Essential reading for members club entrepreneurs

Welcome to The Stanza’s In The Room series, where we continue the podcast in written format. In The Room is available for Insider subscribers only - upgrade your subscription here.

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Today’s guest is Peter Cole, CEO and co-founder of Collectio Group, an advisory group that specializes in members clubs. Prior to Collectio, Peter was the former CFO of Ritz Carlton and Marriott Americas, and former CEO of Design Hotels in Berlin. Peter shared several great insights from his 25 year executive career in hotels, in the US and Europe, that can be applicable to any hospitality entrepreneur - whether you’re creating a hotel, restaurant or members club.

Interview Highlights:

• The current state of members clubs

• Lessons learned scaling niche concepts such as boutique hotels

• Financing a members club & the current state of hospitality capital markets

• American vs European approach to hospitality & placemaking

• Building a strong connection with your guests and members

• How members clubs can maintain longevity despite recessions

• Peter’s advice for members club entrepreneurs

• Industry predictions

You have an extensive background in the hotel world, and now you are focusing on members clubs with Collectio. Can you tell us more about why you decided to focus on the members club industry?

Yeah, it actually goes back some time, to my role as the CEO of Design Hotels. And during that time, we did some work with a company that we partnered with, a futurist company called The Future Laboratory. Back in 2018, we wanted to understand what the traveler is going to be looking for in the next 10 years. Through that work, we aligned on this idea that travelers were going to start looking less at the geographic location of where they were going for choosing their hotel, and looking more at the concept of the idea behind it. And that idea helped shape what our marketing plans were during the pandemic. But it really instilled in me this idea that there's this big cultural shift happening with people searching for belonging. And that's infusing the way that they work, the way that they socialize, the way that they travel. That's what a really good private members club does, is they create a space where people can feel that they belong - it's their place, they identify with it, and they affiliate with it. We saw these big macro trends pushing in this direction, and then we saw a business opportunity to support the players in the industry as it continues to evolve.  That opportunity was to create Collectio Group.

Something that you mentioned is interesting there: how people connect has fundamentally changed. And I think members clubs inherently do solve a problem, or at least identify a problem. What are your thoughts on how and when is the limit? Because for example, Soho House is opening a new location in Mayfair to address the problem of overcrowding. And I think it's hard because with hospitality, you do have to have scale in order for the numbers to pencil. But at the same time, it's also hard to scale intimacy and exclusivity. What are your thoughts on that?

You bring up a couple of good points. In fact, it is one of the reasons why we founded Collectio. We want to be an enabler of the success of private member club individuals and the industry overall. And as we looked at the industry, there is not much infrastructure. Most of these clubs are founded by entrepreneurs and individual players. There's an opportunity for us to help deliver some economies of scale by creating services that could be beneficial to the clients that we have, the players in the industry, and that's one way that we can help enable scaling. 

We think there might be something playing out which almost looks a little bit like creating exclusivity by using inclusivity. What I mean by that is: you have a really strong concept that underlies your club and that attracts people to want to be members. But it will, by default, not attract everyone. And that's OK, because the more inclusive you get the people to feel about why they're a member there, the stronger they're going to feel an attachment to it and want to stay as a member. So to get right back to your comment, I don't know that you can scale the concept side, but we think we can scale the assistance with the business results side.

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