Teeing Up Success in Entrepreneurship with Bill Place and Ace Golf

[00:00:00] I learned that I did not want to be in a corporation for the rest of my life. I knew that there was no other alternative for me but to start a business. I grew up with it. It was in my blood. Even though I had both a very good and very bad experience, or I shouldn't say it was a bad experience, I should say a learning experience, the second one. And so, yeah, no, it just taught me that's what I was going to do.

[00:00:27] Yeah. So what business did you start first? I started with some criteria. One, I started researching who were the wealthiest people in Florida. At the time, nine of the top 10 had something to do with real estate. So I said, okay, I live in Florida. I know that real estate only goes up. So that was the first criteria was real estate.

[00:00:55] Secondly, I had friends that had businesses that they always had trouble collecting from customers, whether it was like remodeling or businesses that had a long cycle or whatever. People just wouldn't pay. And so I wanted a cash business. So that was the next criteria.

[00:01:14] Welcome to the En Factor Podcast. I'm Rebecca White, your host, and I'm really glad that you decided to join us today. This is a very unique episode because we are filming live from a graduate class at the University of Tampa.

[00:01:36] And you get to have the chance to sit in on this class and listen to our guest, Bill Place, talk about his entrepreneurial journey. Bill grew up in a military family and later an entrepreneurial family after his father decided to buy into some franchises, restaurant franchises, Pizza Hut specifically, and then later opened his own independent restaurant.

[00:02:04] So Bill learned at a very early age what it meant to be a business owner. And in his words, he worked through both the success and the failures of these entrepreneurial ventures that his father and family had engaged in. He later went on to college and got his degree, worked in corporate, but knew all along that he had to be an entrepreneur.

[00:02:30] So in this episode, we talk about his entrepreneurial journey and talk about his criteria for selecting a business opportunity. And we also talk about what he's learned from his journey. Everything from how to manage through a crisis, how to find really good people and what he looks for.

[00:02:52] The one thing that he won't compromise on as a business owner and just what it means to deal with both success and failure and then carry it through to exit. So it's a really great story. He talks about the importance of the role that his wife played in this process and their partnership. It's just a great entrepreneurial journey story.

[00:03:15] And inside this, you're going to learn a lot of tips and tools that you can think about for navigating your own entrepreneurial journey. So I hope you'll listen in and enjoy this episode as much as I did. Again, it's from a class at the University of Tampa. And interestingly, Bill had been a judge earlier in the morning with our students, and he had listened to their pitches and given them feedback.

[00:03:44] And so in the afternoon, they got a chance to hear his journey. So join me now with this conversation with Bill Place. So, well, we're doing a live recording today of the En Factor Podcast here in the class at the University of Tampa. And Bill Place is joining me. Thank you, Bill, for joining us today on the InFactor.

[00:04:11] This is our Master of Science class in entrepreneurship. And we've talked a little bit. They did pitches this morning, and you were able to listen to them. So now we're putting you in the hot seat. And we want to learn a little bit more about you. We love to hear the stories of entrepreneurs. And you have, you've worked in corporate. You've had your own business for a number of years, you and your wife.

[00:04:35] And you're in the golf range and golf club or golf course space. And so let's start at the beginning. Did you always want to be an entrepreneur? Did you grow up in an entrepreneurial family? When did you first think about ideas of owning your own business? You know, it was very early. My dad actually was in the military, but then worked a number of different jobs.

[00:04:59] And at one point, he got a call from my uncle, who had, at that point, I think 30 Burger Kings. He was definitely an entrepreneur. And the call was to say, hey, would you want to move from Florida up to Pennsylvania to start this new franchise called Pizza Hut? And so my dad did. And we moved up there and started, he started two Pizza Huts. And I worked in the business starting at eight years old.

[00:05:26] And then he wanted to do his own business. So he ended up selling out of that partnership, moving to Florida and starting a chain of restaurants in 1973, which ended up failing miserably. So this is what I grew up with and worked in. And yet still, I wanted, I knew from that I would have my own business someday. What did you do? Did they have you work? I did everything.

[00:05:52] I know family members, you can work at a young age. Yes. Yeah. The child labor laws are a little bit less restrict for family members. So yeah, so I started at eight. I ended up doing everything from making the pizzas to being a server to cleaning the parking lot, everything. So a restaurant business is tough, but you had a franchise. So how did the franchise work? Because a lot of, maybe the students don't understand that. How did that work for your family?

[00:06:22] It was very good for my father coming out of a military background, not really any kind of restaurant background. So they provided all the training, pretty much set up, determined, helped them with setting the location, had all the procedures set up. So it was very easy for him to walk into that and shift from a very different background. And how many years did he do that? He did that about five years.

[00:06:51] And actually the two Pizza Huts that he started ended up being number one and number two in sales in the Northeast for Pizza Hut. So it was a very good experience with good employees. We had great people, great backgrounds. And then we moved to Florida and I can tell you it was night and day. Is that right? Night and day. You got to Florida and everybody's stealing. I mean, it wasn't going out the cash register.

[00:07:18] It was going out the back door, whole hands, this, that, everything. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So you learned a lot about hard work. Yeah. And did you ever resent that growing up? I didn't. I didn't even when at one point he was paying me 50 cents an hour because he wasn't making any money and had to do everything we can to try and keep the business afloat. So that's what we did. What were some of the things you learned there about customer service?

[00:07:47] I learned I didn't want to be in the restaurant business. In business. Absolutely. Customer service. You're dealing with people every day, dealing with problems, seeing what it took to get people in the door, what employee issues, trying to manage through those. So, yeah, it was a great educational process for me. And so then, but you knew you didn't want to be in the restaurant business, but you went on through school, right?

[00:08:14] And so take us up to at least getting to the golf course side. What did you do after you got out of school? Did you go to college? I did. I went first. I had to pay my way through school at that point because my parents' business had failed. They didn't have any money. And that was in the Florida business, right? Yes. The restaurants. He started four restaurants all at the same time and all when the oil embargo hit.

[00:08:41] You guys don't know this because this was in 73, but Florida tourism just stopped. So that really did not help his business at all. So anyhow, following that, I enrolled at Florida State. I knew I wanted to go into business. I was a finance major. Clept out my first year. So I did three years at Florida State and I wanted to get my master's. So I went straight through. I found the University of Texas at Austin, had a really good program.

[00:09:11] They got me in there with some scholarships and some need-based loans and things. And so got my MBA there. I did it in information systems, which is vastly different in 1981 than it is today. And, but it was a great school, got a great education. I knew that for me, starting a business at that point, there weren't as many tech options at that point.

[00:09:40] It was before the big dot-com craze and everything. At the time, I was even doing my computers on a mainframe, excuse me, my papers on a mainframe because we didn't have personal computers. But I knew I wanted to start a business. I knew I had to raise some money first. And I knew that I probably needed some, some training. I, after I got my degree, I accepted a job with GTE, telecommunications company, which is now Verizon, and work with them.

[00:10:10] I started in their executive training program. They took 150 students, mostly from second tier colleges like Texas, Michigan, Virginia. And they moved you around every six months for a year and a half. So three assignments around the country. So I got some good background there. Ended up with my, quote, permanent placement in the DC area for a data communications division.

[00:10:36] And then wasn't there long before I got a job down here. They had a manager of acquisitions job for GTE data services. So I ended up working then here for three years. After that six years, my boss recruited me to go with him to a company called National Data Corporation. He hired me as his marketing director. And I worked there for about a year before I worked myself out of a job.

[00:11:05] Long story, but we were harvesting a timeshare computing division. And so I asked if I could just move to Florida, open a sales office. It's my Aloha office. And he let me do that. And I immediately began trying to decide what business I would start. So that's when you knew you were going to. What did you learn there that led you to want to start your own business?

[00:11:31] I learned that I did not want to be in a corporation for the rest of my life. I knew that there was no other alternative for me but to start a business. I grew up with it. It was in my blood. Even though I had both a very good and very bad experience, or I shouldn't say it was a bad experience. I should say a learning experience. Right. Second one. And so, yeah, no, it just taught me that's what I was going to do. Yeah.

[00:11:59] So what business did you start first? I started with some criteria. One, I started researching who were the wealthiest people in Florida. At the time, nine of the top 10 had something to do with real estate. So I said, okay, I live in Florida. I know that real estate only goes up. So that was the first criteria was real estate.

[00:12:27] Secondly, I had friends that had businesses that they always had trouble collecting from customers. Whether it was like remodeling or businesses that had a long cycle or whatever, people just wouldn't pay. And so I wanted a cash business. So that was the next criteria. Third, I was looking for something with some good growth trajectory.

[00:12:53] And given that we didn't have these high-tech growth businesses at the time, golf seemed to me would be a growth area. Because looking at the demographics that maybe boomers like me were going to be growing and growing and that golf would just go up. Then I thought, well, near where I lived in Dunedin and went to high school, there was a driving range. And it had been there for a long time, always did well. So I started looking into driving range.

[00:13:22] I also looked at car washes, self-storage. I looked at a lot of just businesses like that. But I settled on golf because, again, for those reasons, real estate, cash business, growing trend. So I started looking for property.

[00:13:41] And that's probably the most difficult thing about starting a driving range is you need a commercial location with good visibility, access to a higher demographic. That's a very expensive piece of land. And I wasn't finding it. Fortunately, I was married to a wife who also worked for GTE and still kept up her corporate job, kept paying the bills, kept up our health insurance.

[00:14:11] So I was able to run around and do all this before my corporate job ended. And so after about a year and a half, she says to me, she says, OK, you've had almost enough time. You need to either go get another job or just end this starting this business. So it took about another six months. And finally, I found there was a time where economically things were not well in the savings and loans business.

[00:14:41] They call it the S&L meltdown where the economy was really bad. S&Ls had loaned money to people to buy land and other things. And those companies were going bankrupt. The economy was at a very low point. So all these S&Ls had all these properties on their books at super high valuations. So a lot of them went bust.

[00:15:05] And what they were doing at the time was having these auctions, auctioning off these assets that a fraction of the amount that the loan was made on. So I finally found a property in Brandon, an 18 acre property. And I was a high bidder for it. It's $287,000 that I bought this property for. And it's a property that six years ago I sold for $5 million. Nice.

[00:15:32] In between was the business, which I can tell you more about. And that was a driving range or was that a golf course? That was a driving range, a practice range, which also had miniature golf and batting cages, a little pro shop. Okay. And it was already there and you built it. So you bought the property, you built it. So what was that like? How did you learn to build a facility like that?

[00:15:58] Fortunately, it's not a terribly complicated type of business, but there's definitely a learning curve. There's trade associations that you get information from. I started visiting every golf range I possibly could. I even went as far as sitting outside in their parking lot and counting customers and deciding what the economics would be of the business. You bought the property. And did you fund it yourself or did you borrow money to do that?

[00:16:27] Or did you have an investor? Let's see. At the time, we got an SBA loan. Okay. To do this. For the property. For the property. And how about, because the build out would be another expense. Yes. So I put a whole business plan together. I think I had enough money saved up at that point to pay for at least the down payment and most of what the land acquisition cost was. But I did a full business plan and started going to see bankers.

[00:16:57] And, of course, it was having a very bad experience with the bankers because basically they wanted to loan only what I already had. If I had, I was looking for a million dollars, they wanted to see a million dollars in liquid assets that they could collateralize. So at that point, the only alternative we had was to go to the SBA. And they were very open to funding it.

[00:17:27] Ultimately, they did. Of course, at a higher cost than what a regular bank would. So that gave us enough between our savings and the SBA loan to get started. We weren't able to do everything we wanted. We started with a little building for the pro shop and did all the land work, built all the tees, put in the lighting, put in three batting cages.

[00:17:53] Did not do the miniature golf because we didn't have enough money for it. But what ended up happening was we opened after, gosh, it was probably about 10, 11 months to get this all built. And, of course, the zoning was a whole other issue that took a lot of effort because anytime you want to rezone a property, you're going to deal with what everybody around you has to say about it.

[00:18:23] And that took a considerable effort to literally, I walked around to every resident and spoke to every resident, every business and asked for their support, got signatures, went in front of the county commission. Actually got the church next door. The pastor came and spoke for us. And so it was an interesting experience, but got the zoning done.

[00:18:48] And one caveat or one thing I'll tell you about it is I had to sign for the property before I knew I was going to get the zoning. So I took a huge leap that if I didn't get the zoning, I couldn't do the business. But at that point, it was like, I got to do it. I got to make it work. Yeah. Have you always been willing to take a risk? And how does that factor into your relationship with your wife?

[00:19:16] She would say now that we're more on the financial investing side, she says, yes, I am definitely the one that will take the risk before she will. So, yeah. Yeah. It's always challenging. One of the things I find interesting about your story is that along the way, there were various changes in the environment. And there was time, the timing of an opportunity really matters. Yeah. Has that played out as you've built out this business as well?

[00:19:44] Have you seen changes in the market conditions you talked about and how that's played out at various times? Like, how did you do during COVID? How did all of your facilities do during COVID? And how about the recession and some of the other things that you've had to work through? There is definitely something to be said about luck and timing. When we started, it was 1993. The economy was definitely down. Things started to improve.

[00:20:12] It was very easy on the driving range side. We were immediately busy, had all these customers. It was definitely an unmet need. Right away, we expanded the batting cages. We put in the miniature golf. Did you have that information before you started? Did you do some kind of market research or did you, was that kind of one of the luck pieces? I did do the research and there were competitors around. I could see what they were doing. So I had an idea that we would be successful.

[00:20:41] I just didn't know how successful. And once we opened our doors, it was like open the floodgates. It was like they needed this recreation. They just didn't have it in that area. So that was what then enabled us each three or four years. So we would start a business and given that it was doing well and cash flowing, we'd be, okay, I'm going to look for the next one.

[00:21:09] So then I found another site and another site. I did that every three or four years. We would just do another business. And then in 2005, I was, initially it was just driving ranges I was looking to do because a driving range, it's kind of, it's a good property investment. It's a good land banking. You buy the land. You pay the taxes on it every year. The business pays the taxes. But I was up in New Tampa looking for a driving range site.

[00:21:37] And I find this golf course for sale in 2005. It's called Pebble Creek Golf Club. And at the time, golf was actually not doing great. Contrary to what my initial research said, rounds of golf were going down in the U.S. And what time frame was that? It started probably more after the 2008, 2009 downturn. Yeah.

[00:22:04] And it continued all the way up until COVID. Do you think that's partly because the cost of golf playing got more expensive? Very much so. The people were saying, oh, it takes too long. It costs too much. It's a, you know, rich white guy sport. So, yeah, it was not doing great. And actually, there were more golf courses closing by about 2016, 2017 than there were opening them.

[00:22:33] And prior to that, the talk was, oh, this is going to be the biggest, you know, business because of all us aging baby boomers. We're going to be saying so many of us all wanted to play golf. But the opposite was happening. Fewer people were playing. And what the talk then was more like young people aren't playing golf. They're more interested in video games and other things like that.

[00:22:58] So, when I see this golf course for sale in 2005, it was a mess. It was not doing well, losing money. It was held by a big sports management company that had 50 golf courses. And they were trying to start to sell some of their courses because they were not doing well. And the property was just, I thought, was just beautiful, even though it was so poorly maintained. So, I went down to the county and I pulled the records on it.

[00:23:28] And I'm looking at the original zoning on this, which was done in the 60s. And I see that the driving range is zoned multifamily. Multifamily in Florida means gold. So, I said, we are buying this property. So, I immediately put it under contract for the asking price. And then went and found a buyer for the driving range, which was the piece zoned multifamily.

[00:23:58] Multifamily just meaning that we could put apartments or whatever on that site, townhomes. And which also meant it was a very valuable piece of property. So, I put it under contract for about the same amount that I purchased the whole property for. So, essentially, I got the golf course for free.

[00:24:21] That enabled me at that point to then take what little money we had and put it into improvements, renovations. So, we were able to get it open, get it improved enough that people would start coming back to this golf course. And we had to run it extremely frugally. My wife started doing all the accounting work. I was doing the marketing and operations.

[00:24:47] We couldn't afford to pay the highest salaries, which created all other kinds of problems. Right. Until we got to a point where we could get quality people. Yeah. So, that brought you up to COVID, you said, right? A lot more happened in between. But basically, when COVID hit, we were really worried that was going to be a very negative thing.

[00:25:13] Because in some states, they were even closing the golf courses. Michigan, they closed them down. California, they closed them down, which was insane. Yeah. You're outside. But what we started to see was we were actually getting busier and busier. In Florida. In Florida. Because we didn't have to close. There was two, three months where things were a little strange. Our restaurant, we had to only serve outside for a very short time.

[00:25:42] And then it was, we could only use half the capacity. We had other issues like golf carts. People wanted their individual, their own golf cart, so you wouldn't be next to somebody you might catch COVID from. So, that caused some operational issues. But basically, from 2005 and up until COVID, we continued on buying more golf courses. How many did you have at that point? Let's see.

[00:26:10] By COVID, we had four. Four golf courses and how many driving range? We had four driving ranges. We had about 350 employees. And we had gone from a very kind of easy to run business to we were like full-time administrators. Because at that point, then you're dealing with some of the less fun things like lawsuits and employee issues and tax issues.

[00:26:39] And we even had one point where one of our volunteers, golf courses all use volunteers. They check people in and stuff. And one of our volunteers was mad because we reduced how much free golf he got in return for his volunteering. So, he reported us. And, of course, Department of Labor came down and decided that we weren't allowed to have volunteers,

[00:27:06] that only municipal-run courses could do that because they were nonprofit. So, anyhow, we had to pay a whole bunch of money out to all our volunteers. We had to pay them for every bit of work for the last three years. And we couldn't do volunteers anymore. Wow. That changed your business model quite a bit. How many volunteers did you probably have at that point? At each course, we probably had 15, maybe 20. At each? At each course. So, yeah.

[00:27:35] And it hits you at a point when we weren't making a lot of money at that point. Because as you're starting one business, you're trying to ramp it up your first two, three years, you might not make any money at all. You may be losing money. And so, we were always on a shoestring until COVID hit.

[00:27:54] And when COVID, I'd say a year into it, one of my golf courses was making more money than all four combined pre-COVID. So, it radically changed things. It radically changed what the businesses were worth. And so, as we approached our 60s, we decided we would start selling them off.

[00:28:21] And at this point in the market, you really couldn't sell to the big sports management companies. Many of them had just divested courses. So, it was individual owners that were open to buying courses. So, we, gosh, in the last six years, we sold our two remaining driving ranges and our four golf courses. No, three of our golf courses. We still have one that we are converting to residential. So, at the max, you had four driving ranges and four golf courses. Correct.

[00:28:51] Yeah. Correct. Yeah. COVID was an interesting time. There were the boating industry, which I've been in, and the RV industry and golf, things like that. I think everybody was sitting in when everything closed down in February and March and wondering what it was going to do. But there were certain industries that really had outlier years, if you will, because to go back and compare to those years now doesn't make any sense.

[00:29:19] But again, I find it fascinating because you're really in the real estate business with this. Yes. And, but real estate can be so cyclical. And the timing in the marketplace, the changes that go on, you can't always predict them. And every recession's different, isn't it? And every impact, every time, it's different. As you were building these, so what were some of the things that you mentioned? Licensing, permitting, all of that. What were some of the other big challenges?

[00:29:46] People, what were some of the big challenges and the things that you had to learn along the way with this, what you did? People, it's always with people. You learn, your hires make all the difference in the world. And early on, when we really couldn't afford the best people, we paid for it. So what did you look for?

[00:30:09] What may, a lot of these students are going to be, some of them will start there in companies, some will be out and they'll be hiring people, but some of them will go out and get jobs. What did you look for? What mattered? Gosh. You look for integrity. Obviously, you want somebody that's going to think like you as an entrepreneur and run the business as you would. That's probably the most difficult thing we, you know, to find.

[00:30:35] I think like most of the people that got into golf got in because they want to play golf, not because they want to be hardworking, successful business people. So that was probably the most challenging thing. And as we did finally start making money and were able to pay more, we were able to get better people. You had restaurants and also like gear stores and shop, golf shops. So did you lease that to somebody else to run or did you run those? We ran those.

[00:31:05] And we, we were way different from a lot of other golf courses. Basically the way I approached each one of these is I just signed on the dotted line for a very expensive piece of property. And I had a piece of property where golf had not been successful. We bought all existing golf courses that were all not doing well. They had either failed or were failing.

[00:31:32] One course was closed for a year and we bought that from the bank. Another course was closed for two years. We bought that from the bank. We had to find ways to make these things work where they previously had not. And so what I did was I looked at what revenue streams can we create that weren't there before or improve that we can improve. A big one was banquets. A lot of people will have weddings at golf courses.

[00:32:01] So each banquet room I looked at and we would expand the banquet room. We add patios for people to sit outside and dine. In one case, the Lund Golf Course didn't have a banquet room at all. So we built a banquet room. As I looked at the restaurant side of things, most of what I saw were these old kind of boring golf course restaurants.

[00:32:26] And I decided that what would be more appealing is an Irish pub. Because all the Irish pubs I've seen all do well. And people want to go there and drink. And drinking is higher profit. My very first golf course, that's the first thing I did was put in an Irish pub. And I wrote to golf courses in Ireland and asked them to send me one of their pin flags or if I could buy one of their pin flags.

[00:32:56] And I put these flags all over inside. I hired an Irish artist that did murals on the wall. We opened up our first Mulligan's Irish pub at our first golf course. And I'll never forget the first St. Patrick's Day, we decided to have a big St. Pat's party. And so we invited a couple friend of ours and their kids and our little kids. And we were just going to go there and have a nice afternoon drinking Guinness.

[00:33:24] And we get there and there's cars everywhere. There's people everywhere. It is so crowded. We are so overwhelmed. We didn't have nearly enough staff. So our friends all started working. My wife and I started working. Our kids were doing who knows what. And we realized that Mulligan's was a good idea. And every year since then, we would get over 1,000 people would come out every St. Patrick's Day.

[00:33:51] So that was just another thing that helped us turn a failing business around to... Replicate that at the other golf course? I did. Yeah. I did. All except one, which just didn't lend itself to... So I find this so fascinating because you're in the real estate business. You're in the restaurant business. You're in the retail business. That's not easy. It's a nightmare. You're dealing with just our grounds crews.

[00:34:17] We typically had 15 to 20 guys on the grounds crew and ladies, actually. And it's just that. And then you have restaurant. Restaurants are always the most difficult thing. Where did you make the most money in all that? Where was the margin the best? The margin is always in the golf. And it's a high fixed cost business.

[00:34:42] So from like 2005 till COVID, we were always trying to pay all those heavy expenses of maintaining 150 acres, running restaurants that were rarely profitable. And actually, in most golf courses, restaurants are not profitable. So we were able to make that. It's just a service you provide more or less, right? Yeah. That people expect to have. Exactly.

[00:35:09] In our case, they became more and more part of the overall profits. And by the time we've sold these, they were making a considerable amount of money. Through that building period, did you ever have any colossal failures, challenges? Yes. Anything that you would care to share? Sure. And that you might have learned from? And what did you learn? Okay.

[00:35:35] I'd say our biggest mistake was a golf course called Wentworth Golf Club in Tarpon Springs. It was a course that was failing. It was a member-owned course in a very small community of about 100 homes where the people that lived there were required by their charter. They had to pay for, they had to be members of the golf club and they had to pay assessments. And this golf club probably needed another 50 acres.

[00:36:04] It was built on a small piece of property. So it was a difficult sell because it really appealed mostly to the best golfers, not the mainstream golfers. But it was a beautiful club and it had this beautiful English manor clubhouse. And that was what I was attracted to. I just saw this beautiful property. And even though I knew on the marketing side, it would be a challenge. My guys were saying, oh, you got to buy this.

[00:36:33] The guys that had working for me were all golfers. They loved it. They wanted to have this in our portfolio. So I went ahead and bought it under the condition that they allow public play because it had been a private course. And so six months into it, we have the Irish pub going. We got the golf course renovated. It was not making money yet, but it was on its way to making money.

[00:37:00] And the HOA sends me a letter from their lawyer saying, we're OK with the golfers coming in here to play, but we're not too wild about the people that are coming to the pub. They're coming there to drink and they're getting into our gated neighborhood. And so as of today, we are not admitting any people who are just coming to the pub, to the Irish pub.

[00:37:25] It was totally against the charter that the legal documents that they had signed, which allowed us public access. And so I had to get my lawyer and I had to remind them of what they had agreed to. And it finally that costs a lot of money. It costs money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But overall, that course never made the kind of money that our other courses did. It was barely, I would say, barely profitable.

[00:37:53] And we finally sold it for not really probably break even at one point. And it is now closed. The next owner could not make a go. So you had some red flags, but you really didn't pay attention to them. So that's probably the lesson in it, right? Yeah. I should have looked and said, you know, now this is going to be way too difficult to market. It's, it's. I can see where emotion would get into it. It's like seeing that beautiful home that you want to buy, but it's got some red flags.

[00:38:23] Yeah. It's flooded or something in the past. And, but you just, you know. It was also a deal too, because the, what they were selling it for. Yeah. Just. And you got to be careful about that, don't you? Yeah. Oh yeah. Especially in real estate. Right. Yeah. Not all deals are a deal. There's a reason, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's really, that's a great story. So you've now sold all of your, all but one, right? Correct. You have one driving range. Yes.

[00:38:51] And so what is the trajectory of the, and the future of golf courses? Because I've, I think I've heard that they're struggling again. Is that true? Or are golf courses growing? And is there a lot of opportunity there? It's still growing. Okay. And then if you would have asked me a few years ago, I would have said, this is going to be a short-term blip that COVID people are just getting out more just to be outside and that it's going to go back to that younger people not really caring as much about it.

[00:39:20] But some things have evolved in the business too. We, we started doing probably our most successful marketing thing. When you think about a golf course and particularly here in Florida, when we first got our courses, many of our courses, the afternoon would be completely dead. Nobody around, nobody wants to be on that heat playing golf.

[00:39:41] So we started offering a $50 a month membership that gave range balls either for free or discounted. It gave the ability to play golf starting at three o'clock for either walk for free or pay $10 in a cart. And so we started getting, it was mostly all young people that were signing up for this young, particularly young guys.

[00:40:08] It was still very much of a guy's business, although we're getting more women and minority participation now is growing. And all of a sudden now our businesses were staying full all day. And by the way, the, the younger people who were coming in the afternoon were definitely going to the pub afterwards. So it ignited that business some more. So no, I would say golf is still on the, on the, on the rise. But you decided to sell. We did. We did. I don't know.

[00:40:37] I guess it's, you think you're supposed to retire or do something like that. But I'm actually, I sold my last golf course in May, no, excuse me, September of 2024. And I really wish I would have held on to it because I don't, I'm not ready for retirement. I've heard that from people before too. I know the feeling. Yeah. I know the feeling. So did you have an exit in mind when you started all this? And how did you get there? Did somebody come and say, hey, I want to buy your golf courses?

[00:41:05] Or did you decide, let's sell them? And you went and looked for a strategic buyer. A little kind of combination. We absolutely did, well, take just the driving ranges. The idea was you buy this piece of property, it's going to go up in value. And at some point it's going to be. For money. Yeah. And it's, it's going to be for housing.

[00:41:30] Our Brandon 18 acres now has 300 and something apartments on it. Our Riverview one that we just sold a couple of years ago has a medical facility on it and 50 townhomes. They were already zoned for that. No, that had to get zoning for those too. And that, that took a couple of years. Okay. It's always a challenge with zoning.

[00:41:55] But yeah, so that absolutely for the driving ranges was what we knew would happen. The golf courses, most of them you can't convert. Most of them will have zoning that keeps them from being changed to another use. Except for this, this one that we have up at Pebble Creek, which never did as well as our, some of the other courses. So we did decide to make that one, to put that under contract with a builder. Their plan is to put 250 homes.

[00:42:25] We're now going into our fourth year of trying to get the zoning. And in about two weeks we should have it. All right. Yeah. I know I've just been going through building a home. So I understand not the zoning, but the permitting, which is a whole nother piece. So did buyers approach you or did you go out in search of them? Mostly approached us.

[00:42:48] There's a number of golf course brokers out there that once you have these businesses, they're always contacting you and asking you when are you going to sell. And they'll bring buyers, even unsolicited. So that's mostly how we never really listed any of our golf courses. Our driving ranges, on the other hand, we did have listed with Cushman and Wakefield. And did you ever have a partner in any of these or were you, besides you and your wife?

[00:43:18] Just my wife. Yeah. My theory, I have a lot of friends that have had partners that some have worked out very well, some not so well. I never really wanted to have partners in my business. Yeah. I didn't want to have my family funding it. Most of my family couldn't. So, no. Yeah. So you've reached this point. You've exited all but a handful of things that you're working on there.

[00:43:45] And I know that you and your wife are both involved in philanthropy now. How does that feel at this stage? And what's ahead for you? What are you thinking of? Besides giving back, what are some of the other things that you want to do? Or are you still figuring that out? Yes. Still figuring it out. We've traveled. Even with our business, we've traveled, I would say, the last 15 years, 20 years.

[00:44:11] We've traveled probably two to as many as four months out of the year. We've been to over 80 countries. We've been fortunate the way we structured the business, even though we have so much to manage between inventories and all these employees. We'd always have a general manager on site. We'd always work on all our vacations. We'd take our computers. And I would still be placing ads and doing other things on the road. What's ahead?

[00:44:41] And how do you think about what you're... You know, what's ahead is definitely... I'd say I'm trying to figure it out more than my wife is. She's always been the one that volunteered the whole time while we had our business. She's always, like with UT, she's been, gosh, since she did go school here. Well, she's on the board too. She's on the board of trustees now. But she had started with board of fellows, gosh, I think 2014. Yeah. So she has all that. She's on the STRAS board as well.

[00:45:10] Well, I've just always been interested in entrepreneurialism. So this is the first place I thought of. And just for me, it's a real joy. I just enjoy it so much to meet you guys, hear about what your plans are, your ideas are. I'm so impressed when I see some of the ideas that, you know, at the same age, what I was going through, even in my MBA, you would never have seen this level of just interest in starting businesses and ideas.

[00:45:38] It is pretty inspiring. Yes, it is. So if you had one piece of advice that you would give to anybody that's listening to this or to the student sitting in this class that wants to be an entrepreneur, what would that be? Get married. And I just say that because starting a business with a spouse that is working makes all the difference in the world. It made a difference for you, didn't it? It totally did.

[00:46:07] And it not only starting, but when we got into it and she quit her corporate job and then started working with me. We worked eight feet apart, mostly in our office at home. And fortunately, we complement each other really well because she is very detail oriented, very process oriented. She always wanted to put the policies and procedures in. And I was just more of the bigger sky. No, let's just go do this. Let's do that.

[00:46:36] We'll worry about all that stuff later. No, I'm not going to file that report with the government because I'm just not going to bother doing it. It's like, yes, we are. She's like, yeah, we're going to do that. That's great. That's great. Well, this has been a great conversation. I want to see, I want to open up the floor to students, ask a question. I'll repeat it. But who has a question for Bill while we have the opportunity? And one other thing I want to add to that last question though, is I'm going to say, it's not a bad idea getting corporate experience.

[00:47:06] When I then would hire people, I would actually look for some that had corporate experience because there's level of training and things you learn that- You can learn on somebody else's, well, somebody's paying you, right? Exactly. Make some money, learn some things in a corporate environment and then go. So- Yeah. That would be great advice. Yeah. Okay. Questions. Who has a question? Alex? Your time, Buckley, I'm married. Quick question.

[00:47:33] You've made a lot of opportunity from major market dislocations, whether it be COVID or a real estate client. What kind of feeling did you get? What kind of sense did you get? Like, I have something here when other people are here for a degree. So you're asking what kind of, what, what he- What kind of feeling did you get? And you saw these dislocations. Deep. Yeah. What kind of feeling did you get when you have a- So I wish I could say it was so brilliant.

[00:48:02] I knew that these were major dislocations that I was benefiting from and things were going to get so much better down the road, but I didn't. All I knew was that at the time, a lot of golf courses had been failing. They were overbuilt in the state of Florida, but that there was some hope that because of demographics that they may improve.

[00:48:26] And I didn't realize at the time, what an opportunity it really was. But I took advantage of it because once I bought these places and made the few changes, I was able to make them profitable. So I kept going, even though I had a friend of mine at Raymond James said, why are you doing this business? He'd see my financials and go, but you're not making that much money. And it's so much work. But number one, I enjoyed it.

[00:48:56] It was a fun business. People are coming to have fun. Number two, it was just a real interesting challenge to take this property and try and make it successful where nobody else, the last guys couldn't. So we just kept going. We just kept, as long as each, we'd buy one, get them profitable, and then another opportunity would come up. But today, it's totally different.

[00:49:21] I can't go find a property like I did from 2005 to 2016. It's just not there. It's a window that's closed. And as you said, it's a dislocation. I wish I could say that I went, I looked at it and said, oh, you know what? This is a total dislocation. This is going to totally change in 15, 20 years, and I'm going to be wealthy as all get out. I didn't.

[00:49:48] But once COVID hit and we really started making money, I went, wow. I never expected it. And today, when I go visit with my three financial advisors, I still can't believe the numbers that I'm looking at. I never expected to make the kind of money I've made at this point. All I can say is I'm just glad I never stopped and went back to corporate. Not that I ever would have. Yeah.

[00:50:16] Because once you're in your own business, you do not want to ever go back. So that's why they need to do it now, right? Yeah. Or work for a little while. Yeah, work for a little while. Yeah. What I mean is that's why they need to work for a while now before they get the taste of entrepreneurship. Yeah, so you understand what corporate life can be. I was not, even though I was with a great company, I was not terribly enamored with making that my life. Other question. Good question. Huh.

[00:50:46] I think I would have scaled more. I know that's the term these days. I didn't think as big as I could have. I was a guy who basically started with only the money that I saved. And so I never thought of, let's buy 10 of these. Because at the time, there probably were 10 golf courses out there I could have bought. Instead, I just did it very methodically as I had the funding.

[00:51:14] I didn't go out and try and get more funding other than we got a credit line at one point. So that's probably what I would change. Just thinking bigger. Good question. Most enjoyable part? Gosh. To me, it was the creative side of taking something that had failed or was failing and going in and tweaking it in different ways.

[00:51:40] And then over the long run, it was finding people that I really enjoyed working with. I ended up with people that had been with us 12, 15 years. And that's one thing I'm missing terribly now because I'm not going into a business with the guys and ladies that I'd worked with for so long. But it was just creating something out of basically the ashes of another business that had failed.

[00:52:09] The one business that actually did the best was the one that had done the worst. And in 2016, when we bought it, it had been closed for two years. Plantation Palms Golf Club up in Land O'Lakes. And it had ended up, it had been bought by these three Native American Indians. And they got funding from the Indian Bureau and all this and everything. And it ended up with fistfights in the clubhouse.

[00:52:37] They were not operating it well. They did not agree on how to do things. So these guys ended up fighting. And finally, they just shut the door and left. And I was approached by the HOA to buy it. And when I first looked at it, you could not recognize it as a golf course because there were weeds and things six feet tall. The equipment had been damaged, spray painted on stuff everywhere. And it was just a total mess.

[00:53:06] But it was just a really fun project to get turned around because the whole community was behind us. They couldn't wait to have their golf course back and not have to look at these weeds in their backyard. So it was really a great project. So that was the fun part. Other questions? Cool to manage. So what advice do you have on managing?

[00:53:35] My advice is to not manage, to find people to manage them for you. I say that kind of half-jokingly because, like in the restaurant business, managing that staff was way different than managing the staff that was the ground crew or that ran the pro shop. They were very different skill sets. That's one thing I didn't enjoy.

[00:53:59] I didn't enjoy managing people other than I managed my general managers and my controller. So recognizing that wasn't my strength, I tried to find people that were good managers. And it's always great when you can hire people you don't have to manage, right? They self-manage. Yes. Yeah.

[00:54:22] And that's what made the business because eventually I would have general managers that I could go away for a month and I didn't have to worry about things. Yeah. Put in the frog. Uh-huh. No, because the driving range parcels that we had, we started in areas that had some visibility to start with. It might have been on a two-lane road that became a four-lane road.

[00:54:51] And pretty soon we were having people coming after us trying to buy the property. And most of the realtors, they realize that a driving range is there as a land bank. And so as they are looking for properties, that's just like drive-in movie theaters. They go, okay, we can acquire that property and put some apartments on it. Of course it has a, like, a set rent.

[00:55:22] Okay. We, you see done different ways. Mostly it's all under one entity. Although sometimes we never did it this way, but I've seen golf courses where they will sub that out because they know it's generally a money loser for them. So they'll have some, you know, restaurant owner come in and set up. We just always approached it as something where we wanted to make the money.

[00:55:47] We wanted to get it making money, which is why we put in the Irish pubs. So, you know, we were as a sub-S corporation set up. And some, a lot of times I'm seeing they're doing them as LLCs. I'm not sure exactly why I would have done LLC versus sub-S, but that's how we went. You mentioned lawsuits. Did you all have a lot of lawsuits? And what were the nature of most of them?

[00:56:16] Oh, this is something I could talk to you for probably the next three hours about. Generally, they're all about trying to get money. I would say of 20, 30 lawsuits we've had, one or two might have been somewhat legitimate. Mostly are just people trying to get money. Was it employees or guests or neighbors or all of the above? Yes. Let's see.

[00:56:45] I would say the predominantly was more like slip and fall type things. But then the employee things would be stuff like we had one lady who was a server and she'd always change the tip on the, when the check was presented and they ran the charge card and somebody would write down $4. She'd change it to $9.

[00:57:09] And so we approached her with it, said, hey, we're going to have to fire you. You can't do this. This is wrong. And so she left. And next thing we know, she had contacted the labor board and told them that we didn't pay her overtime. Of course we paid her overtime. We used a, like a payroll company that did all everything, but nevertheless, we had to stop. We had to go through all the records of every check we've ever paid her.

[00:57:39] Our controller spent probably 40 hours just trying to track down. We finally found out that we probably $1.50 is what she was shorted by some mistake somewhere along the line. But it costs us a bunch of money just going through that process and then crazy. We've had, we had other ones too, where the problem is that the insurance companies would oftentimes just make a payout just to get, make people go away.

[00:58:08] And then our rates would go up. Or we had one situation where a kid at a driving range, he took a club, he had his cousin right behind him and he hit him right in the mouth. Okay, just, they're swinging, they're playing around. Hit him in the mouth, knocked out his teeth. The kid even goes on social media and says, oh, my cousin hit me, we were playing around. Well, the insurance company paid $109,000 to settle that one.

[00:58:37] And it made no sense to us. So anytime we had some, any accident happens, we trained our managers immediately get statements, get feedback, write everything down. Because we knew somewhere along the line we were going to get sued one way or another. So I don't have good words to say for Morgan. You bring up an important issue, insurance, lawyers, accountant, advisors.

[00:59:03] I'm assuming you had a team of people that you developed that helped you, like a banker, a banking relationship. Or did you use multiple banks? How did that work? Did you have a law firm primarily that you worked with or did you have multiple law firms? Okay. A lot of that was probably driven initially by what we could afford, meaning we tended to do a whole lot of the work.

[00:59:29] Like my wife did a lot of the accounting before she would turn it over to an accountant to finish up. I would do all the contracts. A lot of my work, probably the most beneficial, I always thought the most beneficial class I ever had in school was business law. Because I had to do all the contracts because you find out how expensive the lawyers can be. So we found, we wouldn't try to go like the big name law firms. We found more of a smaller local one.

[00:59:59] Yeah, we did a lot of the stuff ourselves. And the big banks really didn't want to fund us. The smaller community banks were a lot more interested in getting our business. And at one point, I'd say it took probably 10 years into the business to where finally we could walk into any bank and they would give us a loan. But prior to that, no, they wanted our kids, our house, everything.

[01:00:26] Yeah, we talked to Martha, with Martha about the lunch. Yeah. It was like, I wouldn't need a loan if I had all you expect me to have before you're going to give me a loan. Yeah, it's easy to get money when you don't need it, right? Exactly. But were there ever any times that you wished you had not tried to do it yourself? That you feel that was a mistake? Or did it work out okay? I'd say it worked out, but it probably goes back to the scale kind of things.

[01:00:55] Perhaps if I had thought bigger and my plan had been, no, I'm not just going to do four golf courses. I'm going to do 10 or 15 or 20. Then I think it would have changed things because you'd, by nature, have to offload some of those things to some more experts than trying to do it yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that I would definitely have done differently. Done differently. Other questions? Anybody?

[01:01:26] Well, Bill, this has been great. Thank you so much for sharing your time. My pleasure. And let's show a little appreciation. Thank you, guys. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Bill had a great entrepreneurial journey story, and I think there's something we can all learn from it.

[01:01:50] And before you go, if there is someone that you believe can benefit from this episode, please share it with them. Also, you can subscribe and visit our website at drrebeccawhite.com. That's drrebeccawhite.com.

[01:02:08] And there you're going to find lots of information about entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial mindset, and also about my latest endeavor, the Entrepreneurial Intelligence Lab, and the book that I'm writing. So thank you again for joining me today, and good luck to you on your own entrepreneurial journey.