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.)