While on vacation in Florida in November 1992, Simmonds conceived the idea for reciprocal golf play, founded ClubLink in 1993, and grew it into the largest owner and operator of golf courses in Canada. His strategy for ClubLink was to acquire a cluster of high-end courses, improve course management and techniques and offer distinctive membership plans, which has become the benchmark selling feature of ClubLink’s success. “I realized one of the big disadvantages of having a golf club membership was most high-end clubs were inflexible. Once you bought a membership, that’s where you would mostly play for the rest of your life.” From there, he made the decision to invest in more golf clubs and allow members access to play at all ClubLink facilities. A year later, ClubLink was formed and went public, Simmonds took $60 million and bought three more clubs. By 1996 the company owned six clubs. By 2001, the tally had zoomed to 21 member-fee and six daily-fee clubs in Ontario and Quebec as well as one club in Virginia. Simmonds retired from ClubLink in 2006.
Pacific Links
Simmonds was lured out of retirement in 2009 to help successful entrepreneur, Du Sha, launch Pacific Links International, a Canadian-owned golf corporation that now provides member access to more than 60 golf clubs throughout North America. Together, they created a unique membership structure that offers reciprocal member access to over 100 top-notch clubs in prime golf destinations around the world. Pacific Links has established an affiliation with the PGA Tour that provides reciprocal access to 23 member properties within the PGA TOUR’s TPC Network through the TPC Passport program, which includes TPC Sawgrass. In 2005 Simmonds was appointed CEO of Minacs Worldwide, a Toronto-based public company that was a Canadian leader in marketing services and BPO business. He successfully led the sale of the company to the Aditya Birla Group of Mumbai, India in 2006. In 2008 Simmonds was appointed CEO of publicly traded Resolve Corporation, also a TSX company. In 2009, he oversaw the successful sale on a share exchange basis to Davis + Henderson Corporation of Toronto.
