The Second Business

A year ago, it felt like a gold rush.

Every week seemed to bring another announcement.

New courts.

New investors.

New facilities.

New memberships.

The logic appeared simple.

Pickleball is booming.

Build courts.

People will come.

And they did.

So why are some clubs already struggling, looking for buyers, or quietly disappearing?

At first, I assumed the answer was financial.

Too much debt.

Construction costs.

Competition.

Bad locations.

Expensive memberships.

Reasonable explanations.

But the more I looked, the less convinced I became.

If those were the entire answer, why were some clubs thriving under the exact same conditions?

Something wasn’t adding up.

I recently found myself reading hundreds of comments from pickleball players around the country.

Not owners.

Not consultants.

Players.

I expected to find discussions about court availability, membership pricing, and facility quality.

Instead, I kept seeing the same phrases.

Home away from home.

Pickleball family.

Welcoming.

Supportive.

Second home.

Friendly.

Kind.

The comments felt strangely similar.

And eventually I noticed something.

Nobody ever said:

“The EBITDA was fantastic.”

They said things like:

“It felt like home.”

Nobody ever says, “The EBITDA was fantastic.” They say, “It felt like home.”

That stopped me.

Because nobody falls in love with Court 7.

Nobody tells their friends about a reservation system.

Nobody stays because the lighting package exceeded expectations.

Yet people routinely drive past other facilities to play somewhere specific.

Why?

Most owners spend years preparing for opening day.

They solve physical problems.

Permits.

Construction.

Lighting.

Insurance.

HVAC.

Software.

Financing.

Every challenge behaves logically.

Then the doors open.

And every important problem becomes human.

The beginner who never comes back.

The advanced player who quietly leaves.

The clique that forms.

The new member nobody introduces.

The volunteer nobody thanks.

The conflict nobody addresses.

The owner thought the hard part was construction.

The hard part was people.

They prepared for construction. They underestimated human nature.

Then the paradox finally appeared.

The things creating value often show up on the spreadsheet as expenses.

Staff.

Pros.

Programming.

Hospitality.

Leadership.

The easiest thing to cut is payroll.

The hardest thing to replace is culture.

And because one is measurable and the other isn’t, smart operators get fooled.

Not because they’re bad businesspeople.

Because they’re often very good ones.

The spreadsheet shows an expense.

The member experiences something entirely different.

The spreadsheet improved. The business got worse.

The more I thought about it, the more the entire industry started looking different.

Owners think they’re opening one business.

They’re actually opening two.

The first business is obvious.

Build courts.

Sell memberships.

Manage operations.

The second business is harder to see.

It’s the business of making people want to come back tomorrow.

Not because they reserved Court 4.

Because they missed the people.

Because they knew someone would notice if they weren’t there.

Because it became part of their routine.

Part of their identity.

Part of their life.

A facility can be copied.

A culture cannot.

You can spend millions building courts.

You cannot spend millions and automatically buy trust.

Or friendship.

Or belonging.

Those things are earned one interaction at a time.

The clubs that survive won’t necessarily have the best courts.

They’ll have the strongest reasons to stay after the match is over.

Because people don’t just want a place to play.

They want a place that feels like theirs.

And that’s the second business.

The first business builds the courts. The second business gives people a reason to come back tomorrow.