Soho House is the most studied membership business in the world, and its accounts reward the attention. Revenue of $1.2 billion. More than 270,000 members. A waitlist of over 100,000 people, for a product whose core offer is a room you are allowed to sit in. Membership revenue grew 17 per cent in the last full year filed.
It has also, in three decades of operation, never reported an annual bottom-line profit.
Both facts are true at once, and any investor in membership leisure needs to hold them together, because each one is a lesson.
The first lesson is that membership is the strongest revenue model in the sector. Recurring subscription income is predictable, front-loaded and defensible in a way that transactional leisure revenue never is. A pay-and-play venue starts every month at zero. A membership club starts every month at last month, minus churn. The waitlist is the tell: when scarcity and community are the product, demand compounds rather than clears. Nobody queues two years for a gym.
The second lesson is that the model forgives nothing on the cost side. Clubs are capex-heavy, payroll-heavy and rent-heavy, and those costs arrive on day one while members arrive over years. Soho House shows that you can compound members and revenue for thirty years and still not return cash, if the rollout keeps consuming the operating profit each unit produces. Growth is not the same thing as a business.
The fitness sector, less glamorous and more disciplined, shows what the model looks like when it works. The operators that trade well share three habits. They prove one unit to a mature margin before building the second. They lease rather than buy, keeping the balance sheet off the floor. And they treat retention as a line item with a budget and an owner, not a hoped-for outcome, because at industry churn rates a club replaces a third of its membership every year just to stand still.
Padel is about to test a generation of investors on exactly this. The sport is social by design: four players per booking, twice a week, with a drink afterwards if the venue gives them a reason. It is the best raw material for a membership business that British leisure has produced in decades. It will still punish anyone who confuses a full court diary with a durable company.
The filings are public. The lessons are free. The discipline is the hard part.
Sources: Soho House & Co Form 10-K FY2024 and 8-K earnings releases (SEC); Fortune; HFA 2025 Fitness Industry Benchmarking Report.