Financial Information Is Not Mine To Give Out

There’s been plenty of discussion on this website over the past week or so about the Rounds Played program that the National Golf Course Owners Association and the Canadian PGA are running in partnership.

In reply to the current poll being conducted on the home page, my answer is that if it’s confidential and our name isn’t attached to it, I don’t mind talking about rounds played in the sense that they worded it something like, `We polled 50 courses and here is the average rounds.’

I can estimate reasonably well how many rounds a particular golf course does and people can guess pretty accurately where we are also. People who really know the business can probably peg my rounds to within 10 per cent and I would think that I can peg 80 per cent of golf courses to within 10 per cent.

When people do a report on rounds in the private club sector or the public course sector or the nine-hole sector, they usually don’t say this course had this many rounds and that course had that many rounds. As long as they generalize, I’m okay with that – it’s good for data as long as they’re not putting my name to a number.

When it comes to financials, even though I know it’s going to be confidential, I still couldn’t give up that information.

It may be one in one thousand, but let’s say somebody left to go to another job and they took my numbers with them. It’s illegal, but my ownership at Angus Glen when I was there or my board at Coppinwood would not be happy spreading that information around.

I’m happy to talk to people in general terms. I’m happy to answer a phone call from colleagues, but I can’t give out financials. I think that most people feel that way in respect to financials.

I’ve got no problem talking to a friend in the business or sitting on a roundtable discussing general information, but when it comes to financials, I’ve always felt I don’t own these numbers, so they’re not mine to give out.

I will try to help out the NGCOA and Canadian PGA as I have in the past, but I have a responsibility to others when it comes to financials. If I work for somebody, they’re not my numbers, they’re somebody else’s.

(For more on this subect, click here and see the current GNN Poll on the home page-Editor)

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