A Full Waitlist Is Not a Strategy

Many clubs came out of the past several years in great shape. Full waitlists, growing usage, financial security that would have seemed unlikely not that long ago. That kind of security feels like proof you’re doing something right.

It isn’t, at least not by itself. A waitlist can mean you’re growing on purpose, or it can mean the timing worked out. From inside your own club, those two things can look identical. Both feel healthy. Both keep the dues coming in on schedule. You won’t find the difference on a balance sheet. You’ll only find it by asking the right question.

Kate Scott is in a good position to help you find it. As Managing Director of the Carolinas Chapter of CMAA, one of the largest and fastest-growing regions in the country, she talks with leadership across roughly 170 clubs, week after week. She came to the role through association management, not club operations, and she describes that background as part of what she brings to the work, not something she had to overcome.

Growing on Purpose Versus Growing by Accident

Here’s the pattern Scott keeps seeing: a real split between clubs that are genuinely growing on purpose and clubs that are just riding the momentum a strong market handed them.

The clubs using this window well are doing something specific with the security it created. They’re finally making the capital improvements they’d been putting off for years. They’re piloting new programming they’d have hesitated to try when membership felt less secure.

“There’s got to be some level of security in knowing that there are so many people knocking at your door,” Scott says.

That security is what gives a club room to take a chance on an idea that might not land, because they’re not worried about losing a member they can’t easily replace.

Other clubs in that same favorable environment aren’t doing much differently at all. The waitlist is a byproduct of timing, not of anything the club built, and it quietly covers for the absence of any real direction underneath it. Nothing about the calendar or the balance sheet gives that away. You have to go looking for it.

Picture two clubs a few miles apart, both with waitlists, both financially healthy. One has spent the past two years finally tackling a clubhouse renovation the board kept deferring, piloting programming aimed at younger families joining the roster, and training staff around member recognition so new members feel noticed early. The other has changed almost nothing. Dues still cover the bills. New members fill every opening within weeks. There’s been no urgent reason to do anything differently. From the outside, both clubs look equally successful right now. Only one of them is building something that lasts. The other is borrowing time from conditions that won’t hold forever.

That gap matters because a strong market doesn’t stay strong forever. Clubs that used this window to build real capability, renovated infrastructure, sharper programming, deeper member connection, will be in a very different position than clubs that just enjoyed the ride once conditions shift again.

A Question Worth Asking Now

You don’t need to see 170 clubs to run this test on your own. You just need to be honest about your own board minutes.

Go back over the last two years of major decisions and ask this of each one: did we make this decision because we decided it mattered, or because we finally had the money and nobody was pushing back? That’s the question. Neither answer is damning on its own. But if you find yourself landing on the second answer more often than not, your club has been coasting on favorable conditions rather than building anything that holds once those conditions change. If you’re landing on the first answer, you’ve been doing the harder, less visible work of choosing your own direction, market aside.

The decisions that pass this test tend to share something. They trace back to a clear sense of what the club is trying to become, not just what the balance sheet happens to support this year. A renovation tied to a clear sense of identity, what the club stands for, who it’s for, what story it’s telling the people who belong to it, lands differently with members than a renovation that simply happened because the money was sitting there. One deepens belonging. The other just improves the facility.

This is also where the temptation to wait creeps in. It’s easy to put off a hard strategic conversation when the waitlist is long and the dues are getting paid on time. There’s no visible cost to waiting when everything already looks fine. The cost only shows up later, when conditions shift and you realize you spent your strongest years reacting to good luck instead of building toward something specific.

The Same Test Applies to Who Gets In

Growing on purpose doesn’t stop at capital projects and programming. The same intentionality Scott sees separating clubs across her region extends to membership itself, and this is where a long waitlist can quietly work against you instead of for you.

When demand outpaces supply, there’s no built-in pressure to be selective. Anyone who can afford the dues and is willing to wait their turn eventually gets in, and it’s easy to mistake that steady fill rate for a healthy admissions process. It isn’t. It’s growth by accident applied to people instead of programs, and it costs a club something real: a membership that grew in number without ever being asked to grow in fit.

A club that’s building on purpose treats a full waitlist as leverage, not as a reason to relax. It has the luxury, and arguably the obligation, to say no to a prospective member who can easily afford the initiation fee but doesn’t share what the club values or add anything to the culture members already feel. That’s an uncomfortable decision. It’s much easier to accept anyone who meets the financial bar and let the waitlist do the talking. But a club that only screens for means, never for fit, will eventually find that its culture has drifted into whatever the willing checkbook happened to bring in that year.

Saying no on those grounds isn’t about exclusivity for its own sake. It’s the same discipline as everything else on this list: choosing a direction instead of letting circumstance choose it for you. The clubs asking hard questions about their capital plan and their programming should be asking the same question about their membership rolls. Not just who can join. Who should.

Where This Leaves You

A full club today doesn’t say much on its own. What you do with that fullness, deliberately or by default, is what determines where you stand once the market turns, and it always eventually does.

The good news is you don’t need someone else’s cross-club view to answer this for your own club. You just need to ask the harder question before the market asks it for you: are we building this on purpose, or is this simply happening to us because the timing is good? Ask it about your capital plan. Ask it about your programming. Ask it about who you’re letting in the door. The clubs that ask it now, while conditions are easy, are the ones still building on purpose once conditions aren’t.

This article draws from Episode 118 of Clubs Made Meaningful, a conversation with Kate Scott, Managing Director of the Carolinas Chapter of CMAA. Her perspective across roughly 170 clubs informs how we think about the difference between growth a club builds and growth a club simply receives.

Listen here, watch here.

Schedule a 30-minute discovery call. We’ll show you how to tell whether your club is growing on purpose, before the market makes that answer obvious for you. Want more content like this? Sign up for Clubs Made Meaningful Insights: original frameworks and ideas on identity, belonging, and club culture, delivered weekly to your inbox.

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