What a Director of Engineering at a Private Golf Club Actually Does All Day
When people ask what I do for a living, "Director of Engineering at a private golf club" usually gets a polite nod and zero follow-up questions. They picture me out on the course poking at sprinklers, which is wrong on two counts — that's the grounds team's department, and I haven't touched a sprinkler in years.
What I actually do is keep the building running. Quietly. Every day. So the members never have to think about it.
That's the whole job in one sentence. The longer version is more interesting.
A typical morning
The day starts with a walk. Before the kitchen fires up, before the first tee time, before the bar gets staged — I walk the clubhouse top to bottom. I'm looking for what changed overnight. A drip that wasn't there yesterday. A breaker that tripped. A condenser running louder than it should. An ice machine making a sound that means a service call is coming whether I schedule one or not.
Most mornings, nothing's wrong. The point of the walk is to make sure of that.
By the time the first member walks through the door, I want every system in this building running like the building itself isn't there. That takes more than just walking. It takes years of preventive maintenance schedules, vendors I trust on speed dial, and SOPs that mean my team can handle anything I'm not personally standing in front of.
Then the day actually starts
A private club doesn't get to have an off day. We don't get the luxury of saying "sorry, the AC is down, come back tomorrow." So a big chunk of my job is fast triage.
The HVAC unit serving the dining room throws a code an hour before lunch service. The audio or video cuts out in the middle of setup for a member event. A pump for the kitchen grease trap does something it shouldn't. Whatever it is, somebody walks into my office or grabs me on the radio and it's mine to solve. Now.
That's where 25 years of operations work pays off. I've been doing this kind of triage since I was installing medical equipment in hospitals across multiple countries, then moving and storing other people's lives at a 90,000 sq ft facility, then managing a billion dollars of property at Florida Atlantic University. Different industries. Same job: figure out what broke, who needs to know, what gets you back up the fastest, and how to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The bigger picture work
The fires get put out. But the fires aren't the actual job. The actual job is the work that prevents them.
That's roofing projects. HVAC system upgrades. Capital projects that turn a quarter-million-dollar line item into a five-year improvement to the property. Safety committee meetings, compliance documentation, code reviews — the unglamorous paperwork that means OSHA never has a reason to walk through my door upset.
It's also AV and IT infrastructure planning, because the modern club isn't just bricks and beams. It's networks, projectors, point-of-sale systems, member-facing technology that has to just work. When somebody books a room for an event, they shouldn't have to think about whether the audio will hold up or whether the Wi-Fi will be working. Those expectations don't get met by accident — they get met by planning weeks or months before the event.
I'm also the property's primary contact for the fire, burglar, access control, and video surveillance systems. When the monitoring company gets an alert at two in the morning, my phone rings. So part of the job is being the person at the other end of that phone — and the person who makes sure those systems are tested, current, and running so the alert that matters actually gets through and the false alarms don't.
And I supervise housekeeping. Because cleanliness in a private club isn't a "nice to have" — it's the entire experience. If a member walks into a restroom and something feels off, that's a story they tell their friends. My job is to make sure it isn't a story.
Managing people is its own thing. You can buy a better HVAC unit. You can't buy a better team. You build it. Train it. Trust it. And when somebody on the team handles a situation well without you in the room, that's the whole win.
The thread
The thread through all of it: keep complicated, multi-system operations running smoothly so the people relying on them never notice the work it took.
That's the whole job. That's been every job I've had for the last 25 years. Different industries, same fundamental skill set. Medical equipment installation taught me precision and quality control. Logistics taught me dispatching, contracts, and the cost of being wrong about a delivery window. University property management taught me how to track and protect a billion dollars in assets across a giant operation. Hospitality engineering pulled all of that together into one role.
If you're reading this
If you're in club management, hospitality engineering, or facilities leadership — drop me a line. I'm always interested in trading notes with people doing the same kind of work. The challenges don't change much from one club to the next, and the best ideas usually come from someone who solved your exact problem six months ago.
If you're just somebody who Googled my name and landed here — now you know what I do. Welcome.
— Brad Bernasek
Director of Engineering, Adios Golf Club · Coconut Creek, FL
brad@adiosgc.com