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Friel Golf Management Defied Family-Business Odds
By Steve Eubanks
Family businesses rarely stay under family control for more than a generation, maybe two.
There are still Fords at the Ford Motor Co., but it’s a far cry from the halcyon days of Henry and Henry II. Chick-Fil-A has its third generation of the Cathy family in management, but governance and legacy are becoming more difficult as the family tree expands. Pick an industry: there are no Macys at Macy’s, no duPonts at DuPont, no Firestones running Firestone (which is, in fact, owned by Bridgestone, a Japanese conglomerate). The Murdochs still control NewsCorp, but it’s a much different company now that Rupert has semi-retired and it will likely change even more after his passing. In golf, the Solheims still make all the decisions at Ping, but how that will work a generation from now remains open-ended.
So, it’s a marvel of the golf course ownership business that the children of Phil J. Friel Jr. not only continued in their father’s footsteps, but that two decades after the patriarch’s passing, Phil’s grandchildren are servicing the golf population of New England with the same zeal that marked their grandfather’s time in the game.
Phil Friel, who passed away in 2000, was ahead of his time. A caddie at Woburn Country Club in Massachusetts who worked his way up to head golf professional, Friel went on to be the head pro at Bellevue Country Club in Melrose, Massachusetts, and Nashua Country Club in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was a good enough player during that time to win the New England PGA Championship as well as the New Hampshire and Massachusetts opens.
But Friel longed for something more. After long discussions about financing with one of his members at Nashua, Phil bought enough property in Hudson, New Hampshire, to build his own public golf course in 1961. It was a pioneering move at the time. Golf was still a country club sport for the captains of industry and well-heeled upper managers of the industrial Northeast. Friel saw a niché and capitalized on it.
Two generations later, Friel Golf Management is thriving in that same niché market.
“My mother’s maiden name was Green, so that’s how Green Meadows got its name,” said David Friel of the first course his father built in Hudson. The one course, which Phil designed and built, expanded to 36 holes with David and his brothers working alongside their father. The company eventually expanded to 15 courses throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
“In the late ’70s, we really started to grow,” David said. “We had a friend who owned Cape Cod Country Club and wanted to retire, so we bought that. Then we took over a course in New London, New Hampshire, that had been donated to Colby-Sawyer College. They were losing money, so we got a good deal and bought that.”
On it went until Phil passed away at the turn of the millennium. That’s when things could have gone off the rails. Governance and transition among family members is always sticky. In the case of the Friels, Phil’s children divided up the courses and operated separate businesses in distinct markets. At first glance this would appear to be a divided house collapsing. But even though New Hampshire is known more for snow skiing and water sports on Lake Winnipesauke than golf, both separate operations work quite well.
“My brothers took the properties up (in the) north (part of New Hampshire) and I have the courses in the south,” David said. “The only property we still have together is the original, Green Meadow, which was too valuable to split up.”
The current iteration of Friel Golf Management includes the Overlook Golf Club in Hollis, New Hampshire, which David designed and built in 1988, Cape Cod Country Club, Green Meadow and a large grass driving range in Hudson with a half-mile-long grass tee.
“The short version is, our courses are less than an hour from Logan Airport (Boston), so a great deal of our business comes from Massachusetts,” David said. “Where the courses up north might do 18- to 20,000 rounds because of the short season and the markets you’re drawing from, down here courses can do 30- to 35,000 rounds. Before the oversupply bubble that led to the big downturn in the business around 2008, we had courses doing 45,000 rounds.”
Now, David is content to do what his father did, run a boutique golf management business with his own son and daughter.
“In the summertime, we have a couple of hundred employees,” David said. “We’re affordable public golf, the kind of place where you enjoy your round and then have hotdogs, hamburgers and Bud Light. That’s our thing. A lot of people drive an hour because it’s good golf. We always pride ourselves on our course conditions. We’ve always been friendly and nice to people and we’re affordably priced. That’s allowed us to build a loyal following. We’re very happy where we are.”
Steve Eubanks is an Atlanta-based freelance writer and New York Times bestselling author.