An 18-hole labor example

This is a MODEL scenario, not a field case. It is a composite 18-hole operation assembled so owners and superintendents can see the shape of the hours. No club is named, no permission is implied, and the numbers below are planning assumptions rather than measured results from a property.

The property (assumed)

Picture an 18-hole club with roughly 125–140 maintained acres in play, plus the usual practice and clubhouse surrounds. The full crew is on for a northern season of about 28 weeks.

The current mix, counted by cutting hours rather than by how many machines sit in the shop, is about 20 percent greens, 50 percent fairways, and 30 percent rough. That split is a planning assumption, not a survey. Labor sits on the order of 200–240 hours per week in season, a small full-time core plus seasonal staff. We use C$35 per hour as a starting point for what the club actually pays, wages plus burden, and you should put your own number in.

The board has asked whether the club should get robots after two seasons of unfilled posts and more overtime than anyone wanted to put on the winter report. None of this is a specific club. If it sounds like yours, that is the point of a composite.

The squeeze

Applicants for seasonal mowing have thinned. The remaining crew can still present the course, but the cost is overtime, skipped detail, and a height of cut that wanders when a less experienced operator draws a loop. Fuel and parts have not gone down, and a capital conversation that used to wait for a good year is now sitting on the winter agenda next to how the club opens in April.

The wrong response is a brand bake-off. The right response is to ask which hours are repetitive enough to hand to a mapped machine, which mowers stay, and what the crew will do with a Tuesday that is suddenly lighter — or suddenly broken.

How the hours split

Greens hours are the most expensive per acre, and they are the surfaces members see first. They are also the hours people most want a robot to take, and the hours a robot is most likely to get wrong if it is not honest around collars and surrounds.

Fairway hours are the volume. A machine that can take a regular fairway route off the morning list, at the height of cut the superintendent already set, is where most of the returned time would come from on this composite.

Rough hours are fewer per acre and easier to over-promise. Robots can help here when the route is clean and someone is named to help if a unit stops. That is not a labor strategy by itself.

A sequenced first year (still a model)

A responsible first season on this composite does not take people off the property. It maps the week first: which routes, which days, who helps if a unit stops, how members are told. Then it stands up one or two robotic routes that replace named hours, not a vague efficiency promise.

The club keeps the existing mowers for everything the unit cannot do on a wet Tuesday. Then it measures hours actually taken off the sheet, and height of cut against the standard the superintendent already uses.

Modeled — not promised — the hours that might come back sit in a range, not a single number. On the default inputs in the ROI worksheet (130 acres, 28 weeks, 220 hours/week, C$35 per labor hour, the mix above) the model returns a band of hours and a payback range. Change the inputs and the band will move; that is the conversation.

How to read it

This is not a before-and-after from a named club, and it is not a vendor story. Please do not quote these figures as if a real property earned them. When a club allows a field case, it will live under Field, with a name and a date, and this page will still say it is a model.