Why Private Club Culture Starts and Ends With the GM

In business, it’s believed that culture starts at the top. Good and bad. But ask a dozen club leaders what drives culture at their club, and you might get a dozen different answers. Gregg Patterson, one of the most celebrated voices in private club management, has a simpler answer. He says culture starts with the manager. Period.

Patterson spent 34 years as general manager of The Beach Club in Santa Monica, California, one of the most sought-after clubs in the country. Since leaving the club in 2016, he’s built a consulting practice around the principles he developed there. His framework, which he calls “Tribal Magic”, is rooted in a belief that we all have a biological need for community. "We are born with a DNA need for herd," is how he says it. The club, in his view, is more than just a provider of wonderful amenities. It is a tribe. And he says every tribe needs a leader who understands what it is and where it is going.

The Umbrella

Patterson’s favorite metaphor for the GM's role is “The Umbrella”. He believes the manager's job is to see the big picture, past, present, and future all at the same time, and to hold that umbrella over the entire organization. "Part of the umbrella is to see the storm coming," he says. "And to have the umbrella in your hand."

That means the manager is more than an operator. Patterson draws a clear distinction between three GM mindsets: the historian who understands the past and its patterns, the manager who deals with the present, and the strategist who, as he says, “smells the future.” In his opinion, the best GMs carry all three. "Someone who manages must understand all three of those components."

Without that vision, the clubs that wait until the storm is overhead get desperate. They make reactive decisions and regrettable mistakes. They renovate without a plan, recruit without a pipeline, and lose good people without understanding why.

Institutional Memory and Futurist

One of the more underappreciated aspects of Patterson's philosophy is his view on what makes the GM irreplaceable. "The manager is institutional memory," he says. "I connect you with the past. I'm the totem with the past." And that responsibility comes with an equally important obligation to the future.

Patterson points out that this is a trap a lot of clubs fall into. Board members rotate, presidents come and go. Their tenure is finite, and their attention is, appropriately, focused on the present. Without a GM who is actively studying trends, attending conferences, reading broadly, and asking uncomfortable questions about where the industry is headed, the club is navigating on gut instincts and faith.

"You've got to be curious. What is the future?" He keeps an idea bank of people, places, and ideas that’s nearly 800 pages long. The information finds him, he says, because he goes looking for it.

Educating the Board Before They Serve

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Patterson's approach is how he thinks about board development. As a GM, he did not wait for a nominating committee to hand him a board. He helped build it, one committee member at a time, year after year.

"The education of board members begins a long time before they're selected to serve," he explains. While at The Beach Club, he identified prospective board members early, recruited them to committees intentionally, and provided governance context at the start of every committee year. Global club issues were always on the agenda, even for committees focused on something as specific as food and beverage. "So everybody was getting a global understanding while they worked on a committee with a specific understanding."

The payoff was a board that had, as Patterson puts it, “drunk the Kool-Aid" before they ever took a seat. They understood the club's culture, its why, and the principles that guided decisions. By the time they were voting on capital plans or membership policy, they were not starting from scratch.

The alternative, in Patterson's words, is a “horror story”. Contested elections. Members who put their names in the hat without committee experience and win on social capital find themselves making consequential decisions without context.

"They get a new board, they had no control over what's coming on, and they lose their job." The average GM tenure, he notes, is roughly three years, about the time it takes for everyone who hired them to cycle off the board. Think about it. That is not a coincidence.

Facts Persuade. Emotion Moves.

To be sure, Patterson also recognizes the limitations of pure logic. He knows other general managers who build a compelling case for a capital project and still walk out of the board meeting empty-handed. "You can persuade people with facts," he says, "but to get them to act, they have to be persuaded by emotion. That's what moves them."

Nowhere is this more apparent than in how he feels about team building. He describes himself, with obvious affection, as “the dancing monkey,” the high-energy presence in the room who opens ears and disarms the audience. His two assistant managers and controller, what he calls the “three sisters," provided the logic and follow-through. "I didn't need another dancing monkey. I needed the logical human being." For GMs who do not possess charisma naturally, Patterson says, know your gaps and hire around them. What matters is that the emotional energy runs through the organization somewhere.

Culture Is Not a Passive Thing

One notion Patterson categorically disagrees with is that culture just happens. It doesn't. Culture is built, tended, and at times, defended by managers who understand the human condition, educate the people around them, and stay curious enough to see what's coming before it arrives.

"My job is to nudge them into the future," Patterson says of the leaders and boards he works with. That quiet and persistent nudge, that is grounded in deep institutional knowledge, could well be the most important thing a general manager does. Of course, that's harder than it sounds. But for clubs serious about building a culture that outlasts any single board cycle, it may be the best place to start.