Driving Value at Any Distance: The Long Drive and the Short Game

Every member pays to use your club twice—once in dues, and once in the minutes they spend coming to and from your location. The question is never how far away we are—it is whether what we deliver justifies the total bill. 

While I was studying urban design at Washington University in St. Louis, we read a study by the urbanist William H. Whyte that I have never been able to forget. It had almost nothing to do with clubs—and everything to do with why some clubs thrive and others fail.

In the 1970s and ’80s, when blue-chip corporations fled Manhattan for the suburbs, each move was blessed by a Relocation Committee, a consultant, and a bound report thick enough to prop open a fire door. Whyte checked the work. He plotted every new headquarters on a map, then added the one data point the consultants had omitted: the CEO’s house. All of the headquarters clustered like ducklings around where the CEOs lived, most within about seven miles. Everything else in the binder was set dressing.

It’s worth saying plainly that a fair number of those relocations were mistakes. Companies lost talent they couldn’t replace, cut themselves off from the labor market, and crept quietly back toward the city a decade later. Whyte’s finding was not that convenience is correct—it’s that convenience is powerful. And misunderstanding that power can be strong enough to blind a boardroom to what actually drives a nine-figure decision.

The people in Whyte’s study are the people on your membership list. Not literally, but in every way that matters: They’re accomplished, analytical, surrounded by process, and—when the decision is personal—governed by the same short, unglamorous instinct to do what’s convenient.

Distance is a Price, Not a Verdict

Here is where most conversations about location go wrong: We treat drive time as the answer, when it is only the invoice.

Every member pays to use your club twice—once in dues, and once in the minutes they spend coming to and from your location. Those minutes have a real cost and can be the most expensive for your best members. So the question is never how far away we are—it is whether what we deliver justifies the total bill. 

The charts accompanying this article use data from six years of McMahon Group member surveys, representing the answers of more than 74,000 total respondents from 118 clubs, to analyze how the distance from members’ homes to their clubs affects key factors such as golf play, dining, and perceived value for the cost of belonging. Collectively, they confirm that distance does not decide whether a club succeeds—it decides where a club needs to be excellent to clear its own price.

The Clock is Ticking

Inside fifteen minutes, the price of time is low, so you have to be excellent at providing a frictionless experience. Your business is frequency. Members stop in because it costs them nothing: nine holes before dinner, a workout that does not blow the morning, a Tuesday drink that was not planned. You are competing with their kitchen and their couch. An everyday club that behaves like a formal occasion is throwing away its only structural advantage, and charging for grandeur its members are not, in fact, buying.

Outside fifteen minutes, the price of time is high, so you have to be excellent at something singular. Nobody “drops by”—every visit is a decision, and that decision needs a justification your members can say out loud: the golf course, the view, the room, the reputation, the things they cannot get closer to home. The threshold is brutal and non-negotiable: Is it worth the drive? A drive that’s merely pleasant can lead to a resignation letter.

Notice what this means: Neither bucket is the safe one. A great destination beats a mediocre neighbor every time. In St. Louis, a golfer will pass three clubs to play championship golf at Bellerive. But a member at a neighborhood club would skip Bellerive entirely because he values dinner on a Wednesday with the people who live next door. Two sets of values, two different purchases.

Where Multi-Location Clubs Win—and Lose

This is where the stakes get real, because the portfolio of multi-location clubs can hold both kinds of distance-related strategies at once. Most mistakes come from running one playbook across all of them.

Your in-town site is an everyday club and should be judged on visits per member. 

Your out-of-town site is a destination and should be judged on whether it is genuinely worth the drive. Same club, opposite strategies, different definitions of a good year. Judge the destination on frequency and it will look like a failure. Judge the everyday club on grandeur and you will renovate away the very casualness that makes people come on a Tuesday. Then you raise dues to pay for a renovation, which turns a strength into a bad trade.

What causes failure is more subtle. Two everyday clubs that are twenty minutes apart do not expand a market— they split one, and often neither reaches the critical mass needed to stay alive. That is not growth; it is division with better signage.

So the question for every site in a portfolio is not whether it’s a good club. It’s whether it earns its place by reaching a market the others cannot, or by delivering something worth its price to a member who has other options.

Making Distance Pay Off

This is where capital investment earns its keep. Amenities are how a club drives its own future, through the fitness center that lets a workout fit inside a Tuesday morning, or the golf course that makes 45 minutes in the car look like a bargain. Those are different projects, justified on different grounds and judged by different numbers. Wasted capital in the club business is rarely spent on the wrong quality—it’s spent on the right quality aimed at the wrong distance members will travel for it.

So weigh the two things that members actually feel: the minutes it costs them to come to your club, and the value they get in return. Get those two right, and the case for a capital project starts writing itself.

If you are an existing club, you can’t control the distance; it’s baked in. But there is a process to understand what matters to your members, and what facilities will deliver the experiences they value. Give us a call if you need someone to help navigate it with your members.