Dear Members
With the sun beginning to shine and the rain clouds giving us some respite we at the club are preparing ourselves for the start of the 2016 golfing season. Our greens team have been working full steam this week and are happy to announce that we are playing off main tees and greens. Tees, fairways and greens have all had a fresh cut, bunkers in play have all been raked and many of our trees are standing prettier than ever before and proudly showing off their winter cut and prune. All the work that we have put in throughout 2015 and throughout the winter months seem to be paying off as evidenced by the fact that our course is recovering faster and looking pretty good for this time of the year. We thank our members for the support you have given us throughout all these works and take this opportunity to promise that our hard work will continue and that we hope that you will continue to see improvements to our course over the years to come.
This Saturday the One Lamp Trophy is being held at the club and we are happy to see a full list up on the board. We are delighted to hear that the Vets won their match against Surrey National Golf Club yesterday and even happier to hear the compliments our opponents paid us on our food and the course. As you will all know we have also appointed our Head Professional. Sam Clayden is currently the Head Assistant Professional at The Royal Automobile Club. He will be at the club this Saturday to greet our members on the 1st Tee and shall also be present at the Captains Drive in before taking up his official duties in the first week of April.
From a management point of view, our intention this year as promised in the members forum held on Saturday the 6 February is to grow our membership. We have no doubt that this is crucial in order to further improve our golfing and social experience here at our great club. As you can imagine, we as a team have discussed at great lengths how best to recruit new members. One of the obvious choices was to offer introductory deals to new members.
Whether or not to do really good offers to new members was something that we thought really hard and long about. On the one hand we were very much aware of our existing members but on the other hand we were aware of every other club in our area promoting introductory offers and growing membership. Although we are strongly of the opinion that price is not everything, it certainly gets new members interested and tempted to try our course. Our research has shown that there are a lot of unhappiness at other clubs at this moment in time and we think that this is a great opportunity to try get them on board with us. Park Wood is receiving really positive comments about our course and the direction we are heading and so we really want to spread the word. We have therefore taken the decision to launch some deals to entice the new member and get them on board.
We have spoken to quite a few members before deciding on these offers and on the whole we have their support as they appreciate the priority for the club as a whole to grow membership. As you will all know, last year we did absolutely no deals for new members. This year however, we feel that we really need to offer something to challenge our competitors and also to show off our improving golf course.
Please be reassured that these are only introductory offers and likely to be time limited. We also hope you understand that it really is quite necessary if we are to grow our membership and recreate the great atmosphere at the club. There is certainly a buzz generating about PW and we just need something to give people an opportunity to give us a try.
We appreciate that some of our current members may feel that this is unfair but we promise that we will do our members justice by raising our standards and working very hard to produce a great course and provide good service to you. We wished to write to you directly to explain how and why we decided to launch these offers rather than for you to hear it through the grapevine.
Please however remember that;
1) Should you introduce a new 7 day member (to whom we can offer these great deals), you will received 75GBP onto your levy card as a thank you gesture
2) Should your spouse be at another club or considering starting golf we can offer them full 7 day membership at only GBP295
We hope we can get your support. Should you have any questions or wish to discuss any of the above, please do not hesitate to knock on my door or give us a ring.
Our warmest regards
KJ