A renowned Napa Valley golf resort wanted to open its doors to locals and families with a brand-new Sport & Social membership. Modern Membership built the strategy, launched it to market, and steadied the program through a year of heavy staff turnover. The category blew past a three-year goal within its first year.
*Revenue reflects the category's published pricing: $6,600 in annual dues and a $20,000 initiation fee per membership.
The resort had golf memberships and a national reputation, but nothing for the people who lived right there: the Napa locals and families who wanted the pool, the fitness, the dining, and the social calendar without a full golf commitment.
A new Sport & Social membership category was the opportunity. But launching it well meant more than announcing a price. The resort needed a real go-to-market plan, a hard look at whether its existing sales and marketing materials could carry the launch, and an honest audit of how it was engaging members in the first place, all before a grand-opening push.
The engagement ran in two phases, and then proved its worth when the team around it kept changing.
Over the course of the engagement, nearly every seat around the project turned over. The operations director was in and out on medical leave, the marketing director departed mid-project, and the membership sales director moved on. Modern Membership held the launch together, anchoring it with a standing weekly meeting to keep launch materials, member and community communications, vendor work, and sales strategy all moving forward, no matter who was at the table that week.
By the end of the engagement, the resort had hired a strong new membership sales director who stepped straight into a running program, with the sales plan, marketing plan, tools, and lead pipeline already built and ready to go. No restart, no lost momentum.
"We've blown past the goals. From July to July we're up 105 memberships overall, and Sport & Social is at 169. We're averaging seven to eight new memberships a month — even in the off-season, which is incredible."
The Sport & Social category was built to reach 150 members in three years. It passed 169 inside the first year, and kept growing, adding seven to eight new memberships a month even through the quiet season.
Counted in members, that's a category the resort will be running for years. Counted in revenue, it's roughly $1.1 million in new annual recurring dues, on top of about $3.4 million in one-time initiation fees, a durable base of income built from the community that was there all along. Club-wide, membership was up 105 year over year, with the resort's Junior Executive tier down to its last few spots before a waitlist.
Whether it's a new category, a resort membership, or a program that needs to find its footing, we'd love to hear what you're working on.
Start a conversation