Golf clubs aren't golf clubs. They're underused leisure businesses.

Forest Hill Golf Club has gone into administration. 600+ members. 140 acres. A championship golf course. A 20-bay TrackMan range. Simulators. Adventure golf. A gym. A bar and restaurant.

That list matters more than the headline. Because the story here isn't really "another golf club in trouble." It's a much more useful question: if someone handed you the keys tomorrow, how would you actually turn it around?

Wrong question, right question

The instinct when a club like this fails is to ask "how do we save the golf club?" I don't think that's the right frame. I'd be asking something bigger: how do you turn this entire asset into a commercially successful leisure destination? That's a different, more interesting problem — and it's the one that actually gets solved.

To be clear: without seeing the accounts, the debt position and the operating costs, nobody on the outside can say whether a commercial rebuild alone fixes a business like this. Distressed assets carry baggage that spreadsheets from the outside can't see. But the commercial logic underneath still holds, and it applies far beyond this one site.

Don't start by spending another £1m

The infrastructure at a site like Forest Hill is already there. The mistake most operators make when a facility is underperforming is assuming the fix is capital — another building, another refurb, another big spend. I'd do the opposite. First 30 days: understand exactly where the money is being made, where it's being lost, and how the existing customer base actually uses the facility. You cannot fix what you haven't measured, and most clubs in this position have never properly measured it.

The pricing tells you the real problem

Forest Hill's published membership is £1,441 a year for 7-day access. Visitor golf starts at £35 midweek and £40 at weekends. On paper, that's a golf club selling memberships and tee times. But look at what actually sits on that 140 acres — a TrackMan range, simulators, a gym, a restaurant, adventure golf — and the ceiling on "memberships and tee times" is nowhere near the ceiling on the asset itself. The commercial model is priced like a golf club. The site is built like a leisure business. That gap is the opportunity.

Make every part of the site feed another

This is the part most operators miss, and it's the part I'd fix first. Every touchpoint on a site like this should be a lead into the next one:

• Someone comes to the range? Get them onto the course.
• Someone plays as a visitor? Get them into a membership journey.
• A member finishes 18 holes? Give them a reason to spend in the clubhouse.
• Kids visit the adventure golf? Introduce the family to junior golf.
• Corporate event? Sell golf, food, entertainment and hospitality as one package, not four separate transactions.

Underneath all of that sits the operational layer most golf facilities still don't have: dynamic pricing, a proper CRM, automated customer journeys, corporate memberships, a coaching programme, junior pathways, bundled memberships across golf, range and gym — and a hard look at how much capacity sits unused through the week. That's not exotic. It's standard practice in most leisure sectors. Golf is just late to it.

Stop marketing to "golfers"

Once the commercial model is rebuilt around the whole site rather than the golf course alone, the marketing has to follow. Not just to golfers — to families, to businesses, to schools, to corporate groups, to young professionals, to anyone looking for somewhere to eat, train, practise, socialise and spend time. Forest Hill doesn't look like a golf club from that angle. It looks like a 140-acre sport and leisure business that happens to have a golf course at the centre of it. That distinction is the whole strategy.

Where I'd actually start

Every underperforming golf facility I look at has some version of this gap: real physical assets, genuine local demand across more than one customer segment, and a commercial model still built around the narrowest possible use case. The fix isn't more capital expenditure. It's treating the site like the diversified leisure business it already physically is, pricing and marketing it that way, and building the operational plumbing — CRM, dynamic pricing, cross-sell journeys — to make that work at scale. That's a commercial growth problem, not a golf problem. It's exactly the kind of engagement I take on.