Golf is not the burgeoning market it once was. Growth is flat, and in the Pacific Northwest, the weather does not help—the area saw a 1.7 percent dip in rounds played last year.

But while many golf businesses are retrenching, Oki Golf, which runs eight facilities in the Seattle area, is growing. Rounds at Oki Golf’s courses rose by 1.9 percent last year, and the company recently acquired Harbour Pointe Golf Club.

Much of the credit for overcoming these obstacles goes to CEO Nancy Cho. In an industry with too few role models for girls and young women starting out, Cho, 47, is the rare woman executive in golf—along with the likes of general manager of Nike Golf Cindy Davis and Carolyn Bivens, the first female commissioner of the LPGA.

Cho has reached her position not through quotas but through talent and perseverance, instilled by her mother. “She had to raise four kids by herself after my
father passed away,” says Cho, herself the mother of two young girls, “and the example she set taught me a lot about hard work and fulfilling your dreams.”

With backgrounds in accounting and restaurants, Cho joined Oki Golf’s parent company Oki Developments as CFO in 1993 after meeting company founder Scott Oki at a Japanese American Chamber of Commerce function. She became president in 1995 and CEO two years ago.

“Nancy is a woman of great integrity and honesty,” says Oki, a former Microsoft executive who founded the company in 1994, when he bought the Golf Club at Echo Falls in Snohomish. “I trust her explicitly, implicitly, upside down, back to front.”

Part of the formula for Oki Golf’s success may be its leader’s lack of success in the game itself. Cho is a high-handicap player who understands both the difficulties of golf and the barriers that prevent many new players from embracing the game. “We managed to buck the trend,” she says.