University Club
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Starting from zero in a 130-year-old institution

The University Club Atop Symphony Towers is one of San Diego's premier private clubs — a place where executives, civic leaders, and the city's professional community have gathered for over a century. When I came in, there was no content strategy, no brand guidelines, no social presence worth speaking of. Nothing. A historic institution with almost no modern marketing infrastructure.

The University Club is one location within Invited Clubs' portfolio of 200+ private clubs nationwide. That context mattered enormously: work that succeeded here had the potential to become a model for how the entire network operated. That's exactly what happened.

Building everything from scratch — then watching it spread

I built the complete brand system: visual guidelines, messaging architecture, social strategy, and operating playbooks. The goal wasn't just to make the club look better — it was to create tools the team could run without a creative director in the room. Scalable systems, not one-off deliverables.

I also created a vendor-inclusive event format — a programming structure that brought local vendors and businesses into the club's events. That format changed how the club engaged its membership and the broader San Diego community. Invited Clubs still uses it. After the model demonstrated results at the University Club, other business clubs and corporate organizations took notice — and started building their own content operations, sourcing local videographers and photographers in cities across the country.

The operating playbooks turned strategic decisions into documented processes: social calendars, content production workflows, event marketing frameworks, membership communication cadences. Everything a club needs to run a marketing operation consistently, without having to reinvent it from scratch every month.

The work earned the club its first Club of the Year award. When Invited Clubs' leadership saw the results, they adopted the systems across 140+ clubs nationwide.