Nobody Has Four Hours for Golf Anymore — Here's What Actually Works for Client Entertainment
Golf used to be the default answer to client entertainment. Book a tee time, play 18 holes, have lunch at the turn, close the back nine. Four to five hours of unstructured time with a client or a prospect, and by the end of the round you knew whether you actually liked each other.
The relationship logic was sound. The time commitment was enormous. And increasingly, neither side can say yes to it.
What's Actually Changed
It's not that clients don't want to spend time with you. It's that the ask has changed. A full round of golf on a Tuesday means leaving the office by 7am, being unreachable until 2pm, and burning most of the afternoon in recovery. Senior executives at middle-market companies — the exact people most worth building relationships with — are not making that trade as easily as they were ten years ago.
Add the fact that not everyone plays golf, or plays well enough to enjoy a full round with someone they're trying to impress, and the traditional outing starts to look like a commitment that only works for a narrow slice of your client base.
The Golf Simulator Solves the Actual Problem
Emergency 9 at Revelance is a private golf simulator that runs over 100 real-world courses. A competitive back nine takes 60 to 90 minutes. You can play Pebble Beach, Augusta, St Andrews — courses that carry the cultural weight of golf without requiring anyone to have a 12 handicap to enjoy them.
The simulator format preserves everything that made golf useful for client relationships: competition, casual conversation, shared experience, light pressure that reveals character. What it removes is the time commitment that makes the ask harder to say yes to, and the weather dependency that gets outings cancelled three times before they actually happen.
The Ask Is Easier
"Want to hit the simulator for an hour and grab a drink at the taphouse after?" is a different ask than "Want to block your entire Tuesday morning?" The first one gets a yes from people who play golf. It also gets a yes from people who have never touched a club, because it doesn't require skill — it requires showing up.
That's a larger circle of clients you can actually invite. And for the ones who do play seriously, the simulator novelty is its own draw — playing Augusta in Mason, Ohio in February is something they'll mention to someone else.
What the Space Actually Looks Like
Emergency 9 is a private room — not a bay in a shared simulator lounge, not a corner of a sports bar. It is a dedicated space with a boardroom table, a full simulator screen, and enough room to swing without checking your neighbors. The Revelance Taphouse is right downstairs, so the natural progression is a round of golf followed by Sonder beer at the bar.
For client entertainment that takes 90 minutes instead of five hours and works for people whether or not they play golf, it is a hard format to beat. See the room or reach out to book it.