Mike Manzella · Founder
I spent twenty years in your chair.
Racquet clubs and luxury hospitality were my whole adult life. By the end I was running programs at the Director/GM level — leading staff, owning membership and program revenue, managing the day-to-day of what makes a club actually work. I loved it. What I couldn't fix from that seat was the thing I kept running into at every club I worked in: growth that came from luck instead of from a system, and no way to prove which one you were living on.
- 20 years at the Director/GM level — racquet clubs and luxury hospitality
- 20+ clubs run or advised
April 2020
COVID shut the clubs down and I got laid off from my Director/GM role. My first son was born two weeks later. The club brought me back a few months after — same job, half the pay. I took it. I wasn't ready to uproot my family over pride.
That same summer
I turned down a Director role at the National Training Center. A dream job on paper. I said no because saying yes meant making the same trade again — my time and my family's stability, on a bet that somebody else's system would work. Three months later we found out my second child was on the way.
May 2025
I'd already been thinking it was time to go out on my own. Then the decision got made for me. The company restructured, and my role went with it. It didn't create the idea. It just removed my excuse for waiting.
The pattern
Across twenty years on the operations side and the clubs I've worked with since, the same thing kept showing up: the clubs growing fastest weren't the best clubs. They were the ones with the least friction. Growth was never about one great ad, one great coach, or one great event. It showed up when every part of the member journey connected — acquisition to onboarding to retention to referral — without anything falling through the cracks in between.
Tennis Club of Rochester
The leak wasn't traffic at all. It was the handoff between a prospect's first visit and their first membership conversation — a seam nobody owned. Ninety days and about $9,000 in, closing that seam was worth $75,000 in annualized new membership revenue. Nothing about that club got better. One connection got made.
Three decades on court
That's why I stopped selling isolated projects and started building complete systems. Instead of asking “how do we get more leads,” I started asking “where is growth actually leaking.” The goal was never just more members. It's clubs that are easier to run and worth more to own.
Why now
Twenty years ago this was a tennis business. Now pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the country, private capital is moving into the category, and padel is arriving behind it. The clubs that build the system now are the ones that get to choose their terms later.