This sits on top of the business case: it doesn’t change the venue plan or the next-steps board, it explains the thinking that connects them and adds one new track. The evidence behind it comes from studying five markets where operators fought booking platforms (golf, boutique fitness, restaurants, hotels, food delivery), the operator-owned consortiums that became infrastructure (Visa, Best Western, Ace Hardware), and what has actually happened in padel.
The objective, the strategy, the tactics
Objective: become the corridor’s padel institution — the club people belong to, not a venue they book. Everything else (the country-club setting, the membership, the cross-venue leagues, the software) serves that.
Strategy in one sentence: use community and experience — the things sheds and marketplaces structurally can’t copy — to own the player relationship, and use our software strength to make other operators allies rather than rivals.
Tactics: the board. Nothing in this note adds work to Stage 1 beyond a few extra questions in coffees we’re already having.
Playing to strengths
Our weakness is leisure track record. Our strengths are software, community instinct, and a local network that keeps turning out to be one connection deep. Three moves convert the strengths into cover for the weakness:
- An experienced operator on the cap table. An investor who has built and run padel venues answers “have you done this before?” with someone else’s track record and real skin in the game — stronger than an advisor, cheaper than a franchise. The people list has the candidates; a founder who has exited is ideal, because they’re free, non-conflicted, and carry scar tissue we can learn from cheaply.
- Our own booking rails from day one. The venue runs on software we build and own: bookings, membership, recurring slots, leagues, access, payments. This is the plan anyway — the strategic point is to build it as a product, not as internal tooling.
- The corridor alliance. A cross-venue league with the other local independents costs nothing, gives players something no platform offers locally, and builds operator relationships before any commercial conversation. Allies first, customers later.
Two companies, not one
The venue and the software are different assets with different investors, and each matches a different part of the group’s credibility.
- VenueCo — the club. Leisure investors, asset finance, the operator-investor, the community round. Its story is the business case.
- PlatformCo — the software. A conventional startup with a founding team whose track record is exactly this kind of build. The venue is its first customer and live testbed, on arm’s-length terms.
Separate entities keep the venue’s lease and debt off the software company, keep each raise clean, and mean neither can sink the other. The operator-ownership idea becomes PlatformCo’s go-to-market: early operator customers get founder terms — zero commission and a stake — so the coalition lives in the cap table rather than in co-op law.
The platform wedge — what the evidence says
The pain is real and operators are already acting on it. Playtomic charges setup fees plus a per-booking commission (unpublished; sales-quote only) and owns the player relationship. Rocket Padel and Padium have already left it over access to their own customer data, and a Huddersfield operator built white-label booking from day one to “control our customer journey”. Meanwhile MATCHi — the operator-friendly alternative — is VC-owned and just merged into a 9,000-venue European platform. No operator-owned booking platform exists anywhere in European padel. The ground we’d stand on is genuinely unoccupied.
The five-market pattern says our scope is right. In golf, fitness, restaurants, hotels and delivery, the same fight ran and the same lessons fell out:
- The operators who did well never boycotted the platform — they confined it to off-peak and kept peak inventory and members on their own channels. The venue that leaves a marketplace entirely loses the demand it does want; the venue that lets the marketplace price its peak inventory gets hollowed out (“golfers who are Hot Deal players only play Hot Deals” — discounted marketplace demand never converts to direct customers).
- Flat-fee, own-your-data challengers (Resy, Tock, SevenRooms, ChowNow, foreUP) proved the wedge works and built businesses worth hundreds of millions — but none displaced the incumbent alone. The realistic ambition for PlatformCo is being the best operator-side rails in one region and then one country, not killing Playtomic.
- Genuine operator ownership survived only where it stayed disciplined: restaurant delivery co-ops run at well under 10% effective commission and are still expanding; Visa and Amadeus turned member consortiums into the world’s infrastructure. The failure mode is also documented: Interflora and FTD’s florists sold their co-op for a one-off payout and watched it destroyed under leveraged owners within a generation. Governance lesson for PlatformCo: operators hold real equity that participates in any upside, and no member — including us — gets control.
Why the timing works, and its limit. In today’s supply-starved market, operators pay commission for demand they’d get anyway — the platform’s value is at its historic low, which is why the door is open. But Sweden flipped from scarcity to glut in about eighteen months, and when courts need filling, marketplace demand becomes valuable again. So PlatformCo is built for both states: the direct rails own the regulars and the peak (valuable in every market condition), and Playtomic or its successors stay useful for off-peak discovery. Complementary by design, not a war.
Version one is deliberately small. The pre-formed group — the weekly foursome — is most of all bookings and needs no matchmaking, no marketplace, no liquidity. V1 is: recurring slots (“your Tuesday 7pm, held every week”), one-off direct bookings, member pricing, and the operator owning every scrap of customer data. The recurring slot is the killer feature — it’s a subscription in a market where the incumbent is transactional, it guarantees operators base-load revenue, and cancelling it means losing your slot. Direct-channel incentives are perks, not discounts — a free drink costs pence, feels like pounds, walks the player to the bar, and no platform contract clause can touch it. Not built in v1: matchmaking, open matches, any marketplace — those come only if the corridor alliance one day gives them liquidity for free.
Two questions to settle in coffees already on the board: what do local operators’ Playtomic contracts actually restrict (exclusivity is very unlikely in a market where platforms need supply more than supply needs them; price-parity clauses are the thing to glance for), and does Playtomic’s API allow calendar sync, which decides whether spare inventory flows to the marketplace smoothly or has to be partitioned.
The honest corrections from the research
Two things we believed got weaker, and the plan should absorb both.
The exit story is thinner than assumed. No padel club transaction anywhere in Europe has a published price or multiple. The UK consolidators build rather than buy — David Lloyd, The Padel Club, Powerleague’s new owners are all greenfield — and the one fund that did roll up clubs (Triton’s LeDap, in the Nordics) wrote down ~€65m and closed most of its Swedish estate; distressed clubs sold at warehouse value. So “build it and sell to a consolidator” is a possibility, not a plan. The venue has to be worth holding: a business that pays its people well and throws off cash is the base case, and any future sale is upside. That happens to match why we want to build it anyway.
Sweden’s other lesson is about size. The mega-clubs failed first; the operator who studied it now deliberately builds four-court sites. Our six-court, hospitality-led format sits on the right side of that finding, and the stop criteria in the business case — rerun the maths if the local pipeline grows again — are the mechanism that keeps us there.
What this note changes
Almost nothing about the next month, which is the point of good strategy: Stage 1 proceeds exactly as boarded, with two discovery questions added to the operator coffees and the operator-investor conversation given priority among the people list. What it changes is what we’re building towards: one institution, two companies, and a piece of unoccupied ground — the operator-owned rails — that we’re better placed to take than anyone currently in the market.