Private Club Radio Show

470: Two Tiny Club Moves That Pack a Massive Punch w/ Denny Corby

• Denny Corby

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What if the most impactful thing your club could do this season… didn’t cost a dime?

In this episode of The Private Club Radio Show, host Denny Corby shares two powerful — and surprisingly simple — ways club leaders can make meaningful connections with members during the holidays.

It’s not about big budgets or fancy activations. It’s about human moments. Gratitude. Intentional outreach. And yes — asking your staff to take the photo.

Inside, you’ll hear:

  • Why Thanksgiving is the perfect time to re-engage quiet or “missing” members
  • A small hospitality habit that creates big emotional ROI
  • “Miss You Week” — a low-effort, high-impact campaign you can run right now
  • How dessert and check-in calls could turn into your club’s most-loved traditions
  • Why member memories matter more than your club newsletter ever will

Whether you're a GM, department head, or hospitality pro, this episode is a warm reminder that the smallest gestures often go the furthest — especially when paired with purpose.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hey everybody, welcome to the Private Club Radio Show, where we give you the scoop on all things private golf and country clubs from mastering leadership and management, food and beverage excellence, member engagement secrets, board governance, and everything in between, all while keeping it fun and light. Whether you're a club veteran, just getting your feet wet, or somewhere in the middle, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Denny Corby. Welcome to the show. We have Thanksgiving coming up this week, the rest of the holidays coming up the next couple of weeks, and before we know it, it's going to be the end of the year. And I want to share with you two simple things, both that are small and tiny on paper, but they scream, we see you and we care about you to your members. One is checking on the members who have gone quiet, and two is helping the members who show up actually capture their memories. That's it. If you are listening to this right now around Thanksgiving, first of all, you're a hero. You have so much work coming up, and I hope you get to spend time with your families, work families, home families, all the families, but more importantly, your home families. So I don't know if you're listening to this on the way to the car to work, on the way to the club, drinking a coffee at the gym, answering a text, mentally counting how many turkeys you have and you're walking. I don't know. But you have so much going on. So I promise I'm not going to give you homework. I just want to give you two ideas, two thoughts to take into this week and the rest of the year. The first is if you haven't done so already, carve out a little bit of time and check in on your members who you may have not seen recently. Maybe not, I'm not saying a week, two weeks, three weeks. I'm thinking a month, two months, maybe even three months. The ones who maybe used to come to Wednesday dinners and now have gone silent, the ladies group players, the people who come to the gym, you know, you can tell and see who's been around. And if not, guess what? A lot of us have amazing club softwares. You have your members firsts, you have your Jonas's, you have your North Stars, you have whatever you use, you have the ability to go in and see usage. So go in, see who has not used the club, and start maybe a mini campaign. Nothing crazy. And I want to tell you what prompted this thought in this episode because I was chatting with a GM friend of mine recently. And this is a club where I personally know members and clients, and we keep in touch. So when I was chatting with them, I asked how these members were, and they said, Ooh, I actually haven't seen or heard from them in a little bit. And I mentioned to them that I know for a fact the husband had a decent health issue, scare, some things that have happened, and her jaw dropped. And it wasn't a cold or uncaring jaw drop or anything like that. It was just because we all have so much going on, and sometimes you just forget things, people, whatever. It slips through the cracks, and that's okay. So many things are flying at you and coming at you on a daily basis, especially around this time. And they told me, I'm gonna go reach out, make sure they're good, and just check in on things. And after that call, I got I got thinking. If I know one family who is going through something at a club and maybe not using the club as much, how many others are quietly dealing in this? How many, how many other people are quietly dealing with this and going through this? And this is has to be happening at other clubs. So find that list, find those people and reach out. Maybe even with the team, I know we're all busy, do a little, a little campaign. Maybe if you get a list, hopefully it's not many because hopefully a lot of your members are using your clubs, but let's just say it's that time of year. And granted, you know, I know some members move and have different clubs that they go to, so that's a whole different thing. That's a whole separate, you know, uh, we're not talking about this here. This is more re-engaging, getting, making sure our people are okay and checking in on them. And you can even divide it amongst your leadership team. Who's to even say it just has to be you? Hopefully, there's not like a lot of people. So if you have to sprinkle it out a little bit, um, or maybe you want to do a bigger campaign, and it's, you know, you have some people who maybe haven't used the club for a while, and then maybe you have ones who haven't used it for three months, two months, a month, whatever, and you have different touch points or a different approach to each one. But regardless, the job is simple. Just reach out like a human. Hey, it's Denny from the club. You popped into my mind. We haven't seen you around lately. Everything okay, everything good. You know, I'm always a fan of giving them a reason to come in. Hey, next time you come in, or why don't you come in next week? Desserts on us. Hey, we know you like, we got a fresh bottle of whatever in. Why don't you come? Bottle's on us, or the first class is on us, the first drink is on us, the appetizer is on us, maybe a handwritten note to those people with a drink ticket or a token or just something that just brightens their day. Nothing huge, just enough to say, we really do care about you. We see you, or actually, we don't see you, we want to see you. Please come come and see us. And you never know what responses you might get. Hey, we've been crazy with sports, we've been helping with the grandkids, we've been traveling. Awesome. Those are all just points to know and just information to have. Because you might also get, oh, my mom's been sick, my wife just had surgery, I lost my job. You you don't know what's going on, and clubs are a place of caring, so let's care. Because that could be heavy stuff, and this is where clubs can really shine. Personally, I think so. And this is the kind of thing that turns membership into relationship. Oh, and hey, if you are looking for fun ways to create really cool memories for your members, I do a really cool magic mind reading and comedy show specifically designed for the club audience. That's a great time. It's super engaging, a lot of crowd work, a lot of banter. If you want to learn more, head on over to dennycorby.com. Perform for well over 350 clubs at this point, I think over 400. So if you want to be in good hands, holla at you, boy, DennyCorby.com. And just real quick, here's a dumb idea. I'm just full of them. Uh, if anybody talks to me on the phone, you know, I just throw out random ideas and sometimes there's there there's there's a good one. Uh, but I thought about what about like a miss you week? It doesn't have to be like an advertised thing, it could be like an internal club thing. Like, what about like a miss you week? Pick a random slow week you know you might have, whether it's December, January, heck, February, who cares? But pick a time and hey, come in this week, enjoy a complimentary dessert on a whatever it is. I just thought that was a cool, a cool idea. Another idea is, hey, and it doesn't have to even be you, the GM or whoever you are at the club. It could be a group effort. Why not maybe give a name or two to chef? Right? The bartender, somebody that that person maybe connects with. Maybe you know that one member who hasn't been coming in loves food and loves the chef and whatever. Maybe have the chef call. Maybe you know the one bartender and the one member always click, they're always laughing, talking about sports. Hey, maybe have the bartender call the member from the from the club phone. Hey, you come in to watch the game on Thursday? I got your seat reserved in a you know, cold cocktail waiting, whatever it is. I don't know. I don't know. Really simple, really human. All right, that is part one. Now I want to talk about the second part, which is memories. Because while some members are missing, we have a whole bunch of them who are about to pour through your doors. Thanksgiving, Christmas parties, holiday parties, kids home from college, grandparents coming in from out of town, whatever, they are utilizing your club. And the club is about to become a foreground or background. It's good, it's gonna be ground for a lot of memories. So I want to give you a fun challenge that costs absolutely nothing, just takes a little bit of time for you and your team and is totally in your control. Now, confession time, me and my wife are horrible at taking pictures together. Every trip we go on, oh man, we have to take pictures. Every time we go out, we have to get a picture together. And the next thing we know, we're home, we're in our jammies, cuddled up with the dogs, and we're like, we did not get a photo together. We just came back from vacation, and that literally happened. We have a few good photos, but we should have more for how good we looked the whole time. No, I have 10 pictures of the sushi, but two of me and my wife. So now imagine we have our members, we have our families, we have our members' friends, our members' families coming for coming to the club. And I know this is not just me being, I know a lot of couples, a lot of families, they just they're just sometimes bad at taking photos. So here's just an idea to talk about to your staff, to your crew, to your bartenders, to your servers, that when you have people come in and they're looking good and you can tell they look good, even if they don't look good, you make them feel good. But maybe at the beginning, maybe in the middle, maybe the food's running a little bit late, maybe at the very end, you just say, You guys look really great tonight. Give me your phone. Let me take a picture of you. Take that little proactive approach, take their phone, take pictures of them. They're never gonna be mad, but they might be really happy. And it might not be right now. It might be a week from now, a month from now, two months. You don't know when, but as they're scrolling, they might stop and look at that photo, but oh, that was a that was a fun night. Oh, that was a great meal. Remember, oh, that was so much fun when Bob and Phyllis came with us and blah, blah, blah. It's not waiting for someone to ask, it's just doing it. Could even be the host as as they're as they're walking in and they and they look great. Oh my god, you guys look amazing tonight. Give me your phone. Let me take a photo, stand by the tree, stand here. Or even if they're it doesn't matter. Hey, before you guys leave, let me take a photo so you guys can send it in the family group chat or whatever. I don't know. But you're picking up what I'm putting down. Because that also got me thinking, too. Remember the lost art of when you would go to a restaurant and when it was your birthday or something, they would take a photo with that digital camera and they would print it out and give it to you. Maybe we can bring that back. You can get really great, really great, cheap, quick ink printers that print on good paper, that are Bluetooth, that you can have, you know, you can have a picture in seconds. Or you can take that picture and do something with like a maybe a nice card or something too. Doesn't matter, that's a whole other conversation. But you get where I'm going. And if you really want to bring this full circle, which I think is always fun, is if you combine the two. So you run that little campaign, you reach out to some members who maybe aren't as engaged with the club, you you know, what for whatever reason, and you get them to come in and you take their picture on their phone, obviously, but maybe you can get that picture, or maybe the staff member, the GM, maybe they take a picture on their phone, maybe they airdrop that picture to you. Hey, we would love to add that to like the newsletter. The thing is just getting the picture. And maybe you run a little campaign, and maybe it's something a week later, two, who knows? I don't I don't know where where I'm going with it, but maybe it's we notice when you disappear and we notice when you're here. And it's just like and it's a picture, and maybe you do something in Canva and you print it out. I don't know. It's just saying, we appreciate you, we're thinking about you, and we want to go above and beyond. You matter here, beyond your dues, beyond your tea times, beyond your F and B minimums. You matter here. You're using data to find out who is missing, and then you're using presence to say, look at this beautiful moment right here in front of us. Let us help us capture that for you. This is the stuff that makes clubs irreplaceable. And what's crazy is that there's companies and businesses that people spend nowhere near the amount of time and money on and with that do things like this. And us at clubs, we have the ability to go above and beyond and do so much. So let's do it. So, real quick, find members who haven't been there for a minute, reach out, let them know you are thinking about them, and if and when you get them in, or just your members, take the moment to capture those moments for them on their cameras. And if you want, you can do stuff with those pictures internally uh for a really cool campaign. So that's it. Make it a great season, take care of your people, take care of your staff, take care of your members, take care of yourself. That's it. And as we're wrapping up 2025 here going in going into 2026, if you are looking for some fun entertainment for your club, a really fun member event night, let me know. We got the Denny Corby experience. There's excitement, there's mystery, also there's magic, mind reading, and comedy, a ton of laughs, gasps, and holy craps. If I can help you create some memories in your club, let me know. Reach out, dennycorby.com. That's this episode. Happy Thanksgiving. Until next time, catch y'all on the flippity flip.

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Denny Corby

Host