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Speaker 1: Today's episode is with golf course architect golf course owner
Speaker 1: Mike Young. Mike has been in the business for a
Speaker 1: long time. Mike built his first golf course, the Fields
Speaker 1: in Lagrange, Georgia. Talk extensively about that. That was built
Speaker 1: in the late eighties. He built it by himself. He
Speaker 1: was really, you know, one of the first design build guys,
Speaker 1: along with Tom Doak and Bill Corr. So Mike's got
Speaker 1: a lot of experience and after a year's in architecture,
Speaker 1: he has bought and manages some golf courses. So we
Speaker 1: talk a lot about the golf management side. So, without
Speaker 1: further ado, here is Mike Young.
Speaker 2: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When
Speaker 2: I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 3: And when I find my ball in a bright egg
Speaker 3: Frida Egg, the dreaded Frida, egg Frida, egg Frida, egg
Speaker 3: brigg Frida, egg bride egg lie.
Speaker 2: I'm about ready to run off of the course.
Speaker 1: I'm interested to talk to you about how you got
Speaker 1: into golf design in the first place. You know, in general,
Speaker 1: you were you were a turf equipment sales rep.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, But I did that on purpose. I did
Speaker 3: that with the intention of getting into golf design. But
Speaker 3: I was I'll go back to the start, and I
Speaker 3: was in boy Scouts and I had a I didn't
Speaker 3: have one of the freaky Scout masters, but I was
Speaker 3: in boy Scouts and I had watched him build a
Speaker 3: golf course near me, and I said, I want to
Speaker 3: learn to design golf courses. I'm sixteen. So my senior year,
Speaker 3: my dad said, you can't get out until you become eagle.
Speaker 3: So I had to do the Eagle Scout thing. So
Speaker 3: they take all the Eagle Scouts in the state and
Speaker 3: they put us up at the High Regency in Atlanta,
Speaker 3: and they bring a mentory in for two days and
Speaker 3: he talked to you about what you want to do,
Speaker 3: and I said, well, I want to design golf courses.
Speaker 3: So they bring me this guy. He's a big architect,
Speaker 3: that John Portman, who did all a lot of the
Speaker 3: big buildings in Atlanta and all over the world. He says,
Speaker 3: I don't know anything about that stuff. But there's a
Speaker 3: guy out here's supposed to be good that's building the
Speaker 3: Athletic Club, and he's building a place down here on
Speaker 3: the side of lind And it's Robert Trent Jones Junior,
Speaker 3: Robert Trent Jones Senior, and his guy was a guy
Speaker 3: named Ron Kirby there. And I went out there and
Speaker 3: I was picking up rocks and doing all this one day,
Speaker 3: and then they had me go out and meet Ron Kirby,
Speaker 3: and I was just a little kid. He says, well said,
Speaker 3: if you're going to get into stuff, you got to
Speaker 3: go through the turf business or something like that. And
Speaker 3: I'm like, yeah, right, whatever. So it went away. Never
Speaker 3: thought about it much anymore of getting in it that way.
Speaker 3: And after school I started thinking about it, and I
Speaker 3: remembered what he'd said. So I started researching, and I
Speaker 3: found the Toro to distributor, and I said, hey, you
Speaker 3: got to let me go to work. I want to
Speaker 3: call on golf courses where I can see everything and
Speaker 3: and learn this business and I do not, And he's like, well,
Speaker 3: nobody can be a golf architect. It's just not that many.
Speaker 3: I said, well, that's what I want to do, and
Speaker 3: I don't want to work for one because I don't
Speaker 3: want to be in an office. So I started taking
Speaker 3: pictures and going around seeing superintendents and calling on new construction. Uh,
Speaker 3: And I liked it. I did it that way.
Speaker 1: That's obviously a unique approach. I mean, most people go
Speaker 1: and work for an architect. What what you know doing
Speaker 1: it that way? What advantages do you think you get?
Speaker 2: It gave you.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm not the first one to do it that way,
Speaker 3: but there were some there's some others who have done that.
Speaker 3: But it if you go work for an architect and
Speaker 3: you sit in the office and you're drawing or rendering
Speaker 3: or whatever. You've got his thoughts, his ideas, and you
Speaker 3: follow that family tree or something. But if you're calling
Speaker 3: on these guys, you can walk in every one of
Speaker 3: them's office, which I did, and you can see you
Speaker 3: come to your own conclusions. And then because you didn't
Speaker 3: work for him, whenever you come out of the turf
Speaker 3: business to start your own thing, it sort of pisses
Speaker 3: them off. And they don't consider you qualified or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it's interesting because I kind of think about it.
Speaker 1: I got into golf from outside of golf, and I
Speaker 1: came in without certain notions that get built in. And
Speaker 1: if you work for an architect, I imagined a certain extent,
Speaker 1: your thoughts and opinions and ideas get shaped by that architect,
Speaker 1: whether you know it or not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that. You know. I had four or
Speaker 3: five years where every day I would see four or
Speaker 3: five golf courses and I would take slides and I've
Speaker 3: still got most of them. And you would see the
Speaker 3: old classics or the old courses, not all of them
Speaker 3: were classic, and then you would see some of the
Speaker 3: new stuff as being built and you're like, man, I
Speaker 3: don't know that I'm into that or whatnot. And so
Speaker 3: you weren't shaped where if you were in that office,
Speaker 3: you were sitting there learning things that were modern golf.
Speaker 3: For instance. I just remember being at one architect's office
Speaker 3: and I was talking to him one day, just driving
Speaker 3: him crazy, you know. And on all your old courses,
Speaker 3: because people walked, you always walked into the front of
Speaker 3: the green, so you approached the green from the front,
Speaker 3: but with golf cars, you approach it from the side.
Speaker 3: And so they would design these golf courses to where
Speaker 3: they made sure there were no bunkers or anything, or
Speaker 3: they had an easy way to get into the walk
Speaker 3: onto the green from side the hole.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, they decided around the cart path.
Speaker 3: But that's common when you start. Yeah, it's designed around
Speaker 3: the cart path. In other words, Hey, they're gonna get
Speaker 3: out here, so let's don't put a bunker here, because
Speaker 3: we want to have plenty of room for not to
Speaker 3: wear it out. And I'm like, that's not what all
Speaker 3: this is about where And so naturally I was if
Speaker 3: I if I built one where you had bunkers or
Speaker 3: something there, then I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker 3: That kind of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, when you're seeing five courses a day, I
Speaker 1: assume you were mostly around the southeast. Were there any
Speaker 1: courses that really stood out to you old or new
Speaker 1: that you know from you know, obviously the bunker story
Speaker 1: with the cart path, But were there ones that stood
Speaker 1: out to you and said I like this? And then
Speaker 1: were there ones where You're like I don't like this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: distinct ones, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know, there were some of those, plenty of those.
Speaker 2: Any examples of the good ones.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, Palmetta Club definitely stood out and people
Speaker 3: weren't really talking about it. The Dick Wilson course that
Speaker 3: nobody talks about called Mountain Mountain View down at Callowi
Speaker 3: Gardens was really in good shape. Then it was a
Speaker 3: good golf course. It stood out. You could see that
Speaker 3: it was it was thoughtfully done. Atlanta Country Club is
Speaker 3: one you don't ever hear about. That was that I liked.
Speaker 2: What did did you?
Speaker 1: You know, your early days and this is obviously these
Speaker 1: travels are shaping the way you're thinking about golf. Were
Speaker 1: like the common things that you saw and courses that
Speaker 1: you liked?
Speaker 2: You know, what would did? Did you?
Speaker 1: Were there threads about, you know about the things that
Speaker 1: you saw, and I imagine in many ways those were
Speaker 1: rarer than the ones that you kind of looked at
Speaker 1: and said, ah, you know golf course.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the I guess I had my eye for art,
Speaker 3: and whether you know, you don't ever know if it's
Speaker 3: a good eye or not unless people hire you to
Speaker 3: do another one. But I heard somebody once say that
Speaker 3: a lot of people want to find the golf course
Speaker 3: and then other people want to move the golf course there,
Speaker 3: and so, like you sort of, my philosophy is is
Speaker 3: to start with that steak and build out a lot
Speaker 3: of the signatures and all. Because they're used to marketing
Speaker 3: themselves to sell real estate and all that, are given
Speaker 3: a piece of property and they start on the outside
Speaker 3: and build in. In other words, I got to put
Speaker 3: the hole here. So they start moving a lot of
Speaker 3: dirt and holds get up in the air, and I
Speaker 3: probably my biggest thing was trying to keep it down
Speaker 3: on the ground. And when I built my first one
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty eight eighty nine, everything I kept it down
Speaker 3: did we didn't do it. And so people are like, well,
Speaker 3: you can't do that. You got to get the greens up,
Speaker 3: you got to do this all these technical aspects. And
Speaker 3: I wasn't worried about the technical aspects out it because
Speaker 3: my ground was sloping and I knew I could drain
Speaker 3: the water. So uh, I just I just think you
Speaker 3: got to find the hole and then carve it out
Speaker 3: from there. I'm not into bringing dirt in to build
Speaker 3: a hole.
Speaker 1: Let's let's talk about your first designed the fields. How
Speaker 1: did you get that opportunity?
Speaker 3: Well, I was in the turf business or the equipment business.
Speaker 3: So you'd go to the trade shows and I'd met
Speaker 3: guys you had a I was building a network, and
Speaker 3: I knew a guy that was a seed salesman, and
Speaker 3: he grew up in the pecan business, and he was determined.
Speaker 3: He wanted to build a golf course. And I knew
Speaker 3: that people weren't gonna let me build one, so I
Speaker 3: just I said, look, let me build this thing, and
Speaker 3: I won't charge anything. We'll trade for a lot or
Speaker 3: something like that. And he said okay. So I routed
Speaker 3: it started going down there. In the afternoons. We'd we
Speaker 3: had a skid steerloader and we had a small dozer
Speaker 3: and we'd work on it, work on it and have
Speaker 3: guys move rocks during the day. Took two years. And
Speaker 3: then while I was building it, I got two other jobs.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, and that's hot and the the uh.
Speaker 3: The first one, the first one I got. This guy's name.
Speaker 3: His name was little Boy. He had one of these
Speaker 3: El Camino trucks.
Speaker 2: Was he a little boy?
Speaker 3: No, not at all.
Speaker 2: Most people of the nickname little boys aren't little boys.
Speaker 3: No, So little boy, little Boy comes down of the
Speaker 3: course and he says, I hear you're building this golf
Speaker 3: course and so and so liked it or something, and
Speaker 3: he says, I want to build one. And it was
Speaker 3: up in Atlanta. It was where Atlanta was developing, up
Speaker 3: four hundred. He says, can you come look at my land?
Speaker 3: So I said sure, he said, he said when I
Speaker 3: said when do you want me to? He said tomorrow.
Speaker 3: So I go up there the next day and I
Speaker 3: look at it and I said, this just won't work.
Speaker 3: It's solid rock and it's straight up and down. He said, okay,
Speaker 3: hold on, let me find some more. I'll call you back. Well,
Speaker 3: I start home. By the time I get home, he's called.
Speaker 3: He said, I got another piece. Can you come back tomorrow.
Speaker 3: I go back the next day and he says, how
Speaker 3: is this? I said, this will work. We can do this.
Speaker 3: And so he had a big country music park on
Speaker 3: the lake in Atlanta that had a lot of big
Speaker 3: country music stars come there. And that was what they did,
Speaker 3: was that and chicken processing. So he says, well, how
Speaker 3: much is this going to be? Said, well, it'll be
Speaker 3: a couple of million dollars. Uh, you know, to build
Speaker 3: what we were doing it. So he writes me check
Speaker 3: for me, and he said here and I'm hold on
Speaker 3: the side. We got a we got the latest thing.
Speaker 3: You know, we got to permit it. He says, well,
Speaker 3: we don't want to do all that up here. You
Speaker 3: don't have to do that, and I'm like, yeah, we do.
Speaker 3: So we started that. And meanwhile, I go back two
Speaker 3: weeks later and I go up to the hill and
Speaker 3: there's one hundred golf cars there. I said, what the
Speaker 3: hell have you done? He said, I'm digging a basement
Speaker 3: over there for the clubhouse, and said I went down
Speaker 3: to athletic club bought all their used carts or something
Speaker 3: they were turning in so we'd have some cars. That
Speaker 3: was my second one, and it was just a matter
Speaker 3: of me. They were really good clients, but it was
Speaker 3: just keeping them under control. These guys they were rolling and.
Speaker 2: Then it sounds like they were very impulsive.
Speaker 3: Very pulsy. But we went from there. So it was
Speaker 3: it was not the refined country club client.
Speaker 1: So with the fields, you get this job and you
Speaker 1: hadn't never done any of this before. No, so the
Speaker 1: dozer gets delivered or there. What how talk me through
Speaker 1: like the first few days when you're just getting on
Speaker 1: the dozer and doing this.
Speaker 3: Well, we had a we had a guy that could
Speaker 3: run a dozer, and I'd start sort of showing him
Speaker 3: what I want to do, and then I'd learned the
Speaker 3: dozer and this was an old dozer, and then I'd
Speaker 3: get on it and mess around some and then the
Speaker 3: other guy would get on it and then we'd get it.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like taking a log and making it
Speaker 3: into lumber and finally seeing it down in the furniture.
Speaker 3: So we probably took five times the amount of time
Speaker 3: a guy that knew what he was doing could do.
Speaker 3: And then we just kept doing everything. We built USGA
Speaker 3: greens and we that was a process. We got a
Speaker 3: guy to help us with that. Once we learned how
Speaker 3: to do it, we did the rest of ourselves. But
Speaker 3: floating them out and everything took a while. We put
Speaker 3: in the irrigation, uh and one of the partners was
Speaker 3: a dentist, and that that guy would go out every
Speaker 3: afternoon put the pipe in the ground. He had a
Speaker 3: ball doing that and it was I mean, it was
Speaker 3: done just just that way.
Speaker 1: So this is before and you know for everybody this project,
Speaker 1: everybody gives obviously Todd, who is it regular here? A
Speaker 1: good friend of yours. All the credit for being the
Speaker 1: first design build guy to come back really, you know
Speaker 1: with high Point and corn Crunchhaw obviously with sand Hills,
Speaker 1: and but this is before both those, and it's just
Speaker 1: you and a couple of guys out there building the
Speaker 1: golf course.
Speaker 3: Huh yeah. And I think that those guys were we
Speaker 3: were all about the same time. I think Tom and
Speaker 3: I really the first good pieces of land and Goodman's
Speaker 3: I got. We've always done design build, and it's it's
Speaker 3: a delicate subject because for so long it it it
Speaker 3: was like, well, you can't do this. It's not fair
Speaker 3: to the client. You know, you could you could be
Speaker 3: screwing the client or whatever. And you can't be an
Speaker 3: architect if you're also building it. And I just didn't care.
Speaker 3: But some of the so called professional architects considered it
Speaker 3: a no no to build your own courses. And now
Speaker 3: looks like they're coming full circle. But I still have
Speaker 3: my theories that that's when Dick Wilson was doing his thing,
Speaker 3: that was he was not professional enough for some of them.
Speaker 3: That's when him and Jones started having their conflicts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it you know, for you had to be you know,
Speaker 1: obviously you alluded to the fact that you took a
Speaker 1: night traditional route into architecture, which probably you know, rubbed
Speaker 1: some of the profession of the wrong way. And then
Speaker 1: you get into architecture and you take a non traditional
Speaker 1: route of constructing a golf course, which you know probably
Speaker 1: saved a lot of money for your clients, and you know,
Speaker 1: but it also you know, you were you were somebody
Speaker 1: doing something different, which always you know, ruffles feathers, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I think it's as you get older,
Speaker 3: you realize you might have ruffled them, but because you
Speaker 3: were taking a job that they would have otherwise gotten,
Speaker 3: and naturally they're going to tell them you don't know
Speaker 3: what you're doing, and you did this wrong or you
Speaker 3: did that wrong. And that used to just really piss
Speaker 3: me off. Now like, well, I don't know that there
Speaker 3: is any wrong in this business, dude.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the field, you know, it opens and it eventually,
Speaker 1: you know, lives the course of life a different owner,
Speaker 1: and it comes up for sale and you you purchase
Speaker 1: it back. Talk about that whole experience, and now you're
Speaker 1: now you're not only a golf architect, but also a
Speaker 1: golf course owner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've owned four different courses different times. And you know,
Speaker 3: my son when he got out of school, he came
Speaker 3: to work with me and probably knows as much as
Speaker 3: he's been building golf courses and designing with me for
Speaker 3: twenty years now. He's forty two years old. And Ashley,
Speaker 3: I said, hey, let's put our office down here, and
Speaker 3: you moved down here. So office is upstairs and he
Speaker 3: does everything from there. It's just a base and he's
Speaker 3: learned the agonomics off of Google. I mean, he's he's
Speaker 3: got a finance degree and he likes being outside, so
Speaker 3: he got on Google and we've he does the superintendent
Speaker 3: work and then he's travels to the different sites wherever
Speaker 3: we're working on golf courses. I mean, he was in
Speaker 3: Costa Rica for two and a half years building that course,
Speaker 3: and uh he's been designing and building and might be
Speaker 3: a lot better than I am because he's uh oh,
Speaker 3: he's a little more laid back.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not necessarily better for certain things, you know,
Speaker 1: not always the uh it could be, could be, you
Speaker 1: could be better for different situations, you know.
Speaker 3: That's right, That's and that's what I think often that's
Speaker 3: how it happens.
Speaker 2: He might not have been able to deal with little
Speaker 2: Boy the way you deal dealt with him.
Speaker 3: I had little boy rowing little boys, and little boy
Speaker 3: was a big concrete pumper. That's what he did. He
Speaker 3: pumped concrete. He was a mess.
Speaker 2: What was that golf course called?
Speaker 3: It was called country Land and it's still there. It is.
Speaker 3: It's six thousand it's right in the middle of all
Speaker 3: the growth in Atlanta. It's six thousand yards long, and
Speaker 3: they cover it up. I mean they play. I don't
Speaker 3: know how many rounds they play. But it's on Georgia
Speaker 3: four hundred and it's just a little golf course that
Speaker 3: we just shaped out. And the guy had shaping with me.
Speaker 3: There was a guy named Craig Mitz, and Craig had
Speaker 3: been with Fozzio and Craig was an architecture nut. And
Speaker 3: he got out of Houston and his father had been
Speaker 3: the head pro at Westchester and the head pro at
Speaker 3: Shady Oaks, and he traveled tour with Hogan and he
Speaker 3: was like second in the master. His name was Dick
Speaker 3: Mitz and you'd look up Dick and Dick was so
Speaker 3: Craig was a nut. All he did was take pictures
Speaker 3: on the weekends of golf courses and he's a really
Speaker 3: good shaper, and he would take the Hispanic dudes and
Speaker 3: at six point thirty they'd do calisthenics. He'd have two
Speaker 3: that'd cook lunch every day. Craig just worked on that
Speaker 3: deal with me and he really did some good shaping.
Speaker 3: And it's a six thousand yard deal that's just nobody
Speaker 3: hears about, and they covered up with people playing it.
Speaker 3: It's right up and coming Georgia.
Speaker 1: It's interesting you talk about Craig mess and how he
Speaker 1: was like a serial photo taker of golf courses. You
Speaker 1: would go to all the different potential customers and customers
Speaker 1: and take photos. And you know, not a lot has
Speaker 1: changed because I go to golf courses and take a
Speaker 1: ton of photos, but you know, the mediums and the
Speaker 1: access the information has changed. How was it watching kind
Speaker 1: of the internet and how golf architecture changed. Talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about that because obviously from you know, your
Speaker 1: time when you started in the late eighties to now,
Speaker 1: you know, the spread of information is just completely different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know that book Outliars, You might have read it.
Speaker 3: It's I was born about the right time. So we're
Speaker 3: to where there was opportunity to do golf courses. Guys
Speaker 3: now don't have that opportunity. So when I'm selling, man,
Speaker 3: there's one or two golf courses a year coming along
Speaker 3: at the most. And then when I started building them,
Speaker 3: it just happens to hit. And when that was going on,
Speaker 3: there was a magazine called Golf Course News, which was
Speaker 3: a big magazine, came out every every month, and everybody
Speaker 3: would put everything they were doing in there. You'd want
Speaker 3: to go in there and say, Hey, Art Hills is
Speaker 3: building over here, Fasio's over here, you're over here. And
Speaker 3: photography got big, so the photographers would would photograph these
Speaker 3: holes and they would photograph sort of from the air
Speaker 3: up on the ladder, where you get these totally different
Speaker 3: views than you would on the ground. And it became
Speaker 3: a big promotional deal. And you're sitting there where everybody's
Speaker 3: hyping this stuff and hyping it, and you're shut in
Speaker 3: the back of your head. I think everybody in the
Speaker 3: business knew, man, this shit can't go on. This can't
Speaker 3: go on. You're just playing it's it's gonna blow. And
Speaker 3: so I put an ad in the mac in one
Speaker 3: of those magazines one time that it said we create dreams,
Speaker 3: not nightmares. And it was talking about and it, uh,
Speaker 3: it really ticked off a lot, and uh, but it
Speaker 3: got me some work. And I realized then that this
Speaker 3: that you don't tell people where you're working because all
Speaker 3: you're doing, all these guys are advertising, and next thing
Speaker 3: you know, they're running around trying to get the developer
Speaker 3: of whatever. A guy come in, say, I work for
Speaker 3: so and so developer blah blah blah blah blah. Next
Speaker 3: thing you know, there's ten guys calling that developer, you know,
Speaker 3: wanting to want to see if they can get his
Speaker 3: next project. So you just don't. It's changed. For so long,
Speaker 3: everybody was hyping in and there was so much stuff.
Speaker 3: And when they started that one course of day thing,
Speaker 3: I'm sitting there thinking to myself, Man, this is crazy.
Speaker 1: But I imagine you had that perspective a little bit too,
Speaker 1: coming from you know, where you were kind of in
Speaker 1: a golf turf business, a different line of the business
Speaker 1: where you're you know, going to clubs and working with
Speaker 1: them and working around their needs if you're selling something,
Speaker 1: you're starting to understand how a golf course works. And
Speaker 1: I imagine you know, an architect at that time, they
Speaker 1: are the one course a day thing. They're just thinking
Speaker 1: this is the biggest swoon ever for their business and
Speaker 1: probably look at you're looking at it through different lens
Speaker 1: at that point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had, And let's go there for a second.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you this. It's one of those businesses that
Speaker 3: you're like, this business shouldn't exist because it's it cannot
Speaker 3: sustain itself. And when I say that, you go back,
Speaker 3: you think, and let me rephrase this. I think that
Speaker 3: if it wasn't for God superintendents, none of us would
Speaker 3: be in business. And those are those guys are the key,
Speaker 3: and I think the world of them. My father in
Speaker 3: law is a superintendent at some good clubs, and I've
Speaker 3: got a great respect for those guys. But I don't
Speaker 3: know of any superintendent's curriculum that gives these guys that says, hey,
Speaker 3: here's how you operate that golf course for profit. So
Speaker 3: often the guy comes out and the first thing he
Speaker 3: wants to do is go to work for a big
Speaker 3: club so that he can get some interviews at another club.
Speaker 3: And the first thing he asked is how much budget
Speaker 3: do I have? You take that budget, you do everything
Speaker 3: you can do with it, so you can go to
Speaker 3: the next club and get more budget, and you work
Speaker 3: through about three or four clubs and it's great. It's
Speaker 3: the way the industry is set up. But in the
Speaker 3: modern world, I don't know that most corporations are set
Speaker 3: up to function that way. They want you to make
Speaker 3: a profit. And so I'm sitting there watching and I'm
Speaker 3: working for these companies, and not to name any companies,
Speaker 3: but they'll go give a grant to Uga Turf School
Speaker 3: or Penn State Turf School. Well, obviously, by the time
Speaker 3: that guy gets out of school, he's been using that
Speaker 3: equipment or that fertilizer or that irrigation and you've been
Speaker 3: taught a certain way. And it's like, hey, if I
Speaker 3: come in there and say, look, we're not gonna put
Speaker 3: in a two million dollar irrigation system because economically we
Speaker 3: can hire one guy to come around and do this, this,
Speaker 3: and this, and it'll be twenty years before you ever
Speaker 3: made up the difference. And the young guys look at
Speaker 3: you like, well, you can't do it that way. And
Speaker 3: the biggest thing to me, and the thing that still
Speaker 3: stands out to me, was I remember, I remember working
Speaker 3: for Toro when John Deere was getting in the business,
Speaker 3: and at one of our seminars, we had this guy
Speaker 3: that would come Ken Peters or something. He wrote a
Speaker 3: book called a One Minute Manager or something. He'd come
Speaker 3: and speak to us, and it was the Toro seventy
Speaker 3: two inch Groundsmaster was a rotary mower that superintendents used.
Speaker 3: And he said, you got to realize, if John Deere
Speaker 3: sells one of their mowers that's seventy two inches, why
Speaker 3: to every distributor, every dealer they have, they will have
Speaker 3: manufactured more mowers and Toro sales an e year. So
Speaker 3: we're like wow. And then I was I was calling
Speaker 3: on Augusta National every other Monday. I'd have to be
Speaker 3: there and I'd go call them them and the mechanics
Speaker 3: spend a lot of time in the mechanic and Paul
Speaker 3: Latshaw was coming in as the superintendent. He was coming
Speaker 3: from Oakmont. He had taken one of our Toro greensmowes
Speaker 3: called a G three, and he'd welded two more reels
Speaker 3: on it made a five gang greens Moore that he
Speaker 3: could mow fairways with. Well. In nineteen eighty five we
Speaker 3: mowed the masters with a Toro eleven blade transport frame.
Speaker 3: It pulls behind a tractor and Lightshaw's bringing this thing
Speaker 3: up to another level. Well, Toro and all the other
Speaker 3: companies they love that because the transport frame the gang more.
Speaker 3: It would last you twenty years at a normal golf course,
Speaker 3: but if you could get a lightweight fairway unit in there,
Speaker 3: you've got about five years out of it, and you'd
Speaker 3: sell the cost of the machine and parts over that
Speaker 3: five years. So we were taught to, you know, don't
Speaker 3: be pushing these gang moars. So now what I use
Speaker 3: in my fairways is game moors. And I go to
Speaker 3: a young superintendent. He's like, I would never have one
Speaker 3: of those things on my golf course. And I'm like, okay,
Speaker 3: how much you want for it? It's like I take
Speaker 3: a thousand bucks. You go get a gang more that
Speaker 3: you can't put buy them for a thousand dollars, put
Speaker 3: to a three thousand in them. The thing last year
Speaker 3: from now on where we've taught people to spend more
Speaker 3: and more money, and we've the guys that are in
Speaker 3: charge of these clubs at all now are their fathers.
Speaker 3: They didn't borrow money and spend money at these private
Speaker 3: clubs like we do today. I've got a picture from
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety, either ninety seven or ninety eight. I'll send
Speaker 3: it to you. Sometimes it's a five gang Jacobsen pull
Speaker 3: frame behind a Willis jeep on the sixteenth hole at
Speaker 3: Cyprus Point.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
Speaker 3: And I took that picture of him and this is awesome.
Speaker 3: And that was you know, that's twenty four years ago
Speaker 3: and these guys are still still pulling this jeep and
Speaker 3: got a jeep out there pulling this five game. I'm
Speaker 3: like yes. And and you'd go to some of these
Speaker 3: modern resort residential places and't it have all this modern equipment,
Speaker 3: these maintenance buildings. That was so we've just we just
Speaker 3: let all that get out of hand.
Speaker 1: I used to work in the restaurant industry.
Speaker 2: We still this.
Speaker 1: I sold this like loyalty program as a startup. But
Speaker 1: I remember talking to a experienced restaurant tour and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, the biggest mistake that all new restaurant owners
Speaker 1: make is they want they want the shiny new ovens.
Speaker 1: They want to go buy, you know, all these shiny
Speaker 1: new ovens. And the first you know, what happens immediately
Speaker 1: is you know, they sink all this costs and what
Speaker 1: I do is I go buy all used evens from
Speaker 1: the people that buy the new ovens and then go under.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting how you know, you know from
Speaker 1: your experience in a way like what you do, especially
Speaker 1: at the field, as you maintain a very good golf
Speaker 1: product for a very low cost to the consumer. And
Speaker 1: you know to do that you have to get creative
Speaker 1: and take shortcuts and do things differently than the modern trend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we're all in it. I mean, what you're doing.
Speaker 3: You know, the golf magazines they don't. Y'all do it
Speaker 3: a much better job than golf magazines and they don't
Speaker 3: know what to do about it. But it's it's the
Speaker 3: golf business. If you don't know how to there's eight
Speaker 3: hundred I think one of the guys was saying not
Speaker 3: long ago, there's eight hundred courses in the United States
Speaker 3: that have a waiting list that are considered exclusive clubs
Speaker 3: that have a waiting list and can still charge an
Speaker 3: initiation fee and can build projects. Only then you got
Speaker 3: another two thousand clubs that are private five oh one
Speaker 3: c three privates with a board and they might be
Speaker 3: struggling but they're all wanting to do projects. They want
Speaker 3: to assess people to do projects. And the difference in
Speaker 3: those clubs is those top eight hundred, the club is
Speaker 3: there for the member, and in these others, the member
Speaker 3: is there for the club because the club's gotten where
Speaker 3: they've got to have that member. They got to you know,
Speaker 3: you're there when you start seeing wide screen TVs over
Speaker 3: the urinals because the clubs that can do the widescreen
Speaker 3: TV ural thing, they're right at the top. That's when
Speaker 3: these and that's what that middle group that doesn't know
Speaker 3: any better, they're just doing all these things. And the
Speaker 3: new thing is we've got to be a family club.
Speaker 3: Got to be a family club. Well, if if you
Speaker 3: don't have a set of dues to where a guy
Speaker 3: that doesn't play golf can't join, then you're not a
Speaker 3: family club because the golf is the number one thing.
Speaker 3: And if your do's are up where you are, what
Speaker 3: are the fifteen grand a year from clubs up there?
Speaker 2: Yeah it depends, but yeah.
Speaker 3: Let's just say if but down here seven hundred bucks
Speaker 3: a month and if you don't play golf, you're not
Speaker 3: going to join for the swimming pool and the tennis
Speaker 3: you're gonna go to another place. And so we've gotten
Speaker 3: into this deal where everybody's selling everybody on the clubhouse
Speaker 3: and all that other stuff. And while all that's going
Speaker 3: going on, you got twelve thousand golf courses out there
Speaker 3: that are either run by management company or individual owners.
Speaker 3: And those individual owners, like me, they're not gonna get
Speaker 3: into magazines. They're not gonna run around to everybody and
Speaker 3: tell them how they do it. They just gonna keep
Speaker 3: doing it and keep their mouth shut. And every state's
Speaker 3: got that, and you can find it, and it's it
Speaker 3: might not be as gloom and doom for them as
Speaker 3: some people make it out to be.
Speaker 1: Well, I think if anything twenty twenty has taught us
Speaker 1: that with clubs and club golf, is that the golf
Speaker 1: has got to be your core product because all of
Speaker 1: the other stuff, if it goes away, you know what,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, all you have is
Speaker 1: a golf course. And you know, with with obviously social
Speaker 1: distancing and what's happened the popularity for golf, and you know,
Speaker 1: all these places are posting record rounds and I'm sure
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've seen it on your end where more
Speaker 1: people are playing golf because it's a way to get
Speaker 1: away and safely, you know, get recreation and do something.
Speaker 1: And at the end of the day, I hope one
Speaker 1: of the long term impacts of it is that these
Speaker 1: clubs have windfall from you know, they lose all their weddings,
Speaker 1: but they get windfall from golf and the revenue generally
Speaker 1: by golf, and they think to themselves, wow, you know
Speaker 1: this golf thinks the most important thing we have.
Speaker 2: But it probably won't go that way.
Speaker 3: I think it could, but I think what determines that's
Speaker 3: the square foot the size of the clubhouse. Some of
Speaker 3: them they don't know how to get rid of that clubhouse.
Speaker 3: You know, if you had, if if your generation's gonna
Speaker 3: end up saving golf. As far as I can see
Speaker 3: it coming, they don't really want to go join the
Speaker 3: big club. That's they don't want to be burdened with that. First,
Speaker 3: they're too mobile. There's no way to pay a big
Speaker 3: initiation fee here, stay three or four years, move to
Speaker 3: another town, do it again, and do it three or
Speaker 3: four times. Not gonna happen. They would rather be at
Speaker 3: a club with good greens, good teas, some architectural merit
Speaker 3: to it. Go on a golf trip to Bandon here,
Speaker 3: sand Valley or wherever, and you can see that coming on,
Speaker 3: and you can cater to that guy and create a
Speaker 3: product that works and they're gonna they're gonna use. And
Speaker 3: I think it's so good to watch these kids that
Speaker 3: that are that don't mind you know what I mean
Speaker 3: by edges? When when they don't mind the edges, if
Speaker 3: my cart pads are broken over here, and uh, I
Speaker 3: don't have all my ob steaks up, or I don't
Speaker 3: spend a fortune on my edges, but give them a
Speaker 3: good product with good greens, good teas, bunkers and let
Speaker 3: them go play golf. They understand it and they're fine
Speaker 3: with that. And you can give it to them at
Speaker 3: a price that lets you make money and lets them play.
Speaker 3: That's where we're going.
Speaker 1: It's the expectations, the set of expectations, what people value
Speaker 1: in a way that is changing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like hippie girls that didn't wear makeup. You
Speaker 3: have real good looking girls with no makeup on, just
Speaker 3: a little hippie girls. Then you get these damn girls
Speaker 3: with all this makeup on, all this stuff, wanting to
Speaker 3: be a step for wife. And you you you see that.
Speaker 3: It's your generation is more in the hippie hippie gulf.
Speaker 3: It's where the edges are just it's just natural. I
Speaker 3: mean I'm a one height in the yeah, and then
Speaker 3: thirty yards in front of the greens. We really soup
Speaker 3: it up. We primo it. We go ultra light. Fairway mowers,
Speaker 3: chipping areas, everything are mode that way and that's where
Speaker 3: everybody plays. But in the in the fairways, we're a
Speaker 3: little over half inch with game moars and doesn't it
Speaker 3: lets us do it? I mean I could, I could
Speaker 3: take it up another level of two, but I had
Speaker 3: to charge more.
Speaker 2: How how does that you know? And relate?
Speaker 1: Like, say you you want to make what you're doing
Speaker 1: around the greens all the all the way through the
Speaker 1: fair away what you know in the end cost, how
Speaker 1: would that translate to the golfer? Like you know, I'm
Speaker 1: going away from gang mowers. I'm going to the lightweight
Speaker 1: mowors that can I can get this thing down a
Speaker 1: little bit more, you know on a greens feed basis.
Speaker 1: Are we talking a five ten dollars increase to the
Speaker 1: retail golfer for all times?
Speaker 3: Probably probably ten to fifteen. And I say that let's
Speaker 3: think about that. I've we maintained with three people. Ashley
Speaker 3: does that. He as we have three people. One guy's
Speaker 3: been there thirty years, needs great, and that's our crew.
Speaker 3: If I go to mowing fairways, I'm gonna go to
Speaker 3: the lightweight fairway mower. I'm gonna have to mow it
Speaker 3: more frequently. I'm gonna have to sharpen it much more
Speaker 3: because the gang mores. We sharpen those once maybe twice
Speaker 3: a year if we get some knicks. But other than that,
Speaker 3: you sharpen that real mower, and then you come in
Speaker 3: for the winter, rebuild it and go again. We're gonna
Speaker 3: fertilize more. We're gonna we primo the entire course. Anyway.
Speaker 3: The primo is a growth retarding that tightens it up,
Speaker 3: and so we would end up getting that look and
Speaker 3: and mow and wall to wall like that would take
Speaker 3: considerably more time and probably another two to three people
Speaker 3: on the crew.
Speaker 1: You know, Garrett Morrison just did a pod for us,
Speaker 1: a story on you know, the pursuit for green grass,
Speaker 1: and you know, kind of related around Augusta, and he
Speaker 1: related it to people's lawns. And I think everybody can
Speaker 1: understand it from a long standpoint is you know, you
Speaker 1: go out, you get the fertilizer. You know, you put
Speaker 1: all these inputs in and you start mowing it lower.
Speaker 1: All you're doing is you you just need to do
Speaker 1: more for the lawn because you're opening it up to
Speaker 1: so many more you know.
Speaker 2: Different diseases, diseases.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it becomes so much more susceptible. And it's so
Speaker 1: different than especially a public golf course where you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're an hour fifteen south of Atlanta. You're not
Speaker 1: in you know, you're not in suburban Atlanta, where like
Speaker 1: you could just you know, you could throw a stone
Speaker 1: to one hundred thousand golfers and you're you're you're providing
Speaker 1: a you know, affordable golf product for you know, the masses.
Speaker 1: But you in order to do that, you have to
Speaker 1: do things certain ways, and you know, and this is
Speaker 1: a perfect example of a way that nobody's It doesn't
Speaker 1: provide any real difference, Like the amount of money that
Speaker 1: you have to essentially pass on to the consumer doesn't
Speaker 1: equal the increase in playing experience. Right, I'd rather save
Speaker 1: fifteen bucks and have fairways that's you know, a half inch,
Speaker 1: rather than have it be you know, like a you know,
Speaker 1: a fringe and pay fifteen dollars more in my personal opinion,
Speaker 1: but you know, somebody else would say that's great. I
Speaker 1: want the fairway to be this.
Speaker 3: Way, I think. I think you're exactly right. I think that.
Speaker 3: And the other thing is that I think so many people
Speaker 3: now they equate that level to the quality of the course.
Speaker 3: They can't under they can't distinguish or differentiate between maintenance
Speaker 3: and architectural strategy. So lots of times, the higher your
Speaker 3: maintenance and the better your maintenance, they consider that a
Speaker 3: much better course design wise and everything. So you got
Speaker 3: to get past that. But the number one thing in
Speaker 3: my opinion, and we'd have to talk to a superintendent
Speaker 3: about this. But by the way, I listened to his
Speaker 3: podcasts on the green grass and it was good. The
Speaker 3: number one thing is high to cut. You think about
Speaker 3: it all the way through. If when I was growing up,
Speaker 3: bent grass was nowhere near the problem in the south
Speaker 3: it is now, but fast was eight and the grass
Speaker 3: was mode at a quarter inch or more. So the
Speaker 3: grass didn't have near the disease issues or near the
Speaker 3: problems that it had once you started cutting at an
Speaker 3: eighth one inch or a hundred or whatever you're going
Speaker 3: to call it, and so everything. When you start lowering heights,
Speaker 3: you get more disease, you get more issues, You got
Speaker 3: a different mowers, more expense, more people, and so height
Speaker 3: to cut has so much to do. And the number cuts.
Speaker 3: If you've got a fairway cut and then you've got
Speaker 3: a short rough cutting and a rough cut and a
Speaker 3: tee height and a cut around the greens. Look how
Speaker 3: many mowers you got, Look how many people you got?
Speaker 3: We just mow everything just like just like they do
Speaker 3: in Europe. If we can't to use that.
Speaker 1: With so you the field is doing really well, you know,
Speaker 1: and now you're to the point where you're reinvesting money
Speaker 1: into the club, Like how are you thinking about rein
Speaker 1: putting money back into the golf course and the different
Speaker 1: projects that you're doing, whether they're on the course or
Speaker 1: off the course.
Speaker 3: Well, this is Ashley's doing all that. He's on site
Speaker 3: with me doing projects, but his his the fields is
Speaker 3: more like his thing is. We're trying to create a
Speaker 3: a millennial type golf is what I call it. And
Speaker 3: everything we haven't taken anything. Everything we've put back in there,
Speaker 3: we haven't taken anything out and it's it's it's a
Speaker 3: a different environment. And the the restaurants more like a
Speaker 3: pub with the fire pits and what's the cornhole stuff
Speaker 3: y'all do and all that corn but uh but uh,
Speaker 3: the bags, the boats ball or bochi ball or whatever.
Speaker 3: And we've we're doing music. We had three hundred people
Speaker 3: at a concert the other night where we had a really
Speaker 3: good band in from Mobile. And we're focusing right now
Speaker 3: on specialized in barbecue. Got a smoker coming in, built
Speaker 3: a barbecue shed, deal, really focusing on the practice area
Speaker 3: and and understanding that that we're not a country club,
Speaker 3: but we're going to be where the guy that wants
Speaker 3: to play golf and then wants to see his kids
Speaker 3: play softball or soccer or whatever later in the afternoon
Speaker 3: can come out, pay, come back the next day if
Speaker 3: he wants to, or walk away, and we can still
Speaker 3: make it. We're not we're not dependent on having a
Speaker 3: five hundred person membership or something. And so it's it's
Speaker 3: a it's a totally different venue than a club. It's
Speaker 3: very simple. Inside we're doing like a little dormitory upstairs,
Speaker 3: trying to decide whether to do airstreams or do little
Speaker 3: cabins out in the woods where because we've got guys
Speaker 3: that come down and you know, they would stay there,
Speaker 3: and we can build those things fairly reasonable. So it's
Speaker 3: it's just back to basics.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised that it has become a place where
Speaker 1: people travel to to play from, you know, sometimes eight
Speaker 1: plus hours away?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am. I think Sweeten's Cove helped us and
Speaker 3: everybody with that. They really did a good job on
Speaker 3: that social media and all that stuff, and I wouldn't
Speaker 3: I wasn't aware of how much that helped. But I
Speaker 3: see these guys coming in and like one night and like, well,
Speaker 3: you know, well, what's that Harvard bag dude? It's like, well,
Speaker 3: I played golf at Harvard. And I'm like, well, so
Speaker 3: what are you doing down here? And he's like he's like, well,
Speaker 3: we love it here we come. And and then I've
Speaker 3: I've found that that guys that are good players that
Speaker 3: are playing in the mid Am and the us M
Speaker 3: and all one day I see that and he's gone
Speaker 3: back about one hundred yards because I'm fairly open, he
Speaker 3: just crossed over a hole and teed up on a
Speaker 3: hole there and says, man, I come in here and
Speaker 3: play all the time to practice from a tournaments because
Speaker 3: it's firm and fast, and I can step back on
Speaker 3: these teas and make these holes have a long I wan't.
Speaker 3: So I'm like, well, maybe we're onto something. Maybe it's
Speaker 3: me that has the issue of thinking I got to
Speaker 3: be nicer and nicer and nicer. Maybe these kids do understand,
Speaker 3: because a lot of the guys my age don't understand that.
Speaker 3: And they don't they don't want that they my age group.
Speaker 3: I grew up playing golf. I see too many guys
Speaker 3: that now that are my age. They don't care about
Speaker 3: really getting better at golf. It's more of a social
Speaker 3: thing where they can hang out, smoke some cigars, get
Speaker 3: their handicap where they can win this, that and this,
Speaker 3: and they're not into it. The kids now actually walk
Speaker 3: and do things, and it's hard to get four guys
Speaker 3: my age that will walk, even our golf trips. When
Speaker 3: we go on a golf trip, you gotta get guys
Speaker 3: that'll go walk. So y'all's generation is gonna change it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think about my dad.
Speaker 1: He's you know, he's golf nutt plays every chance he can.
Speaker 2: He's like a fifteen handicap. He walks.
Speaker 1: But you know, I'll send them to places. You know,
Speaker 1: they'll ask me when they're going somewhere where they should
Speaker 1: go play. I'll send them. You know, one time he
Speaker 1: went to places in Wisconsin. I send him and he goes.
Speaker 2: You know, I just struggle with those wide open places.
Speaker 2: I just I kn'tck it on. He's like, you need
Speaker 2: more trees. I'm like what. I'm like, that's gonna help you.
Speaker 1: You're you know you're for you don't really know where
Speaker 1: the ball's going, like evinent wide open. It's only gonna
Speaker 1: make it more fun for you. But he almost struggles
Speaker 1: with the juxtaposition.
Speaker 3: I think that's yeah, that's the other and they don't
Speaker 3: get it. It's just just I'll had guys. I was
Speaker 3: going to take some guys down to Hoopy a few
Speaker 3: months ago, and when they found out they had to walk,
Speaker 3: It's like, no way in hell am I going there.
Speaker 2: Little boy wouldn't be going to Hoopie.
Speaker 3: A little boy, little boy didn't he play golf. Little Boy,
Speaker 3: little boy didn't play golf. He'd come out there and
Speaker 3: ride around drink beers. But uh, when you've got that
Speaker 3: el Camino and you got that thing waxed up and
Speaker 3: you don't play golf, you just ride. But it was
Speaker 3: so I don't know, but it's it's changing.
Speaker 1: So you've operated, you had a different perspective coming into
Speaker 1: architecture because you were on the turf selling turf equipment side.
Speaker 1: You get into architecture and then your journey gets you
Speaker 1: owning golf courses. How did owning golf courses, you know,
Speaker 1: did that bring another level of different way thinking of
Speaker 1: the architecture side, which you still are building, you know,
Speaker 1: redesigning golf courses. How did your views on architecture change
Speaker 1: once you got in the weeds of owning and operating
Speaker 1: golf courses.
Speaker 3: Not much, you know about the time that we were starting,
Speaker 3: like Tom was starting, and I knew who Tom was.
Speaker 3: He probably didn't know who I was, but I was
Speaker 3: regional and and my goal all along is I saw
Speaker 3: a niche there for public golf. And if you remember,
Speaker 3: you might not be old enough to remember. When I started,
Speaker 3: the signatures didn't touch it, they wouldn't go near it.
Speaker 3: There was never it was all resort, residential. And then
Speaker 3: then when things started changing in that you started seeing
Speaker 3: the Nicholas's and all go to the public, and they
Speaker 3: called it upscale daily fee, our country club for a day,
Speaker 3: and that was the new hike. But for my first
Speaker 3: five or six years, nobody wanted to go near the
Speaker 3: public stuff. It was all and so you could. The
Speaker 3: big boys didn't didn't touch it, and I thought there
Speaker 3: was a niche in public golf, and I just started
Speaker 3: sort of championing that and seeing what was out there
Speaker 3: because I saw a lot of owners that were doing
Speaker 3: okay with it, and they were individual owners. My theory's
Speaker 3: always been, if God's doing well, you really don't need
Speaker 3: management companies that much, because most a lot of the
Speaker 3: management companies there were there to say, hey, I can
Speaker 3: lose you less money and you lose yourself. And that
Speaker 3: was brought on by a big builder that had a
Speaker 3: thousand acre subdivision wants somebody to run the golf while
Speaker 3: he sold the houses. And that's and so I just said, hey,
Speaker 3: my focus is going to be public. I'm going to
Speaker 3: try to make it where they can make money at it,
Speaker 3: or if not make money, at least not lose money.
Speaker 3: And so we went at it that way. And it's
Speaker 3: sort of like a guy that owns McDonald's versus a
Speaker 3: guy that has, uh, Peter Lugers in New York. Everybody's
Speaker 3: heard of Peter Lugers or whatever, and they want to
Speaker 3: go there and spend all the money. But the guys
Speaker 3: at the McDonald's are doing okay. So you're both in
Speaker 3: the restaurant business. And the golf in this country is public.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's twelve thousand golf courses. I had a
Speaker 3: guy tell me the other day we're down to we've
Speaker 3: got twenty eight thousand golf pros in less than six
Speaker 3: thousand of our golf courses now have a class A
Speaker 3: head pro, you know, because the way it's changed. You
Speaker 3: got a lot of resorts. I might have ten of them,
Speaker 3: but the whole industry people are saying, hey, I don't
Speaker 3: need this, this and this, I can run it. So
Speaker 3: golf pros are having to change. And it's it's the business.
Speaker 3: Business is just getting more and more efficient, and it's
Speaker 3: you're never going to hear about public golf. You're going
Speaker 3: to hear about You're going to hear about Bandon and
Speaker 3: I don't have a problem with that. You're going to
Speaker 3: hear about whatever. A new course is being built on
Speaker 3: the right kind of land, but not many people even
Speaker 3: get to play those courses when you weigh it all out,
Speaker 3: I mean, those of us that are fortunate enough to
Speaker 3: play them see it. But so many other guys just
Speaker 3: go from public course to public course.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's the way ninety eight percent of
Speaker 1: the golf worldy not ninety eight, but ninety percent of
Speaker 1: the golf world interacts with golf.
Speaker 2: Everybody always loves to look at the twenty.
Speaker 1: Five million golfer statistic in America and they've failed to
Speaker 1: recognize that, you know, twenty of at least twenty million
Speaker 1: of those people are just I go play public golf
Speaker 1: course around me. Like, that's the way almost all my
Speaker 1: buddies are that have just recently gotten to the game
Speaker 1: in their early thirties. They just go play public golf
Speaker 1: course to public golf course. They don't play the same
Speaker 1: public golf course every week they go. You know, it's
Speaker 1: just like, oh, I'm going here this week. They invite
Speaker 1: me all the time, and I'm like, I don't play
Speaker 1: golf on Saturday mornings.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm in the golf business.
Speaker 1: But like it's like, they go here, they go here,
Speaker 1: they go here, and it's just and I ask him
Speaker 1: about like why do you choose that? And they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I wanted to go see this place. So
Speaker 1: they had a good deal on golf. Now, how did
Speaker 1: how is golf now being somebody that was in the
Speaker 1: in the owning golf and operating golf before and after?
Speaker 2: What has that done?
Speaker 3: I think it's the worst thing ever happened to public golf.
Speaker 3: And that's my opinion. They did a couple of years
Speaker 3: ago they did fifty nine million dollars in revenue and
Speaker 3: Golf Channel lost six or seven million, own by the
Speaker 3: same company. And all they've done is take the average
Speaker 3: public golfer and make him a commodity. He has no
Speaker 3: loyalty to you or anything else. He looks for the deal.
Speaker 3: And their system is based on barter, where they're not
Speaker 3: out there to make money on you selling around off
Speaker 3: their software. They're out there to take if you know
Speaker 3: how it works. They get two tea times, sometimes three
Speaker 3: tea times a day. It's twelve players at three and
Speaker 3: if they sell that at twenty bucks while you're trying
Speaker 3: to sell it at sixty, you know they've made two
Speaker 3: hundred and forty dollars a day off of you and
Speaker 3: you'll see people. I was on it for six months
Speaker 3: and you'd see the same people come in and by
Speaker 3: that time, if they couldn't get that time, they would
Speaker 3: go to another course where they could get the deal.
Speaker 3: But they were not going to pay your full green fee.
Speaker 3: So I stopped and it helped me, and I think
Speaker 3: more and more people are changing now. I think the
Speaker 3: eventually somebody will figure out another t sheet that works, because.
Speaker 1: It's have you ever thought about doing like a punch card?
Speaker 1: I know it sounds stupid, but you know, like in
Speaker 1: a way, it's kind of like, oh, I got the
Speaker 1: Field's punch card. I get a free round or a
Speaker 1: free card every five rounds or something.
Speaker 2: Something we.
Speaker 3: Do, something like we sell a card where they they
Speaker 3: get twenty five percent, they can buy five hundred dollars
Speaker 3: worth of golf for four hundred bucks, that kind of stuff,
Speaker 3: and then they just it doesn't punch anymore. It works
Speaker 3: off the point of sale. But we do a lot
Speaker 3: of those different things like that.
Speaker 2: I think there's value in the punch card.
Speaker 3: I think there probably would be just having.
Speaker 2: The physical card would be added marketing.
Speaker 3: Well, why not. It's it's something to try.
Speaker 2: It's something people carry around.
Speaker 1: I got stuff in my wallet from all over the place,
Speaker 1: Like you never know when you pull it out and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about.
Speaker 3: That, and then you realize how many people just like
Speaker 3: you just said, they forget about it. So you might
Speaker 3: make more money with that than you do, you know,
Speaker 3: because they don't they throw it away or lose it
Speaker 3: or whatnot. But it's it's it's y'all are just gonna
Speaker 3: view that differently. It's it's y'all just view the entire
Speaker 3: entire thing is different. And if you're I've asked guys,
Speaker 3: if I'm a titleist salesman, I might want to call
Speaker 3: them the bigger clubs in Atlanta because Titleists is geared
Speaker 3: towards that. But if I'm the bridgestone salesman, I might
Speaker 3: want as many of those public courses as I can get.
Speaker 3: Same with golf carts, I mean, golf cart people don't
Speaker 3: make their money selling just to the privates because there's
Speaker 3: not enough of them. They got to sell to everybody.
Speaker 3: And it's it's it's you can't. You can't come in
Speaker 3: and sell an irrigation system to a guy that's doing
Speaker 3: six or seven hundred thousan dollars a year. You can't
Speaker 3: come in and sell them a two million dollars irrigation system.
Speaker 3: So you've got to stop it. You got to figure
Speaker 3: out how do I get this guy to where he
Speaker 3: survives or does he just have to shut down when
Speaker 3: everything quits working? And that's it's the gorilla golf or whatever.
Speaker 3: There's guys out there. There's a course will shut down
Speaker 3: over here in a one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 3: pump station. Somebody might pick it up for five thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: And he's sitting down there in Florida and he's also
Speaker 3: picking up the heads every time they change heads on
Speaker 3: a resort course in Phoenix every four or five years.
Speaker 3: And he's cleaning those heads up. And little Johnny Public
Speaker 3: he knows to call him, called in there and buy
Speaker 3: irrigation head for twenty bucks apiece and buy a pump
Speaker 3: station for this. That market is huge.
Speaker 1: And it's like when a golf course closes, like you know,
Speaker 1: go get their green grass. You know, see if you
Speaker 1: can go scalp the greens.
Speaker 3: You can do that, you can go. But look at
Speaker 3: the guys that go cut that dig the heads up
Speaker 3: the guy digs all the heads up, the takes the
Speaker 3: pump station. It's it's it's you know, and and and
Speaker 3: doing you see that all over and a lot of
Speaker 3: the renovation stuff or we try not to do that
Speaker 3: much renovation restoration, but a lot of it you you
Speaker 3: end up doing that way because they don't even know,
Speaker 3: they don't even know that's available. Mh.
Speaker 1: I'm curious if you were going back, if you were
Speaker 1: Mike Young and you were sixteen year old eagle scout, now,
Speaker 1: how would you would you how would you get into
Speaker 1: the into the golf architecture business. If you were redoing it,
Speaker 1: would you do it the same way or how would
Speaker 1: you go about it?
Speaker 3: I don't know that I would. I mean I think
Speaker 3: that it's it's uh, all these all these kids that
Speaker 3: come to you, good kids, smart kids that want to
Speaker 3: do it. I mean, I can we all know a
Speaker 3: lot of them show art kids that could go into
Speaker 3: business doing something else, and they considered a glamour job.
Speaker 3: It's not a glamour job. I mean for the average
Speaker 3: golf architect you're building stuff like I build, it's there's
Speaker 3: five or six guys that get the glamour and and
Speaker 3: that's a brutal business. It's just that you don't know,
Speaker 3: you don't know where the next one's coming from, and
Speaker 3: and that's that's we'll get out of here. But the
Speaker 3: that's why I started trying to figure out how to
Speaker 3: buy golf courses or whatnot, because I don't think if
Speaker 3: you go back and look, I don't think any golf
Speaker 3: architect in the past was really what you'd consider full time.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's always been the old guys. They were
Speaker 3: either golf pros or doing something else that's at that
Speaker 3: subsidized their golf design. They would do it when it
Speaker 3: was there. And that's sort of what I like to
Speaker 3: do is try to mix it in there where you're
Speaker 3: like a holistic golf company. We can we can do
Speaker 3: it all. We can operate it, we can buy it,
Speaker 3: we can build it, we can design it. But if
Speaker 3: you're not doing that, then you're going to be sitting
Speaker 3: there where your wife better have a good job or something,
Speaker 3: because there's gonna be times when there's just nothing to do.
Speaker 3: And not just it's it's a business. That's it's a craft.
Speaker 3: It's not a it's not a profession. It's a craft.
Speaker 2: You got to have lots of side hustles. You know,
Speaker 2: you've got to be a hustler.
Speaker 3: It's basically you've got to be a hustler.
Speaker 1: But in a way, what you've done is like you know,
Speaker 1: you a lot of I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: that build golf courses are don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 2: You know, like they say, I want to build a
Speaker 2: golf course.
Speaker 1: Is they It's not like they made their money building
Speaker 1: golf courses. So having somebody that you know, like you,
Speaker 1: you've got a nice perspective where you operate them. You've
Speaker 1: built them, You've sold surf grass equipment into them. You
Speaker 1: you know, you maintained a golf course with with Ashley
Speaker 1: and other golf courses that you maintained like you, you
Speaker 1: actually could be more of like a consultant on top
Speaker 1: of designing a golf course.
Speaker 3: We can take them. I mean we've done turnkeys, we've
Speaker 3: done it where we've built clubhouse, we've done everything all
Speaker 3: the way through. And there's other guys that do that.
Speaker 1: Mike, we we're gonna get you out of here. Thank
Speaker 1: you for coming on. Well, may do more topics like this.
Speaker 1: I think obviously unique expertise beyond just the golf course
Speaker 1: architecture standpoint, and being somebody that owns and operates and
Speaker 1: you know, has a wonderful place, I recommend the fields
Speaker 1: to everybody. I think it's one of the most best
Speaker 1: hidden gems in America. You know, there's it gets. It
Speaker 1: doesn't get nearly the traffic that it deserves. So you know,
Speaker 1: it's only an hour fifteen from from Atlanta. My buddy
Speaker 1: and I my buddy who I went out there with,
Speaker 1: and I still talk about it.
Speaker 2: You know. It's we went on a great winter day.
Speaker 1: It was not, you know, a pleasant day to play golf,
Speaker 1: but both of us being northern nurse, we we had
Speaker 1: just the best time out there playing a match. And
Speaker 1: it is so so neat. So I love that place.
Speaker 1: I can't wait till I get back down there.
Speaker 3: We'll come back down. Yeah, stop back next time. We'll
Speaker 3: talk about Johnson City. Ye see that while we're doing it.
Speaker 2: It's my golf course. Yeah, there you go, Jath City.
Speaker 3: That's it. That's it. Yeah, all right, I'll tell a
Speaker 3: little boy we talked about it. I'll see you