A Different Take On Why Golf Clubs Are Struggling (And What They Can Actually Do About It)

Ask ten club managers why membership is hard and you will get roughly the same four answers: the weather, young people, the five-hour round, and the cost of living. All four are real. None of them explains why the club fourteen miles down the road, with the same weather, the same young people and a worse course, has a waiting list.

Something else is going on, and it is uncomfortable, because unlike the weather it is entirely within our control.

The excuses we reach for first

Let us take the standard four seriously for a moment, because each contains something true.

The weather. British golf loses playable days to rain, and a wet winter genuinely hurts. But the weather is identical for every club in a thirty-mile radius, and their results are not. Weather explains variance between years. It does not explain variance between clubs.

Young people. The claim is that under-40s will not commit to a subscription. Except they will — to gyms, to climbing walls, to padel clubs, to five-a-side leagues, to streaming services they barely use. What they will not commit to is an inflexible annual subscription with a joining fee, paid in one lump, to a place where they are not sure they are welcome.

The five-hour round. Genuinely a problem, genuinely fixable with tee interval discipline and ready golf, and mostly a symptom of a busy course. Clubs with a five-hour round are usually not the clubs with an empty tee sheet.

Cost of living. Real, and it changes what people will pay for. It does not stop them spending — it makes them ruthless about value. A £1,200 membership that gets used forty times a year is £30 a round and feels like a bargain. The same membership used twelve times feels like a scandal. The problem is usage, not price.

Every one of the standard excuses is a variance amplifier, not a cause. They make a good club's year slightly worse and a struggling club's year much worse.

So here are four causes I would put in their place.

Reason 1: the leaky bucket

Most clubs measure recruitment obsessively and retention barely at all. The committee minutes record "we recruited 34 new members this year" and everyone nods. Nobody writes down that 41 left.

Here is why that matters more than it sounds. Recruiting a member costs money and effort — advertising, tours, open days, staff time. Retaining one costs a phone call. And yet the entire industry's attention, budget and anxiety points at the front door.

The second club recruits a third fewer members and ends up 110 ahead, with a lower marketing spend and a more settled culture. Cutting attrition by two percentage points is worth more than any campaign you will ever run, and it is cheaper.

Most clubs cannot tell you their attrition rate. If you can only fix one thing after reading this, make it that: count leavers, by category, by tenure, every year. You cannot manage a number you do not have.

Reason 2: pricing built backwards

Club pricing is usually built by taking last year's subscription and adding inflation. That is not pricing — it is indexation, and after fifteen years of it you end up with a structure that fits nobody.

The classic symptom is the missing middle. A club offers full membership at £1,250 and a flexible or country membership at £420, and nothing in between. The person who wants to play thirty times a year — the exact person most likely to become a full member in five years' time — has no product to buy. So they buy nothing and play visitor golf, and you have handed them to a booking platform.

Three principles worth more than any percentage:

• Price on usage, not on age. "Under 30" is a proxy for "plays less and earns less". Price the actual thing: rounds, days of the week, seasons.
• Monthly direct debit as standard. Not a penalty option with a surcharge. The lump sum in January is the single biggest barrier to joining a golf club in the country, and it is entirely self-inflicted.
• Kill the joining fee, or make it mean something. A joining fee made sense when there was a queue. With empty capacity it is a tax on the exact behaviour you want. If you keep it, make it buy something visible — a bag, lessons, a guest pass book.

Reason 3: nobody owns growth

This is the quiet one and, in my view, the biggest.

At a typical club, greenkeeping is owned by the head greenkeeper. Catering is owned by the caterer. The pro shop is owned by the pro. Compliance is owned by the secretary. And growth — membership, visitors, societies, the actual revenue — is owned by a committee that meets every six weeks and is made up of volunteers with day jobs.

A committee is a superb mechanism for governance and a terrible one for execution. It can approve a budget. It cannot reply to a Saturday enquiry within an hour, follow up a lapsed member in March, or notice that the society enquiry form has been broken since Easter.

The clubs that grow have a named individual whose job is growth. Not "marketing" as a task bolted onto the office manager's afternoon — a defined role with defined numbers: enquiries, reply time, tours, joiners, leavers, society bookings, green fee revenue. At a small club that might be two days a week. It still transforms the outcome, because it converts "someone should look at that" into "that is my job".

Reason 4: the first 90 days

Attrition is not evenly distributed across tenure. It is heavily concentrated in the first two years, and disproportionately in the first season. A member who makes it to year three usually stays for a decade.

Which means the entire retention problem is really an onboarding problem.

Think about what actually happens when someone joins most clubs. They pay. They receive a card and a handbook. They are told about the Saturday roll-up. And then… nothing. They turn up on a Sunday morning not knowing anyone, do not know whether they are allowed to join a group on the first tee, play on their own, and go home. Do that four times and you do not renew — not because the course was bad, but because you never became a member of anything. You bought access to a car park.

A first-90-days plan is not complicated:

1. Week 1. A phone call from a human. Not an email. What do you want to get out of this year?
2. Week 2. Introduce them to two members with a similar handicap and schedule. By name, in person or by message. This single step does more than everything else combined.
3. Week 4. Get them into one competition. Walk them through entering it. The first comp is the scariest and the most bonding.
4. Week 8. Check in. Have they played? If not, why not? A member who has not played in eight weeks is already leaving; you just do not know it yet.
5. Week 12. Ask for feedback and act on one thing. Then tell them you acted on it.

None of that costs money. All of it costs attention, which is exactly why reason three matters so much — attention requires an owner.

The four levers, in order

If you have limited time and limited money, do them in this sequence. The order matters more than the list.

Advertising is last on purpose. Marketing is an amplifier: it makes whatever you already have louder. Pour traffic into a club with a broken joining process, no onboarding and a pricing ladder with a hole in the middle, and you will spend money to prove that the club leaks. Fix the leaks first and the same budget performs two or three times better.

The clubs that will still be thriving in ten years are not the ones with the best courses or the biggest budgets. They are the ones that decided membership was a thing to be managed deliberately — counted, owned, priced properly and looked after — rather than a thing that happens to you because of the weather.