I founded the women’s club at Presidio Golf Course — the West Coast’s second-oldest course, in San Francisco — and produced more than 300 tournaments over seven years. The lessons aren’t about golf.
Tournaments are a perfect operations laboratory. There’s a fixed start time. The course is a one-way system — Hole 1, Hole 2, Hole 3, until you’re back. You have between 60 and 144 players, each on a slightly different schedule, and they all need to eat, drink, score, and check out without anything bottlenecking. Either it works, or it very visibly doesn’t.
Operations Is Sequencing, Not Effort.
The first dozen tournaments, I did what most new operators do: I tried to be everywhere. The result wasn’t bad — but it wasn’t repeatable. Every tournament was a small heroic effort, and the day after, I couldn’t tell you which decisions had actually mattered and which had been wasted motion.
The shift came when I started treating tournaments like a sequence problem instead of an effort problem. Every event has roughly fifteen moments where the wheels can come off. Most operators try to be present at all fifteen. The right move is to identify which three or four are truly load-bearing and ruthlessly own those.
For our tournaments, the load-bearing moments were: arrival check-in, the shotgun horn, the turn (when half the field hits Hole 10), the scoring tent at finish, and the awards. If those five moments hit clean, everything else could absorb minor friction. If any one of them broke, the whole day felt off.
How Do Small Details Compound in Event Operations?
Three hundred tournaments is enough to teach you that small details aren’t cosmetic — they compound. The temperature of the coffee at 7am check-in. The sequencing of the cart staging. The position of the photographer at the awards. Whether the music at the clubhouse is two clicks too loud.
None of these on their own change anyone’s day. But together, they determine whether the player walks away saying “that was a great day” or “that was fine.” The difference between those two adjectives is the difference between a club that grows and a club that doesn’t. So you fight for every degree of coffee and every click of the music.
The Players Are the Product. The Operation Is the Service.
I built the women’s club from zero. We had a charter membership of about thirty when we started; we ended my tenure at multiples of that. Growth came from one thing: the day-of experience. People joined because their friend had played one of our tournaments and called them on the way home.
The mistake new clubs make is investing in marketing before the experience is right. Marketing pulls people in once. The experience is what brings them back, and what makes them recruit their friends. If the operation is tight, the marketing essentially becomes word-of-mouth.
Why I’m Telling You About Golf in a B2B Marketing Context.
Because the same skillset runs both. The day I produce a partner roundtable for a B2B tech company isn’t different in kind from the day I produce a women’s tournament. Same load-bearing moments. Same compound effect of small details. Same insistence that the experience is the marketing.
Three hundred tournaments is what made me good at corporate events. The floors I walk now look different — convention centers, hotel ballrooms, outdoor brand activations. But the operating system is the same one I learned at the second-oldest course on the West Coast.