A self-confessed Newcastle United football fan, times are exciting both personally and professionally for Karl Hepple, director of golf and leisure at Stoke by Nayland Resort in Suffolk.

In football parlances and backed by Saudi investment – the same wealth management fund that has financed LIV Golf – Newcastle United, or the ‘Toon Army’ are just about to embark on arguably their biggest season in living memory, as they prepare for Champions League football on Tyneside.

And whilst Hepple can look forward (hopefully) to an action-packed season on the football pitch, back on the golf course, his career is very much in the ascendency thanks to a recent promotion with added responsibility.

Hailing from Northumberland, Hepple moved to Suffolk in 2018, and recalls his first experience of the North/South divide, an often referred to split in UK geography.

“It was funny,” he recollects. “I remember driving down here for my second interview and people talk about the North/South divide quite a bit, and until you’ve experienced both, you don’t really typically know about it.

“I left home at 2pm, and I remember that it was light, and it was ten degrees. And I remember driving down here for five hours in the pitch black, and it was four degrees warmer in the dark than it was in the daytime in the northeast.

“And I was like, ‘You can understand why golf’s a bit more prosperous down here’ laughs the 31-year-old.

Growing-up, aged 12, Hepple got into golf through school friends and a few years later, realised that he wasn’t half bad. That was when in his own words, “playing football became less of a priority.”

His first role in golf was at his local club, Longhirst Hall, recalling: “It was very new at the time, and I actually look back now and I think how forward-thinking it was.

“I’m going back near enough 20 years, and at that point they had flexible memberships in their offering. At the time it was a bit weird because it was the only club doing it, whereas looking back, I think actually those guys were really on it. Really on it.”

After finishing school, Hepple was considering a career in either teaching or physiotherapy, but after talking with the proprietor of Longhirst Hall, opted to stay, alternating roles between the pro shop, bar and even spending six months working on the greens.

“Looking back, that was a really good thing for me to do,” says Hepple, “as I don’t think many GMs or directors of golf have done that.”

Having gained a foothold in the industry, Hepple began his career proper in golf with MacDonald Hotels in April 2013, working at Linden Hall, Slaley Hall and for a year, on the Costa del Sol in Spain. The opportunity to move to Maften Hall, again in Northumberland presented itself in May 2018, and following a six month stay, got the career break he was seeking when Hepple took over the vacant role of golf manager at Stoke by Nayland.

Located on the Essex/Suffolk border, and in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the resort boasts two highly respected courses, The Gainsborough and The Constable.

A family-run business, Stoke by Nayland is owned by the Peake Family who founded the Copella apple juice brand, and has been home for Hepple for the past five years since arriving in November 2018.

Aware of the resort through its association with the EuroPro Tour and the Seniors Challenge Tour, Hepple’s initial role was more administration than management as he explains: “The job that I was brought in to do, I probably was doing something vastly different within six months.

“It was a very traditional role, more of a secretary position than a golf manager. I was actually reporting to a board at the time, and I basically went to them, and I said: ‘You’re paying me to do not a lot here, really. This is what I think I should be doing.’

“And very quickly it became less of a working in the business job to working on the business.”

He soon set about building a team that would help elevate not only his standing with the business, but perhaps more importantly, the operational effectiveness of the golf club. Now accountable for the leisure offering as well as the golf, Hepple has helped develop a unique business model for a golf hotel, that appears to be bucking the trend.

“If I look at how many golf break rooms we were doing in 2018 when I got here, versus our current projection for 2023, there will be an 80 per cent increase,” he states.

“We’re really lucky in the sense that we’ve got a really good sales team, and a good marketing team, and our job is to promote, market, and make sure that we’re hitting the right demographics of people.

“Obviously we must be doing something right as 75 per cent of our business comes direct to us rather than using any tour operators. That’s a really nice thing to have, because it just means that we don’t have to give away any commissions.”

And interestingly, when quizzed about the average length of stay, Hepple has a quite unique perspective. “We actually don’t really want them staying for any more than a night,” he admits. “We would rather sell one night twice than a two-night once, and it’s because of the correlation between the food and beverage spend when somebody stays for two nights.”

And this strategy appears to be working, although a two-round, one-night stay does put additional pressure on the tee-sheet with between 55,000 and 60,000 rounds per year, on each course. “If you said those numbers to a private member’s club, they would have a heart attack. Do we notice a difference? Yes, we do, predominantly because the golf course just wasn’t built to facilitate that amount of golf.”

Despite these constraints, membership is currently around 960 (up from 660 in 2018), and new initiatives to grow the game such as the ‘Wednesday Club’ are being actively rolled out, which advocates no rules, no dress code – just fun, for one hour a week.

Designed to bring newcomers into the resort – not necessarily the sport – Hepple is quite clear on his objective.

“Because I work in the industry, I quite often walk into clubs and I put myself in the place of a 23-year-old woman. Because I know that’s the demographic that we miss in golf. And I say, so am I comfortable here, and nine times out of ten, it’s no.

“Whereas you don’t have that at Stoke by Nayland. You have an environment where pretty much every demographic of person is comfortable and wants to spend time. So because of that, our average age is 51 at golf, so it’s pretty low in terms of comparing it to the industry average.

“If I was to compare it to a couple of clubs locally, I could almost bet my life on the fact that they’re about ten years older than that.”

Working with 59club, Hepple knows that those figures aren’t randomly plucked from thin air as he explains: “I brought them in here, but I’ve worked with those guys for far longer than that.

“Other clubs ask me why I use 59club, and I think that the overwhelming thing is the ability that they have to show you industry data for varying different things – I just don’t understand why somebody wouldn’t want to know that.”

As to the future, for now Hepple is content in ‘Sleepy Suffolk’ although like a star centre-forward, it may prove difficult for his current employers to retain their prized asset should a Premier sized golf facility put a bid in for his services.

Until then, it’s a win-win for both sides.