Redditch’s Kerry Alligan-Smith

The interview...Kerry ALLIGAN-SMITH

Redditch’s ‘Pocket Rocket’ is leading her club out of the coronavirus pandemic with confidence

You came to Redditch from a very commercial background. What was it that attracted you about working in a private members’ club? They’re very forward thinking. They made some dramatic changes before I joined – so smaller committees and having the general manager on the board. They were looking for somebody to take it to next stage and to really try and push things a lot more.

It is a traditional club. It is a private members’ club, but they are very open to new and creative ideas.

That’s my background. It’s all about ‘what difference can we make? Let’s try it. If it doesn’t work, what lessons can we learn from that?’ It’s about having the trust in the membership, and having the trust in the committee, to allow me to do what I need to do for the betterment of the club.

Was it a bit of a culture shock at first? I don’t mean that negativity, but you’ve come from very highprofile projects and environments that are heavily sales oriented into a traditional private members’ club environment… It was really challenging in the beginning. The way you would look at it is going from a corporate background into a family-owned business. There’s policies, rules and regulations, and discussions about making decisions.

So one of the things was really to try and develop trust within the committees – to say ‘look, this is what we need to do, this is how we can change it’.

It was going to be bumpy in the beginning, because it’s a bit of a shock for the members but also for me. In my first year, we took the pro in-house as well. You were brought in to be a moderniser and one of your first projects was to consolidate the golf club as one entity and one team. That must have been a tricky project to push through because you’re dealing with structures that have been in place for a long time… You do have to ride it out and it is painful at times but it’s just one of those things you need to do. It was the best thing we could have done – especially coming into the pandemic.

We moved staff around. We all did a bit of everybody’s role. Even at the moment, I’ve got pro shop and bar staff working on the greens.

Normally I’ve got six greens staff. Now I’ve got nine of them all focused on the work to prepare the course for opening.

That’s key. If we were split up as a team, or we had franchises here, there, and everywhere, it would have been an absolutely traumatic period.

We didn’t have to worry about paying a retainer for the pro, or furloughs, or any of those things. We tried to be really creative and really proactive.

Even though we’re going through this difficult time, everybody’s still being supported by the club and still in work. That’s really important.

A lot of people out there aren’t working. When they do come back to work because they’ve had so much time on furlough, they’re really going to struggle coming back into the workplace.

So you’ve had this big consolidation exercise and then a pandemic the like of which hasn’t been seen for 100 years in your time at Redditch. You’ve not experienced normal yet… The first month I started it snowed so I was known as the Ice Queen.

Now I’m known as the Covid Queen!

What has helped is my background. Working in shopping centres and at the Olympic Park, I’d done quite a lot of work around crisis management.

So, in this sort of scenario, I’ve actually come into my own. These things don’t faze me. I always look for a solution. I always look at how we can get around things.

The first and second lockdowns, I worked all the way through. I was part-time furloughed in January and then back to normal because we’ve got a refurbishment and an extremely tight deadline to get that sorted.

We did go through some redundancies. It was a heavily reduced headcount but we are now starting to rebuild as we come out of the pandemic.

I had all the support from the committee, but it was still really challenging and a really testing time. But it was something that, as a club, needed to be done.

At that time, we didn’t know how long the furlough [scheme] was going to continue. We didn’t know where anything was going. There were some extremely difficult conversations taking place.

I’ve struggled in the latest lockdown, I must admit. January was really challenging. You’re constantly up and down through this whole pandemic.

You come out of it, things are going well, you start planning and rebuilding and then you get slapped down again with the second lockdown.

Then you have Christmas and you think ‘right, it’s a new year and we go into that’ and you’re knocked back down again.

So, in the first part of January, I struggled but it was more a point of just keeping yourself busy.

Now, with the refurbishment, we’re getting back into golf and we’re starting to rebuild and make plans, that has brought me back up to where I was before.

Those things give me the buzz. That keeps me going. We all want an easy life but if it wasn’t fast paced, if there wasn’t a challenge, if there wasn’t anything I didn’t have to do, that would worry me more than having to do too much. I enjoy spinning plates.

You have a consensual style of management. You like your team to take responsibility and you give them the means to do that. But you’re also a people person so how difficult has it been not to have communication over lockdowns? I still had my team meetings. We always had a catch up with the team at least once a month. It’s just to keep them updated and make sure they’re still motivated to come back.

Because the team has been condensed so much over the last few months – and we’ve all been doing each other’s roles at some point – that’s actually made us even closer.

For example, there’s the bar staff and pro shop working on the greens. They’ve got more of an understanding in terms of how the greenkeepers work, the amount of work that’s involved, and vice versa.

So even though the pandemic has been absolutely awful, it’s actually been a benefit for the club and the staff coming in.

I would never ask somebody to do something I wouldn’t do myself. It’s leading by example.

If somebody has an idea, if they want to try something, I will completely support them.

Even if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. We tried it, and it’s about the lessons that can be learned and what we can improve.

That’s where you get the

momentum, the constant change and the constant improvement.

The members will naturally come with you. But you do need the whole team to be on board, to get the end result and meet the members’ expectations.

You said you’re going through a refurbishment. It’s been a terrible time financially for some clubs through this period but, presumably, Redditch is looking forward with confidence? The golf club is in a healthy position. We did what we could for the members in the first lockdown. We have actually reduced our 7-day membership fee for this year, when lots of golf clubs are putting their prices up.

Last year, we looked at a five-year plan and what we wanted to do was to try and harmonise the subscriptions.

Five and six-day will come into seven-days. We’ll have intermediate discounted memberships integrated so when they hit the age of 30 it’s not so much of a big jump.

We started that process last year. We made a decision to make the reduction, which is what we promised our members. We’ve

Kerry Alligan-Smith Kerry started her career in a corporate environment – in banking, sales, media sales and managing shopping centres. She managed large outdoor events at the Olympic Park, in London, and successfully applied for the general manager’s job at Redditch in 2017. Kerry was named Newcomer of the Year at the prestigious GCMA Golf Club Management Awards in 2019.

stuck to that, and all the new members joining now will be on the same subscription fee as a full 7-day member.

You’re known as the ‘Pocket Rocket’. Tell me a little bit about where that came from? Presumably it refers to the energy you show in your work… I was called the Pocket Rocket in my previous role as well. I’m all over the place, but in a good way. I can do so many different things. Once a decision is made, I don’t mess around and it gets delivered.

The refurbishment we’re doing at the moment is a big project. I got the go ahead on the Friday, work started on the Monday and I’ve given the builders and all the team a deadline of April 12 for that to be 100 per cent finished.

The committee thinks it’s going to be May 17 and I haven’t allowed myself enough time. It will be done by April 12.

We’re building a working hub. I went to the committee in January to say ‘look, a lot of people work from home anyway. More and more people are naturally going to be working from home. Why can’t we create a space where we can get members to come, plug in, do some work, meet a friend and go out and play the game?’ Or they can be one-on-one having a coffee meeting.

It’s just ways to really try and utilise the space and create that work-life balance for our members

as well as having the social elements and the functions that go with it at a later date.

Again, there’s a lot of golf clubs you can’t go into and use your phone. We’re putting workstations in and areas where you can have a meeting.

It’s quite different but so many people are really excited, and we just hope they can and do use it in time.

There’s a debate about this at the moment – how golf needs to change. Whether that’s surrounding dress codes and so on. Here, you’re putting workstations into the clubhouse. Presumably you’re quite relaxed in your approach? Do you feel modernisation is the way forward? Yes, I think so. You’ve got golfing ambassadors and you’ve got the pros. You’ve got Hatton in a hoodie around Wentworth.

It’s very difficult to, as a golf club, then say ‘I’m not allowing a hoodie’. I’m not saying at Redditch we’re that brave – we haven’t come across it yet – but if somebody sees a professional on TV wearing a hoodie at Wentworth then their expectation, immediately, is ‘I can go to any golf club, wear a hoodie, and play golf’.

I think it’s more about how you manage those expectations. If someone turns up with a hoodie with a big massive logo on it, that’s just not going to happen.

But it’s always that argument: whether it’s golfing attire. If you can buy it in a pro shop then, in theory, you should be able to wear it on the course.

There’s going to be some pretty hefty conversations in golf, in terms of those dress codes going forward.

Ultimately, it’s down to the club. We are smart/golf attire on the course and relaxed casual/smart in the clubhouse.

As a result of the refurbishments, the whole of the clubhouse will be soft spikes. You don’t need a spike bar; you don’t need to worry and say ‘I can’t go in there because I’ve got golf shoes on’.

We’re looking at that flexibility to create. When people come in, you don’t want to bombard them with loads of rules. You want them to feel as comfortable as possible.

You won the GCMA’s Newcomer of the Year Award in 2019. How big a deal was that for you and how has it helped as your career has progressed? I was absolutely shocked. The expectation was that I’d entered and been recommended for the award. The whole process really opened my eyes and it did build up my confidence quite a bit.

It was lovely to see people [who had been nominated], their backgrounds, how long they’ve been dedicated to the club, and being on top of things that have happened through their process.

When I won, it was incredible and I felt the work I had done had been really recognised. The only people who had seen that work were my committee.

As a general manager, you get more bad than positive feedback. It is quite a lonely place, so to have the external recognition – and obviously the recommendation from my own committee – really gave me the confidence to prove to them even further that we can succeed and we can keep pushing on.

Since then, even though I had the trust of the committee previously, they’ve really supported the decisions being made and they’re just allowing me to get on with the work for the best of the club because they put their trust in me and know I can deliver.

I think it’s really important committees can leave the club to be managed. That’s probably always been a little bit of a sticking point in a lot of clubs.

It’s just a shame that I got the award and haven’t been able to do anything with it. Part of winning was being an ambassador for the GCMA for that two-year period and I just haven’t had the opportunity to be able to do that.

I’m quite hopeful, once things do go back to normal, I can take part in any conferences they’ve got coming up and try and support the GCMA in a better way going forward.

Pictures courtesy of Mike Hyde/ Carefree Golf Photography Redditch Known as one of the Midlands’ best courses, Redditch is a part-parkland, part-woodland private members’ club and was founded in 1913. The Callow Hill course was designed by Frank Pennink in 1972 and is renowned for its exceptional greens, which were re-laid in the mid 1980s under the direction of the Sports Turf Research Institute. Redditch was the first club in Worcestershire to sign up for the R&A’s Women in Golf Charter.

Bespoke legal support for golf clubs

At MS Rubric our experienced and efficient solicitors understand that getting to know you and your golf club is the key to a peerless, value focused legal service. Whether your requirements relate to the club, your personal affairs or a mixture of both, we can comfortably tailor solutions from our comprehensive areas of expertise. We encourage you to book a free of charge, no obligation initial meeting anywhere in the UK.

Email Call Website james.howell@msrubric.co.uk 01454 800 008 www.msrubric.co.uk

For your club

• Commercial and corporate law • Commercial property • Debt recovery • Employment law and HR • Regulatory law

For you • Inheritance and Capital Gains Tax advice • Residential property • Succession planning • Trust creation and administration • Wills and lasting powers of attorney