Tapton ParkChesterfield
- £625k › £1.4m turnover
- Two years
- £650k invested
Investment in the course, clubhouse and operating model helped an existing venue fulfil more of its potential.
Our experience
For golfers, by golfers.
The team behind Link Club already runs golf courses: the greens and the machinery, the tee sheet and the till, the food and drink, the marketing and the people. It started with one course facing closure, and the team now looks after eight.
Most of us came into golf as players. Link Club brings that experience to private members' clubs.
How we operate
How we create lasting momentum
- InvestPut capital behind agreed priorities
- GrowStrengthen the experience and create more revenue
- Operate wellBring in experienced people, systems and buying power
- ReinvestCreate the capacity to keep moving the club forward
£500,000
Average investment into a new club within the first two years
Invested in our clubs, invested in the game
Investment can support:
- Course and machinery
- Clubhouse and facilities
- Technology
- Food, drink and retail
Our capital is committed against an agreed plan, with the club's long-term future in mind.
What investment does
Two courses we already run
The same approach Link Club brings to a members' club, at two venues the team looks after today.
Middlesbrough MunicipalTeesside
- £615k › £1.1m turnover
- One year
- £1.4m invested
A rebuilt range, improved hospitality, new machinery and wider investment transformed the experience in year one.
The vision
Courses with history. Clubs with momentum.
Great clubs can be standing still for all the right reasons. The instinct to preserve a club’s identity is understandable, but that identity should give confidence for the future, not fear of it. A club does not have to be failing to be standing still.
Course Forward puts the course at the heart of every decision and gives the club around it a clear plan. Progress is measured in what members notice from one season to the next.
Courses worthy of their past
Marland: where it all began
Courses matter to the next generation of golfers, and we believe in protecting them.
It began at Marland, where Andrew learned to play with his dad and Joe played with his grandad.
When closure threatened, they stepped in. Within months, the course was sustainable.
That experience shaped the business that followed and still shapes the decisions we make today.
For club committees
How a club decides
The conversation. A chair or secretary gets in touch, and Andrew and Joe come to the club to listen, over a cup of tea. It commits the club to nothing, and what is said stays between us.
The paper. With the committee's permission, we read the club's recent figures and write a short paper: what we take on, the capital we bring and where it goes, and the terms. Every line is agreed before anything is signed.
The decision. It stays with the club, made the way its own rules set out. If it goes ahead, the committee sees progress in writing, season by season, and can hold us to what was agreed.
Our focus: long-term strength without losing your identity.
If your committee would like that first conversation, you can talk to Andrew and Joe in confidence.
Questions we're asked
About Link Club
The questions golfers, members and committees ask us most often, answered the way we would over a cup of tea.
Link Club is the invested operating partner for respected private members’ golf clubs with more potential to fulfil. A club stays entirely itself, with its name, its crest, its history and its members, and we take on the running: the course, the clubhouse, food and drink, tee times and tills, and the paperwork behind membership.
Two founders, Andrew Terry and Joe Jackson, and a golf course that was about to close: Marland, told above. In Andrew’s words, “We set the business up in 2019 for one reason, which was to stop the unnecessary closure of golf clubs.” You can meet them and the team.
Andrew calls them “a sleeping giant”: once strong, with a layout as good as ever, a large population within a sensible drive, and a name that still means something. Falling membership, in his words, is “normally the symptom rather than the disease.”
Much of British golf’s history lives in members’ clubs, kept going by committees and volunteers. Running one now asks a lot of those people, and a team that runs golf courses every day can carry the operating side.
It stays the club’s own: the name, crest and colours, the honours boards, the competitions and traditions, and the members and their handicaps, which stay with England Golf. The club’s own rules on joining, dress and etiquette stay as they are. The club's staff come with it, on the terms they have today.
Five, in the first phase, and no more. Andrew has said it plainly: “I would much rather do five clubs brilliantly.” A partner club is announced only once its own members have had their say.
No. We shape the structure around the club and agree it with the board.
Link Club takes on the operation, its costs and its capital. We earn when the club performs.
The course and the club, with the terms agreed before anything begins.
In the journal, including Andrew on why no two courses get the same plan in We Tried to Turn Every Golf Course Into Wentworth and on free coaching for 3,500 children in An Incredible Week at Wentworth.
