Why 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs Still Close Deals on the Golf Course (Not in the Boardroom)

A private equity guy I met at a conference a couple years back told me, half-joking and half-serious, that he’d closed more meaningful deals standing on a fairway than sitting at any conference table in his career. For him, executive networking through golf wasn’t some quirky side habit — it was practically the backbone of how he built relationships that mattered. He wasn’t bragging exactly. He said it almost like a confession, like he knew it sounded a little ridiculous but couldn’t argue with how often it actually played out that way.

You’ve probably heard some version of the claim that something like 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs still close major deals on the golf course rather than in formal boardroom settings. I can’t tell you that exact number holds up to rigorous statistical scrutiny, because frankly nobody’s running a clean survey asking executives to confess where their biggest handshakes actually happened. But the broader idea behind that oft-repeated stat isn’t far-fetched at all. Anyone who’s spent real time around senior dealmakers knows golf still plays an outsized role in how serious business actually gets negotiated.

So why does this stubbornly persist in an era of video calls, data rooms, and instant messaging? Let’s actually dig into it.

The Boardroom Is Built for Decisions, Not Trust-Building

Here’s something that took me a while to fully appreciate. Boardrooms are designed for structure. Agendas, time limits, formal presentations, lawyers occasionally hovering nearby. That environment is excellent for finalizing terms, but it’s a pretty terrible environment for the slower, messier work of building the kind of trust that makes someone actually want to do a deal with you in the first place.

A golf course strips away almost all of that structure. Four hours, no agenda, no slides, no clock ticking toward the next meeting. You watch how someone reacts to a bad shot, whether they’re gracious in a loss, how they handle a long stretch of quiet between holes. That’s an enormous amount of character information that a thirty-minute boardroom pitch simply can’t reveal.

Dealmaking, especially at the size and complexity Fortune 500 executives operate at, often comes down to a gut-level question: do I trust this person to behave reasonably when something inevitably goes wrong after signing. Golf, oddly enough, answers that question better than most formal settings ever could.

The Power of Unstructured Time

There’s a concept worth naming here, something close to “decision incubation.” Big strategic decisions rarely get made in the meeting where they’re announced. They get made gradually, often during unstructured time when someone’s mind is loose enough to actually process complicated tradeoffs without the pressure of needing to respond immediately.

A boardroom meeting demands real-time answers. A golf round doesn’t. You can sit with a tricky question for three holes before responding, and nobody thinks that’s strange. That breathing room changes the entire texture of a negotiation. People say things on a golf course they’d never say with lawyers present, not because they’re being careless, but because the environment itself lowers the stakes of speaking before everything’s fully buttoned up.

I’ve heard executives describe pivotal moments in major deals happening almost casually mid-round, a half-joking comment about valuation that turned out to be a real signal, or an offhand mention of timeline pressure that revealed more leverage information than an entire round of formal diligence calls.

It’s Also Just Efficient Relationship Maintenance

Here’s a more practical angle that gets overlooked. Maintaining relationships with other senior executives takes real time, and most CEOs don’t have much of it to spare. Golf solves a scheduling problem as much as a relationship one. You get four uninterrupted hours with someone important, mixed with exercise, fresh air, and a built-in excuse to turn phones off without anyone questioning it.

Compare that to scheduling a purely social dinner or coffee meeting, which often feels transactional and oddly more pressured precisely because there’s no shared activity providing natural pauses in conversation. Golf gives everyone something to focus on between the moments that actually matter, which somehow makes the important conversations feel less forced rather than more.

What This Means If You’re Not Already on the Course

You don’t need to become a scratch golfer to benefit from understanding this dynamic, and honestly, trying to fake competence at golf to impress senior executives usually backfires anyway. A few more useful takeaways:

• Look for unstructured, low-pressure environments in your own dealmaking, even if golf isn’t your thing. Long walks, shared meals without an agenda, anything that removes the clock-watching pressure of formal meetings.
• Pay attention to how people behave in low-stakes moments, not just polished pitch settings. Character shows up more honestly when nobody’s performing for a slide deck.
• Don’t dismiss relationship-building time as separate from “real” business. For a lot of senior dealmakers, it is the real business, just dressed up as leisure.
• If golf genuinely isn’t accessible or appealing to you, find your own version of unstructured time that still allows for that same kind of organic trust-building.

Wrapping It Up

Whether the exact 90 percent figure holds up under a microscope or not, the underlying truth behind it is hard to dismiss. Boardrooms finalize deals. Golf courses, and honestly any unstructured shared experience like it, are often where deals actually become possible in the first place.

If you’re someone trying to build serious business relationships and you’ve been leaning entirely on formal meetings to do it, it might be worth rethinking where the real trust-building happens. You don’t need a golf membership to apply the lesson. You just need to find your own version of four unhurried hours with the right person.