The New Modern Country Club: The Numbers Behind a Members-Only Wellness Destination

Situation

The New Modern Country Club is a members-only luxury wellness destination — a 24-acre resort-style ranch in Fort Worth combining a golf course, padel and tennis, saunas and cold plunges, a gym, a farmhouse, and farm-to-table dining under a strict, invitation-only, privacy-first model. The founder had a vivid concept and a real market instinct. What the concept lacked was the thing that turns a vision into a raise: a defensible market size and a returns story an investor can underwrite.

Private clubs are a specific kind of hard. They sell scarcity, so the business can’t be modeled like a gym chasing volume — it has to prove that the economics work at a deliberately small, capped membership. And the competitive set (established manor-estate, farmhouse, padel, and social-wellness clubs) is well-branded, so “a nicer club” is not a position. The engagement had to size the opportunity honestly and structure a club that makes money at 200 members, not 2,000.

The engagement

CMA built the market case, the business plan, the five-year financial model, the brand, and the investor deck — the full package behind a fundable private club.

Sizing the market — top-down for context, bottom-up for defensibility

The market work started wide and narrowed hard. Global wellness is a ~$1.8T market; the U.S. is roughly a third of that ($600B), and the luxury/exclusive-club slice roughly a tenth of the U.S. ($60B). But a club in Fort Worth doesn’t sell to the country — so the number that matters is local and bottom-up: ~76,000 DFW high-net-worth prospects at a $16,700 blended annual value per member (a $12,500 initiation plus $4,200 in annual dues). That funnels to a defensible obtainable slice.

A seven-stream, five-year model

A club that leans on initiation fees alone is fragile. The model was built on seven revenue streams — membership and maintenance dues, dining, event hosting, merchandise, wellness and training, and classes — so the business compounds on recurring and repeat spend, not one-time joins. Across five years, revenue scales from $2.8M to $5.35M against a controlled expense base ($1.75M → $2.55M), and the model returns a 17.45% IRR on the $12.5M investment, with ROI climbing from 8.4% to 22.7% by Year 5.

The revenue mix matters as much as the total. Even in Year 1, the club isn’t a membership business with amenities bolted on — dining matches membership dollar-for-dollar, and events, wellness, and retail add real diversification, which is exactly what makes the model durable through a soft membership year.

Membership economics built to protect the brand

The membership design is where strategy and finance meet. Pricing sits at a $12,500 initiation plus $350/month — premium, but positioned as affordable luxury against the traditional clubs the concept critiques. And the roster is capped: an 80-to-200 member ramp to a hard ceiling, then a waitlist. That cap is a financial decision as much as a brand one — it forces the model to prove profitability at 200 members and turns scarcity into a durable asset rather than a growth constraint.

Why the structure mattered

The discipline was to size locally and model for scarcity. A global-wellness headline would have flattered the deck and misled the raise; a grow-forever membership assumption would have diluted the very exclusivity the club sells. Building a bottom-up DFW funnel, a seven-stream model that works at a capped roster, and pricing that reads as attainable luxury is what made the concept legible to an investor — a scarce, defensible asset with a returns profile, not an aspiration.

Impact

The club walked into investor conversations with a complete, defensible package: a $1.27B local market sized from the ground up, a seven-stream five-year model returning a 17.45% IRR on $12.5M, and a membership structure engineered to protect the brand while the numbers scale to $5.35M in Year-5 revenue. (All figures are pro forma projections from the primary investment model, not operating results.)

The club is planned for Fort Worth. For the same work in this market, see business plans in Fort Worth and pitch decks in Fort Worth.