The Discipline of Belonging

Walk into a club that’s struggling and you’ll usually find a board trying to do three things at once. It holds dues flat to quiet the members who think the club costs too much. It approves a wellness wing because the club down the road built one. And it tells the membership director to “personalize the experience” with whatever staff survived another year of turnover. Each decision is reasonable on its own. Taken together, they add up to a private club strategy that makes sure the club won’t be great at anything.

The clubs that lead their markets made a different decision. They picked one way to win, built the whole operation around it, and accepted being merely good at everything else. That is the central argument of Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema’s 1995 book The Discipline of Market Leaders, and it fits private clubs better than almost any other management framework.

Three Value Disciplines, Four Rules

Treacy and Wiersema found that every industry leader delivered superior value in one of three ways, which they called value disciplines:

• Operational excellence: the lowest total cost and the least hassle. A fairly priced club where everything works, from tee times to billing.
• Product leadership: the best product, renewed constantly. The best course, the newest facility, the place people talk about.
• Customer intimacy: the best total solution for each customer over a lifetime. Staff who know a member’s family and habits, and a club that becomes part of how that family lives.

The rules are strict. Be the best in your chosen discipline. Hold threshold standards in the other two, meaning good enough that no member leaves over them. Raise your own bar every year, because competitors will copy whatever you do well. And build an operating model (structure, systems, culture and hiring) dedicated to the discipline you chose. The first rule is the hardest. In the authors’ words:

“Choosing a value discipline is not just a choice about what to do, it is a choice about what not to do.” — Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

Member-owned clubs are built to say yes, so this is where they struggle. The result is being stuck in the middle: dues low enough to annoy no one, amenities added fast enough to drain the capital reserve, and a promise of personal service the club doesn’t have the people to keep.

Why Customer Intimacy Is the Strongest Private Club Strategy

The clubs most people would call the country’s best are rarely the cheapest, and often not the newest. What they share is an unusually close relationship among the club, its staff and a carefully chosen membership.

Members notice the difference. GGA Partners’ Club Members Perspective Report 2024 found that 88% of members feel welcome at their club and 82% say it’s easy to interact with other members. But only 68% agreed they could make friends or build new social networks there, and 67% said the club offers quality social opportunities. The space between feeling welcome and actually belonging is where customer-intimate clubs win.

“Customer-intimate companies make money by tapping the unrealized potential in the client’s operation.” — Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

For a club, the “client’s operation” is a member’s life: the business dinners hosted somewhere else, the children who never joined the junior program, the spouse who rarely comes in, the friends who would make strong members. The club earns its premium by finding that potential and serving it.

Intimacy can work at scale. Boca West Country Club in Boca Raton is a resident-only community of about 1,400 acres with four championship courses. Its $45 million expansion was designed around how members actually live there: a 96,000-square-foot aquatics center with five pools, a new restaurant and bar, and renovated sports and fitness facilities. In March 2026 Golf Business Network named it Club of the Year, chosen from more than 200 peer-nominated submissions. The award cited high member satisfaction and a strong organizational culture.

Selectivity is part of the same discipline. Treacy and Wiersema argued that customer-intimate companies choose their customers, looking for relationships that are profitable for both sides. Augusta National Golf Club is the extreme case. Membership is by invitation only, and when the club admitted its first women members, Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore, in 2012, the chairman stressed that they went through the same private process as every other member. Few clubs should copy Augusta’s model, but the principle holds. A club that admits anyone who can pay the initiation fee can’t be intimate, because it no longer knows who it is serving.

Staff Retention Is the Operating Model

If customer intimacy is the strategy, the staff are how it gets delivered, which makes keeping them the central management job. The industry has started measuring it that way: in 2025 the same firm added employees to its research series alongside members and leaders, surveying more than 1,600 private club employees on what keeps them in the job.

Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo treats the problem as infrastructure. Its Associate Village gives employees a place of their own, complete with a fitness center and a swimming pool, and the club puts it at the front of its pitch to prospective hires.

The logic is simple. When a ten-year server leaves, the club loses part of its relationship with every member that server knew. A customer-intimate club protects those relationships through pay, housing, career paths and culture, the same way a product leader protects its R&D budget.

The Traps: Arms Races, Hollow Networks and the Curse of Celebrity

The amenity arms race. Product leadership is a real discipline, but it’s unforgiving. It needs constant renewal and capital that never stops. A club that adds padel because a rival did, then a spa, then a new grill, isn’t leading. It’s following, and paying product-leader prices to do it, without the culture of constant renewal that makes product leadership pay off.

The alternative is renewal driven by evidence. Grey Oaks Country Club in Naples approved a $63 million capital plan, phased from 2027 to 2032, after five years of member surveys, focus groups and feedback. It renovates the Estuary Course and clubhouse, adds a patio for à la carte dining, and expands the spa and longevity facility to about 9,500 square feet. “Grey Oaks has a longstanding tradition of investing in the experiences and amenities that make our club special,” said general manager Don Emery, adding that the plan aims to keep doing that “while continuing to anticipate the evolving interests and expectations of our membership.”

The network that owns the relationship. Treacy and Wiersema observed that customer-intimate companies often run “hollow” delivery systems, relying on outside partners for much of what they deliver so they can concentrate on knowing the client. For clubs, that is the right way to think about reciprocal and partner networks. Access to other clubs, travel partners and outside experiences can extend what a club offers far beyond its own gates. The trap is letting the network replace the relationship. A club that sells reciprocity as the reason to join has handed its core experience to someone else. A club that knows which member would love which partner, and makes the introduction, is using the network the way the book intended.

The curse of celebrity. The authors warned that reaching the top breeds complacency, as leaders start protecting a reputation instead of improving. A club named best in its class faces that test immediately. Boca West’s general manager, Matthew Linderman, responded to his club’s award by pointing outward: “We are so honored to be named Club of the Year and nominated by our peers from around the nation,” crediting the club’s team and members. That is the right instinct, because:

“Sustaining market leadership is a full-time job.” — Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

“In more than 20 years working in and with the country’s top private clubs, I’ve rarely seen a club fail because it chose the wrong discipline. I’ve seen many fail because they never chose at all,” says Zack Bates, founder of Private Club Marketing.

A Board Retreat Exercise for Your Private Club Strategy

The book closes with a three-step process that fits a board retreat almost exactly. Bring the general manager and membership director into the room.

1. Agree on the facts. What do our members actually value? Who in our market delivers it best? How do we compare? The firm’s 2025 Club Leaders’ Perspectives research found that two-thirds of leaders believe their club delivers the value members expect, but only 48% think they measure that value well and only 45% think they communicate it well. Use member surveys, usage data and resignation interviews, and don’t move on until the room agrees.

2. Develop realistic alternatives. Sketch the club under each discipline: dues and capital, staffing, membership criteria, facilities, and how you would measure success. Some versions won’t survive contact with the balance sheet, and that’s useful to learn early.

3. Make the hard choice. Pick one, then decide out loud what and who the club will leave behind. That could be an amenity a vocal group loves but few use, or a membership category that brings in revenue while pulling the club away from the members it serves best. Write threshold standards for the other two disciplines, set next year’s bar for your chosen one, and build the decision into the budget, the job descriptions and the membership committee’s criteria.

A value discipline only counts once it shapes the club’s daily decisions. If your board is heading into a retreat, Private Club Marketing can help you put together the member data for Step 1 and the message that follows Step 3. Start the conversation with our team.