If your course is currently – or soon to be – open for business during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s highly likely the safety of your staff and customers is paramount among your daily considerations. If you’re a conscientious operator, like Kelly Morrow at EagleSticks Golf Club in Zanesville, Ohio, you’ve made all the right moves – incorporated a touchless payment system for online tee times, advocated CDC-recommended social-distancing throughout your facility, collaborated with industry colleagues about best practices – all the while continuing to do your best to keep your working areas and golf cart fleet sanitized and virus-free.
“We were diligently washing and scrubbing our carts but couldn’t be 100 percent sure we were actually disinfecting them effectively enough to protect our customers,” said Morrow, the course’s general manager. “Plus, we were relegated to whatever products were in stock at the local Walmart, and that was changing day to day. Everywhere we turned, we were met with shortages.”
If you do a little research, you can find a long list of disinfectants available for sale – all EPA-approved and containing active ingredients that destroy the COVID-19 virus. So, problem solved, right? Not exactly.
Those products are extremely hard to come by, according to Nate Clemmer, whose company, SynaTek Solutions, provides turf products, technologies and transactional programs for the golf and agricultural industries. He understands where operators like Morrow are coming from.
“The supply chain is the important thing here,” Clemmer said. “It’s not that these products aren’t being manufactured but, because of the special circumstances we’re all living in right now, most of them are being re-directed to medical facilities first, and rightly so.”
With the help of SynaTek, GOLFNOW is now helping members of its ClubBuy group purchasing organization with the ability to buy an EPA-approved golf cart disinfectant solution at a discount.
NeutraFect solution has been added to the list of ClubBuy products, helping golf course facilities better adhere to safety protocols recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other medical experts during the COVID-19 pandemic. NeutraFect is found on List N, which is made up of disinfectants for use against SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. When mixed properly, a ½-gallon bottle will yield 32 gallons of disinfectant. The solution also is sold separately or by the case (four bottles; 128-gallon yield).
More information about how to purchase NeutraFect at a discount, as well as Best Management Practices for Golf Cart Disinfection, can be found on the ClubBuy website.
“We are very happy to have access to this resource,” said Morrow, who recently ordered a supply of NeutraFect for his operation. “We intend to use it in ‘high touch’ areas throughout our facility when things ramp back up. I want our customers and employees to feel safe when they are on our watch.”
“When we get to the other side of this curve, I don’t think we’ll get back to what we knew as normal,” Clemmer said. “Safety practices like this can be a really good thing for the industry. If we’re all smart, our ‘new normal’ will permanently adopt new best practices.”
A membership in the ClubBuy purchasing program is free and open to any company, club or organization.
“ClubBuy has become a huge resource for us to not only save money, but also to find solutions,” Morrow said.