Working with boards at every stage of strategic planning: clubs building a plan for the first time, clubs in the middle of implementation, and clubs looking to reconnect a plan that has drifted. Whatever the starting point, we consistently see the same four patterns that have led to reduced results:
- Seeing the retreat as the finish line
- Letting the plan disappear between meetings
- Spreading accountability too thin
- Overlooking governance continuity
None of these calls for a more sophisticated planning process. Each comes down to a different set of decisions about who owns the plan, how it gets communicated, and whether the club's own governance structure supports its follow-through or works against it. We think of strategic planning as an ongoing operating discipline rather than a single event, one a good partner helps install and reinforce well beyond the retreat itself. The four practices below are the ones we return to most often, wherever a club happens to be in its planning.
Seeing the Retreat as the Finish Line
A facilitator and a planning partner are two different things, and the difference is worth understanding before a club engages anyone to lead its strategic planning. A facilitator's work is generally built around the retreat: designing the agenda, guiding the discussion, and producing a summary of what was decided. That work tends to wrap up after the plan is approved, right at the point a club most needs help.
A planning partner stays engaged both before and long after the retreat. They help the board and management team build the implementation roadmap, check progress against the goals throughout the year, and adjust the plan as circumstances change, whether that is a shift in membership demand, an unexpected capital need, an unexpected outside factor (storm, pandemic, regulatory, etc.) or a change in board leadership. So when a club is deciding who to bring in, the most useful question is: who will support us to see this through a year later, when the document has to become a set of decisions and actions?
Letting the Plan Disappear Between Meetings
A strategic plan stays relevant to the people it is meant to guide only if the club keeps talking about it in a regular cadence. We encourage every club we work with to adopt a simple, repeatable update: what has been accomplished, what is being worked on now, and what comes next.
How often a club shares this matters as much as what it says. We recommend no less than twice a year and no more than once every two months. Less often than that, and the plan fades into the background between annual meetings. More often, and the updates start to feel like noise. Whatever rhythm a club settles on, the board, staff, and membership should all be getting some version of the same update, so everyone is working from the same understanding of where the plan stands. This reporting activity is also key for both accountability (noting that progress is required) and building trust (action is being taken on the feedback gathered throughout an effective planning process).
Spreading Accountability Too Thin
Every strategic plan needs one person who is ultimately responsible for its progress. That person can and should enlist help across the organization, dividing the work by department, committee, or initiative. But responsibility for the plan as a whole should sit with one individual, usually the general manager, rather than being spread so broadly that no one feels accountable for it.
We guide clubs through a simple discipline for this: a plan, do, check, adjust cycle, a concept popularized by quality management pioneer W. Edwards Deming, and applied here to strategic execution rather than operations. The plan lays out the goal. The do phase puts it into action. The check phase asks whether it is working. The adjust phase makes the correction and moves forward. Reviewed monthly, this cycle keeps a strategic plan from becoming something the club looks at once a year, and it gives the person responsible a structured way to keep it moving.
Overlooking Governance Continuity
The plans that last are the ones built to survive turnover, which means giving governance succession and leadership alignment the same deliberate attention a club gives its capital priorities. New board members should be brought into the strategic plan as part of their orientation and even in the nomination vetting. Member feedback should be gathered on a regular cycle and weighed against the plan's stated priorities, so the plan continues to reflect what the membership values. And the plan should be revisited each year to confirm it still holds and update as needed.
Governance structure plays a bigger role here than most clubs recognize. A board that turns over too quickly, or too completely at once, will struggle to see any multi-year plan through, no matter how well it was written. This is where the National Club Association's own governance guidance for member clubs is worth close attention, and it lines up with what we recommend: a board of nine serving staggered three-year terms, eligible for two or three consecutive terms before rotating off, with directors nominated to stand for reelection rather than reappointed automatically. Vacancies should be filled by appointment for the remainder of the departing member's term, preserving continuity instead of resetting the clock. A structure built this way gives a strategic plan enough institutional memory to see it through.
None of this happens by accident. Clubs that treat governance as a planning input, reviewing bylaws and term limits in the same process that sets membership and capital priorities, tend to build boards capable of carrying a plan across multiple election cycles. Clubs that treat it as a separate administrative matter often find the plan's success outpaces the board's ability to stay aligned around it.
Building Plans That Last
The clubs that get the most from strategic planning are rarely the ones with the most sophisticated plans. They are the ones that treat planning as an ongoing discipline: supported by the right partner, guided by consistent communication, owned and led by one accountable person, and reinforced by a governance structure built to carry the plan through leadership transitions.
Approached this way, a strategic plan stops being a document a club produces every few years and revisits now and then. It becomes part of how the club operates, understood by staff, communicated to members, and carried forward by whoever sits on the board next.
For boards weighing how much time and structure to put behind a strategic planning process, success looks like this: not whether the retreat produced a compelling document, but whether the club can still point to it, act on it, and explain it three board terms later. That is what separates a plan on paper from a strategy the club actually lives by.