Kelsi Collins: Redefining the Private Club Experience
In private clubs, membership is often described in numbers: inquiries, prospects, conversions, retention and demographics. Kelsi Collins, CMP, sees something more complicated—and more human.
For Collins, Director of Membership & Marketing at The Oaks Club in Osprey, Florida, membership sits at the intersection of nearly everything a club does. It begins with the story a prospective member hears, continues through the expectations created during the buying process and ultimately succeeds or fails based on the experience delivered after someone joins.
That perspective has steadily expanded the boundaries of her role.
Today, Collins’ work reaches across membership strategy, branding, communications, technology, real estate relationships and member experience. Increasingly, she is also looking beyond her own department, deliberately developing a deeper understanding of club operations as she prepares for the next stage of leadership.
It is a trajectory that makes sense when viewed against an unconventional career built not in one straight line, but through a series of experiences in sales, retail, merchandising, marketing, management and hospitality.
Learning to Read the Customer
Long before Collins entered the private club industry, she was learning how people make decisions.
Her early career included customer-facing sales, retail management, merchandising, promotional and marketing roles. On paper, those experiences may seem removed from private club membership. In practice, they taught her many of the skills she relies on today: how presentation influences perception, how to recognize what a customer is not saying, how to build trust quickly and how to translate a brand promise into a personal experience.
Her studies in Hospitality and Tourism Management at Florida Atlantic University gave those practical lessons a clearer direction, while additional training in leadership, communications and hospitality continued to sharpen her approach.
Private clubs ultimately offered something other customer-facing industries could not: the opportunity to build a relationship that continues long after the sale.
At Coral Ridge Country Club, Collins progressed to Membership Sales Manager and began working directly with prospective members navigating one of the industry’s most personal purchasing decisions.
A prospective member is not simply evaluating amenities. They are asking themselves whether they can see their life unfolding there: whether the people feel like their people, whether the culture fits, whether their family will be comfortable and whether the experience justifies the commitment.
Collins learned to pay attention to all of it.
In 2022, that service philosophy earned her international recognition when the International Hospitality Institute selected her as one of 10 recipients of its Julian Star Award for extraordinary hospitality.
But the next chapter of her career would challenge her to think beyond the traditional membership conversation entirely.
A Different Kind of Membership Journey
When Collins joined The Oaks Club in 2022, she entered a membership environment unlike the conventional model.
The Oaks is a mandatory-membership residential club. Access to the Club is tied to purchasing a home within its affiliated communities. As a result, the membership journey often begins before Collins or anyone on her team has met the prospective member.
It may begin at a kitchen counter during a home showing.
Or in a car with a realtor.
Or while a buyer is scrolling through a property listing from hundreds of miles away.
“We are a mandatory membership club, which means that the only way you can gain access to the club is by purchasing a home,” Collins explains.
That reality led her to a deceptively simple question: If real estate professionals are often having the first conversation about the Club, why wouldn’t the Club make sure they are equipped to have the right one?
Collins began systematically monitoring homes entering the market, identifying listing agents and developing relationships with the professionals surrounding the community. She invited realtors into the Club, offered tours and organized educational sessions designed to help them understand not only mandatory membership, but the lifestyle they were representing.
“They’re already doing showings. They’re already talking about your club. Wouldn’t you rather equip them with the right information?”
The idea reframed realtors from referral sources into strategic partners.
It also illustrates something larger about Collins’ leadership style: she looks beyond the traditional boundaries of a department to identify where the member experience actually begins.
When the Membership Changes, the Brand Must Listen
That instinct became particularly important following the extraordinary real estate activity surrounding the pandemic.
In a relatively short period, approximately one-third of The Oaks Club’s membership changed hands. Incoming members were younger, many came from other private clubs, and their expectations around dining, programming, communication and technology were evolving.
The Club itself had not suddenly become something different. But the way members experienced it—and the way prospective members needed to understand it—was changing.
Collins became closely involved in a comprehensive rebranding effort that refreshed the Club’s visual identity, photography, messaging and communication touchpoints.
The objective was not reinvention for reinvention’s sake.
It was alignment.
A private club brand, Collins believes, cannot simply describe what an organization believes itself to be. It has to accurately reflect what members experience when they arrive.
That philosophy is visible in the numbers. During The Oaks Club’s 2024–2025 year, its 25 incoming members had an average age of 60.5, and 68 percent already belonged to another club. They arrived from markets including New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
These were not consumers who needed to be taught what a private club was. Many arrived with a sophisticated frame of reference and their own expectations of service, communications, amenities and community.
For Collins, that makes listening increasingly important.
The strongest membership strategy is not a script delivered more persuasively. It is an ability to understand who is sitting across the table and what matters to them.
Beyond Membership
Perhaps the most significant evolution in Collins’ career is that her work no longer fits neatly inside the word “membership.”
She has contributed to the branding of The Overlook, one of The Oaks Club’s newer dining experiences, and has helped advance the Club’s digital member experience. In 2026, The Oaks launched a redesigned members-only website intended to give members more intuitive access to reservations, governance information, Club resources, communications and other essential information.
Even initiatives far outside conventional membership marketing have attracted her attention.
After seeing on-site beekeeping programs elsewhere in the club industry, Collins helped introduce bee colonies at The Oaks—an initiative designed to support the local ecosystem while eventually supplying fresh honey for culinary applications within the Club.
The projects may appear unrelated: a restaurant brand, a website, a realtor education program and a colony of bees.
To Collins, they are connected.
Each represents another point at which a member encounters the Club’s identity. Each can either reinforce or contradict what the organization says it values.
That is why Collins increasingly approaches marketing not simply as promotion, but as experience design.
From Practitioner to Industry Voice
As her responsibilities have expanded, so has Collins’ presence within the broader hospitality and private club industry.
She earned her Certified Marketing Professional designation in 2023 and served as a local Professional Club Marketing Association chapter president in 2025. She has twice been recognized among the Top 50 Women Leaders in Hospitality, in 2024 and 2025.
She has also returned to Florida Atlantic University to speak with hospitality students about careers in private clubs—a full-circle moment for someone whose own hospitality education helped redirect a career that had already crossed several industries.
More recently, Collins has begun moving from participant to presenter on the industry stage, including presenting at the 2026 Club Management Association of America World Conference.
In 2026, she was also selected as a recipient of the Florida Chapter CMAA’s Jay DiPietro Scholarship, supporting her continued pursuit of broader club-management education. Collins is actively pursuing her CCM (Certified Club Manager) designation to potentially pursue a future role as a General Manager / COO.
The significance of that development is less about adding another credential than about where Collins wants to go next.
“One of my goals this year has been to gain a deeper understanding of every area of club operations so I can better support our team.”
It is a revealing goal for someone whose title is Director of Membership & Marketing.
Collins is no longer interested only in understanding the beginning of the member journey. She wants to understand the entire organization responsible for delivering it.
A Different Kind of Leadership
For all the professional milestones Collins has reached in recent years, the role that has changed her perspective most has nothing to do with her title.
She is also mom to her two-year-old daughter, Anastasia.
Motherhood arrived during a period of significant professional growth, as Collins was taking on broader responsibilities at The Oaks Club and becoming increasingly involved in the private club industry. Rather than diminishing her ambition, becoming a mother has given it a different sense of purpose.
It has made time more valuable, priorities clearer and the example she sets—both at work and at home—more meaningful.
For Collins, being a successful leader and a present mother are not competing identities. They are parts of the same life, and each has influenced the other. Motherhood has reinforced the importance of patience, adaptability and being intentional about where she invests her energy—qualities that translate naturally into leadership.
There is also something particularly meaningful about raising a daughter while continuing to challenge herself professionally.
“I hope my daughter sees that she can be anything she wants to be—and that she can have it all,” Collins says. “I hope she sees a mom who loves her and loves what she does, and who shows her that you can have both a rewarding career and a family.”
The awards, credentials and career milestones matter. But Collins is increasingly aware that success is also measured by the life being built around them—and by the example being set for the little girl watching it all.
Connecting the Promise to the Experience
There is a common temptation in luxury hospitality to separate marketing from operations.
Marketing tells the story. Operations delivers it.
Collins’ career increasingly challenges that distinction.
A realtor describing The Oaks to a homebuyer is part of the brand experience. So is the website that buyer visits that evening. So is the membership conversation that follows. The welcome process matters. The dining experience matters. Communications matter. Technology matters. The way an employee answers a question matters.
They are not separate experiences from the member’s perspective.
They are simply The Club.
That may be the clearest thread connecting Collins’ career—from retail and sales to Coral Ridge Country Club, and from membership at The Oaks to branding, communications, technology and broader club leadership.
She has built her career around the moments when expectation becomes experience.
And as the private club industry evolves—welcoming new generations of members, adopting new technology and reconsidering how it communicates its value—Collins is increasingly focused on making sure those two things remain connected.
Because attracting someone to a private club is only the beginning.
The more important work is making certain that what they discover once they arrive is even better than the story that brought them there.