Joe Skovgaard, left, launched Clubhouse Work & Golf with Josh Kaplan in late 2024. (Matt Geiger/BusinessDen)
Josh Kaplan and Joe Skovgaard have set a tee time for an office building on Colorado Boulevard come late summer.
The two entrepreneurs are opening a second location of Clubhouse Work & Golf, a coworking space with golf simulators, in 26,000 square feet at 720 N. Colorado Blvd. Most of that will be offices on the top floor of the building’s north tower, with space for five Trackman golf simulators and a couple of conference rooms in the lobby.
“Once we got the first one opened and people could come see and experience it, the floodgates started opening,” Kaplan said. “People started coming to us with opportunities and deals, and that’s how we got this place.”
IWG Regus, an international coworking brand, had previously been in the top-floor space, and the building’s owners were looking to backfill it with a new tenant.
The first location, at 5680 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. in Greenwood Village, opened in late 2024. It reached 100% occupancy 13 months later, Kaplan said. Tenants sign 12-month leases, and rents range from $1,000 to $3,800 monthly. There’s also an option for people to work in the space without a dedicated office.
“Cherry Creek and the adjacent market … the income levels in that area are similarly high to Greenwood Village, but the density per capita is much higher,” Kaplan said.
Because demand is so high, the two are adding more space in Greenwood Village, too. To finance the expansion and the Cherry Creek addition, the company is raising $1.5 million from investors.
But the process to get the business online was grueling and took three years. Landlords were skeptical about signing a lease for the unproven concept.
“They’re essentially giving you a 10-year loan on a 10-year lease. And so they look at your risk. Well, you’re a startup, you don’t have a ton of money in the bank. You’ve got no assets for me to take from if you default on your lease,” Kaplan told BusinessDen before opening the first location.
Inside the existing coworking space in Greenwood Village. (Courtesy of Clubhouse Work & Golf)
Over the past year and some change, the two business owners have watched their coworking and golf experiment unfold. Some people join because they’re avid golfers and want a fun way to blow off steam during the work day. But for many others, the simulators have become part of their business strategy.
“The golf simulators are a way to bring people together, just the way that, when you go play golf at a course, here you’re paired up with three other random people you’ve never met,” Kaplan said.
“We have people that joined here that really don’t golf at all, but I think they sense that those simulators, they’re not just for practice. They get people to relax a little bit. … You can take your guard down and not have things feel so stuffy,” added Skovgaard, Kaplan’s business partner.
The business has put on ample programming to tie the model together. Golf club maker Mizuno puts on demo days, for instance, where members can try its products. The company’s territory manager is a member of the club, too.
Golf coaches frequently come in as well, helping members with their games. And tournaments run throughout the year for bragging rights and small prizes.
“It creates fun little banter in our Slack channel,” Skovgaard said.
The demand for memberships led the duo to expand the existing 17,000-square-foot space in Greenwood Village. They plan to add 9,000 square feet. That’s 30 more offices, two conference rooms and a pair of new Trackman simulators.
“We won’t need to really raise too much more until we get to the point where we’re like, ‘OK, let’s go out and do 20 of these in the next two to three years.’”
Until their recent foray into raising money, Kaplan and Skovgaard had been financing the business themselves. The former worked for a French tech firm and the latter in software design.
Kaplan had built up an expertise with golf simulators from building one in his garage before the pandemic. Within a week of meeting Skovgaard, the idea for the business began to percolate.
“I probably made some off-the-cuff comment. And next thing you know, we’re sitting at the bar just brainstorming,” Kaplan said.