Lightspeed helps Advance Golf scale effectively and elevate golfer experiences.
Advance Golf Partners is a group of highly experienced former golf course management executives who ventured out on their own to purchase and invest in golf facilities as owners. By focusing on customer experience and implementing scalable, predictable formulas for success across their portfolio of golf facilities, Advance Golf is reimagining the golf club model.
Business type
Multi-course operator
Products used
Lightspeed Golf
Location
Southern United States
Customers come first
For Pat Kelley and the team at Advance Golf, the customer experience is everything.
Dynamic food and beverage options, infrastructure investments, flexible hybrid memberships, turf quality, pace of play and more—Advance Golf sets a high standard, investing heavily in their facilities to exceed expectations.
The challenge for Pat and his team is implementing predictable, scalable practices for success. From data capture, reporting, and cloud-based visibility to efficient workflows, automation, and flexibility, Advance Golf requires golf management software that supports their strategic goals, improves efficiency and delivers for customers.
Saving time and seeing clearer
For Pat and his team, a key part of delivering for customers is understanding customer activity and making service adjustments.
“We observe activity at the club, not just revenue. What we’re watching is whether our customer set is shifting in a direction that is intended.” With Lightspeed’s cloud-based reporting, Advance Golf can track this activity across facilities “and provide any sort of change in direction we need to.”
When adjustments are needed, Lightspeed speeds up workflows. Advance Golf’s unique membership model means they have thousands of members paying dues across various categories, making pricing adjustments a mammoth task.
“[With Lightspeed], our team is able to update pricing and push it down through entire categories versus having to go into individual profiles. From an efficiency and employee morale perspective, that is huge.”
"You don't always buy software for what it is, you buy it for what it has the potential to be. One of things I like most about Lightspeed is the amount of development capability it has. I've experienced it first hand over the years. It's not just something that I was told would happen, but it actually happens."
-Pat Kelley, Partner, Advance Golf Partners
A platform that makes scaling simpler
Lightspeed has also made it easier for Advance Golf to scale their best-in-class food and beverage experience across facilities. With its cloud-based functionality, Advance Golf can standardize core menu items and workflows across their portfolio in a way that makes sense for their staff.
“Take one of our menus that was set up really well: We took that menu and that F&B account, cloned it to another club, dropped it in and took it from there. It’s gone from Texas to Georgia to Florida and all points between.”
“The system is set up the way we need it. Everything is a well-oiled machine, as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel with a food and beverage manager that hasn’t worked with us yet or with Lightspeed.”
More support and flexibility
Advance Golf needs a platform that evolves alongside their business. Lightspeed’s open API and integration ecosystem help Pat and his team manage change and benefit from certain tools immediately, without having to wait for development.
Pat sees this most clearly in “the responsiveness of support on the development side of things.”
“We’ve come to Lightspeed and said ‘we’re looking to do X, Y or Z’ and they have said we don’t have that functionality, but we know of a company that does. We can integrate with them and access a workflow that helps you accomplish what you’re trying to do.”
“That’s been helping adopt new processes faster.”