Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:16
Almost like a no brainer offer. It’s like it’s basically free to you.
Jarrette Schule: 13:19
Right? And it doesn’t cost them tee times off the tee sheet, which is their product, right? That’s the product the golf course is selling. That’s their main offering is the permission to play golf 18 holes or nine holes on their course. And so I was like, why give that away when you can just have me charge the customer? So we went to that and, you know, it was just me and the company. So I was the trainer and the installer and the tech support and the sales guy and all that. And did that for about a year and a half. And then word kind of spread in town.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:55
Was it an app at the time? Sure. Like how was the first golf course using the technology?
Jarrette Schule: 14:03
At that time, there was only two things. There was an Android based point of sale booking tee sheet. So in golf, a tee sheet is your calendar of tee times that’s viewable by employees. And then your booking engine is what’s exposed to the golfers. So there was the Android app that’s meant to be used by the kind of the rank and file employees at the golf course, bartenders, clerks at the pro shop, etc. Then there was the back end portal for management that would have like, you know, all their revenue reports, tax reports, event coordination, all that stuff. And then there was the online booking engine for the golfers. And those three, those three products were all I had at the time. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:54
At the time were people buying stuff like you were talking about like food and whatever from like an app on their phone or not yet?
Jarrette Schule: 15:03
No, no, I didn’t, I didn’t have that piece yet. I had kind of some, kind of some, you know, generic e-commerce offerings. Yes. On the website, on the booking engine, as well as being able to prepay or just reserve a tee time online. But the point of sale system, and I was kind of learning as I went about golf, but golf is and I’ve said this from the beginning, if I had to do it all over again, would I have picked golf? I don’t know, because it’s very, very complex. When you think about a golf course, it’s like ten businesses in one, right? Because you have mobile food delivery, you have a full bar and a restaurant in most cases. You have retail, you have inventory, you have event planning. Right. You’re talking about weddings, golf tournaments, etc.
And the more I learned about golf, the more of this onion that just kind of kept unpeeling. So the first thing I knew was this beta course had a full bar and restaurant and a full retail store. So it was kind of two different point of sale systems in one. Right. You know, one was it you could wait on a table order. You start a tab at the bar, quick orders in the restaurant, and then you have like the back end kitchen side. So you have to, you’re basically building all of toast and then you’re building all of retail and then you’re building event planning, event coordination, tea time scheduling, on and on and on and on. So.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:39
I guess that creates a bit of a moat though too, right? Because it’s like complex. I mean, it’s a bad thing, but it’s a good thing.
Jarrette Schule: 16:46
High barrier to entry and high barrier to exit as well. Because once the golf course is invested in all this software and it’s all in one and it’s all, you know, going through one single sign on, it’s pretty hard to just leave all that behind, train all your staff on all the different parts of the business and take the plunge on someone else.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:09
Did you keep that business model throughout, which is just like a little additional percentage, or did you change it?
Jarrette Schule: 17:16
I tried to. As I started growing, I got friction from it. People didn’t like it. They didn’t, they didn’t like it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:26
They’d rather pay a monthly fee or something?
Jarrette Schule: 17:28
They’d rather pay a monthly fee. And now what we’re running into is some people still like the barter, right? They actually want to trade tee times in lieu of payment. And, you know, as I grew, I also realized, I also discovered because I went through payment processing was a big piece, right? And I’m sure you’ve talked to other SaaS people about this, about what a crazy environment and business that is. But I started off with, I went through five different payment processors before I finally found the one I liked. You know, I started with Stripe and then and then did the new Stripe Connect program where basically I was.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:16
Are you just too big for Stripe in the end or?
Jarrette Schule: 18:20
No, not at all.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:22
Okay.
Jarrette Schule: 18:22
Stripe is a monster. And they’re a great company. But the problem with Stripe is they were just gouging me with fees. And a lot of the fees were kind of hidden. Like I’d have to kind of dive into the statements to kind of find, oh, I’m paying X amount per golf course per month to have this feature turned on or whatever. And at the time I was doing the, where I was actually the payee of record.
So the processor of record where I was actually taking in all the money every night, taking out my 2.5%. And then or actually it would be higher than that because it was even on cash transactions and then and then depositing the remainder in the golf course bank account every night. So that was also another fee. So anyway, it was the hardest few years of my life keeping up with all of the, you know, the bug fixes, the feature requests on all these different parts of the golf course business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:27
So do you still use Stripe or did you decide on something else?
Jarrette Schule: 19:31
No, we’re with Fiserv now. And Fiserv, you know, they own you know, they have their Ingenico line of card readers, which are under the CardPointe umbrella, and they also now own Clover. So they have.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:46
The. Oh they do.
Jarrette Schule: 19:47
Oh yes. Yeah. So we support both of those. And you know, it’s another revenue stream, right. Which I learned, which is, you know, depending on the deal, you negotiate, you know, you get a percentage of the credit card fees that the golf course pays. So on top of your SaaS fee, you have that as another important revenue stream.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:14
I mean, you’re a developer, right? So obviously probably is, did you find Stripe’s way easier to integrate just because it’s.
Jarrette Schule: 20:23
You know, people say that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:24
Or is Fiserv just as easy or, or not, you know, because I don’t know anyone using Fiserv. I mean, I know a lot of people using Stripe, and I don’t know if it’s just because they’ve never heard of Fiserv, even though it’s a big company because Stripe is so prominent or it’s just harder to integrate.
Jarrette Schule: 20:42
I think Fiserv might be one of the biggest in the world, right? Between CardPointe and Clover, you know? So my thoughts are, you know, Stripe does seem to be more of a tech forward company. There’s a lot of resources online on their website for a developer to go through and parse. And there’s just tons of things you can do with them. Most people do consider them a more programmer friendly platform. But what I found is, especially in those days, and I’m sure that they’ve evolved a lot over the years as well over the last decade, but there was just little things like, like the Bluetooth readers, right? Because, you know, for our bev cards, we had to have a mobile solution where they could be on the 17th hole that may not have Wi-Fi. Right. And they need something reliable that they can tap cards and the Bluetooth devices they offered at the time. We had all kinds of issues with them, which is, you know, the expense on that is like immense where, you know, they’re upset, they’re, you know, the bev cards can’t bring up this transaction, etc.. So that was one of the other other reasons I left Stripe.
But I mean, I went through four other ones that were terrible and then finally landed on Fiserv and one of the big things that kept me with them was their Clover acquisition, because I always really liked the Clover devices. I thought they were futuristic looking. They’re sexy. Their design was really nice. But what one thing that, you know was Square or Stripe or any of these other places, you have to use their software on their devices. And that’s not what we want, clearly, right? Golf is a very specific niche thing where you, you, there’s things you do on those devices. You don’t do any other business. And so they came out with a program called at the time it was called Clover Connect. So it was basically allowing companies like myself, ISVs to inject their own software into the Clover devices.
And so I just, I was ecstatic. I was like, this is what I’ve been always waiting for. You know, this thing it can talk through instead of using Wi-Fi, it can use cell towers. It’s got a built-in scanner, it’s got a built-in receipt printer, it’s got a built-in tapper because at the time, I was frankensteining tablets together with plug in readers and trying to find these specialized cases too. So it would be in one piece and Clover had already solved for that. Right? And it’s a sexy device. It doesn’t look like you bought it in Amazon.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:28
It’s like right here. It looks nice. It’s touch screen. You know, actually when I owned.
Jarrette Schule: 23:35
Right there. So you see that’s the Clover Flex and the Clover Mini. Yeah, those are the devices that we support. And they’re kind of like on our mobile side of things where you can kind of take that Flex anywhere you want to go, completely turn off Wi-Fi, you could lose a lot. One thing that in golf that happens a lot is they’ll lose power and internet but they still need to do business. And those Clover Flexes are nice because you don’t need any of those things provided by the course power or internet. So even courses that don’t really use the Clover line of devices, they always, we always advise them to have a backup in a drawer somewhere for when in those kind of occasions, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:17
So it starts off, okay, we’re gonna make it easy to get beer and food. Right? And you know, to your credit, went out and you got feedback from people from not just golfers, but people who are going to be paying the bills, which are both important, right? Because if the golfers like, I don’t care about that, then it doesn’t matter. And if the golf course doesn’t care about like you need both of them on board to want to use it. And then you got the feedback and the courses didn’t care. Right.
And so it sounded like then you went back and listened like, well, what do you care about? And you found some broken, you know, items of like, well, why you, you know, it’s kind of like, I don’t know if you call it antiquated, but just like they were just losing, they were giving away a lot for what they had, right? Which is the tee times, right? And so you’re like, well, I can include all this and for at the time a percentage, right? So the percentage is paid by the golfer essentially. Right?
So now you have a solution. I know you’re like honing in on the product because that’s your product person. Now you got to go sell it. So you start off locally. How do you go from there?
Jarrette Schule: 25:42
Yeah, I started locally just making phone calls and actually, you know, found a little nine hole course next. That was in San Antonio as well. And you know, went in there with my polo and my little bag with my stuff and made my pitch, sat in front of the board and they ended up signing up and I was ecstatic. You know, my second real golf course. And, you know, I added a few more over the next year or two.
And one of my first golf course clients actually ended up quitting his job. And joining me as my first CSM. And because I just couldn’t handle the calls anymore, I was like, look, I want to focus on the product, building out what we need to build out. And remember this is pre AI right? So I’m doing all this code myself and figuring out all these hard problems myself. And I was working, you know, seven days a week, 365 days a year, all, all day, well into the night. And so I had to have that person to shield me from the influx of phone calls and things like that. And he came from the golf space. So I added him.
And then I kind of used him to go out and make little road trips. So I’m in San Antonio. So he went at one point down to the valley, you know, to the coast and got in his car and just carpet bag, you know, went in there and did his spiel.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:16
What was the sales pitch, Jarrette? Like when you went in because obviously it works. And it’s like a no brainer, right? It’s not going to cost you anything. It’s going to be convenient where you don’t have to give away the farm. What did that as you honed in on the sales pitch? Right? Because you’re a software engineer, right? Now you’re on the road traveling salesperson.
Jarrette Schule: 27:39
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so the pitch at the time was, hey, this stuff’s old, we’re new. So it appealed to a certain demo, right? Of golf course operators. It wasn’t the, you know, the older gentleman who’s, you know, happy in this clunky software he’s been using for 35 years. It was more of like the younger, you know, tech forward kind of operator. And, you know, my message to Ryan at the time, which was my CSM, I was like, just get to the demo. If you can just get to the demo, they’re going to love it. Right?
And it’s true. They loved it. I mean, they were like, wow, you know, this, this is something I always wished because apart from being my first CSM at the very beginning, I actually brought him on as my, my golf advisory board because he had run nine golf courses at once for an MCO in San Antonio. And I was like, all right, we’re going to meet, you know, once a month and you’re going to tell me, you’ve used all these different systems. I want you to tell me everything that sucks about them and everything that’s awesome about them. And we’re going to kind of make, we’re going to kind of bring that together into a perfect system.
And I think one of the advantages and disadvantages that I had was that I wasn’t from golf, but I was from tech, and I had seen a lot of the pains and stuff from other spaces that I could bring over that experience into golf. And so I was looking at it from a pair of eyes and a paradigm from a tech perspective and not from a golf perspective. And that was a hindrance and a help at the same time, because, you know, some of the ideas I had to solve the problems that the golf courses were having, the pains they were having came from kind of like a fresh perspective, right? Like, well, why are you doing this? Why are you doing it that way? We can just do this. And they’re like, wow, like, I’ve never seen that in golf. That’s great. That’s great, I love this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:37
I remember I was at a conference and Perry Marshall was speaking. Perry Marshall was kind of early on in Google AdWords. He wrote 80/20 Sales and Marketing. And he basically said, like innovation, this always sticks out when I think about this. Innovation comes from outside industry. And then his example is like Steve Jobs, like with the charger cable from like a coffee machine. So like if you tip the coffee over doesn’t electrocute, you know, like then the, so the chargers are magnetic, right? And so, but innovation comes from outside industry, right? So totally get that.
Jarrette Schule: 30:18
Yeah. Like a perfect example is when I came into the space and I started learning all my competitors, you had, you know, half the market was private golf courses. And then you had this other segment for public golf courses. And, you know, I love designing databases from the beginning, right? And, you know, one thing you learn is that things that are the same go are the same table. And that seems like a very simple concept, but the difference between a private country club and a public municipal golf course, the only difference is you have members at one and you don’t at the other. So it’s just really another couple of database tables, right? And I never understood it because it’s like, it’s such a niche industry already. I mean, it’s, it’s a big one. There’s 15,000 golf courses just in the United States.
But like, why would you already take a space that’s already niche and cut it in half? It didn’t, never made any sense to me. But no, people have been doing that for so long in golf software that it was just that’s the way it was done, you know?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:29
What was the big milestone? I know you got these, you know, smaller golf courses, but at what point you. I know that now you serve the city of Houston, city of San Diego and Cedar Rapids. What was the milestone you remember, which is this multi golf course owners?
Jarrette Schule: 31:52
Yeah. So in the golf world they are called MCOs, multi-course operators. And that was always kind of like pie in the sky. Like, oh, one day I’m going to get a Troon golf, which is like we have hundreds and hundreds of golf courses. And it was still at the time when there was just two people in the company, me and the CSM, and we got a meeting with a company called Hampton Golf. And they have a bunch of golf courses, mostly on the East Coast, a lot of Florida courses, East Coast courses. And they actually agreed to meet. And, you know, over the course of the next couple of months. You know, they got to I just shared my vision of what I saw as the future of TenFore and that if they just gave me a chance, I would never let them down. Right.
And I think they kind of, I think they kind of saw how passionate I was about making this like making ten for the best. And they kind of just bought in and just took a chance on me. And I’m still, you know, to this day very grateful to them. But that was a huge one. That was a take the wife out and, and have a drink kind of night. So that was pretty cool.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:04
That comes with advantages. And this comes with more work because those tend to want specialized features and things, but that also improves the product. What do you remember from like the MCOs that like, Jarrette, this sounds great, but we need this, this, this feature. And once you create it, you can roll it out for the other ones. But to create it in the beginning is a lot of work. You’re like, okay, great. I can’t see the family for like three days because I’m going to be coding all day.
Jarrette Schule: 33:33
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:34
What were some of those suggested features that helped improve the product from?
Jarrette Schule: 33:39
Yeah. So for you know, every MCO, of course, and, you know, and I really feel this way, I don’t think an MCO would sign with a company our size or smaller if there were some custom programming that they were getting right. Otherwise they would just go to a big company that’s in stasis, right? They see that there’s like, there’s this one thing that’s been holding us back as a company, and none of the established companies will even pretend they’re going to build this for us. But hey, we’ve got this guy. He’s like crazy and he’ll build whatever we want.
I remember, so with Hampton specifically, they wanted a promo code system, which I didn’t have. Right? Like, hey, we want to be able to email market. I already build an email marketing tool for them. We want to email market and give them like this code where they can enter and they get like half off. They get half off their tee time or, you know, whatever, maybe a beer and a hot dog for free included in their reservation. That was a big one. But it’s just now it’s just every MCO we sign, there’s always a laundry list.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:55
Which it’s interesting because I’d be, I’d go into the conversation, I’d be like, we built everything, you know, and then they’ll probably come up with like ten more things. They’re like, okay, I guess we haven’t built everything.
Jarrette Schule: 35:07
Yeah. The moment we always think we’re going to get to this place of Xanadu where we have everything they can think of. But now, you know, now with AI, like, you know, a lot of that, it’s such a buzzword, right? And like, it’s not just a buzzword, obviously. It’s a significant change in everything we do. But, you know, I just I’ve always kind of came at it from the perspective of, I don’t want to just build AI fluff just to put AI in our tagline. And I want to make sure that when we choose a customer-facing AI product to build that it’s actually meaningful and it actually moves the needle for the business, right?
So we’ve got a lot of that stuff going on behind the scenes right now, and we’ve got some pretty cool ideas. And I just, you know, going back to what you were talking about with feature requests from MCOs, you know, we have this kind of thing internally called the rule of three, where we won’t build something until three different clients actually bring it up in conversation.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:16
Do you ever entertain it, like for an additional fee, or you just say you’re too busy with other things like, hey, we build this. We haven’t got any requests. It’s going to be an extra X amount of dollars if you want us to build this. Or do you just say it’s on the feature request list?
Jarrette Schule: 36:33
Yeah, it’s interesting you bring that up. I just had a conversation with my CEO, who we can talk about that a little bit too, how that came to be, how I moved myself from CEO to CTO, because he structured a deal that like that recently, very exclusive private country club, you know, you only know if you know somebody that knows kind of thing. And, you know, they had a big laundry list of integrations they wanted, I think it was like 4 or 5. And you know, he was, you know, I understand from his perspective, he’s like, oh, but they’re paying for all of it. But from the technical side, it’s like, yes, but we only have X number of engineers. It’s not like money.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:22
There’s an opportunity cost because like, we can’t work on these other things that are a priority because we gotta put our resources there.
Jarrette Schule: 37:29
Right. And it’s and it’s great that the company is getting reimbursed for that. But again, we only have a certain bandwidth. And so other things kind of have to take, you know, have to slow down a bit.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:44
Talk about the evolution of the team. You mentioned, eventually you replaced yourself as CEO.
Jarrette Schule: 37:50
Yeah. I think one of my biggest strengths is knowing where I’m weak and not that I’m. And I would say in this case, it wasn’t so much. Well, yeah, it’s because I’m weak in this area, but also I’m just not interested in sales. I’m not interested in that part of the business. I’m more interested in building things. And I knew that, you know, by the time we reached like six years, six or something like that, I mean, we, I had only. It was still just me and a CSM and we had like 20 something courses and it’s like, I’m getting older, we better speed this up a little bit. So I started kind of looking for someone who I knew. You know, you hear the saying, there’s two types of people in the world. There’s farmers and hunters, right? I’m a farmer and I needed a hunter. And I was well aware of this. And I found a guy who lives for this kind of stuff. He’s just as passionate about me on the product side, he’s just as passionate on the business side. And he’s got that motor right. That. And so we did it. And in fact, he was with the company at the. He had founded another golf software company and, and turned it from zero to hero over the course of some years.
And I had always admired the company from a distance. And I had heard about him and we started talking. And then originally they tried to buy TenFore, the company he worked for that he founded. And I was like, no way, it’s way too early. I’m in this to make it the best. I’m not even close to that. So that deal ended up falling through. But he agreed to quit his job and become, he believed in TenFore so much. He was just blown away because he knew all the competitors. In fact, he had bought and sold a couple of my competitors.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:02
Is this Jonathan, there?
Jarrette Schule: 40:03
Yeah. And so he actually left that company to become our CEO. And ever since he did that, and I guess it’s been about three years now. I mean, we’ve just blown up.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:17
Is that a big leap? I mean, for a company from also from a monetary perspective, right?
Jarrette Schule: 40:26
You mean like his salary?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:28
Yeah, exactly.
Jarrette Schule: 40:28
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. He, in fact, was using some of his own money to keep us afloat because we were not in the black. And he wanted to bring in, he wanted to grow the company. You know, he wanted to hire people.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:42
You’re like, I want you to come on. And I also want you to put money in the company.
Jarrette Schule: 40:48
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, like, I think, you know, pre-Jonathan, you know, we were like kind of in the black in a weird way. Like I would sometimes make money on a month and sometimes not get a salary, you know, and I made sure we were in the black because I had to, we could only spend, we had no investors apart from a few friends and family. We already blown through that money. And so he was, it was the perfect move. I mean, he’s just been a total savior on the business side, keeping us. And now we. So last year we closed our series A, which he spearheaded all of that.
That was the other thing I hated was talking to investors and shopping investors, and I just was just such a time sink and I hate doing like paperwork and, you know, you know, doing all the money stuff. And I just, I had to do it. So I did it, but it wasn’t something I enjoyed doing. And he does somehow.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:54
Jarrette first of all, thanks for sharing the journey. It’s pretty fascinating. And I do want to just point out people can check out TenFore.golf and they’re going beyond golf courses, right? So you’ve indoor simulators, driving ranges, tennis courts, pickleball golf clinics. So I know we have a minute, but like, that’s, is that kind of growth through also expansion as well through different those type of channels?
Jarrette Schule: 42:27
Yeah. It’s interesting because, right. Because with golf, like I described before, it’s a bunch of different businesses in one. So now we’re exploring things where, hey, we already have this product. We’ve already built it, this product. This one of seven products by itself could serve this space and this space and this space.
And we just signed an agreement with a huge company that they do software for municipal properties. Now think about RV parks, tennis courts, you know, public parks, all those facilities. And the one product they don’t have is golf. So we just partnered with them. They have thousands of municipal contracts. And so we’re just, we have a lot of internal discussions about expanding, expanding, expanding. Yep.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:19
And pickleball is huge too.
Jarrette Schule: 43:21
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And you mentioned golf simulation earlier. And, you know, we have a whole section of our company that’s dedicated to building features for those types of businesses.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:34
Jarrette, first of all, thank you. Such a cool, interesting journey. Everyone could check out TenFore.Golf. So if you know of one of these type of facilities and you like want to modernize it, tell them about TenFore Golf. Or maybe you own one of these facilities or work for one of these facilities. So check it out. Check out more episodes of the podcast. We’ll see everyone next time. And Jarrette, thanks so much.
Jarrette Schule: 43:58
Thank you.
