Golf Club Management
Lesson 4: Research and analysis: PESTLE, SWOT and stakeholders
Goal: carry out a PESTLE, SWOT and stakeholder analysis of a golf club that leads to strategic choices, and explain the limits of each tool.
Start with evidence, not opinions
Environmental analysis is only as good as the research behind it. Before any framework, collect:
- Internal data: membership by category, age and gender; joining and resignation trends; rounds played; tee sheet utilisation by day and time; revenue and margin by department; member and staff survey results; complaints log; course condition reports.
- External data: GolfRSA and provincial union figures, The R&A’s participation reports, HNA handicap and rounds data, local population and housing growth (Stats SA census and municipal plans), competitor pricing, water and energy prices, legislation in progress, weather and climate records.
A SWOT built from a workshop of opinions is a list of what the loudest people already believed. One built from data can change minds.
PESTLE: scanning the macro environment
PESTLE organises the external forces the club can’t control. It grew from Aguilar’s (1967) “ETPS” scan of economic, technical, political and social factors, and was later extended with legal and environmental.
| Factor | Examples for a South African golf club |
|---|---|
| Political | Transformation policy in sport (the Eminent Persons Group barometer, GolfRSA’s charter); municipal lease terms for clubs on council land; the quality of municipal services |
| Economic | Cost-of-living pressure on subscriptions; electricity tariff rises and load-shedding; a weak rand raising the cost of imported machinery and chemicals; interest rates on clubhouse debt; the national minimum wage |
| Social | Pressure to transform membership and staff demographics; women and junior participation; crime and members’ concern for safety; demand for nine holes, social golf and off-course formats |
| Technological | Online booking and dynamic pricing; simulators; handicapping apps; AI tools (Lesson 14) |
| Legal | Employment equity sectoral targets (from 2025); the harassment code (2022); mandatory online reporting of POPIA security compromises (from April 2025); provincial liquor licence conditions; child safeguarding |
| Environmental | Water supply failures and restrictions (Gauteng especially); Highveld lightning; heat; treated effluent and borehole options; biodiversity expectations; pressure to cut chemical use |
The trap with PESTLE is the shopping list: 40 bullet points with no judgement about which matter. Finish every PESTLE by ranking each factor on impact (how much it would affect the club) and likelihood or timing, and carry only the top five or six into the SWOT.
Porter’s five forces: the competitive environment
Porter (1979) asks why some industries are more profitable than others, based on five forces: the rivalry between competitors, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitutes, and the bargaining power of buyers and of suppliers. For a club:
- Rivalry: other clubs in the catchment competing for the same members.
- New entrants: simulator venues, driving range entertainment complexes.
- Substitutes: other leisure for the same five hours on a Saturday.
- Buyer power: members can resign; social and nine-hole golfers have many options.
- Supplier power: specialist turf chemicals, irrigation contractors, skilled greenkeepers and chefs in a tight labour market.
It is built for profit-seeking industries, so use it to understand pressures, not to calculate profitability.
SWOT, done properly
SWOT sorts the findings into internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. It is the most used and most criticised tool in strategy:
- Hill and Westbrook (1997) studied 50 companies’ SWOTs and found long, generic lists, with no prioritisation and almost no use of the results afterwards. Their title was “SWOT analysis: it’s time for a product recall”.
- Helms and Nixon (2010) reviewed a decade of SWOT research and found it still widely used, but most valuable when combined with other tools and real data.
Evidence: practitioner framework. Make SWOT work by:
- Building it from your PESTLE, five forces and internal data, with every entry backed by evidence.
- Keeping each quadrant to the five or so items that matter most.
- Converting it into strategy with a TOWS matrix (Weihrich, 1982): match strengths to opportunities (SO), use strengths to counter threats (ST), fix weaknesses to seize opportunities (WO), and defend against the combination of weaknesses and threats (WT).
| Opportunities (younger members, social golf demand) | Threats (drought, rival club’s new clubhouse) | |
|---|---|---|
| Strengths (great course, PGA coaching team) | SO: launch a coached nine-hole beginner membership | ST: market course quality and coaching against the rival’s facilities |
| Weaknesses (tired clubhouse, potable water dependence) | WO: fund the refurbishment with a social membership tier | WT: secure recycled water before the next drought |
Stakeholder analysis
A stakeholder is any group that can affect or is affected by the club (Freeman, 1984). At a golf club the list is long: members (sub-grouped, because full, women, junior, senior and social members want different things), the board, staff, the PGA professional and their team, contractors, neighbours, council, the state golf association, regulators, sponsors and the local community.
Two tools help to prioritise:
- Power and interest grid: high power and high interest stakeholders are managed closely; high power and low interest are kept satisfied; low power and high interest are kept informed; the rest are monitored.
- Salience (Mitchell, Agle and Wood, 1997): stakeholders matter more when they have power, legitimacy and urgency. A neighbour group with a planning objection suddenly has all three.
Bryson (2004) offers a set of practical techniques for running stakeholder analysis in public and non-profit settings. They suit a club, which has to keep many groups on side to pass a special resolution.
Critical view
- All three tools are snapshots, and the environment moves. Repeat them each year, not once per strategic plan.
- They reward confident lists. The skill being assessed is judgement: which three findings really drive your recommendations, and why.
- Stakeholder maps can hide whose voices are missing, such as potential members, women who left, and casual staff.
Seminar questions
- Which PESTLE factor will most affect South African clubs over the next ten years? Would the answer differ between a Gauteng club, a Western Cape club and a coastal KwaZulu-Natal club?
- Is the off-course golf boom a threat or an opportunity for a members’ club?
- Hill and Westbrook called for a “product recall” of SWOT. Defend SWOT against them.
Workplace task 4
Do a ranked PESTLE for your club (top six factors only, each with a source), then a TOWS matrix with one strategy in each cell. This is a first draft of part of your assignment.
Watch
- The five competitive forces that shape strategy (Michael Porter, Harvard Business Review)
Sources
- Aguilar (1967), Scanning the Business Environment, Macmillan
- Bryson (2004), What to do when stakeholders matter, Public Management Review
- Freeman (1984), Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, Pitman
- Helms and Nixon (2010), Exploring SWOT analysis: where are we now?, Journal of Strategy and Management
- Hill and Westbrook (1997), SWOT analysis: it’s time for a product recall, Long Range Planning
- Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997), Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience, Academy of Management Review
- Porter (1979), How competitive forces shape strategy, Harvard Business Review
- Weihrich (1982), The TOWS matrix: a tool for situational analysis, Long Range Planning
- GolfRSA, Affiliated golfers; The R&A (2025), 2024 Global Participation Report
Draft module material for the PGA of South Africa Director of Golf certificate, for discussion. South African law applies throughout. It is general education, not legal or financial advice: Acts, regulations and codes change, so check the current version and take advice before acting on them.