Your friends and business partners at Feed Lease will be attending this year’s Annual PMA Golf Outings in Grand Haven, MI on June 13 and in Cleveland on June 16. We’d love to see you there to find out what’s new with you, hear what’s going on with us, play some golf and basically, socialize. It doesn’t matter how well we play. For us, it’s refreshing and rejuvenating just to get out from behind our desks and away from the shop for a minute.
Of course, if we’re being honest, we know we’re not totally getting away. Business will undoubtedly sneak onto the links – it always has and always will. Doing business on the golf course may be a tired stereotype, but it still happens. And as well it should. Golf provides the perfect atmosphere for business communication, decision making and selling.
First, since it’s not likely anyone on your foursome is a scratch golfer, there will be a fair amount of shanking, slicing and hooking from everyone. Golf has a way, sometimes a very cruel way, of leveling the playing field. And in fact, the hillier and more undulating the course, the more level that playing field becomes.
Suddenly, that competitor CEO isn’t such an impenetrable force. He or she is just like me, wandering around the rough trying to find my ball. There is common ground to be found at a golf outing. Back in business, our relationship may be ‘them’ versus ‘us.’ But on the golf course, it’s both of us versus little white dimpled balls and a holes in the ground.
On the course, dare I say, we’re partners. We’re even friends. Like a bunch of kids playing in a sandbox. Well, hopefully not too many of the sandboxes.
Everything you encounter in business, you’ll encounter at a golf outing. There’s a lot of planning, a lot of time spent lining things up. Both settings present possibilities for hope, success, disappointment and immense satisfaction. Just like in business, there are times on the course when you just have to survive a hole. You have to play through the failure. You get all your ducks in a row, you take your shot, and for some unknown reason, you end up hitting one of the ducks.
Or worse, a duck picks up the ball and walks away with it. That happens all the time on golf courses and in board rooms.
In the end, though, golf outings like the Annual PMA Golf Outings are all about the golf, recreation, getting out into nature, beer carts, steak dinners, door prizes and, under the best possible playing conditions, getting commitments for future orders.
