Value for Shareholders
Golf is a highly successful global business delivering profit to the industry, to related sectors, and into thousands of smaller supplier businesses around the world. And like all commercial enterprises, maximising revenue and minimising costs is essential. But this can be done while creating value in a host of ways, through diverse social to environmental benefits, which then feed benefits back into our industry. It’s a virtuous circle. It's a continuous and self sustaining return on investment.
Golf can create wealth for investors, while generating broad economic prosperity, multiplying valued social benefits across local communities and even across entire regions.
Profit in every sense
As one of many 'social returns on investment' the sport can sustain fair, long term and mixed-skill employment across a wide range of professions providing opportunities for career development. It can drive new investment in education, health, transportation, energy and water infrastructure. It can provide land which grows food for local communities, cultural and sporting facilities. This can all be achieved in tandem with core contributions in protecting and enhancing the environment.
This is golf creatively reaching outside the ropes, responding to the environmental and social needs of the 21st Century and responding positively and openly in the knowledge that these principles can actually strengthen rather than detract from the bottom line.
Contrast this with the ways the industry is sometimes criticised for its corporate and commercial initiatives - from events and hospitality, to acting as a tourist magnet, to being a vehicle for real estate speculation and a driver of insensitive development in pristine locations. What’s clear is that golfing developments which put profit above everything risk being a force for negative rather than positive change. To do that makes doing business for the whole sector more difficult.
But there is no absolute right or wrong here. A one sided perspective actually fails to see the big picture. Evaluating overall sustainability and the value of golf’s social, economic and environmental contribution is complex. It needs a fully integrated appraisal of the returns and benefits that the sector and its businesses bring.
