Episode 287 - Jason Pearsall/Todd Westra

 

Todd Westra

Jason Pearsall

 

02:29  Hey! Welcome back to another episode of the Growth and Scaling Podcast. I'm your host, Todd Westra, and today we are doing a refresher. We've got one our original podcast guests from the original show of the Leadership and Business podcast, and I cannot wait to introduce you all to, this man who has built an amazing company doing something that I am super passionate about. And I'm gonna let him tell the story. We got Jason Pearsall here today. Jason, tell us who you are and whose problem do you try to solve?

 

03:03 Todd, thank you so much for having me back. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. Uh, my name is Jason Pearsall. I'm the CEO at Club Caddie. We're a leading provider of cloud-based golf course and country cloud management software. And I'm also the managing partner at Warren Valley Golf Course, which is a Donald Ross facility in Metro. 

 

03:21 Nice. Nice. So you live in your client's world and you help your client's world. 

 

03:26 Yeah. I was a golf course owner before I built golf course software. Uh, so I think that I was a client first and, you know, built software to solve problems that we were experiencing, but we still see it that way.

 

03:40 I love it. I love it. And now that's not a very common like thing to happen, especially in your niche, like in the golf. You don't just go from owning and operating a golf course to like becoming a software developer. Tell us about that journey. How did, how did you actually fall into that? 

 

03:57 Well, I was fortunate to have a software exit, and then bought a golf course and then built another app. Um, to build our golf course. So I guess I kind of had the software background, um, and a passion for golf. My father was a country club general manager, so I, you know, worked every job at a facility over the years, and I kind of missed it and, you know, came into a little money at a young age and, um, bought, you know, thought it would be a smart investment. So it's been a, an interesting transition and, uh, a very fun one too. 

 

04:29 Now, on a personal note, I, I wanna know like, was it worth it because I, early on in my career, I tried to jump into the golf world and it wasn't as awesome as I hoped, like, tell me about it though. I mean, you're still in there. You've been doing this for years now. How has that transition been? You did software, busy, fun, highly profitable, then jumped back into the golf world. How'd that work out? 

 

04:54 Well, I went into the golf world because I was passionate about golf and not really to make money in golf, and it's right, very difficult, um, you know, to, to run a golf course, uh, efficiently, to run it profitably. Um, and so, you know, I, I, I guess, uh, if you golf, the golf experience was more something that I wanted to do because, you know, it was a passion project and I realized that if I wanted to make money, software was a much better way to do it. So, you know, building software for golf allowed me to combine passion with, with the opportunity to potentially make more money.

 

05:31 All right, so now a lot of golfers out there are probably thinking, okay, should I be downloading an app to, to keep my score or to, to create a, a GHIN record? And I can start recording my, my, uh, my handicap. That's not what you're doing though. Tell us about how you're helping the golf community with your software.

 

05:51 Yeah, so golf courses, um, Kind of peaked in the late nineties, right? Tiger Woods was playing. There were a lot of players, a lot of golf courses throughout the country were built. Um, as we hit a recession in the early two thousands, um, there wasn't disposable income for people to play golf. So suddenly you had a surplus of golf courses. And less people playing the game of golf. And for many golf courses across the country, they shut down. Um, you know, I mean, when there's not enough demand and there's an oversupply, uh, you've got a real problem. Um, you know, what we do is we help golf courses run their operations with fewer staff. We help them make better decisions so that they make more money with the fewer staff that they have, and that enables more golf courses to stay open. 

 

06:37 You know, that's such a real problem that people don't really think about. And, uh, I think golf courses in general are, are, I hope they maintain the growth that they're having right now.

I feel like there's a little bit of growth in golf right now, as opposed to, I remember that recession when that hit it, it affected everything. And I, I do drive past two golf courses on my way to the airport that are dead and just overgrown and it just, it, it kind of breaks my heart personally, but, um, what you're doing and the problem you're solving fits such a practical use case. Um, how did you, I, I mean, obviously as you ran your course that you bought and we're trying to operate it, you saw that overhead kind of getting a little heavy, I'm guess during the slower seasons. And, and, and what problem did you set out to solve first? I mean, you, you obviously, you're, you're a smart guy. You're a software guy. Which problem did you think you were gonna solve? And how, over the years has that solution evolved in the growth of your business? 

 

07:38 Yeah, so, um, there are different types of golf courses, right? And the golf course that we acquired in 2015 was formerly a private country club that had built a big clubhouse during the nineties when, you know, there was golf's peak and had a huge mortgage of the print afford to pay. So our vision, um, we bought the golf course, um, kind of, uh, out of foreclosure and it was really struggling at the time. And our vision was to turn into, uh, a public golf course. And when we got there, yes, there were a lot of members who had, you know, born and raised on this course. It's been a private course for a hundred years. You're not gonna turn my course, you know, public. And we ended up compromising with the members. We didn't wanna alienate them to go semi-private, which meant that we were still gonna have members, but we were gonna be open for play during limited times of the day. Um, you know, because there weren't enough members to support the financial obligations of the facility. Um, from a technology standpoint, that was very challenging. There were a legacy based server, you know, onsite or on premise. Software systems to run country clubs. And there started to be some early cloud-based systems to run public golf courses, but those, you know, kind of public golf courses were more like, What we call mom and pop type golf shops. You have a small shop, you have a golf course, you don't necessarily have a restaurant or a wedding venue, um, you may not have, you know, a driving range or pool or some of the, you know, other amenities that require their own software systems in order to, to effectively operate. So our vision was to build software that could run both public and private clubs that was cloud-based, and then consequently would have the ability to, to service the needs of semi-private facilities as well. And today, um, there. Cloud-based solutions, um, that have started off in the public space and have kind of tried to grow to address country clubs. And many of them have struggled because if that wasn't your goal from day one, then you didn't set up the database in a way to handle the needs of, of what members need different than what public offers may need. Um, so anyway, uh, you know, seven years ago we started building and, um, you know, a couple years ago we finally got a system together that could handle both pretty well. And we've really grown since then. 

 

09:55 That's awesome! That's awesome! So you're, you're literally coming into these venues who were kind of a one trick pony and turning them into, you know, a management tool that could take, what used to take a director for weddings, a director for party, you know, the pool area and the restaurant and all these other parts of the business, and put them all under one umbrella so that it's fewer people can run it. Essentially. 

 

10:18 Yeah, that's right. Like, an event coordinator is a good example. An event coordinator may also book a golf outing. And a golf outing not only includes, you know, blocking off the T sheets that other golfers don't book at that same time, but it also involves breaking out lunch, breaking out dinner, maybe giving retail items like a sleep of golf balls to every golfer. And when you combine, um, you know, retail golf services, food and beverage. In legacy systems, you had to go to three or four different systems, produce a different invoice out of all systems, combine those together, and then, you know, trying to get reporting data of what your profits were, um, out of an event became very difficult. You know, having customers spread out between all of these different systems meant they'd received redundant email marketing campaigns, or, you know, maybe not at all. Um, and so, uh, yeah, those were all problems that, you know, that we recognized and, and we wanted to solve. 

 

11:13 That's so cool. All right, so, so now you're into this seven years and you've been growing, you know, obviously sounds like the first four or five years was heavy on the dev side, really trying to figure out where the fit was and how you can solve all these problems at once. Tell us about the last two years though. How has your growth expanded and, and what's been your favorite part about that growth journey? 

 

11:38 Well, my favorite aspect of our growth journey is that I work with my best friends in an industry that I'm passionate about, and it awesomely doesn't get better than that. Um, our passion is growing the game of golf by helping golf course operators run their facilities more efficiently and more profitably. And we get to do that every day and see, you know, see results. You know, and, and hear feedback from operators of how we've helped them. And so, uh, you know, building relationships is, is always the best part of life. And not only growing those relationships with those friends that I started the business with, and the new employees that have become friends, but also with the operators that we get to work with every day. 

 

12:17 I love that. And you know, I, having been in the golf world for a little bit, um, it is a fun community. Like everyone, no matter what role, whether you're a superintendent, whether you're a greenskeeper, whether you're at the pro shop, everybody kind of feels connected in some way, shape or form in the golf world. Um, how has your, in trying to develop the product though, and, and kind of get it to where you feel like, you can just go forth and conquer. What's been your biggest challenge? What, what's been the biggest hiccup you've had to overcome as you've been trying to get this ready for mass? Mass production, mass adoption. 

 

12:56 Yeah. You know what we're really kind of talking about is the stage of scaling the business. Right. And, uh, I think it's important to understand what we mean by scaling the business. So, scaling is not raising money. It's not building a product. And I don't think that a startup should even try to scale until it has confidence in its ability. To sell the product, and more importantly, that it's validated its revenue model. So to me, scaling means setting your company up to grow from few to many clients and it's difficult to talk about scaling because, um, every business has to scale differently. So, you know, the how to scale truthfully, I don't think is difficult. With enough time, money, and resiliency just getting knocked down and getting backed up, you'll eventually, every business will solve the how to scale. I think the better question is the when to scale and more specifically when to scale what function, um, in your business. If you try to scale the wrong team at the wrong time, you burn your runway and possibly your opportunity. Uh, our early mistake was trying to scale every function too quickly. I like to think I'm a good project manager. I always can improve, right? But the, the goal, when you, when you're building out a plan, you have to assume you're gonna hit your target. So you're gonna hit your goals. So then you become a, the problem becomes, all right, well, once our sales team sells 50 courses in the next week, which, you know, of course doesn't happen, but I've gotta have a team to implement 'em. I've gotta have, you know, a team to support them and so on. So you think that you need to build all those teams in parallel, um, and it's just not how it works in practice. You can't really build a support implementation team before you've mastered sales in your revenue matter model. And mastering those was our biggest challenge.

14:42 Cool. That, you know, that's some great, that's some great input. Um, a lot of businesses do struggle to kind of differentiate that, and I think, uh, they'll, they'll focus entirely on customer success before they've even nailed their revenue model. And, and, and a lot of companies even struggle to identify who their ideal client avatar looks like. You know, and, and without really nailing down those essential front pieces, it is almost impossible because by the time you nail those front pieces, you may have tried to solve the wrong problems that the wrong avatar was gonna have with your product, and, and so this is great. Now, how, how do you give people advice? How do you let people know? As you talk to other businesses, how do you let them kind of identify, hey, instead of worrying about that right this second, these are the places you should focus on. Any advice there? 

 

15:35 Yeah, you only focus on sales and marketing. That's the only thing you should focus on, until your sales and marketing is, is outpacing the rest of your team and the rest of your team is coming to you saying, I can't support all the business that's coming, right? But sales and marketing drives every business. So if, if leads are coming in. If demos are turning into revenue, every problem solves itself. Um, there may be a couple month periods that are difficult because you're understaffed, but your team is generally happy because when you're growing and revenue's growing, you can compensate them more. You can help them build a team. Generally, once somebody's, you know, involved in a startup, they're excited about the growth and they see, you know, I'm willing to put a couple of extra months, 60, 70, 80 hour weeks and, and, you know, to build my team because it will get better in the future. 

 

16:22 Now, I, I heard you, I heard you talking like, as you were kind of describing your business model, you know, the difference between public course, private course, or mixed use course.

Were there different sets of challenges that you had to overcome to kind of fit each of these different avatars that you were heading? 

 

16:40 Yeah, definitely. Um, we call it moving upstream. Um, so, you know, we started off with kind of those daily feed, uh, public type golf courses that I referred to as mom and pop type shops earlier. And as we, you know, moved upstream and needing, serving more and more clients, um, you know, you're able to, to handle clubs that are more complicated. Country clubs are typically more complicated, more high touch, um, you know, have a different level of expectations from a service expect, uh, level than, than maybe those daily fee type courses. And, um, you know, so I don't think it would. It's been smart for us to go after everybody at once. We had to identify here's who we can currently sell to, figure out how to sell to them, um, figure out how much money we could make off of them and what we couldn't, what was too high and what we couldn't make off of them, and then move upstream and try the next vertical, um, which, you know, was semi-private and then private and, you know, other types of clubs as well.

 

17:35 I love it. So, so quite, quite literally, I mean, you picked the lowest hanging fruit first. Tried to solve their problems before you started trying to solve the ones that you knew would be the most profitable. Is that, is that accurate? 

 

17:49 Yeah. Um, but I would say that it was more of a progression to get there than intentional to get there. Um, initially we started off trying to target that lower hanging fruit, like you said, and what we recognized is there were like five or six other companies that were trying to do the same thing, and several of them had started before us, and they were better funded than us, and they didn't work harder than us, but they did a lot of other things that gave them a competitive advantage, right? And so we had to quickly recognize where we wanna be different and what's our place in the market. And so we, we for a while actually realized like we're. We're not gonna win these low end deals, and it's a race to the bottom in revenue. So we need to step back and we need to analyze what's our value prop, how can we be different? And we started focusing on other tools that our competitors hadn't yet started building. And, you know, altogether the kind of combination of those tools, the basic ones we had built early on, and the more sophisticated ones that the upstream clients needed, gave us a competitive advantage with the downstream clients too.

 

18:52 You know, that's so smart that Jason, you are such a smart guy. I love this. I love this interview. Like, honestly, like as you were describing that whole process, I was thinking about my journey the past couple years and which is, you know, I, I was working a lot of startups providing this really cool service, helping and them message their brand and all this kind of stuff and build their marketing. And yet there's a ton of people playing in that low-hanging fruit market. As soon as I put my trajectory up a little bit to the companies that were actually a little further along down the road than a lot of the startups that I was working with, it became easier to solve their problem because there was less people trying to solve that one and, the benefits I gave to those mid-level clients do, feed down to the lower end client, and it does give you a competitive advantage over the other players. That's a smart play. 

 

19:41 Well, I appreciate it, Todd. I, I don't think that I'm that smart. I think that we've, we've just failed a lot of times to get it right eventually, right? And that's the key to being a successful, you know, startup founder, I think is you're gonna get it wrong and you're gonna feel stupid a lot and you just gotta keep on going. So eventually, you know, you learn from every single effort. Here's what worked a little bit and here's what didn't work at all. And you try to do a little more. Here's what worked a little bit, a little less of that, here's what didn't work at all. 

 

20:10 I love it. I love it. So smart. You are, you are one of the guys that will be an inspiration to those listening, you know, listen to Jason's original interview we did three years ago versus the one we just did right now, and you're hearing a much more professional sound, very polished in, in your approach to your business. I would have to say, Jason, you have, um, it's been fun. It's been fun to kind of see and do this, revisit today because a lot of people listening to this podcast right now are those that are kind of in the shoes you've been in the past few years. I've launched. I'm I'm going, but, but how do I get to that next stage? And you're figuring that out right now. You've, you've grown how much in the last two years you were telling me pre-call, what's your growth been looking like? 

 

20:55 Uh, we've doubled the business size every year for four years straight. So, um, it's starting to be significant. 

 

21:05 I love it. Jason, thanks for sharing that with us. Now, last off, I, I always ask this, I'm my guest. I'd love to give a shout out to somebody in your circle, someone in your, um, in your network that has inspired you to keep going through these hard times. Who is that shout out and who can we, who can we give that little tag today in the, in the post. 

 

21:25 You know, so we sold a company that I founded, Club Caddie, to a public company in, uh, two and a half years ago, uh, called Jonas Software. And Jonas is the hospitality division of Constellation Software. And Constellation is a public traded company, 25 largest or 25th, or with top 25 software companies and revenue in the world, and they're a really good company to work for. There's 500 other companies like Club Caddie in our portfolio, and we all have, kind of a, a coach mentor who's really high, highly experienced, and all things SaaS and that is there to give us advice. My mentor is Joe Oswald. Uh, ed, he's the President of Jonas Club. He's helped us tremendously as an organization. Um, we definitely wouldn't be, be where we are today without him, and he is become a close personal friend over the last couple of years. So, Hi Joe! Hope you're watching, and, uh, maybe we'll get you on this show too.

 

22:15 I love it. Yeah, I would love to get him on the show. And honestly, that is a great shout out because a lot of people. What happens after I sell? What happens if I get acquired? What happens if I do? And now you're shouting out someone who has been your mentor through the acquisition group. And, uh, that's, that in and of itself is inspirational. Jason, honestly, thank you so much. Any, how do people get ahold of you? Is there a way for them to follow you on any kind of social or where, where you at? 

 

22:41 Uh, I'm probably most active on LinkedIn, on social. Um, [email protected] uh, is also a good place to get ahold of me. 

 

22:49 Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks to you and, and your business. I'm so proud of you and what you've been able to accomplish. Jason, we look forward to catching up here in the near future. 

 

22:57  Sounds good.

 

22:58 Thanks for being on the show today. 

22:59 I look forward forward to seeing you next time,Todd. Thank you!