Josh Kaplan sold out all 50 private offices at his first Clubhouse Work & Golf location in just under 13 months, and he had written the pro forma around 18 to 24 months on purpose, because he would rather plan for the worst and know the business can survive it. Those offices run from $1,000 a month for a single-person interior up to just shy of $4,000 for a large corner, all on standard 12-month terms, in a suburban office park southeast of Denver.
Clubhouse Work & Golf is a coworking space with indoor golf simulators built into it. The first location opened in Greenwood Village, in the Denver Tech Center, and a second is opening in Cherry Creek, the high-end restaurant and retail neighborhood closer to the city. Josh joined me on this episode of the Everything Coworking podcast to walk through how he built it, and the most useful part of that conversation had very little to do with golf.
The simulators are what people notice first, but the useful part is what the right amenity did for everything else: how fast the space filled, who signed, and in Josh’s case, whether a landlord picked him over the coworking brand bidding against him.
Three years of dead deals before the right building
The concept started in the winter of 2021 at an indoor golf bar, where Josh and a dozen friends who all worked remotely talked about renting a warehouse and setting up the simulator boxed in his crawl space, and by Christmas he had enrolled in the Coworking Startup School.
He went into 2022 assuming a battered office market would welcome a new operator, and instead watched 30 or 40 deals reach the letter-of-intent (LOI) stage and die, mostly over securitization: landlords did not want to hand space to a first-time operator with no track record behind it. What broke the pattern was bringing on JLL in early 2024, and their willingness to tell him that most of the market was a waste of his time and four or five asset managers were the only ones likely to work with a startup.
The building he ended up in was not even on the tour. Josh was across the street looking at 10-foot ceilings, which do not work when the golf lounge needs 12 feet of clearance, asked what else was nearby, and got pointed toward a building his brokers described as garbage. It had just gone back to an asset manager who was putting real money into it, wanted new energy in the lobby, and had two adjacent first-floor suites sitting empty.
Clubhouse opened in December of 2024 with 17,000 square feet, 50 private offices, three Trackman simulators, an indoor putting green, and a lounge designed to feel like a high-end golf clubhouse. That last part was not Josh’s instinct.
His original plan was coworking with simulators in it, office furniture and all, until his wife Devin told him that if he was going to do this he had to build something that read as a clubhouse rather than an office with an amenity bolted on.
The easy stuff and the hard stuff
I asked Josh what makes the space feel the way it does, and he splits it into the easy stuff and the hard stuff. The easy stuff is the coffee and the beer, neither of which Clubhouse charges for, and Josh spent four to five weeks with a local roaster developing a custom blend that members can now buy on the roaster’s website.
At a space priced like his, his view is that paid or mediocre coffee is a non-starter, and free coffee only counts if it beats what someone could make at home.
The hard stuff is the design and the team. Josh told me he used to roll his eyes when I talked on the podcast about what a strong team does for a space, and he does not anymore, because he has watched his own team welcome guests and keep members renewing.
Members who have never touched a simulator
A few months after opening, the team ran utilization analytics and found members who had never once used a simulator. This is a premium space at premium prices, so Josh asked them why they were paying for it. The answer came back to the hospitality his team provides and the design of the space: it represents their company and their brand, and they are proud to bring clients and prospects into it.
My shorthand for the layout is party in the front, business in the back, the reverse mullet of coworking. Josh calls it “fun and focus,” which is the better description. Either way, the lounge is what makes the space memorable and gives Joe, his co-founder, something worth posting. It is the design and the service that convince someone who will never pick up a club to sign a 12-month membership.
Why he calls them hospitality managers
Clubhouse runs with two hospitality managers rather than community managers, and Josh means the distinction. Both came in already knowing how a coworking space runs day to day, which he says took enormous pressure off the founding team, because neither of them had to be taught the small operational things that keep a community working.
His first hire is the reason he thinks the place runs the way it does. She knows the day-to-day detail, she is close enough to members that she goes to concerts with some of them, and Josh’s own assessment is that if she left, members would quit immediately.
The second hire is the organized one, and she spends about half her day writing operating procedures, which is what the business needed heading into a second location.
Josh is deliberate about what the job includes. He and Joe keep handing the hospitality managers more of the business, including hiring, planning, and lead management, and Josh gave up the sales funnel entirely once he realized both women were better at it than he was.
His reasoning is that a two-location company has a ceiling, so the role has to keep growing if the people in it are going to stay. They move into general manager roles as new locations open, and Clubhouse backfills hospitality underneath them.
The amenity that won the second lease
Within 30 to 45 days of opening, buildings started calling Josh instead of the other way around, which let him wait until the team was ready and then choose the deal. The second location runs about 24,000 square feet, with the workspace suite on the penthouse floor of a 13-story building looking west at the Front Range, and a 6,500-square-foot golf lounge down in the shared atrium between two office towers.
Clubhouse won that space over another local coworking brand, and Josh is direct about why: the lounge, and what the hospitality in it would offer the building’s own tenants and any prospect the landlord is trying to sign.
At Greenwood Village, he kept the lounge exclusive to members, worried that outside traffic would crowd the bays. In Cherry Creek he is opening it up. Of the five simulators going in, members get access to all five, and building tenants can book two of them hourly or buy a corporate membership with punch-pass credits for hours and access.
That is a revenue line the first location does not have, and it exists because he stopped reserving the lounge for members and started charging other people in the building to use it. At $60,000 to $70,000 per simulator, five bays is a lot of capital going into hospitality space instead of rentable square footage, and the landlord support has followed the track record: moderate build-out contribution on the first deal, heavy on the second.
What events and meeting rooms bring in
Meeting and event revenue runs between 10 and 15% of the total and moves with the season, and Josh has only recently started pushing on events now that daily operations are steady.
Events also bring people into the building who have never seen the space, the team runs tours during them, and Clubhouse has signed a meaningful number of members that way. Josh says his favorite thing is sitting in his office and hearing a member’s client come through the front door and ask, “What is this place?”
Two fears that turned out to be unfounded
Josh built the model around a couple of assumptions that turned out to be wrong once the space opened, and both are worth borrowing.
- Capping social memberships. The non-office membership is $500 a month with 24/7 access and unlimited simulator use, and he capped how many he would sell, afraid social members would tie up the bays and frustrate the office members paying far more. It never happened. Social members brought energy that the space needed, and converted into office members over time, so Cherry Creek gets a lower-commitment tier.
- Requiring 12-month terms. Denver golf season ends around November, and the fear was that month-to-month members would flood the space all winter and disappear in the spring. Also unfounded. People need workspace year-round and treat the golf as the benefit on top, which is what Josh believed about the business in the first place.
What this looks like if you will never install a simulator
Clubhouse sold out in roughly half the time Josh planned for, kept members who have never used the amenity that supposedly justifies the price, and won a competitive lease because a landlord wanted what the lounge would do for the rest of his building. Most operators reading this have no reason to buy a simulator, but the rest of it applies to any space.
Josh built something distinctive enough that people chose him for it, hired team members they do not want to lose, and then rented that amenity out again to the tenants upstairs. Almost every space has some version of that asset sitting in it already, an event room or a rooftop or a lounge the neighboring floors would happily pay to use, and Josh’s second lease is a good argument for asking who else in your building would pay to use yours.
For the full conversation with Josh Kaplan, including how he is funding the growth and what he has learned about the gap between Meta leads and Google Search leads, listen to the full episode of the Everything Coworking podcast.
