Topgolf and adapted those experiences to their own facilities. By adding comfortable seating, entertainment and refreshments to a driving range, those clubs have created unique and engaging experiences for their members.

There are many new ways to leverage your existing facilities to create new membercentric experiences, such as converting tennis courts into a dance showcase or transforming the wine cellar into an intimate jazz club. The possibilities are endless when clubs start to think creatively about the spaces they already have.

The key to creating unforgettable experiences lies in thinking outside the box, leveraging industry entertainment resources, and adding elements of surprise. By elevating events in this way, clubs can boost member recruitment and retention, increase staff engagement and morale, and give their members something truly special to talk about. The physical facilities of a club serve as the canvas upon which these experiences are crafted, and investing in their versatility and adaptability is essential to staying ahead of the curve in the age of AI.

In an age where AI is becoming increasingly adept at creating art and music, the value of in-person experiences will only continue to grow. By focusing on creating unique, engaging, and memorable events that maximize the potential of their physical facilities, private clubs can set themselves apart and provide their members with experiences they simply cannot get anywhere else. It’s time for clubs to embrace the power of their spaces and create unforgettable experiences that will keep members coming back for more.

 

Endless Possibilities

In addition to the live music events described with this article, here are some other concepts for maximizing what already exists within a club property and turning “ordinary” facilities into extraordinary experiences.

 

Bringing Nashville North 

Nashville, Tenn. has exploded as an in-demand destination in recent years, but with that has come huge crowds and soaring costs. For their members who’d still like to hear the sounds of Music City along with other high-end live music experiences, but aren’t too eager to battle the bachelorette parties on Broadway, two clubs in the upper Midwest have found attentiongetting ways to bring Nashville north to them, as part of a regular series of wildly popular concert events that have transformed otherwise ordinary facilities into exciting entertainment venues.

When Kyle Ruch, CCM, became general manager of North Shore Country Club in Glenview, Ill. (suburban Chicago) in 2017, a club committee expressed a desire to bring a large concert event to the club. Ruch then turned to Little Owl Entertainment to help stage a Nashville music festival on the golf course.

“I don’t want to say it’s complex,” says Ruch (who is now general manager/ chief operating officer of The Forest Country Club in Fort Myers, Fla.), in explaining the decision to engage an outside production company to help put on the event. “But if you don’t have the experience, you want to do it right, especially the first time, to get the members on board moving forward.”

Through the partnership, Ruch says, “I handled the club side and financial side, and [Little Owl] did everything from arranging the talent to laying out the stage, handling the lighting and sound, and loading everything in and out. “We learned a lot that first year, and it just got better and better each year,” Ruch adds. North Shore scheduled its sixth annual Music Fest for 2024 (it had to skip 2020 because of the pandemic) and has changed themes and locations on its property for the event over that time. Five hundred to six hundred people now routinely attend the concerts, which are tied into the club’s member-member golf tournament that is always held in the third week of July.

“It’s become the premier event of the year for the club,” says Ruch. “After the membermember gets over on Saturday, everyone rallies and comes back that evening for the concert. We changed to themes like ‘Yacht Rock,’ where we brought in some boats that members had a blast getting into for pictures, and we also moved the location around, to now be in the parking lot. We wanted to keep having different experiences for the membership, to keep them guessing and on their toes and surprised.”

Through the experience it gained over the years, North Shore has also learned to position tents around the concert area, not only in case of rain, but also “to accommodate any of the folks who want to sit down at tables and aren’t looking to be on the dance floor all night,” Ruch notes. The club also found a benefit in outsourcing all food-and-beverage service for the concert to food trucks, which helped to reduce overtime for the week and make it possible to cross-utilize staff from different departments to become servers, bussers or “just hospitality attendants in general,” Ruch says.

Over time, North Shore also learned that it didn’t need to try to lure members with a lot of extras outside of the concert itself. “The first couple of years, we used to include gifts like foldable chairs with the club logo or themed cups or t-shirts, as part of the admissions price,” Ruch says. “But we scaled back from that, because we realized it was less important to the membership to have something to take away, and it was more about the experience.”

Reinventing the Ballroom 

At Edina (Minn.) Country Club, members have been treated to more intimate “Music City Live” events held in the club’s ballroom, as well as on its outdoor patio adjacent to the golf course, with attendance ranging from 150 to close to 300. For the club’s 100th anniversary, a larger music festival was held in the parking lot that drew 500 people.

“The way these events are orchestrated and set up, it makes you feel like you’re in a club in the middle of Nashville’s Broadway district,” says Three Carpenter, CCM, Edina CC’s general manager. “Very quickly, you can create a vibe and experience that is so different than anything you’ve ever done at your club, people walk in and say, ‘Where am I?’

“Our members hated our ballroom and didn’t want to be in there for anything,” Carpenter adds. “But now for these [Music City Live] events, they’re like, ‘Absolutely, it’s a great place to go.’

“The success of the concerts has also raised the bar at Edina CC for its regular schedule of eventssuch as Mother’s Day or Easter or Santa’sBrunch, Carpenter notes. “The buzz has become, ‘What just happened at the club— we’ve never seen an event like that,’” he says. “When our members see the kind of entertainers that are being brought in— we’ve had Grammy winners and several performers with number-one hits— they tell their friends, not just at the club but all around the city, and say, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ 

“So we want to continue to pushthe envelope, to change the culture of the club and create the expectation that this is now the norm.”