On Grand Strand Golf: Course owners tap into Moglia’s secrets of success
The Myrtle Beach golf market is trying to tap into some of the successes of TD Ameritrade, Merrill Lynch and the Coastal Carolina football program, which reached the No. 1 national ranking this past season.
The Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association managed to get Coastal Carolina football coach and TD Ameritrade chairman Joe Moglia to speak Thursday at its annual customer service seminar, which is open to any golf industry employee.
About 150 seats were set up for the seminar at The Dunes Golf and Beach Club, and they were nearly all filled.
“I recognize what the owners and leadership for the Myrtle Beach golf association bring to the entire area and I was happy to do it for them,” said Moglia, who spoke gratis.
The MBAGCOA traditionally goes through a service to book a professional speaker who travels the country. “They’ve been very good. They really focus very succinctly on customer service and self improvement as well,” said MBAGCOA executive director Tracy Conner, who asked Moglia to speak. “But with the opportunity to get Joe we couldn’t pass that up.”
Moglia touched on customer service, but also delved deeper into what he believes are the principles of success and leadership.
He was an upper level executive at Merrill Lynch and spent several years as chief executive officer of TD Ameritrade during a period of great success for the online brokerage firm, then became chairman after deciding to pursue a football coaching career again after a long hiatus from the sport.
In his recently-completed third season at CCU, the Chanticleers went 12-2 and reached the quarterfinals of the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision playoffs, losing for a second consecutive year to eventual champion North Dakota State.
Moglia spoke Thursday of the parallels to success and leadership in the worlds of business and sports.
“When I was at Merrill Lynch and TD Ameritrade we had three priorities. They were the customer, the shareholders … and you deliver value to each of those constituents through the employees. In the world of football for me at Coastal Carolina, it’s about the players and the coaches and the fans, and the fans are everybody and anybody connected to Coastal, however that might be. And anything you do has to only be focused on those priorities.
“… It’s important to focus on a handful of things that are really very, very important. Too many people focus on things that don’t really matter too much. The things that are important go back to the three priorities – your clients, your shareholders and your employees, or your players, your coaches and your fans.”
Moglia described his principles of leadership that can be summed up as Being a Man: BAM. The acronym was plastered throughout the football team’s facilities and on the back of its helmets.
“It’s an understanding that great leadership comes from individuals who stand on their own two feet, accept responsibility for themselves and live with the consequences of their actions, and treat people with dignity and respect,” Moglia said. “That was the leadership mantra for the entire extended executive team at TD Ameritrade, and that’s the entire premise or mantra or standard we build our Coastal Carolina football team on.”
Moglia stressed that leaders should care about the people they are responsible for, and those people should be able to feel that. He talked about knowing the strengths of your business that give you a competitive advantage and leveraging and adjusting those to give you the highest probability for success. In football, that would be adjusting the playbook to the strengths of your players.
He encouraged the golf industry owners and employees to be creative and think outside the box, and not be afraid to make mistakes. “But when you make mistakes saying, ‘Just don’t do that again,’ doesn’t work because then people don’t do it again because they just don’t do it,” Moglia said. “The key is finding out why you made a mistake and why something doesn’t work so you can fix it, so you can improve it.”
Moglia shared the missions at both TD Ameritrade and CCU. “At Ameritrade we wanted to bring financial literacy to every family in this country,” Moglia said. “Our mission for Coastal Carolina football is we want to put a team on the field that everybody connected with Coastal is going to be proud of. The two things those two mission statements have in common is they’re both aspirational and they’re both about others.”
Moglia touched on his life story and took about 30 minutes of questions from an engaged audience before Conner had to end the questioning.
Hopefully Moglia’s wisdom was heeded by those in attendance. Anyone who has played a significant amount of golf in the Myrtle Beach market knows there is a need for more consistent customer service.
“It’s one of those projects that’s never completed,” Conner said. “In a resort tourism business there is a high rate of turnover. You continue to work on it and try to get better at it, especially with the turnover and staff there’s always a need to work on it and improve.
“This is the right time of the year to be focusing on it before the spring golf season.”
Moglia was complimentary of the service he has experienced at area courses, albeit in a small sample size. He is a member of The Dunes Golf and Beach Club, but has played only a few rounds there and a few additional rounds at other area courses.
“Every time I have played the service has been impeccable,” Moglia said. “But I stress I haven’t played much.”
A round of nutrition
The four courses at Ocean Ridge Plantation in Sunset Beach, N.C., are in the midst of their biannual mission to feed the needy in Brunswick County.
The courses have canned food drives from June through August and again in December and January to assist Brunswick Family Assistance, which distributes food itself and through local church food banks in Brunswick County.
The promotion has rates of $34 at Panther’s Run and Lion’s Paw and $44 at Tiger’s Eye and Leopard’s Chase, and requires three cans of food per player and booking within 48 hours of the tee time.
The promotion has raised as much as 32,000 pounds of food in a year for the charity, according to Ocean Ridge golf operations and retail manager Roxanne Shearon, and averages around 20,000 pounds of food per year.
“Our marketing department reached out for ways we could help out and at the same time bring golfers to the courses,” Shearon said. “It has worked out well. We’ve been doing it for a handful of years in both the summer and winter, when kids are eating more and times are tougher in the cold offseason.”
This story was originally published January 19, 2015 at 10:28 PM with the headline "On Grand Strand Golf: Course owners tap into Moglia’s secrets of success."