Club Support Inc

Free productivity tip for any club leader already using ChatGPT: turn on Temporary Chat.

It's the small icon in the top right corner. One click, and you get a session that:

✔️ Doesn't appear in your chat history
✔️ Won't be used to train future models
✔️ Has memory off, so the AI forgets you the moment you close the tab

A caveat: OpenAI still retains a 30-day safety copy on their side, so this isn't a substitute for the Golden Rule (never paste truly sensitive data, like member lists, financials, or board minutes, into a public AI). But for everyday work like drafting a member email, summarizing a long PDF, or brainstorming event names, Temporary Chat is the smarter default.

Think of it as the difference between writing in pencil and writing on a billboard. Small habit, meaningful protection. Worth setting up across your team this week.

In 2013, attackers stole 40 million payment card numbers from Target. They didn't break in through a payment terminal: they got in through a refrigeration and HVAC contractor's stolen password.

The contractor had remote network access to manage the heating and cooling systems. Once attackers had that login, they walked sideways into Target's network and found their way to the cash registers.

The full story was first reported by Brian Krebs in 2014, and it's still the textbook example of how a single connected vendor becomes the whole risk.

Most private clubs are running smaller versions of that exact architecture. A typical mid-sized club has between 100 and 300 connected devices: POS terminals, kitchen displays, cooler sensors, cameras at the gate and locker rooms, smart locks on back offices, irrigation controllers, the BMS.

Each one was installed by a different vendor at a different time. Many of those vendors still hold active remote access years after the install, often with the same password they used for the original setup.

After 20+ years working only with private clubs in Canada and the US, the gaps we find at most properties are usually the same ones, and almost all of them are fixable in a quarter without a major capital project.

We wrote a practical guide for GMs, with a 30/60/90 day playbook.

https://clubsupportinc.com/blog/iot-security-for-private-clubs-risks-in-connected-devices/

If you'd rather just have us take a look at your own club, we run a complimentary IT and security assessment. DM us for a free audit.

When operations feel inefficient at a private club, the instinct is usually to hire more staff or ask people to do more.

But after 20+ years working with private clubs, we've noticed something: a lot of what looks like a staffing problem is actually an IT problem.

Members waiting at the entrance because access is verified manually. Kitchen tickets getting lost during a busy service. Seasonal staff onboarded one account at a time every spring. Five systems that don't share data, so someone rebuilds the same report every week by hand. IT issues that land on whoever is nearby – sometimes the GM themselves.

None of these show up on any report. Nobody calls them IT problems. They're just part of the day.

They don't have to be. We wrote about the seven most common ones — and what it actually takes to fix them – on our blog.

🔗 https://clubsupportinc.com/blog/how-the-right-it-setup-reduces-administrative-workload-at-private-clubs/