274: Dark Side of Member Vetting at Your Club

Speaker 1: 2:03

Hey everybody, welcome back to Private Club Radio. I'm your host, comedy Magician, the club entertainer, denny Corby. Hope everyone is having a fantastic time of day whenever you are listening. This is an interesting episode because we talk about how well do you really know your members and the people you're bringing in to your club. I'm going to bring on Paul Dank of Kennis Slash, member Vending, and they are all about doing the background research. They help uncover the true personalities of potential members. They know how to find people's ghost social media accounts. We're going to go over what a ghost account is. It is fascinating because we talk about how Kennis leverages public records and open source information to find data points that are relevant to the individuals, because Google is pretty limiting. actually, there is a much, much bigger web out there and they know how to uncover hidden details about your potential members and evaluate how an individual's values and culture can be crucial when considering membership at your club. I find this totally fascinating. This is wild. We talk about some cool stories. I join you in welcoming a very interesting episode of Private Club Radio. Please welcome from member vetting slash Kennis, my new friend, paul Dank. This is just really fascinating and to me I thought this would have been a common practice. Why don't you get us up to speed? Who are you? What do you, kennis, and member vetting do? Ian, we'll take it from there.

Speaker 2: 3:49

My name is Paul Dank and I'm the president of a company called ASG Investigations. Five. Five and a half years ago ASG was approached by a client in the private equity space who was on the board at a club and the club had a unique problem. The problem was there were essentially two camps of people within the club who were very divisive toward one another. What they found is they had something in common They were from the same ethnic group and they were all in the same line of business, either working for company A, whose owner and president was a member, or company B, who was the rival and the competitor. It got to the point where it was so bad there were fisticuffs at the Easter Cotillion and it was bad. What they said is what they want to do is to try and vet out who was being nominated by anybody in either one of these camps to say do they work in that business and are they going to have the same kind of will toward their competitor? because we're going to say no, we're just going to stop adding fuel to the fire. It was unusual. We'd never really done work for private clubs. We started doing this and shortly after that general manager left and went to work for another club and he said I don't have that problem anymore, but I don't want to go without what you give me After a couple cups of coffee. What we sort of learned was that the applicant controls most of the information in the process. Even if they're nominated by a great member, that member probably doesn't know as much about them as they think they do. Even if they do know one set of facts, there might be information in the background that tells a different story. Clubs care about the character of the person. It's not just about are they a threat? something obvious like the person is a criminal, right, but they need to see who the people really are. He loved it and he took us with him. Then we were at two clubs. Well, then somebody else went to another club and they told a friend and all of a sudden we had five or six clubs that we were doing this kind of due diligence at. We looked at it as a line of business and sort of learned that the club industry hasn't really changed much in their vetting process in probably 150 years. It's usually a combination of there's a nomination, there's some kind of a meet and greet, and then maybe you post the applicants' name on the club website for members to come and speak up about if they know something, maybe last but not least, as you do some kind of a pedestrian background check similar to what's found in employee screening. The problem with those is, again, you have people that nominate somebody for membership for a variety of reasons and they don't always know the person that well. They don't have that lifelong bond. They're not their lawyer, psychiatrist, doctor, godfather, their children. It's just somebody that you know and you got along with them in some context so you invite them. Maybe it's the person pushed you to invite them, their vendor, their client, their friend of a friend. I have a sister-in-law who lives about an hour and a half from us. She and her husband went to dinner with my wife and at my club and two or three weeks later she calls and says need to nominate somebody for membership in your club. I said who is this person? Why am I doing this? She said I don't even know the guy, but his girlfriend is really important in my business. I told her we went to dinner there and she wants him to get in the club. I think those kinds of situations happen a lot more than people may be taking into account. The other thing is, when it comes to a meet and greet, you're going to have a cocktail reception for prospective members or you're going to have a board member take somebody out for lunch in nine holes. I would argue that even Vladimir Putin can get through one of these sessions without screwing it up. You know you're being watched. You know you have to be on your best behavior. You have a vested interest in getting in the club, so you're going to have to have whatever they want you to act. The people that are doing the evaluating are trained in evaluations. These are everyday folks and I'm sure they're incredibly smart. We can all be really smart, but also really bad judges of character. The only way to be a good judge of character is to know a lot about the person ahead of time and then spend a great deal of time observing them when they have their guard down and they're behaving naturally. A meet and greet or nine holes to meet a board member doesn't cut it. So again, you're not going to get a lot of information that that applicant doesn't want you to have. Then, when it comes to posting names, i love this because it's effective when you have a member who knows something and is willing to come forward. but in truth, i've been a long time member of my club. I miss a lot of those emails, so I don't see who's on the list. I'm not paying attention. You have that. You have a combination of things where I've heard really bad things about this person, but I've heard them from someone else I don't know at first hand, so I'm not going to step forward. Maybe you get people who just don't want to get engaged in the process. I don't want to run into this person at Pigley Wiggly and have a confrontation. I don't want to see them at church and there's an issue. I was the person that blackballed them And so I think it's limited. It's great when it works, but it's limited. I'm in less than that, at least to do a pedestrian background check, and I would venture to say that there are very few people who are recently released from prison who want to run out and drop $80,000 to join a country club. If you can afford a country club and you just got out of prison, you're probably worrying about behaving for a while and not your social network. So I think that it just falls short. And so we saw this opportunity and we wanted to take it slow and really learn from our GMs and our membership directors. Are we adding value and are we really providing something that's meaningful? And every club that signed up with us has stayed with us. So it's really been fantastic And I think we've come across the new best practice, in large part because, if you think about most of the private club members, these are folks that come from the top 1% of society. I think they expect some level of vetting. They expect to have people that are there for the same reasons. They are Social reasons, people that are aligned with the club in its culture and its values And unfortunately get a whole bunch of people who want in for all kinds of reasons And there are predictive things in their past that are likely to show up again and therefore make them preventable from happening at your club. To fellow members, to guests, to staff. You can stop it at the onset And the final piece is most clubs find it much easier and much less drama-filled bar someone entry in a club than to kick them out. And so here we are And it's been great so far, met lots of fantastic people and I feel like we're really helping. So it's been neat.

Speaker 1: 11:10

So about how many steps would you say? is the average vetting process? Four For four steps or so?

Speaker 2: 11:18

Well, in traditional vetting it could be up to four, and there are some clubs, don't get me wrong. there are some clubs that do more exotic things. They say you have to have right, you have to have six nominations and you have to come before a panel of people. I think you have to look at how exclusive the club is and who you are. If you're already a US senator, there probably isn't a lot that's unknown about you and the vetting process can go quicker. But I think if you're someone who is moving from, you know the club with maybe a $30,000 initiation fee and now they're gonna go to a $100,000 club and it's a whole new pool of people. that club may have more steps, you know, but the four is pretty much the limit, at least as far as we've seen on any kind of a larger scale.

Speaker 1: 12:08

So what would separate your process then from, like, a normal vetting?

Speaker 2: 12:13

So what we do in terms of what is the fact-based due diligence portion of it is we look for information that's available and open, publicly available information, and we're at a really interesting time in terms of the evolution of technology and living in a free country, and so what I would argue is that right now, there has never been more information available about Americans waiting to be found If you know where to look for it then at any point in history And we're now leaving footprints. With the advent of social media and so much data going online, we're putting footprints about people out there that they don't know are there. So it's not that I'm posting things on social media that talk about me. Somebody that might be two and three steps away from me is posting a photograph and tagging me in it and putting me at a place, or I'm part of an association And I did something for the association and somebody else memorialized that in its own, and it's out there waiting to be found. So Kennis looks not only for things like public records, meaning court documents and police runs to houses, those sorts of things. We also look at all of the information that's available through open source on the web, and it's crazy abundant And I think where there's a little bit of a disconnect with people into what, in terms of what we can find versus what they can find, is Google. Google is the problem child. I love Google. Most of us think of Google as a replacement for God, because you will type things in there that you won't tell your doctor or your lawyer or your spouse. You know, when you're at your darkest moments, you get on Google and start typing things looking for help. The problem with Google is Google realistically indexes less than 5% of the web, so that means the other 95% of that information could be responsive, could have important things, but it's not Google worthy. And remember, google is a private company. They have their own agenda and they want to put forth and pull information that they deem to be relevant. There's also a whole bunch of information out there that's unstructured or semi-structured, meaning you need an expert to look for it and say, ah, that's actually connected to Denny, that's not nothing. There's something here and here's where I can find it. So we go in and we look for all of that information that's available And the way it really works is you have an individual and they have a sphere. You have your sphere that you create and then maybe you have a spouse and she creates a sphere and there's overlap, and then you have kids and you have NamNam and you have Grandpa Joe and you have your two buddies from college and you have the person you used to work for and the hilarious bartender, and we have all these spheres and they grow. Those people all may have potential information that leads back and points to you and your character, and my team has to be able to number one, identify them And, number two, search for anything that's relevant So we're able to harvest a lot of information. I'm not saying that everybody in America has lots of information out there. There are plenty of us who are really boring and have almost no footprint. But the point is we can look at that information, present that to our clients so that they can look at it and say number one, is everything that we were told true? Are we starting this relationship out with lies and embellishment to get in the club? And then, secondary, what didn't they tell us about that? we should probably know and would be apropos to ponder as part of the membership decision process. So when I see that the applicant really controls everything they do, they control everything that's on the paper. Most of the time, they control what the sponsor is saying about them and knows about them. They've probably been controlling what they see, and then they go home and they have, you know, their dollhead collection in the basement with a couple of people chained up. We don't always know that, and so the idea is we're able to look for all the information that's already available, waiting to be found, and coalesce it into one report and then make it easy for a client to look through and say, okay, there's something relevant for me to pay attention to or not.

Speaker 1: 16:21

Gotcha Now, when you're pooling all of this data and let's say you find that person, how many chained up bodies are too many?

Speaker 2: 16:29

You know, i think you have to look. If your club is more goth based, i would say you know, you can have three or four bodies in the basement. That decision really comes down to culture And, if you think about it, america's pretty diverse place and our clubs are very diverse. So there are clubs, let's say, in Washington or Northern California, who are very much opposed to a lot of conservative ideas, and I think that they find that if somebody is taking a strong stance on that, or maybe already doing things on the internet that violate your decorum policy and they're going to be toxic to your culture and your community, maybe it's just not a good fit. Remember, i look at member betting as is the person going to fit in here? Does it make sense for them to be here? Forget about the fact that they want to be here, or they think they want to be here, right? Forget about their motives. Are they really going to be a good member of our community? Because that's what a club is all about And that's what I expect that a mind club is. There's a sense of camaraderie and community, and when you get a toxic personality or maybe that's just a personality that's not a good fit, let alone someone who's a threat. You know that's what you're using this tool for or are capable of using it for if you wish.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Yeah, after our talk. You know we were having a conversation I think we had like one or two talks before you were teaching me about everything And because I just find like just different industries fascinating as well And my head immediately kept going towards negative. But this isn't not just a bad thing, it's really. It is just information to see if they're going to be a good fit or not, because that is really what it boils down to, like. This isn't just about like hey, did they do bad things? This is just getting information about them together.

Speaker 2: 18:17

Yeah, it really does. The narrative they provide Pan out Is it accurate? You know clubs use some. I guess there's another informal approach that clubs can use and I recommend it, and that's to reach out if the person claims that they were a member of another club or elsewhere, to reach out to that club. Now, that club may not always respond. That's something we can assist with as well. But I think that's another great way to help with your vetting process, because if someone has been a successful member in the club environments and where else, they get how the game is playing and they're actively getting into something they understand. I have met at my club multiple people who it was their first club experience and it's not what they expected, right, and so they probably aren't going to stick around very long because they're not getting out of it what they thought they were. Or they're doing it just for business development reasons and things like that, and it turns out in the end it's just not a good fit. But that's a big part of it is trying to help them with that fit And if they have prior club experience, that's usually a big win.

Speaker 1: 19:20

Do you have any like cool examples of how you've helped clubs make more informed kind of membership decisions?

Speaker 2: 19:30

Yeah, i mean we constantly are finding information that is of interest to our clients and helps them. The negative is probably the easiest to focus on. So there was a club that recently because it's pretty obvious, right, there's a club that had an individual apply for membership and her spouse was going to come along And the spouse unfortunately the spouse was not currently on the sex offender registry but had been, and so in a traditional FCRA compliant employment screening background check you would not have seen that the person was off the list. It was too far out of date. I think if you end up on that list, you're probably probably better suited somewhere else, especially a family oriented club, and so, yeah, i think that the wife applied specifically so that there wouldn't be any eyes on the husband, right, i think that that's a pretty easy one. We found one where recently, where we have a gentleman who owns quite a few properties in New York City and is through his holdings, is arguably a slumlord, and there's been multiple articles and reddits and blogs about the fact that person does the very minimum to keep the regulators from seizing the buildings but leaves people in impoverished filth and then is in Connecticut applying to join a country club. So those examples of again talk about character. You have to understand there's also, even though people have money, they still behave the same. There's a certain percentage of us that like to present well where we want to, and then we show our true selves in ways like we set up ghost accounts, right. So I'm going to have three or four ghost social media accounts where I'm going to trash your podcast anonymously Well, anonymous is more difficult when I'm looking for you And we can find many of those ghost accounts and link them back to the people and show what their true colors are. So we've had many of the examples where people have these ghost accounts and they're spreading hate, they're spreading all kinds of messages, they're ostensibly terrorizing people and then they're going to go in golf nine And so when you, when you don't look, you know it's not going to come up. But, it's nice to know about those personalities when you get them. We had another club where there was a sad situation. The club had an applicant. The couple was great, they do everything right, but they had an adult son who enrolled in college out of state. He got to the college and there's something wrong with them, i'm guessing made a comment to someone in his dormitory that if he didn't get into the fraternity he was rushing, and his assigned roommate did, apparently had problems with the roommate, that he was going to kill the roommate and then kill himself, and that he had the guns and was going to do this. So now, meanwhile, the club and mom and dad are far away. But what happens when wealthy people get into legal trouble? they muster all the resources and create attorneys, and what they did is they. They convinced the judge in the state where the university was to remand him to the parents custody in their state, far away, with the agreement he would never come back to the state And then, rather than going to prison, he could reside there. The problem was club that mom and dad were applying to until your age 23,. The adult children are free to use the club independently as much as they want, and so the club was going to get great mom and dad and they were going to get, hopefully, a young man who's getting care and wouldn't be a problem. But that's a big if right You have just a few months before you were going to kill someone because you were disappointed about a decision, and then yourself I question whether that's the right time for him to be at the club.

Speaker 1: 23:34

Yeah, yeah, that's kind of heavy. Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:41

And then you know we didn't see the other examples, i guess, are the easy ones right, where you get someone who you know, you get someone who is openly and publicly doing something like fat shaming on social media. Right, sounds ridiculous, but if you're doing that openly on social media and you're calling people out, you're going to behave that way at the club too, and is that? I don't know, that's a personality that fits in anywhere, but that's what you get if you don't look again. Everybody was smiling and nodding and the check clear, so in normal circumstances they'd get in.

Speaker 1: 24:12

That's wild And you just find that stuff on the normal. It's just up. Here's another one, here's another one.

Speaker 2: 24:19

Here's the thing you know, the vast majority of people are who they say they are And maybe there's a data point or two that they forgot to mention, or there's something small that they embellished. But you get the people that do things like say I was a Navy SEAL, well, no, you were in the Navy but you weren't a Navy SEAL. So you're starting out the relationship telling people that you're a SEAL. There's a way to verify whether somebody was. We had that. We've, by the way, we've also had two real SEALs who have come through. So they're out there. But you know, again, you can't fact check if you're not using some kind of a resource like ours to do so. So just, it just leaves management in an information, you know, dark spot. I'm from Detroit And people probably remember this if they're football fans, but Matt Patricia was our head coach of the Lions And this was this was really a nothing issue. But a reporter from the Detroit Free Press, i believe contacted the general manager of the Lions and said did you know that, coach Patricia, who had already been hired and working there for months, did you know that he was arrested for sexual assault when he was in college? The bad news is, management didn't know. They had no clue And I'll give you the backstory and they were technically in the right not to know. The problem was the response was I don't know what you're talking about, which then fueled the fire like napalm. And then it's picked up and it's on the front page of the USA today. Well, manufacturing was hired as an employee and that's a regulated kind of background check and he wasn't convicted of anything. The problem were all the optics. If he had said well, of course we know about that, he wasn't convicted of it and for employment purposes, we can't even consider that it would have been over. Instead, it lasted for days and trust me, up here I couldn't turn on sports talk radio for two weeks. But the problem was management was uninformed. In the case of most private clubs, they're uninformed, and the arguments against using the service are usually a couple of things. It appears invasive. Why do we have to snoop around? Now it's snooping around again. This information already exists. Do you want to pay somebody to aggregate it so you can see it, or do you want to pretend that it's reasonable not to know? I question whether it's reasonable not to know when it's just a few dollars that you're talking about. And what if the person is dangerous and something happens? If somebody wants to really have an eye-opening experience, google the term country club sexual assault. I stopped looking at 25 pages and it's news story after news story after news story about something that went wrong member that attacked a member, member that brought a guest and attacked the guest, member that attacked staff, children of members who've attacked people. And these are clubs that you're thinking are crazy and it can't happen here. It's random and it's everywhere. It's in liberal, conservative, north, south, east, west. It doesn't make a difference. Unfortunately, that's part of it. Here's a bigger problem that comes with that. If something bad happens and the person wasn't vetted, i can guarantee you that two things are going to happen. There'll be a lawsuit and the plaintiff attorneys are going to hire guys like us to say let's find everything about this person and their background, and they're going to say this club, let the guy in, but he had all of these things that look like they're building up. Right, when you look at predictive behaviors and we use that throughout all forms of risk management right, predictive behaviors, we're no different in our character information. That's what you're using it for. So if you don't look, you're not going to see that things were building up and we have a series of events and this person probably isn't stable, but I'm not looking for it. So therefore it can't be all accountable And every club has liability insurance and they'll have an insurance carrier that will get in and represent them. But how does it look to say no, what we did is we decided not to look at all for any facts. We just decided to go with what people told us. We keep it subjective around here. It's been a tradition for 80 years. It seems rather unreasonable. The other problem that's going to come with this is the story will break in the media, And in the media what happens is it's not someone broke and did something horrific right, which can happen anywhere, any level of society. Instead it turns into rich people at that club think they can do whatever they want. They think they can behave however they want, and that's what they do with that club. And then you have every member at the club who's now looking at one another in the locker room or across the dining room and saying who are you really? What do I really know about you. Are you the next flake? who's going to come unwound and do something awful? Now again, awful things don't happen every year at every club And for many clubs they don't happen for many, many years. But usually there are arguments that you know, our community is pretty cohesive and everybody already knows everybody's business, so there isn't a need to look for facts. I would challenge you and say think of how many times you said you know what I need in my decision making. I need less facts. I really want less facts to go with right now. I want to go completely off the cuff and intuition. I'm just. You know, i love that guy's haircut, so he's in.

Speaker 1: 29:46

You're just jealous that he has hair.

Speaker 2: 29:49

We're going to go right there. Okay, we can go right there.

Speaker 1: 30:02

I was not sure. I was like we're going to go for it. We're going to go for it, and I wasn't sure if that was a dig at me or not.

Speaker 2: 30:07

No, but you do have cool hair, so I'm a little hair jelly.

Speaker 1: 30:11

Thank you, it's okay. It's okay. Oh, maybe I'll have, like my editor, put like my hair on top of yours. We'll do like a foot, let's not Thank Um. Do you do anything in terms of helping clubs, uh, like, monitor and assess behavior? Is there anything like that? Is that like a thing?

Speaker 2: 30:34

No, um, no, I think. I think that steps a little, a little far out of our field of expertise.

Speaker 1: 30:39

Okay, You know, well, i, i wasn't even sure if that was because, you know, i was just going through the process of my own. Once I get my head on something I start getting like super excited. So then I was like, oh, i wonder if there's people who will have like lawyers on retainer who like search, you know, make sure no one uses their patents and terms and phrases I wasn't sure if you had any or even if there is any sort of monitor. No, no, there's not the clout. That might be a little.

Speaker 2: 31:01

I would say the closest thing we have is when management is made aware of a situation that they think should impact whether somebody should be a member, but they don't have the facts. They're certainly welcome to hire us to see if we can find any hard data points somewhere in the process, because, let's face it, they're not. That's not what clubs do. I think often what they do is they turn to local counsel, who then either hire somebody like us or spends time to try and figure out is there any documented proof that this happened and that we should act upon it? So we do do those things upon request, but unfortunately reaction mode right. So no, i don't think there's monitoring. I think maybe a good point that someone made to me. I was talking to a general manager who was relatively new with us and he said you know, it's amazing that what we were doing anything fact based until we started working with you. But I have a daughter who's now applying for college and I've never seen more due diligence. And if you think about it college application process and all of the things that they verify, the information that they look at and all of the information you have to provide you can walk into a country club if you've got a check. And just really interesting that he picked up on. Look at what we do just to get into a public university to basically a child, and yet we have clubs that aren't really using any facts and they're member running. So kind of an interesting analogy.

Speaker 1: 32:28

Yeah, i was going to say that's very interesting, very interesting. Do you have any kind of insights or tips on how to like manage difficult conversations? Because I know you don't fully. You know you kind of just give over the data and how you analyze it, but do you ever help with, like, difficult conversations? I'm sure there's. You know you might be putting people into situations or giving them information that they may have never had a deal with before, or you know, or like now they have to take this information and present it. Do you any help with it?

Speaker 2: 33:06

No, no, no, Help with it, no, but I can. I can sort of empathize a little bit with clubs that don't maybe have a history of saying no. So there are clubs that, because they haven't been doing anything fact based or any kind of due diligence and they've been relying on sort of that old, traditional, tried and true methodology Everybody passes that right, everybody's application looks good, everybody has the check, everybody is nominated, everybody manages to get through the meet and greet, okay, and so they say yes to everybody when they have a roster slot. It's definitely new for those clubs to then say, okay, we now have brand new sources of information that are impacting the process and we traditionally haven't dealt with that. The good news is and this is not legal advice, but the clubs legally in America we're lucky. We have some really good elements of the Constitution the guarantee that we can associate with whomever we want. I don't think that that means a club should explore using bias against people, especially for protected things like race and gender and ethnicity. No one's talking about those things. But when it comes to fit, you're allowed to pick who fits and what defines a good fit. So you might be a conservative club down in Texas that says everybody is a Republican business owner, gone owner, who hates taxes and loves the police, and we don't really want to bring members in that are radically have radically different viewpoints, because it's probably not going to work, probably going to end up violating the decorum policy on like day one. And we know who we are. So we identify with a group And, to be honest, think about this way if you're selecting a club, you're probably selecting it for one of two reasons. If you are someone who's established, you're picking a club because you want to play golf there and you like the people that are there, or you want to keep your both there and you like that community people The other group are the ones you really have to watch And those are social climbers. And I understand that everybody has to get to the top from the bottom. But if you're only getting into the club for the name and so you can run around and wear a flag draped around your shoulders that says you're in this club and that's your cloak of legitimacy, i wonder if you are a good fit. Are you actually going to be a good fit with people who are there and they're doing it for purely social reasons? And so I think clubs have to examine themselves and their culture And remember saying no isn't difficult To say to a prospective applicant. The board is not ready to move forward with your application at this time. It's pretty easy And the applicant really doesn't have any elegance to stand out. They're not a part of the club and I think the club is free to do what they want. I think it becomes more difficult to talk to the nominating member than anything else because you're going to come and say, hey, paul, you nominated Denny. You really don't know about Denny. I think you have to be very well thought out and planned in the conversation of how to say the board and the club did its due diligence and we don't feel that it's a good fit at this time. It's not a reflection on you, it's just not the right time for that applicant and we appreciate that you nominated her over him and we want you to keep nominating people. But there is something that's given us pause and it has nothing to do with you And you know, for some members that's not going to work right. They're going to be upset and they're going to want to know more And the clubs may have to deal with that. But that's part of being exclusive, right, how can you be exclusive if you haven't excluded anyone and you have to set the bar somewhere And that bar may change with the club, just like clubs, personalities change. I was talking to a fantastic club today and they said you know, we just had sort of a revitalization at the beginning of COVID and we're almost a completely different club. We have a different trajectory, boards are focused on different things and we're really excited about our future And I think that happens all the time. But knowing who you are and what you stand for and what is okay, i think that that's really important. In the process We were joking around. We have a club that had an older gentleman This is down south who applied for membership and I don't know if you're a pretty young guy, do you remember David Duke? So David Duke was the Klan's guy in DC, right, and so I couldn't believe it when the report came back and there's all these donations. Can't you Paying contributions to David Duke? I don't know how that went with that club. It was the 80s that he was giving the money to Duke, but I don't know how that went with that club, which was also in the south, and maybe that's more forgiven. Could you imagine if I had a club in Portland and had somebody who was making contributions, right, and so I? but I think that that's sort of the personification of what I'm talking about Know who you are and what you stand for, what your members stand for, and you get to choose who to associate with. You shouldn't have to be subjected to people that are going to make you miserable. That's not part of it for anybody, i don't think.

Speaker 1: 38:19

No, no, and it's part of the board to hopefully, you know, if they do a good job, to be a good, good vibe catcher, as they say. You know I want to leave people with some like tangible things. So if there's just a club or somebody who's just like doing like they do their own vetting process as they're just like doing their own normal stuff, are there any like signs or red flags that are just like early indicators that everyone should maybe like if they see, go okay, that might be something to you know, take, take note on.

Speaker 2: 38:54

Boy, it's hard. One of the things that we're contemplating doing in the second half of this year is to look at a sampling of as many club applications as possible and sort of aggregate information on it and maybe come up with some sample best practices in application building right, because I think a lot of times they're very deficient. I mean, you know it's name, address, phone number, are you nice? And that's the end of it. I have clubs believe I believe it or not have clubs that are very concerned with someone's actual you know golf capability. These are competitive golfing clubs and they want to make sure that someone is what they say in terms of their golf handicap and their capabilities. So I think you can ask more information up front or ask members to provide more information. I don't have it down to a science yet as to what is going to be the easiest to determine and uncover inaccuracies Because, again, the problem is clubs currently don't have a lot to fact check on. I think if somebody says that they were a member of another private club, you should reach out. Even if you hear no, i'm not going to talk to you, you should reach out to that prior club or that other club and find out, at least verify that they are a member, and a successful one, and that they haven't been kicked out. That's a huge tell is, if somebody is having problems at a club and they are switching clubs because whatever happened at that prior club I would suggest can probably happen again and you're looking at onboarding another problem child, i would say that, to the degree that a club can, they should look at the civil record civil litigation record locally of an applicant. Here's the problem with doing that. People can live in a lot of places and they can also have legal problems in other places. I'm in Detroit. You could arguably sue me in a court in Denver and there isn't one quickie database that finds all litigation connected to all people. That's for the CSI TV shows. That's not how it works. You have to know where to look. But if somebody says I've been in this community for 20 years, you can have someone check and look for that. That's what I would suggest is if someone is being sued constantly or maybe worse, suing other people constantly, we saw a gentleman who had filed eight suits for slander liable against different people over the years and had sued two clubs previously. Again, i don't pass judgment, but I'm pretty sure he didn't get in Train wreck.

Speaker 1: 41:42

I'm just laughing because you said the guy had two other clubs. who was a member? No one did their research at all.

Speaker 2: 41:52

Again, how do you? He's moved to a state. He's only been in that state for nine months, so you got to look where he was before and then where he was before that. If you know to look and you know that history, i don't think from a home gamer standpoint you can say you know, sarah the new intern is pretty good with the internet. We're going to put her on member vetting It can't hurt. But I don't think it's going to do what we do, simply because they're not going to be able to search the way we search with the tools we have and the resources. And, frankly, we're kind of weird. We have people that do nothing but this online research and they conference and they have user groups and they're scary. I don't go back there a lot because I mean they're pretty, they're pretty honed in on their world and information technology is changing so fast that they have they have an unlimited amount to keep track of, right. Look at TikTok and how explosively popular it became. It caught us completely flat footed and we had to pivot quick and say it's not like some people are using it, everybody's using it, right. Instagram was the same way. And what can we harvest from that? What can we find and how do people use that, and how do we find ghost accounts and how do we dig through that data? So we're always being challenged. We can't see everything, but again, when you have 95% of the information, that's dark. As far as Google is concerned, a lot of people don't have another play other than Google. Well, i know duckgo, but it's not a real thing.

Speaker 1: 43:29

It's like a reference. Only probably five people are going to understand.

Speaker 2: 43:33

Well, high five to those five.

Speaker 1: 43:38

Well, duck you. Oh, this is such a fun conversation.

Speaker 2: 43:48

I enjoy chatting with you You crack me up Here for your amusement.

Speaker 1: 43:57

Any other things you'd like to add or talk about?

Speaker 2: 44:00

I'm excited about the changes in the space. It's neat to hear the conversations when facts start to come into play and there's a lot of stakeholders in a club And when management can do something, even if it's a small thing, to help prevent something bigger from happening. That's negative. I think that that's a huge win And I think the members would be all behind it. There are some people that think that any kind of looking into someone's background is invasive and in poor taste. The reality is it's happening in every other space. There's no chance you and I are going to do a business deal without me checking you out. There's no chance that you're going to you know, i mean it happens. I can't volunteer at my grandkids hockey, but I can't do any of that without being vetted. So it's happening everywhere And I think it's accepted. I think you know Ronnie Reagan's trust, but verify is the new norm but it hasn't really migrated to, you know, to the private club space yet. But I see it happening. I'm excited to be part of it. I've made great friends. I love the club community. You know you get all these type A's and management and clubs and they're just positive and it's great because I spent so much of my career cutting my teeth, working for angry lawyers or risk managers or, you know, yeah, professionals that deal with reactive situations. Hey, paul, something really bad happened. Can you tell us the extent of how crazy the people involved really are? Sure, and so it's nice to, it's nice to be on a proactive and appreciated side of it, and we're having fun.

Speaker 1: 45:41

So I was going to say what's like, what's the fun part about your job? Like what? what gets you excited?

Speaker 2: 45:47

I think the most important part is when, when clubs say this has been great, i mean we never would have known, and I don't think this person was going to be a good fit And they were shooing, they were a lot if we hadn't seen what you helped us with. And, excuse me, when they say things like the board was really excited with things. I have one of my longest standing GMs who called and said everything just seems to be humming better. Everybody seems to be rowing in the same direction. There just seems to be less conflict. You know, i went to a very large club that has a huge tennis complex And the director of tennis asked us to come over to the tennis office. And the tennis club are two clipboards I might have told you this, you're smirking And on one of them it says men and the other one says women. And it's all conflicts of people that they don't schedule in the courts at the same time because they hate each other And it, you know it just makes their life miserable. And so the poor scheduling desk has to literally say, oh, denny's on the phone and then pull up the sheet and look for all the people that you get into it with And you know what a terrible environment. I feel bad for them And they said so. When it comes to toxic people and situations, it sure would be great to have a few less of them. And you know, i don't think with clubs it's the 80-20 rule, i think it's like the 97-3 rule. I think there is a small minority of members who are awful and clubs wish they could get rid of, who haven't done anything technically wrong, you know. But times are changing, you know. Since I've been in this space actively we've been out there for maybe you know 18 months And the advertising I've been reading Club Director Magazine and Boardroom Magazine and trying to soak up as much information as I can, and I see a lot of articles about how the club environment is changing as people are changing right. It used to be no phones and clubs, no phones almost everywhere And no denim, but you know simulated denim, and no open-toed shoes, but you know Roman sandals and clubs are having to change And there's conflict and there are people who are coming to clubs that just have way different value sets than the clubs are trying to join And it's strange, but I think it's causing friction And I think some of it's avoidable. So that's a neat part of it is hearing no, we're definitely better off having this here, paul, having it in place, let's see It's cool Nice.

Speaker 1: 48:13

And I think that episode. I found all of that so fascinating. If you're interested in talking with Paul, i'll put his information down below. Let him know you heard about them on Private Club Radio and he has a special gift for you If you're enjoying the content here on Private Club Radio. We would love and appreciate any support you can give by sharing subscribing rating. Nothing is too big or small and we truly appreciate the support. Until next time, catch you on the flippity flip.