Episode: The Pro Shop P&L Nobody Shows You — Why Club Retail Is One of the Worst-Performing Retail Businesses in America The average private club pro shop generates between $350,000 and $1.5 million in annual gross retail revenue — real money, by any measure — yet most boards have never seen a P&L that honestly […]
Episode: The Case for Letting Members Smoke Inside Again — What Clubs Have Optimized Away in the Name of Modernization Over the past thirty years, private clubs across the country have systematically removed the sensory, social, and architectural textures that once defined club life — not because the law required it, but because boards, committees, […]
Episode: The Pro Shop Window Nobody Reads — Fifty Square Feet That Tells the Whole Story A regular member passes the pro shop window three to four hundred times over the course of a season, and a prospective member on a membership tour forms one of their first three impressions of the club standing in […]
Episode: What Kuo Got Right, And What He Missed — A Response to Howard Kuo’s Essay on International Club Design – Read Article – Designing for Difference Howard Kuo’s Spring/Summer 2026 Forum essay argues that domestic private clubs have lessons to learn from international club models — and on several counts, he’s correct. But the […]
Why Imitating the Famous Clubs Produces Awkward Copies Instead of Confident Institutions The overwhelming majority of American clubs are quietly modeling themselves after a handful of institutions they are not, cannot be, and should not try to be — Augusta, Pine Valley, Cypress Point, Seminole, Winged Foot, and a few others whose influence over boardrooms […]
Why the Residential Real Estate Market Around Your Club Is Telling You More Than Your Board Realizes There is a person within fifteen minutes of your gate who knows more about your club’s actual market position than your board president does — and your club has almost certainly never had a substantive conversation with them. […]
How Projects Die Slowly at the Finish Line The hardest stretch of any clubhouse renovation isn’t the design phase, the demolition, or even the month-eight budget crisis. It’s the final six months — the period between drywall and ribbon cutting — and most clubs enter it structurally unprepared. By the time a project is four […]
Episode: Every Three Years: The Discipline of Listening — Why Member Surveys Fail and What Strategic Listening Actually Requires Most private clubs run member surveys. Almost none of them run them well. The questions are drafted by the wrong people, fielded at the wrong intervals, analyzed without segmentation, and followed by silence — a sequence […]
Episode: The Kitchen You Can See — Why Open Kitchens Are Now Expected — and Why Most Clubs Get Them Wrong By the mid-2010s, the visible kitchen had stopped being a differentiator in contemporary dining and become a baseline expectation — yet most private clubs are still cutting holes in walls and calling it an […]
Episode: What the Vendor Sees — The Industry Intelligence Network Your Board Never Taps The wine rep who’s been servicing clubs in your region for eighteen years knows which boards are about to fire their GM, which clubs are substituting cheaper products under the same menu prices, and which operations are quietly stretching payables to […]