LINKS Magazine has been the most trusted name in golf for nearly four decades: the title that lives in the locker rooms of America's best private clubs, read by people who are worth, on average, about five million dollars apiece. After all those years, it is for sale. Jack and Nancy Purcell built it, they are ready to retire, and they care more about who carries the name than about the last dollar of it. They are selling to Nate Scott, who ran golf media at USA TODAY and Golfweek, because they trust him with it.
The business is profitable, and it has barely been touched. Nearly everything it earns comes from advertising, print and the newsletter, and it has barely begun to build the digital, travel, and real-estate businesses an audience like this is begging to be sold. We are buying it for $650,000, mostly with a seller note and bank debt, and raising a small Friends & Family round of $300,000 to switch those businesses on. A trusted brand, a profitable floor, and a great deal of room above it. That is the whole of the bet.
Strip away the glossy paper and a magazine is a simple business. It gathers an audience someone wants to reach, and it sells access to that audience. For a century that meant advertising, and it still does. But the best media brands now do something worth far more: they sell directly to the audience they've earned: trips, memberships, products, introductions. The brand is the trust. The audience is the asset. The money is in how many ways you can serve it.
By that measure, LINKS has barely begun. Its roughly $2.5 million a year, earned profitably, comes from two places: the print magazine and the email newsletter, now one of the brand's biggest revenue lines. That newsletter matters more than its size, because it is the one piece of digital LINKS ever leaned into, and it worked the moment it launched. The rest is barely tapped: the website earns nothing today, an early attempt to sell ads on it never found the traffic to support them; social is real but scattered and unmonetized; events are a handful a year. This is not a brand that needs fixing. It is a brand primed to explode, because everything it has truly switched on has worked immediately.
What changes hands is the whole of it:
What makes it valuable can't be bought any other way: thirty-eight years of trust, and a standing relationship with the most desirable audience in golf. Which is exactly where the potential begins, with who that audience is.
The audience is the asset, and no one has ever sold to them as a whole person.
Three clubs. One round.
We've already found the fairway off the tee: a media business that turns a profit today. The irons are the approach, the trips and private clubs this audience already wants to reach. The putter finishes the hole: the real estate they are already buying somewhere else. One bag, one audience, played in order.
The high floor
The print magazine reaches the country's best private clubs, and the email newsletter, already one of the brand's biggest revenue lines, proves the rest: when LINKS builds a digital product, this audience shows up. Where it has stalled is the website and social. An early attempt to sell website advertising never found the traffic to support it, so the site earns nothing there today, and the social presence is real but scattered: about 54,000 followers on Instagram, 13,000 on Facebook, a token presence on X and Threads, and a barely-used TikTok under a different handle entirely. For an audience this affluent, and with advertisers steering their budgets toward digital, a cohesive social operation and a website that finally sells advertising are the most obvious money in the building.
The LINKS Invitational
LINKS already runs events, and they already work. Last year four of them drew about 64 guests each, at more than $4,000 a head, over a million dollars in bookings, at roughly 30 percent net margin. Four events. That small slate is the single biggest reason 2025 revenue jumped 21 percent and the margin nearly doubled. The owner found it late; we are buying at the moment it turned.
From there, run the model proven across golf media: curated, high-touch trips to private clubs and the world's great resorts, sold to an audience that does extraordinary things for golf access. Scaling even modestly (a few more events, larger and priced higher) is a major opportunity on its own. Pair it with a membership whose card opens private courses with first call on the trips.
Premier Properties, productized
48% of the audience is looking to buy a golf-course home, and no one serves them, in a market where the average golf-course home rose 13.6% to $541K. Turn the Premier Properties Guide into a data-driven listings and referral engine: developers and realtors pay to list; LINKS earns a referral on every closing.
→ A 1–2% referral on a $750K home is $7.5–15K per closing; even 20–40 closings a year ≈ $0.2–0.8M, on top of listing fees, from an audience that's already half in-market.
Right now, LINKS is a magazine and an email.
For thirty-eight years the relationship has run one way: LINKS publishes, the reader reads. That was the business, and it was a good one. But it leaves the most valuable thing untouched.
The most defensible businesses in media today are not audiences. They are communities. People will pay far more to belong than to read, they do not churn, and they bring their friends. It is why the companies growing fastest in this space look less like publishers and more like clubs and networks: the founder groups, the members' clubs, the curated communities people pay thousands a year simply to be inside.
A great community needs one thing almost no one has: a trusted brand and an affluent, passionate audience that already shares an identity. LINKS has exactly that and has never used it. And this audience is anything but passive. They pay $5,000 to travel together. They want onto the private courses. Half of them are buying homes on the same fairways. They have kept a magazine alive for thirty-eight years.
A club that doesn't know it's a club yet.
This is what the three engines really build. The trips are where the community gathers. The membership is the belonging. The real estate is where they live near one another. The media is the trust that makes all of it possible.
The magazine was only ever the door. Let's step through it together.
LINKS already makes money. The engines are the bet.
Revenue held near $2.0M for three years, then stepped up 21% to $2.52M in 2025 as events kicked in, and the earnings turned real. We quote them two ways, both conservative: strip only the sellers’ owner financing, which disappears at the acquisition, and 2025 EBITDA was $295K. Pay one full-time operator the market rate and it still throws off about $335K in cash today, before a single new initiative.
Today it is mostly print and newsletter advertising, with events the one new line that already drove 2025's jump. As the rest of the engines switch on, that narrow base becomes five: print, newsletter, digital, travel, and real estate.
Two operators, each playing the half they've mastered.
LINKS will be run by two full-time founder-operators, two Tulane grads back in the same pairing, each taking the part of the round he has spent a career learning to play.
Nate Scott
Nate knows how to turn an audience into a business. He has spent the better part of two decades in digital media, from the founding team of USA TODAY's For The Win to senior roles at SB Nation and Fox Sports.
Most recently, as General Manager of USA TODAY Co.'s Sports and Events and Publisher of Golfweek, he ran a sports-network P&L north of a hundred million dollars, including its twelve-million-dollar golf business, where he built the very travel, events, and membership playbook this plan now follows. Making audiences from nothing is the thread of his career; the true-crime podcast he created and hosts, The Sneak, has passed two and a half million downloads.
He is also the reason this deal exists: of everyone who came to buy LINKS, he is the one the Purcells trust to carry it. At LINKS he will run the media and the relationships the brand was built on.
Ben Earley
Ben knows why people travel, and what they will pay for. Thirteen years ago he founded HOLT and bootstrapped it from nothing into a roughly sixty-person property developer and hospitality operator working across four countries: the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Romania. To give LINKS his full attention, he is handing HOLT's chief-executive seat to his wife and COO, who has built the company beside him from the start.
He understands the upscale consumer just as well, having co-founded Paul Evans, a venture-backed luxury footwear brand made in Italy that sold into more than a hundred countries. And he began his career where he learned to weigh a bet, in a multi-asset hedge-fund group at J.P. Morgan, earning a CFA charter and an instinct for capital allocation, risk, and where a market is headed.
At LINKS he will run operations, the capital, and the two engines this round is built to fund: travel and real estate.
Sink it to unlock The Ask.
Drag back from the ball, aim for the pin, and release, or just keep scrolling.
Own a piece
of LINKS.
LINKS has been the most trusted name in golf for thirty-eight years. We are bringing it into the modern age, turning a beautiful print brand into the digital, travel, and real-estate business its audience has always deserved.
What you're buying
Series Seed Preferred shares. In plain terms, you are a preferred owner, not a lender, and you sit ahead of the founders. Your preference is 1× and non-participating: if the company is ever sold, your money comes back to you first, and then you share in everything above it.
A tax advantage worth understanding
There is a federal rule, Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), that rewards investing early in small American companies. We are structuring this deal to qualify for it: the company is a C-corporation, you buy your shares directly in this round, and the business stays within the size limits the rule requires. If those conditions are met, the gain when you sell can be excluded from federal tax, up to a generous cap. You do not even have to hold the full five years: at three years, half the gain is federally tax-free; at four, three-quarters; at five, all of it. It is not automatic, and it depends on your own circumstances, so confirm it with your tax advisor; but on a strong outcome, it is worth a great deal.
A lifetime inside the ropes
Owners get a LINKS membership, a place on the trips, access to private courses, and a standing in a world people pay simply to be near.
The round is open and the pairing is set. Own a piece of the most trusted name in golf while it is still teeing off.
For discussion only, with accredited investors. This is not an offer or solicitation; any offering is made solely through definitive documents. Full disclosures below.