“Instead of going after the business where people come and play the course and check it off the box and never come back,’’ Mr. Ginella said, “he was trying to build golf courses that people would come to play and come back to play and come back to play. While everyone was chasing everyone who got paid to play golf, he was chasing everyone that pays to play golf.”

Thus, all his courses are open to the public.

Like Bandon Dunes, Cabot Links, whose two courses hug the Nova Scotia coast, takes time to get to. It’s a three-hour drive from Halifax, the nearest major airport.

After viewing the property that would become his first golf development, a young Mr. Cowan-Dewar sought Mr. Keiser’s advice, and was told that he would need more land than the golf course required.

Mr. Cowan-Dewar went to work assembling the parcels along the Atlantic coast necessary to build out the resort to accommodate lodging and growth, which meant a second course, should the first prove successful. But he lacked the capital to complete the project.

That’s when Mr. Keiser, one of the founders of the Chicago-based greeting card company Recycled Paper Greetings, joined him as the majority owner at Cabot Links. But those roles will be reversed in the Cabot Saint Lucia development. In part, Mr. Keiser said, that’s because he is working on a variety of projects, including a development in Dornoch, Scotland, and three other “exciting sites,” including one in the Rocky Mountains.

Although Mr. Keiser will be involved, Mr. Cowan-Dewar will take the lead on setting the aesthetic of the resort and working with the influential golf design team of Bill Coore and the former Masters champion Ben Crenshaw, whose credits include Sand Hills in Mullen, Neb., and the Plantation Course at Kapalua Resort in Hawaii.