Annual Meetings
The Club State of the Union
Clubland USA has spent much of 2025 producing Clubhouse Guides for proper etiquette at your Club. This spans from bringing your special someone for the first time, navigating the various membership fees and even voting in club elections.
Ishaan Jajodia brings you yet another Clubhouse Guide this week: the Annual Meeting. Some members of your Club — like yours truly — almost always find themselves on international soil (or golfing with novelists) on the date of his Club’s annual meetings. Others, like Ishaan, are the most observed as their commentary certainly influences locker room and bar chatter.
This week’s Dispatches from Clubland is brought to you by yours truly.—LR
Annual General Meetings: The Club’s State of the Union
You might ask, what in darned clubland is your AGM?
Sometime during the first three months of the year, it is tradition that the President of the United States presents an address to both Houses of Congress and other federal officials. While between Jefferson and Wilson presidents shied away from Congress and transmitted their report in written form, the norm since then has always been an in-person State of the Union, where information about the agenda for the following year, finances, dues, levies, and plans are readily available. Such is your club’s annual general meeting, the AGM, to which you might have received an invitation (now hastily confined to your recycling). Unlike the State of the Union, however, these important events, which give you valuable information and a say in the club’s officers and functionings, are poorly attended; our club has less than 10% of the membership present.
It is, I would say, what you owe to your club: knowledge of its affairs.
It is where officers of the club are usually appointed anew or their appointments renewed, where finances are revealed and reviewed and subject to question, and where prospects for future financial, administrative, and strategic positions, good and bad, are openly revealed.
There is also conventionally a cocktail hour which precedes it, usually on the club’s dime, and you might find someone amenable to your complaints to help you protest whatever injustice you might perceive to have been perpetrated against you: your bartender’s martinis only equal three standard drinks instead of four, or someone had the audacity to charge you for a club soda (after all, sir, this is a club).
The flow of an AGM generally proceeds as follows: the secretary of the club calls the meeting to order, quorum is ascertained, and then the speeches begin. Some amount of lubrication through the aforementioned cocktail hour is necessary to get through the humdrum, though, admittedly, one ought to not imbibe too much, lest one forget the important details that follow.
In the weeks preceding the AGM, you would have received a ballot, a nomination form, and additional details.
On the ballot are typically board members and officers such as the treasurer. One of the clubs I belong to staggers terms like the Senate, and no more than a third of the board is refreshed every two years, which I think to be the best way to preserve institutional memory and promote long-term collaboration.
The nomination form enables your vote to be cast as the club’s recommendations in case you would not like to attend the meeting or are unable to do so. It also typically includes a space for write-ins, and at my club ten write-ins constitute enough quorum for consideration.
This is also the time of the year to brush up on bye-laws, which govern the rules of the club. Amendments to the bye-laws are typically included within the notice of the AGM, and while most are innocuous, suspicion is always the right state of mind, and any possible implications for changes ought to be teased out and thought about in advance of writing a blank cheque to the board. Club boards tend to hold the reins (or at any rate believe they do), but club managers do their part, putting their thumb on the scale.
The AGM is the only forum where the club lays out to its constituent members its financial standing. If you want to know the extent to which your club broke even the past year (or not), you ought to attend. Debt, bonuses, pay for officers, and improvements made to the physical clubhouse are typically presented alongside, along with a statement of sales and income, broken down by categories. This is usually after the budget, P&L statement, and balance sheet has passed external audit and board review.
Don’t be shy to ask questions. Grab your friends, and corral them into expressing concerns and appreciation. Your board doesn’t get paid, and it is a thankless job for them. And some club managers hide behind closed doors, but this is a good time to see the helmsman of your club.—IJ
Dispatches from Clubland
Motor City Clubland Embraces Big Smoke. A reader of Clubland USA has informed the writers of this publication that the Detroit Athletic Club allows members and reciprocal guests to smoke cigars in its Last Word bar. Three cheers for these club cats!
Bye, Bye Falmouth Country? The Falmouth Country Club in Cape Cod, MA could be turned into the state’s largest solar photovoltaic facility by 2027. We wish the best to these club cats!
Club Culture Course Coming. Starting in 2026, fans of Seth Thevoz’s Clubland Substack will be able to take club culture courses. These courses, which will occur over a period of 10 weeks, will consist of weekly online lectures followed by a group discussion capped at 12 participants. Thevoz, an expert on British Clubland, is the author of London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious.