How to open a crazy golf business

1. Pick your kind of venue

Almost every successful course is one of three things, and the choice drives everything after it:

• Bar-led, indoor, adults in the evening. Neon or heavily themed, in a city-centre unit, open late. Tickets are the entry fee; drinks and food are the profit.
• Family attraction. Daytime, holiday parks, seaside towns, garden centres. Higher footfall, lower spend per head, busy in school holidays.
• Add-on to something else. A pub garden, a hotel, a leisure centre. Fewer holes, low fit-out cost, and the course brings customers to the main business.

2. Find a site

Start from the course you want and work out the floor area: about 35 m² per hole including walkways, so about 315 m² for nine holes before the bar and toilets. Our space guide has the full table. Then check the building, not just the floor:

• Ceiling height. At least 2.4 m for players, and 2.4 m anywhere you want a windmill.
• Fire exits you can reach from every hole within about 45 m, and a step-free route in.
• Use class and licensing. In the UK a leisure use may need planning permission, and a bar needs a premises licence. Ask the council early; it's the slowest part.
• Evening footfall if you're bar-led: a cheap unit on a dead street is expensive.

3. Lay out the course

Before you pay a designer or builder, sketch the course in the actual building. You'll find out quickly whether nine holes really fit, where the bar has to go, and whether the first tee ends up next to the toilets. Good layouts share a few things:

• Hole 1 within 10 m of the ticket desk; the last hole within 10 m of the bar.
• Each cup within about 8 m of the next tee, in a route that never crosses itself.
• 1.2 m walkways, and a 0.9 m step-free route to every tee.
• A mix of holes: a couple of easy openers, one showpiece (a loop, a windmill, a jump over water) people will film, and a closing hole that ends near the bar.

4. Run the numbers

Capacity is the number most business plans get wrong, usually by assuming the course is full all day. Here's the working with typical assumptions for a 9-hole indoor course:

• Round time: 9 holes × 4.5 minutes a hole = 41 minutes.
• Throughput when full: one group per hole, each hole frees up every 4.5 minutes, groups of 3.5: about 47 players an hour.
• A real day: nobody is full all day. At 35% of that across 10 opening hours, it's about 163 players a day.
• Takings: at £9 a ticket, with 60% of players spending £6 at the bar, that's around £2,058 a day, £14,406 a week, or £749,112 a year, open 7 days a week.

Every one of those is an assumption you should replace with your own. Change them in the estimator on the venue planner page and every line of the working updates.

An estimate from your own assumptions, not a forecast. Gross takings before VAT, staff, rent, stock and fit-out costs. Check local demand before committing money.

5. Design, quote and build

With a layout and numbers you believe, get the course designed and quoted. Specialist crazy golf builders will want a floor plan with dimensions, the hole list, the ceiling height and the theme. Give every builder the same drawing, or you'll be comparing quotes for different courses. Fit-out typically also covers flooring, lighting (UV for neon courses), sound, the bar and signage.

6. Before you open

• Fire risk assessment by a competent person, and building control sign-off for the fit-out.
• Insurance: public liability as a minimum.
• Soft launch with friends and local businesses. Time a few rounds: if groups take longer than you assumed, your capacity is lower than you think.
• Something to film. A hole-in-one board, a showpiece hole, a leaderboard. Most crazy golf marketing is customers' own videos.

This guide is general information, not legal, planning or financial advice. Rules of thumb for early planning, not a building-regulations, fire-safety or accessibility compliance check. Get a fire risk assessment and building control advice before you build.