#25: Brian Borichevsky, Founder & CEO | ROK Golf

Get inside the mind of a scrappy solo founder as we talk with Brian Borichevsky, the CEO and pioneer behind indoor golf entertainment startup ROK Golf. With no prior experience starting his own business but equipped with ample vision, Brian bootstrapped his unique concept from the ground up, tapping into his life savings to open the first high-tech swing analysis bay location in 2018.

In this episode, Brian gives an inside look at the Tribe of solo entrepreneurs by sharing his real-world journey - the idea lightbulb moment, navigating start-up unknowns and learning curves as a new dad and founder in parallel, to persisting through early COVID headwinds through sheer grit.

Brian transparently details the exhilarating reality of bringing a pioneering business to life, dispelling myths of overnight success and glory along the way. New founders and solopreneurs will gain tangible tips on fearlessly executing on a vision despite inevitable challenges, while ultimately keeping the purpose, product and customer experience at the core.

About Brian:
Recently we asked our followers what questions we should start including in our founder interviews.  There were so many great ones and one in particular was perfect for our next guest.  Should you make a business out of your passions or hobbies? 

In this episode, I speak with Brian Borichevsky, founder and CEO of ROK Golf, an indoor golf entertainment company with locations in Austin, Texas. Brian shares his entrepreneurial journey, from watching his father build a successful meat provisions business to starting his own fantasy sports software venture before regulations changed. He then tapped into his life savings to launch ROK Golf during a chaotic time in his personal life.

We dive into the gritty realities of those early days, like realizing he had no point-of-sale system to take payments just days before opening. Brian also shares the steep learning curve of leasing retail space, hiring employees, managing cash flow, and delegating tasks. 

Ultimately, Brian's passion for golf and vision to create better jobs in an industry he loves is what sustains him through the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship.

About ROK Golf:
ROK Golf operates state-of-the-art indoor golf facilities created to bring elite Trackman technology to the whole of the golf world.  Designed by an avid golfer, for avid golfers, ROK Golf combines top technology with incredible instructors and master fitters in a seriously fun atmosphere where golfers can practice, take lessons, compete or just have a blast with friends all on your schedule.  Combining practice, instruction and fitting in one holistic model, ROK Golf is here to help in all areas of the game.  ROK Golf was founded in 2018 in Austin Texas and has locations in Westlake and Bee Cave.

To learn more, visit rokgolf.com. 

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Brian Borichevsky

Founder & CEO, ROK Golf

What is In The Thick of It?

Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.

I always had this dream or vision of

waking up and going to work and actually

being interested in going to work.

Like actually being excited about going to work.

I haven't got up dreading going to work in five years.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Recently we asked our followers what questions we

should start including in our founder interviews.

There were so many fantastic suggestions, and one

in particular was perfect for our next guest.

Should you make a business out

of your passions or hobbies?

In this episode, I speak with Brian Borichevsky,

founder and CEO of ROK Golf, an indoor

golf entertainment company with locations in Austin, Texas.

Brian shares his entrepreneurial journey from watching his

father build a successful meat provisions business to

starting his own fantasy sports software venture before

regulations changed and caused him to close.

He then tapped into his life

savings to launch ROK Golf.

During a chaotic time in his personal life, we

dive into the gritty realities of those early days,

like realizing he had no point of sale system

to take payments just days before opening.

Brian also shares the steep learning curve

of leasing retail space, hiring employees, managing

cash flow, and delegating tasks.

Ultimately, Brian's passion for golf and vision

to create better jobs in an industry

he loves is what sustains him through

the roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship.

Brian, thank you so much for making the drive up 35.

In fact, you're from Austin.

I think every one of our guests that lives

in Austin, we've actually done in person, whether it

was us being down there and it just happened

to work out or people have driven up.

So really appreciate the effort.

That's not a short drive, especially when

you got a business to run.

It has changed a lot in the last

25 years since I've been doing that drive.

It seems like it's been under construction the entire time,

but they kind of have Waco figured out now.

So it wasn't as bad as it has been before.

So we're getting there.

I'm just over 40, 35, has been under construction

my entire life, and I'm sure that it will

be under construction through my kids entire life.

So just part of it.

Yeah, and it's always driving

through Hillsborough is interesting.

It used to be like, we're going to go

down the Hillsborough and go to the outlets.

Now it's a ghost town, right?

But they build a bucky's there,

so maybe it's on the rebound.

So we'll see when Bucky's pops up.

You never know what else is going to come along.

Well, you're not a native to Austin,

if I understand correctly, where'd you grow?

Just north of Philadelphia. Okay.

And what was growing up like for you?

So my dad owned his own company.

It was a meat provisions company.

So they did portion controlled

proteins, sold it to restaurants.

I believe he started in 1980.

So I was born in 77, so

I was very young when he started.

I don't remember the very early days, but I remember

it from when he had his first little store, and

it was him and two other guys, and they worked

seven days a week, 14 hours a day, trying to

get that thing off the ground.

And I remember vaguely going with him to that place.

In the beginning, we didn't have much money

and wasn't successful right off the bat.

He was a partner in a gas station, a hess station.

Before he started that business, his business partner

passed away kind of suddenly, and their family

didn't go well, and kind of he got

taken advantage of a little bit.

So one of the guys that worked for him,

he said, hey, he came from the meat business,

and he's like, let's start a meat business.

And my dad was like, okay, let's do that.

So they start the meat business and took it from

two, three guys to when my dad left and finally

sold his portion of the business to his partner.

I think they had 40 or 50 guys

doing 20 or 30 million a year.

So they built it into a pretty big business.

And I kind of was there watching the whole way from

the beginning where it was a struggle, and we didn't see

him much to when he became very successful and had not

uber successful, but enough to where we were comfortable and money

wasn't an issue, and he had flexibility to go to our

games and go to do everything he wanted.

And that's kind of always what I wanted for my family.

It wasn't necessarily trying to get extremely

wealthy, although that would be nice.

It was more the.

I see entrepreneurship as having your own business and

having the flexibility to really be with your family

and do those things and not be bound by

the nine to five corporate life.

So that was always in the back of my

head of something I wanted, and I'm sure we'll

get into how it finally came to fruition.

But kind of typical suburban upbringing.

Wasn't Westlake, but it wasn't far out either.

It was kind of somewhere in the middle.

It was a nice suburb, smaller school

now compared to everything that's around us.

It would probably be a three a school here.

I think my graduating class was, like, 400.

So decent sized school.

We were outside of the city, so we didn't go

into Philly that much, but big Eagles and Flyers fans

and being in Texas now, that's been interesting.

You probably get a lot of looks in football seasons.

Oh, yeah.

It's been fun, though, because for most of the

time we've been here, the Eagles have kind of

dominated the matchups, but we're mutually kind of terrible

this year or disappointing, I should say.

But growing up, things were hard and there wasn't much.

And when I was really young, then

it kind of got pretty comfortable.

Then towards the end, when I was in high

school, college, things were doing pretty well for my

dad and his business, and it was growing.

You mentioned a turning point where he had staff

and he was able to come to your game.

So I take it you played some sports.

I played baseball, football, a little

bit of soccer here and there.

Kind of always been a decent athlete and can

play any sport that I kind of try to.

I was never exceptional at any of them, but I

could play any of them at a fairly decent level.

So football was probably my main sport growing up.

I had a bad skiing accident and kind

of hurt my lower back, so that was

always a hindrance in the football world.

I was good at baseball, just

didn't really love it as much.

Football was kind of my main sport, but once I

got to college, I didn't really play sports anymore.

As a kid, did you spend time up at work with your dad?

You got a front row seat? Oh, yeah.

I would go with him sometimes, and it's

ironic thinking back now when my five year

old wants to come to work with me.

I'm like, I remember that I was probably more

of a hindrance to him than helping him, but

he was probably trying to because there's knives and

equipment and bandsaws everywhere, so perfect place for a

kid to be running around.

So I remember those days.

So I would go with him and see it, and I

can still kind of see that first building they were in.

But then once I got to high school,

I started working for him, and that's when

I got fully exposed to the business.

I helped him kind of grow into the new

facility, and eventually in college, I was in engineering

school, and when they were making a big expansion,

I helped with that on that side of it.

But I started doing all the

crap jobs, and that's grounding.

I think that's an important thing that's missing in a

lot of kids that I'm seeing today is having those

hard labor, blue collar jobs where I started making boxes

and taking out the trash and cleaning the racks.

We would put the chicken on, which was disgusting.

It was a valuable lesson to start with those

jobs, not start in the office and start doing

the fun jobs and the nice jobs.

You start at the bottom and you learn what it takes to

build the business, and you kind of go up from there.

Cleaning the chicken rack sounds like a pretty bad job.

Was there a worse job than that?

I was a dishwasher at a really bad

catering place, and that was pretty awful.

I did that job.

I did landscaping.

I did caddying.

I actually worked in a pottery place, like

pouring pottery molds and pouring clay molds.

Worked at my dad's company for a while.

They were kind of all my pre college jobs.

You did a lot? Yeah.

You've been working since you were how old?

I guess my first job was that pottery job.

May have been freshman of high school.

It was pretty early.

What was your favorite job that

you had as an adolescent? I forgot one.

I worked for my mom as a balloon decorator.

So my mom started a little balloon

decorating business, and I built, like, balloon

arches and letters out of balloons. That was fun.

But then she fired me and then rehired me

in the same day because she realized that I

was the one that built everything and she couldn't

really do the work without me.

But I got a raise.

Wait, so fired, rehired, and got

a raise in the same day? Oh, yeah. Okay.

She needs to get that job done.

And I was like, well, who else

is going to have to do it?

I want my job back, and I want more money.

And you had the upper hand. Yes.

That's also important.

Lesson learned. Okay.

Those that actually can do the things have

a little bit of power in the negotiations.

I was just going to say we'll learn a bit

more about your negotiation tactics as we go along.

But we figured out where the foundation came from.

The favorite job I liked a lot

of the jobs I like to work.

I've always liked that.

In the early days, I assume we're not talking about,

like, once I got into my career, but I liked

working for my dad and being a butcher.

It was fun.

One of the things I did was I was kind of in

charge of the cooler, which is massive, and you would have boxes

and boxes and boxes of primal cuts, which are like five and

ups and one by ones that you cut strip stakes out of,

and they're 60 to 100 pounds a box.

And we would have 40,000 pounds come in a day, and

I would unload them all, and by hand, unload all the

boxes off the trailer into our kind of staging area.

Take the old stuff out, put the new

stuff in, put the old stuff on top.

Make sure the racks were nice and square and stable.

And I was very proud of the cooler

and keeping the cooler very organized and manageable.

And make sure the boxes were stacked

straight, because if they weren't stacked straight,

they would kind of fall over.

So I really like that job, and it kept me in shape.

Yeah.

If you're moving around 60 to

100 pound boxes, that'll get you.

Well, you mentioned college. Where'd you go to school?

I think you went to school in Delaware? Yes.

University of Delaware.

The fighting blue hands.

Pride of Joe Flacco is the pride of Delaware, I think.

All right, big school, 14,000,

I think somewhere around there.

So small in today's world.

In high school, I wasn't necessarily exceptional, and

I was kind of a little bit lazy,

like I think most high school kids are.

And this is before the days of talking

to some of the high school kids.

Today, where you fill out one

online application, it goes everywhere.

Like, you had to actually fill out

every application and write every essay.

So I'm like, I'm not doing that ten times.

So I applied to Delaware and Villanova, and I got

into both and realized that I couldn't really afford Villanova,

so I went to Delaware, and it was close. Yeah.

They were both 40 minutes to an

hour from where we grew up, Delaware.

I could get there in, like, an

hour and 15 minutes from my house.

I think you mentioned engineering.

What kind of engineering?

I landed in civil engineering, so

my degree was in civil engineering,

but I started with environmental chemistry.

Actually, when I was filling out the applications,

it was just, what major do you want?

And there's just a bunch of stuff, and I didn't

really know, and I was like, oh, that sounds interesting.

I'll just check that box.

I don't think at the time I fully grasp

that that was going to be my major.

So show up to orientation and in this little room

with, like, six or eight other kids that are signed

up for environmental chemistry, and the professor is all excited

and starting to talk about all the chemistry.

I'm like, I don't really like chemistry.

Why am I here right now?

This is not going to work out.

So I quickly switched out of that into something else.

I think it was criminal justice at first

because I wanted to be an FBI agent.

Then in the first semester, I took some

CJ classes and kind of realized that they

weren't going to make any money.

CJ, is that criminal justice?

Yeah, criminal justice, okay.

And then started looking for other majors, and I just

looking through the syllabus at all the things, and I

was reading down the list of the civil engineering courses,

and I'm like, yeah, I like that.

I was always good at math and science, so

switched into civil engineering and took statics, which is

kind of like the first course you take when

you do civil engineering, and loved it.

And I was like, all right, this

is the right major for me.

So I didn't even really know what engineering

was when I went into school, so I

had no intention of being an engineer.

But in hindsight, I was always good at building

things and solving problems, and that was its core.

That's what engineering really is.

It teaches you how to solve problems.

Did you like math or did you come to like math?

I don't love math, but I always

came much more naturally than language.

And English so means spelling. Don't get along. Grammar.

No, rules are more clear in math.

Yes, I'm much more numbers than spelling.

Grammar, what were your favorite classes in college?

I mean, I loved all the engineering stuff.

I really liked geology.

In hindsight, I should have taken

a couple more geology courses.

I could have got a minor in

geology and how the earth works. Blake.

Tectonics, the core.

And I just love rocks and minerals, what the composition

of all those, how the different layers of the earth,

and I loved that field, how the earth is formed.

So it's also a big unknown.

We still don't know a lot about what's going on

underneath of us, so I've always found that interesting.

But also the stuff where you get to build

things and structural analysis and building frames and trusses

and identifying how much load is on each and

how big members need to be.

But I kind of worked my way into my

specialty, like in civil engineering is very broad.

It covers a lot of space, anywhere

from structures to traffic engineering to environmental

engineering, which is really wastewater treatment.

It goes across the board.

And I kind of found my way into material science.

So we're studying concrete, steel, and how materials

are made, and mainly construction materials are made.

So concrete was really my specialty,

so I loved all those courses.

That's a first on the podcast.

Concrete is my specialty.

You grew up working?

We talked about lots of jobs.

Did you work your way through college as well?

So my dad was very smart, and he put money aside

for my brother and I's college education, put it into a

mutual fund that did well, and basically we had x dollars

and he said, here's what you have for college.

If you have any leftover, you can have it.

If you need more, you are going to have to pay for it.

So kind of taught budgeting early

on and that was smart.

And I was like, well, if I go

to Villanova, it's going to cost this.

I'm not going to have enough.

And if I go to dilleram I can probably squeeze by.

But I worked during the summers and I

did some bouncing when I was in college.

So that was kind of my job

in college, bouncing like at a bar.

In the summers I would work for my dad or do

the landscaping gig or whatever, and I was at home.

So I always work in the summers as well.

All right, you graduated with a civil

engineering degree, but that's not the field

that you went into after school. No.

So when I graduated in 99, it was right

at the kind of start of the tech boom.

There wasn't any real talent out there

and schools hadn't really caught up.

The MiS and CIS programs at schools weren't

that many kids in them and there weren't

that many people graduating those degrees.

So at the job fair, I just remember

all the tech companies were offering the moon

compared to the civil engineering companies.

I ended up getting a job.

I think I had four offers, if I remember correctly.

One of them was with Turner Construction,

who is a huge commercial construction company.

So I would have been doing

building sports complexes and buildings.

They didn't do roads, I don't think.

But it was funny because everybody

in our classes wanted that job.

And I got one of the two offers they made and

I turned it down to go with this little it startup

in Philadelphia that I was going to be an Oracle DBA.

So got this know how to do oracle book and was

going through that and I took the job in the winter.

So the whole spring semester was my last semester.

I was not going to be in civil engineering anymore.

So I was kind of just having more fun than

focusing on school and kind of getting ready to get

out of engineering and get in the it space.

And then I forget may, June somewhere, I forget what exactly

it was, but I called the company and, hey, how are

things going and what do you want me to be doing?

I haven't heard much from you guys and

they basically said, oh, we didn't get some

work that we were hoping to get.

So you don't have a job anymore?

And are you thinking, hey, can

I call Turner construction back?

I called them immediately and they're like,

oh, no, that offer is gone.

So all my offers went away.

One of my favorite professors from school,

my concrete professor, he transferred to Texas.

And before he know, we talked,

we were pretty good friends.

And he said, hey, if you ever want

to go to grad school, let me know.

So I called him up and said, hey, remember

when you said that thing about grad school?

Is that still possibly an option?

And he's like, well, the deadline's in

two weeks or something like that.

So if you have to take the gres, which

I hadn't even prepped for, really been paying attention

to school for six months, take the gres.

You have to do really well.

If you do that, we'll see what we can do.

So crammed, took the gres, did really well.

Got a full ride to go

to UT engineering graduate school.

I went from thinking I was going to

be an oracle DBA to packing up everything

I owned and driving off to Texas.

So it was a pretty substantial change of

plans and really wasn't really prepared for.

And just all of a sudden just

know I'm on my way to Texas. Here we go.

Wow, that's a very fast change. Yes.

What were your parents saying to you at this time?

I think my mom is pretty devastated because my brother, at

the time, he was in Dallas, he took a job.

Part of the reason I went the it route.

He kind of was always in the business

it world and he was an IT consultant.

I forget who he worked for at the time, but

this is in the glory days of it consulting.

He was flying around first class and as a

junior consultant even, and having these big, expensive dinners

with $100 bottles of wine and corporate apartment.

And I'm like, this looks better than concrete.

So that's kind of what led me into

wanting to get into the it world, is.

Look how great this is.

And then the crash happened right soon after that.

But he transferred to Dallas because we grew

up in an italian family and nobody really

leaves the nest of our hundreds of cousins.

They're all still in

Philadelphia or around Philadelphia.

My brother and I are kind of

the black sheep because we left.

And my mom's still kind of devastated by that, that

we're now both in Austin and have families in Austin,

and we're not in Philly with the whole family.

But yeah, it was a pretty big, quick turnaround.

And as I said, my brother was in Dallas at the time, so

kind of drove down there and I went to visit him once.

I'm like, this is awesome.

My perception of thinking back on it is

pretty funny, my perception of what Texas was

like when growing up in Philadelphia.

I thought it was everybody walking around

in boots and riding horses in the

streets, know, tumbleweed going across.

And I'm like, then I got here.

I'm like, oh, no, this is pretty awesome, actually.

I like this modern civilization.

Oh, yeah, we have running water. I know.

I was shocked.

There's not outhouses everywhere.

But, no, it was awesome.

And I loved it, and he loved it.

And, yeah, this is probably going to

be somewhere I want to end up.

All right, so you did

finish the engineering graduate program.

No, I got there.

So kind of continuing the story.

I got there, and I had been out

of the mindset of school for a while.

I was ready to start my it career and

make money and fly around on first class and

go to big corporate dinners and all that stuff.

And then all of a sudden, I'm back

at school, like, limited budget, talking about what

your thesis is going to be.

And I was just like, man, this is

not really what I want to be doing.

And furthermore, since I was pretty much the last

one to get into the program, all the classes

were taken that I would have taken.

So I was taking advanced graduate steel design when I

didn't take undergraduate steel design at top five engineering school

in the world, and I was taking some crazy math

classes that I was nowhere near prepared for.

And so I was not motivated, didn't go well, and

I was like, all right, this isn't going to work.

So I started immediately

looking for other opportunities.

I found a company in Dallas that basically hired

engineers and taught them how to code and took

that job, went up there, started working there, and

that's where I started actually getting.

Actually got into it and actually became a developer.

Was the mindset there that engineers are naturally

oriented toward problem solving, and what we do

with software is solve problems, and therefore we

just need to teach them to code.

Yes, they have the mental aptitude and the

technical background to understand how to code.

And most engineers at that point had some, like,

I had a Fortran class, so I did some

Fortran coding in college, so most engineers had some

type of programming built into it.

I think that their mentality was, we'd rather.

Again, at that time, the schools were behind,

so they weren't putting out the best developers.

So their philosophy was, we were going to hire smart people, teach

them how to do it the way we want them to do

it, and that's going to be a better result for us.

And then having kids that were taught by who knows how

good of technical talent at the colleges in those days.

It's probably changed since, but back then, what was coming

out of school wasn't as good as what they could

create by hiring the people with the aptitude and teaching

them how to code, how they wanted them to code.

Do you remember the first assignment, like

the first thing that you built?

One of the first things we did at that company

was I kind of helped design their website, which wasn't

really because I was still learning how to code.

So they weren't ready to put me

on a project, actually building something.

So I helped kind of rebuild their website a little bit.

And then the first project I was on there, it

was in Colorado, actually, so went out to the office

at the top floor of one of the big buildings

in Denver and had a corporate was.

That was awesome.

And it was in the energy space.

The company I worked for was they had

a lot of software that did kind of

energy accounting, like upstream and downstream.

They did a lot in that space.

And this is a production company in Duke Energy.

Yeah, I think it was them who was

a client, and it was really just kind

of helping them on a networks, on their

kind of infrastructure side, which wasn't my specialty.

I wasn't really writing any code there for

that client, so I wasn't at that company

very long, actually, only like eight months.

And then I went to another company in Dallas where

I was more pure it consulting and development, and that

was the first project where I really started writing code

and having my code show up into space.

And it was with my first project there was in

Lubbock with a sprint affiliate, and we basically built their

kind of intranet site where their employees could go find

information and submit forms and collect data.

And this is all in early 2000s, so it's in

the infancy of software development and building things like that.

But that was an interesting.

I remember going to Lubbock for the first time

and landing in Lubbock and looking out the window,

I'm like, this place is really ugly.

I mean, just brown as far as you could see.

And the cotton fields looked

like there was litter everywhere.

I'm like, this is not the

glorious job I was looking for.

Glorious project I was looking for.

But it ended up being a really good project because it

was basically me and two other colleagues, and I did a

lot of the heavy work on the programming, so it was

kind of trial by fire, and the project went well and

it was successful, and then that kind of led to a

bunch of other projects and I was at that company for,

it was a small kind of niche consulting company, and then

it got bought by Sunguard.

So Sunguard was a very big software company

at the time, big financial software company.

We were kind of their custom dev it kind

of consulting arm within sunguard and worked for them

for eight years, ten years, something like that.

Had a bunch of, kind of went up the chain.

As far as you're the hardcore developer writing all

the code, then you're kind of leading a team

of developers, then you're leading the projects and you're

leading the programs, and then you're getting more into

the true strategic consulting and sales.

So kind of your technical consultant developer path

is what I kind of went up.

So the world's a little bit different today in 2024

than it was back then, in what, early mid 2000s.

But you were there for a long time, and

especially in the consulting world, it's a grind, or

it can be, especially if you're with a bigger

firm and you're working with big enterprise type companies.

It's typically long hours and really hard work.

What kept you there?

That's a long time, especially by today's standards.

I really liked the people I was working with.

I'm still in touch with a couple of them.

The guy who was my kind of mentor, I think he's

running the Dallas office now, should be if he isn't.

But I really liked the group we were

working with, and I liked the company.

And it was better when it was smaller,

as it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

And I think they actually got bought out by fis now.

More corporate, more corporate,

more corporate, more corporate.

And that's when I started kind of getting

less interested and kind of, I liked the

small niche, kind of family aspect of it.

And as it got bigger and more corporate,

it kind of got more tedious and more

red tape and more boundaries to success.

And I wasn't a fan of that.

So that's one thing I always remember.

If I always said, if I ever start my

business, I don't care how long somebody's been there,

I don't care how old they are, if they're

doing the job and they're doing it well, they're

going to get bumped up and get promoted.

There's not going to be these, you must

be at this position two years before you

can make it to the next position.

Before you can make it to the next

position, because I got held back because of

that number of times, and it frustrated me.

So always vowed that if I ever start my

own business that I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to rapidly promote the people

that earned it and deserve it.

So what did you go on to do after that?

I left there and went to

another company for a little bit.

It was jetty.

I was only there for one project.

I think I was kind of losing

my, like, I wasn't passionate about it.

I didn't love it anymore.

I was like, this kind of stinks came down to

Austin and I started working on kind of my own.

I want to build a fantasy sports kind of

platform, not to compete with draftkings, but if you

play fantasy sports, you need to build a bunch

of rosters and lineups and manage them.

And if you want to do it successfully, you

can't do it on the back of a napkin.

You need some intelligence behind it.

And so I was building that platform and kind of

on the side and then started doing it more seriously.

And then that's when kind of

Texas shut down fantasy sports.

I was like, all right, well, that's not good.

From there, I got another job.

Kind of picked up another gig running a redevelopment of

basically the whole software platform for a friend of mine

at the country club I was a member at and

did that project for about a year.

But the whole time I wanted to start

my own business, I wanted to start something.

And that's when I kind of started putting things together for

what ROK Golf was going to become what I wanted.

And then when that contract was up, I just kind of

pushed all the chips in the middle and started ROK.

When you were doing the fantasy sports thing, did

you say at some point you were doing it?

Like, that was full time?

That was full time for me

for probably almost six, eight months.

I would like, I was all in on it.

I didn't have another job.

I didn't have another contract.

I finished up one contract that I was doing

in Austin, the contract that moved me down here.

In fact, I was finishing that up.

And then once I got done with

that, it was a pretty lucrative contract.

So I had a little cushion.

So I started kind of just banging away

on this software platform and building it out.

And I got it to where it was pretty neat.

And it's frustrating now because my vision

is out there in a bunch of

different platforms and they're killing it.

I'm like, man, regulations have changed. Oh, yeah.

Now it's all legal.

And what I wanted to build is out there and

would have worked and would have been pretty cool.

So I always kind of look back on that.

And in hindsight, it's reassuring, because

I had something, I was right.

I just didn't have the guts to see it

all the way through and stick with it.

I was like, I have probably like three or

four more months of money before I'm in trouble,

so can I get this thing to where it's

making money in three or four months?

And I was like, probably not.

So that's why I got another kind of it consulting

gig in the meantime, got a little cash, and then

realized, found a way to invest basically my life savings

into ROK and start that with the fantasy app.

Did you actually have users on the platform, or were you

still developing it in order to get it to market?

No, we were developing it to get it to market.

I was working with a couple of friends who,

they were kind of my users, if you will,

my trial users to help work on the platform.

Basically, it was kind of like a combination

of analytics so you could look at the

player I brought in data from.

There was a service that just presented

you with all the data, all the

numbers from every sport that you wanted.

So you would sign up for football or baseball or

whatever, and we were focusing on football and basketball.

So I'd bring in all the numbers, and then I

built a really cool display that enabled you to look

at the numbers and the performance without bias.

So you weren't looking at the names, you were

looking at the actual color coded heat maps on

how many points they were getting and what type

of player there were and classifying them.

And then we could work together saying that I

like these guys and I like these guys.

And then I would go into an engine and spit

out combinations of those within the budgets for the teams.

And then here's all your lineups, and then

you can mass import them into the GPPs.

So all that exists now.

But we were way ahead of the game, and

it would have been pretty groundbreaking if I would

have got it all the way there.

But I didn't have the capital,

I didn't have the couldn't.

I had to put food on the table and I

had to survive, and I just couldn't make it.

I didn't have.

With it being illegal in Texas, that was making it

really hard, and I just had to make the calculation.

Can I get this to where it's going to

start making money in two or three months?

I was like, no, I don't think I can.

And the downside is pretty terrible.

So I still have all the code.

It's all there somewhere, but maybe one day we'll

knock the dust off and see what's there.

I was playing pseudo professional fantasy sports for

a little while and made like, at one

point I was up like 75 grand. Oh, my gosh.

I had one big weekend where we were

up like 55 grand in one week.

I started with a couple of $100.

So once you figure it out, there's ways to do it

and ways that you can make some money doing it.

That was my idea.

I was like, I think this is actually a beatable game.

You're looking at patterns and interesting.

You just have to take your bias out of it.

Don't pick all the Eagles or the Cowboys.

You have to pick the right

players in the right situations.

Overlay weather and history and things

like that on top of it.

So actually, some of the stuff I was going to build into

it doesn't exist yet, so maybe I can do that someday.

Roughly what time frame is this?

Like early 2010s, mid 2010?

This is like 2011. Twelve.

Somewhere in there. 13 maybe.

So the iPhone has been out for a few years.

You got the App Store.

People are very used to doing

this kind of thing online.

This was not going to be an app.

It was a browser based desktop.

I'm sure there would have been an app version at

some point, but I needed a lot of screen space

to do all the things that we were doing.

I built business applications, and this

was definitely in that vein.

It wasn't a little thing on

your phone to play around with.

It was a serious interface.

So this doesn't work out, you

go get another it consulting gig.

And you said you did that for about a year.

It was about a year, I think.

So a guy that I knew, he had his own company

and just talking with him, playing golf, I was like, man,

you're sitting on a time bomb with your IT infrastructure.

Just on the story you're telling me.

So talked more and more and more, and

when I needed a gig, I was like,

hey, have you ever thought about doing this?

And kind of just fell into place.

I worked with the guys I

worked with before at Sunguard.

I basically went to them and

said, hey, I have this project.

You guys think you can do this?

And brought them in, and I was just part of the team.

I was basically managing the project.

They were doing all the technical stuff, and I

was more or less managing the project, more of

a project manager and product manager than.

I wasn't doing any of the actual development

on it, but basically rebuilt their entire platform.

And it was the kind of work you were used to doing.

Yeah, it was custom app dev, pure custom app dev.

And you were able to just slide right back in.

Yeah, at that point I wasn't that far removed.

I was only a year removed.

And during my whole fantasy thing, I was writing code.

I mean, that's probably the

heaviest code I've ever written.

I mean, that was up till midnight, 01:00 a.m.

Every night, just pounding out code.

So I was technically sharp at that point for sure.

Going backward just a little bit.

You talked about when you found civil engineering,

like that seemed to be your thing.

You were a concrete guy, and I don't want

to put words in your mouth, but it sounded

like your impetus to get into it was you're

watching your brother have the high life right?

Or what you perceived to be that once you got

into the it world, the software development world, did you

have a passion for it and was it what you

thought it would be, what you wanted it to be?

Yeah, it's a great question, actually.

I fell in love with it.

What I realized, what I really

like to do is build things.

And with code, as you know, I can build

something in an hour and actually see it and

use it, play with it and touch it.

In the engineering world, it takes much

longer time to actually see your work.

I really fell in love

with development and writing code.

And if you think about it, it's very similar to

building a building or building any civil engineering project.

You have the same phases, you have the

same pattern, you do the same things.

You're just using code instead of steel and concrete.

I mean, you have to do your

planning, you have to build it.

You have your kind of

iterative development, if you will.

It's very similar process.

And I just liked that I could do it real quickly.

I've got three kids.

My oldest is going into high school next year.

And recently there was an orientation, high school

orientation, kind of an event he went to.

And we're talking about the different classes that

are offered and electives, and they've got a

phenomenal career center in our school district.

And it's rare that we all get to eat dinner

together because somebody's at this and somebody's at that.

But got all five of us at dinner and I

said, you know, guys, I would like for all of

you to take a computer programming class in high school.

And I'm not saying you need to go into the software

development world, I'm not saying I want you to go into

it, but I think if you got into it and you

liked it would open a ton of doors.

But more importantly, I think that there's so much

you can learn about the process because you start

with this big problem and you have to figure

out your way backward and you have to put

it into small chunks to solve this big problem.

And so I personally think

everybody could benefit from it.

And I'm saying that as somebody who never actually

took a class like that, I wish I had.

Does that resonate at all?

Yeah, I think that when I was at

sunguard, I used to do a lot of

the college recruiting and interviewing and an interview.

I'd always ask the question, like, what's the

most important thing you learned at school?

And you get all kinds of answers,

this or that, blah, blah, blah.

But the answer I was looking for, and I got

it once or twice, is I learned how to learn.

And I think that's the most important

thing that comes out of school.

It's not any specific.

I mean, clearly I don't use 90% of the actual things

I went to college for, but I use the process, how

to break down a problem into, as you said, small, manageable

things, solve that problem, move on to the next, move on

to the next, move on to the next.

And that's how you solve big problems.

And I think engineering specifically, but it as

well, it teaches you how to do that.

And that's one thing I'm almost fearful of.

With all the stuff that's going on now, the

automation, the AI, the AI writing code, you're losing

those skills to an extent, asking Chat GPT to

write you a piece of code.

To me, you don't understand

what's actually happening underneath.

Like, back in the day, it used to be, for

me, it was like when you had the wissy wig

tools where what you see is what you get.

You just drag something on and this magically happens.

And I always hated those because I'm like, well,

you don't know what it's actually doing underneath.

You don't know where the data

is coming from, where it's going.

And there's kind of two mentality.

There's the ones, like, I don't care, it works.

And there's the other ones, like,

I want to know what's happening.

And I was always the, I want to know what's happening and

I want to be able to write the code to do it.

And I think getting kids exposed anything stem,

I mean, whether it's computer programming or even

basic engineering courses or anything stem related, I

think is extremely important at a young age.

Like, try to get that going quickly

because we're going to need problem solvers.

And anybody that can has that kind of mentality

is going to be ahead of the game.

Talking about the need to actually understand what's going

on behind the scenes with this and be able

to put together other kitchen table conversations we've had

recently is, why do I need to take math?

Like, I've got a calculator?

And I'm like, no, you don't understand.

You have to know how to put the

numbers into the calculator to solve the problem.

The calculator, it's not about that.

It's about being able to solve the problem.

And that, in and of itself, doesn't solve the problem.

I even talked to some kids today who are

in engineering schools, and I'm like, in school?

Are you still deriving the formulas yourself based on

the base formulas and at the beginning, your test

and your challenge, or are you just punching numbers

into a software program that spits out the beam

design and, oh, yeah, we're shooting.

If you don't understand where it comes from, it's

like, we're never going to have to do that.

We're never going to have to write it out on pad.

But if you don't understand it, you don't have

the context to understand what numbers you're typing in

and where they come from and why they're important.

Maybe it's just because I'm old now, but when I still

have pages on pages on pages of working out the problems

and putting in all the formulas and all the variables, and

that's the other thing you learn in those schools.

If you make a mistake in the beginning, that

carries all the way through on the page three,

and your answer is going to be wrong.

But you could do everything right

from steps three through 25.

But if you got step two wrong and

made one calculation error, everything else is toast.

You got to check your work. Yeah.

You get back into the it space.

You do this deal for a year, and in this time,

you get the idea for what would become ROK Golf.

Talk us through that experience.

So I was doing that gig not because I

was passionate about it, because I needed to.

I needed a gig, I needed the money.

But the whole time I just felt empty.

I don't know, just not motivated.

I didn't feel fulfilled. Yeah.

So I always had this dream or vision of waking up

and going to work and actually being interested in going to

work, like actually being excited about going to work.

And there were times I had that based on

some projects I was on when I was at

Sungarden, other points in my career, but it wasn't

truly what I really wanted to be doing.

I'm like, all right, so what do I liked?

I like sports, and I liked cooking. I liked golf.

And so I was like, I want to find

a way to make one of these a business.

So I went to a custom fitting place, and my brother

got me a custom fitting for you go to a place

and they look at your golf clubs, and you buy golf

clubs, and they fit them to your swing.

They had something called trackman in there.

And Trackband is this platform where you hit

a golf ball into a net, no cage. And it tells you.

It has a video, your swing,

it tells you all the numbers.

Says the ball speed was this, the club

speed was this, the face angle was this.

Has a video, your golf swing, and it shows you

in slow motion, kind of what your swing looked like.

And that was the first time I

really hit on anything like that.

And just, I was like, holy.

If I had this, I would actually get better at golf.

And we haven't talked about I wasn't a good golfer.

I was an avid golfer.

That isn't to say I'm a good golfer.

And I was frustrated because I didn't have time,

number one, to play a lot of golf.

And I took some lessons, and I would go

out to the range and try to get better,

and it just wasn't really getting better.

But I couldn't really afford lessons with the

high end pros or anything like that.

But I had the mindset and I had the

technical ability to understand how the golf swing work.

And from an engineering perspective, it's all

engineering as far as club hits.

Ball, ball compresses, ball goes off, their

spin drag, all the things you need

to understand how the golf swing works.

And when I got on trackman, I was like, man,

if I had this, I could actually start getting better.

So the light bulb went off at that

point, and I started looking, I was like,

what if I just wanted to rent this?

And there wasn't any place, like, in your house? No.

If I could go to a facility and just, I want

a track man bay, and I want to be able to

rent it for an hour so I can hit goffles, because

to have it in your house, you need the space, which

is 15 x 30, basically, with twelve foot high ceilings that

most people don't have that much space.

It's almost a garage. Yeah.

And then they need the budget,

they're expensive to do it, right?

It's 40, 50 grand, and they need the spousal approval,

which is usually the one that gets you the most.

Hey, honey, I want to put this 300,

400 square foot golf bay in our house. No.

So most people aren't going to be able

to have one of these in their home.

Most golf courses don't actually have them.

Most country clubs don't have them.

If you go to the big box golf stores like Golfsmith,

I remember going up there and they had kind of very

basic versions of it, and there would just be people lined

up to just hit a couple of golf balls on a

launch monitor, is what they're called, basically.

And like, man, I've had people pay for this a lot.

So I just started kind of putting the numbers together

and doing the research and looking at the market.

I was like, is there anything

out there that really does this?

There were some kind of versions of it, but

nothing like what I had in my mind.

So that's kind of where the idea was born.

What was the closest to what you had come up with?

So there were two kind of similar ish models.

There's one that was very instruction focused,

but it was a very cold atmosphere.

It's called golf tech. It's still out there.

It's probably heard of it if you're a golfer.

I think they claim that they do

the most lessons in the country.

They probably do, but it's not where you

would go to hang out with your friends.

Part of what I wanted was like, a golf

cave that you would have in your basement, and

you'd bring your friends over and you'd play golf

on the simulator while you're watching your kids.

So you would never do that at that place.

And then there was the other side of the spectrum.

It was just that.

It was just play course, drink, have fun,

but you're not really going to get better.

They didn't have lessons.

And I was like, I think there's a way to do both.

It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

It doesn't have to be one or the other.

And there are a couple, just one offs, I

found, but nothing really big and structured that had

it mass produced or had gotten momentum.

Most of the ones I found were some golf

pro wanted to be able to teach more.

When the weather was bad.

They threw a simulator in a thousand square foot

retail place somewhere, and that was their simulator.

It wasn't really that well put together.

So when I started, there weren't many like it at.

And there weren't any in Austin. Really.

You've got this itch, you've got this vision.

And are you married at this point? Yes.

How long have you been married?

Two years, and my wife is pregnant with our first kid.

So you'd wrapped up this project.

Were you looking for the next it consulting

gig, or were you determined at this point

already to go do your own thing again?

I mean, I think once I started putting

pieces together for what ROK Golf would be,

I was kind of committed to that. All in. Yeah.

And then it's a capital intensive startup.

I mean, it costs a lot to build out one of

our facilities, and so I didn't have that much money.

The consulting gigs were good, and I did okay,

but I didn't have millions of dollars into my

bank account where I could be like, okay, just

cut a check and make it happen.

So I had to figure out how to

use my retirement savings to fund the business.

And basically, that's what I did.

And I got some angel funding from my father as well.

That was the seed capital I had.

And in hindsight, I was

probably 200% under capitalized.

I had nowhere near the amount of money I

really needed, so I had to do everything.

I put all the money into getting the.

People don't understand in the brick and mortar

world, you can't just go out and say,

I would want that spot there. Just sign me up.

It's not like renting an apartment.

That was a big eye opener for me, is I thought I

could just find a vacant retail space and just sign it up.

Oh, no.

I got turned down and turned down and turned down.

And the landlords.

You're going to hit golf balls inside?

Like, no, go find somewhere else.

So I quickly realized, okay, this

is going to be a problem.

I need to find a space.

And that got more expensive.

And then you get your first retail lease, and it's

60 pages of legalese, and like, all right, are you

doing this real estate search on your own, or did

you have a commercial broker that you were working with?

I had a friend who was a commercial broker, and

he was doing a little bit for me, but I

was driving around looking at all the spots, because another

issue that I came up with early on was, it's

not that easy to find spaces that fit the bays.

I mean, they have to be a certain width.

The columns can't be, and you can't have a big steel

column in the middle of your bay or in your backswing.

So it had to be a pretty big space

with pretty free span, even if it couldn't be

a weird shape because these are big rectangles that

you need to stack next to each other.

So you need a very specific space and

a very specific kind of size and orientation.

And I want it to be in a fairly nice shopping center.

I wanted to be convenient.

A big part of the business model was convenience.

Most people don't play golf because they

don't have time to play golf.

I didn't have 6 hours to go PLAy

around on the weekends, so with the siMulators,

you can play around in 20 minutes.

So I want it to be very convenient.

I want to be off major roads

in PRETTY high volume, high traffic centers.

AnYway, so to answer your question, I was more

or less doing the search on my own.

And just to restate, you not only had to find a

place to rent that had the dimensions, the size specifications that

you needed, but you also had to find a landlord that

was willing to let you put this in there.

Oh yeah, landlords, especially big corporate ones,

they want nail salons and bagel shops,

and they don't like unknowns.

Just last night I picked up my daughter.

We're driving home and there's a little strip center

not far from our house, and there's an indoor

swim lesson, an indoor swim school for kids there.

And my daughter was asking ABOut it and I said

if I was the landlord, there's no way I would

LEt SOMEBODY put a swimming pool in my building.

You think ABout, OKAY, if this DOesn't

work, who am I going to find?

There's only one kind of company

that's going to take that space.

And so how did you get

through that objection from the landlords?

I finally just found one that was a pretty big

company, but I met with the guy who was his

father owns is the landlord, basically, and kind of just

had a bunch of meetings with him and convinced him

that it was a good sell.

And part of my convincing him was like, listen,

I'm not going to customize the space too much.

And that's part of my business model is we go

into a big space, we set up our bays, and

if we have to leave, it's just a big space.

A lot of my competition is they put, I don't

even know how much money into framing out all the

bays and making it very specific to their needs.

So if somebody else comes in, they

have to knock all that down.

There's a lot of tenant improvement

money that goes into that. There's a lot of tenant

improvement money goes into that.

For me, I just need a big white

box and we can put in everything.

I need bathrooms, I need a bar, I

need a little reception area, and that's it.

And I need space.

So if it doesn't work out, even after

now being established, we're just about to move

into Westlake and probably the number two shopping

center in Austin, owned by a huge reit.

And it took a lot of convincing for them.

Even though we have the numbers now and we have

the proof that it's going to mean it was. It.

It was very tricky.

And that was one of the things like, listen, if we

leave, this is what you're going to be left with.

It's not going to be the space that you can't leave.

It's just going to be basically an empty shell.

You can put whatever you want in here.

So that became a big selling point.

But early on, I think I just got.

In hindsight, I looked back at the ones that said

no, and in hindsight, if some of them would have

said yes, I don't think we would have survived, because

I had to go off the beaten path, and I

was starting to look at places I didn't really want.

I just needed somebody to say yes.

And it's funny how those things work out.

Just the one that said yes ended

up being in a good enough spot. It was the right.

I could afford it, and it was a

big enough space that it worked out.

There's an important lesson in that.

Sometimes when you got this idea and you're just so

eager to make it happen, you're willing to make a

lot of compromises in order to just get going.

But as you said, it would have been catastrophic if

you would have taken one of these, because it wouldn't

have been in that traffic pattern that you're looking for.

It wouldn't have been in the right socioeconomic area.

Do you ever wake up at night and go,

golly, I'm so glad I didn't do that?

There were some bullets I dodge that I

didn't know was dodging at the time.

There definitely were some.

The one spot I almost signed up with, ironically, it's in

the same shopping center, my b cave one is now.

They were going to be willing to rent me a spot,

but it was way too small, and I would have had

to make the bays way too tiny, and people would have

been hitting the walls of the clubs all the time, and

it would have been a terrible experience, and it was going

to be on the upper end of what I could have

afforded which in hindsight I probably couldn't have afforded.

And it was going to not go well.

I have definitely dodged those bullets, but even the

bigger bullet was at the beginning of ROK.

There are kind of two paths, so the business is always

going to, there are going to be two parts of it.

There's going to be the brick and mortar side of it,

and there's going to be a software side of it, so

not going to give up on my software experience.

So we plan on kind of building a custom

software platform for our business because there isn't one

out there that handles what we do.

And there are a lot of places like ROK popping

up and we're all struggling with the same problem.

We have a lot of different use cases that go into

what we need to do from bookings, from a lot of

people like, oh, just use a green grass golf system.

Like, no, yes, we're golf, but that's

about the end of the similarities.

Greengrass golf courses, they don't care who's in

the bay and how long you've been there.

They just care when you start. We care.

Is it an hour and a half, 2 hours and

who was in there and what membership type they are.

So a lot of the different use cases that we have,

they break a lot of the systems that are out there.

So I kind of realized that early on and

I was going to start by building the software

platform first and then do the brick and mortar.

And if I would have done that,

we wouldn't be sitting here right now.

I would have got the software platform wrong.

I didn't know enough about the

business space at the time.

Some of the things I was going to build or

would have been a complete waste for a while was

just kind of going back and forth on those decisions

and I was like, well, I know I can just

have trackman the bays and I can sell that.

People will pay just to be in

there with nothing else, with no software

using the software that comes with Trackman.

I know I can sell that.

I know people will come and use that and

then we'll see where the business goes and then

we'll start building the software once we get that

part, the brick and mortar part going.

So that was probably the biggest bullet that

was dodged, was choosing to do the brick

and mortar first and wait on the software.

Was that a serious consideration, though?

I'm going to go build software to support these

companies, but there weren't that many that existed.

It wasn't necessarily at the time I wasn't

thinking of it to support the other companies.

I was thinking of it.

To run my company yourself?

Yeah, but I would have burnt through

all my budget and all my time.

It would have been a colossal mess

if I had gone that path.

That's a big investment, and we're in the

software technology business in my organization, and we

get into conversations with clients about should I

build or should I buy?

And, I mean, the economics of building oftentimes

just, it's hard to make that work.

If somebody's got something that works, run with it.

Different story.

If you're going to go build a product and take

it to market and sell it to all these people.

But how long would it have taken you

to get that v one up and running?

It probably would have taken me six months to

get the core of what needed to be there.

Not the bells and whistles, not the love

to haves, but just the must haves.

But again, I would have gotten it all wrong.

The path I was kind of going down was

not the path I would be going down now.

A lot of it would be there,

but a lot of it's very different.

Do you consider yourself a patient person?

Not generally, but I'm a logical person.

If I know the timeline is unrealistic, I

can be patient and know that it's going

to take time for that to happen.

So I'm patient.

When patience is called for and mandated, you

can see the long term payoff for waiting. Yeah.

I want to go back to something you mentioned a minute

ago and don't want to get into numbers and details or

anything like that, but you talked about tapping into your retirement

to fund this, to get this off the ground.

I am confident that many

entrepreneurs have done just that.

But it's not like you can just call up Schwab and

say, hey, liquidate my IRA and send me money, or give

me that 401K rollover check, make it payable to me.

There's penalties, there's tax consequences.

Were there any things that you learned from that

that you might help somebody else think through?

Yeah, don't do it.

There's a program out there.

The acronym is robS, but it basically allows you

to take your retirement savings money, IRA and 401K

money, and basically invest that into a business.

So, in essence, you can self directed iras,

you can invest that into a business.

So you're investing into a business, but

it's a business that you're running yourself.

But if you have employees and you run

a legitimate business, it is a very good

program, conceptually to use your retirement savings to

invest in yourself, to start a business. All right.

You find a landlord.

It is in the right budget range.

They're willing to let you do it.

You buy the equipment.

Do you remember the first day that you were open?

The big ribbon cutting with the giant scissors?

Well, so my son was born in the end of June,

and our first day of business was the beginning of August.

So, literally, the ribbon cutting was a month after my

month and a half after my son was born.

So it was more, this thing just needs to

get open, and we need to start seeing money

on the other side of the balance sheet.

So there was no ceremony. There was no procession.

There was, we need to get

this thing open and start going.

That was 2018. 2017. Somewhere there. 2018.

All right, so it's August of 2018.

You've got a six week old, five

week old, eight week old, something like.

Doesn't really matter at that point.

You've gone through getting the lease, doing all the

build out, and it's time to open the doors.

Do you remember the first customer, the

first paying customer that came in?

Yeah, I still have the $1 bill. For real? Yeah.

Like, the chamber of commerce comes

and they give you that frame. Okay.

Yeah, I remember the.

And my background, again,

wasn't really marketing advertising.

So I had zero budget for it.

So I did very little marketing.

So in the beginning, it was all just somebody

drove by, saw Goff, and was this came in,

and that's how my first customers started coming in.

I was a couple of days away from opening, and

I realized I have no way to take a payment.

I have no Pos system.

If somebody comes in and wants to pay with a credit

card, I'm going to have no way to do that.

Okay, you just realized this?

Days before opening, we were in full chaos mode.

Yeah, it was nuts.

I had never run a business.

I had never owned a business.

I never thought about owning a business.

I had never done anything in retail.

I'd never done anything in brick and mortar.

I wasn't even in the golf industry.

So I was figuring it all out.

Never built a golf bay.

The title of the show is in the thick of

it, and, man, you were in the thick of it.

So a couple of days before open, I

don't have a way to take a payment.

What did you do?

Luckily, a guy walked in and he worked

his business was he set up PoS systems,

and I literally did zero due diligence.

I'm like, set me up.

Just make it so I can take a credit card payment.

Doesn't matter how much it costs, just set

it up, and I'll figure out how to

put in the products and everything.

So did that, and literally used him up

until the end of last year when we

switched over to a different POS platform.

Unfortunately, it was a POS platform mainly

for kind of the restaurant industry.

So they had a lot of functionality that

we didn't need, and you couldn't hide.

You had the bar, but that was

probably the only in the OG.

In the original prototype, there was no bar.

So it was just BYOB.

At that point in time, I was

actually risk averse in some ways.

I was full risk in starting the business, but

I was trying to minimize potential pitfalls, and one

pitfall I saw was in the alcohol space.

If I screwed that up, I'm done.

So I didn't do tAbc, I didn't

do a bar in the first one.

It was just all BYOB, which is fine.

A lot of customers actually like that, so there's no.

It was just.

I needed the most basic payment system.

I just needed to take a credit card payment.

That was the gist of it.

And on day one, did you have employees, or were you it?

I hired my first employee.

When did I hire him?

A couple of months before we opened.

And he helped me with getting the store

built out and getting the store created.

We laid all the flooring in the store.

We did the bathrooms.

We did a lot of the construction ourselves in order to

save budget, I took on as much as I could to,

and part of it was, I get asked a lot.

Why didn't you have people do all that?

I didn't know what I needed to do.

I needed to figure it out.

I couldn't afford to pay people to

come in and while I was sitting. No. Move it over here.

No. Move it over there. No.

It needs to be like this.

It was R and D.

The first store was literally R and D.

So I couldn't pay people to do it because

I didn't know what needed to be done.

And there wasn't, like, a commercial

golf simulator installer in town.

There was probably six iterations of how we hung

the screens and did the bays, and, ironically, how

I wanted to do the original one.

I was scared to do it because I was

worried the fire marshal would shut us down.

So I wanted to do it all modra.

Like, my current one is a b cave.

And I didn't do it that way because I was like,

what if fire marshal comes in and he shuts us down?

I'm screwed.

So I paid a lot to have a contractor

come in and kind of build out the bases

when drywall and frame them all up, which drywall

and golf balls don't really get along well.

Lots of loud sounds.

So I wish in hindsight I would have had the

gall to do what I wanted to do from the

get go, but I just didn't have the.

I was like, well, it's going to cost more,

but I won't get shut down by the fire

marshal, so I won't have to worry about that.

There are all the things you

think about when you're starting.

I'd never had a retail business in a retail center.

I didn't know how strict that was or I didn't know

a lot of the pitfalls that could be out there.

But I went around and looked at anywhere that

had a golf bay and sometimes the sprinklers are

going into the bay, sometimes they had no sprinklers.

I'm like, how's that all work?

So we were just figuring it

out and trying to get something.

Obviously read a bunch of business books.

One of them was art at the start.

I don't know if you read that one.

It's a really good book.

And one of the things in there is don't spend

time, an arduous amount of time on a business plan.

Get it open, get to market, get it open.

That was some of the best advice, is just you

can think through every possible scenario and this and that,

but in the end you just have to get it

open and get going and see what happens.

You can't plan everything.

I have a friend who had

a business many, many years ago.

He was also an engineer and

his business didn't work out.

And there were a lot of reasons for that.

And I think that the single biggest reason was

he tried to reverse engineer any potential for failure

of any part of what he was doing.

And he would stay up till two morning

and whiteboard out all these different scenarios and

how he was going to get around it.

And it took him so long to actually get going.

And we weren't talking about some high risk kind

of a thing and we're talking about residential remodeling.

And I don't mean to downplay that.

Like, yeah, you got to treat somebody's house with

respect, but you don't need to come up with

1000 possible scenarios and figure out how to protect

against every single one of them.

You're going to miss something along the line.

There's no business and no ventures without risk.

And I think that's what keeps a lot of people out

of being an entrepreneur and starting a business is that appetite

and ability to exist with a certain amount of unknown and

risk, and you have to be able just to do that,

or you're not going to be successful.

This whole thing is about figuring out

what is acceptable risk and taking it.

That's the TABC is one thing, the fire

marshal, what things can shut me down.

Another one is like, we're dealing with this

now is kind of recurring credit card payments.

If you don't have authorization to charge a credit

card, what things could really get me in trouble?

So anything that's in that realm, I try very hard to

make sure I don't go, ready, fire, aim on those things.

I want to make sure that we have

everything in place, that we're not going to

kind of walk into a bad situation.

What was that first year like?

It was very hard.

I say this a lot of times.

It is by far the hardest thing you will ever do,

but it's also the most rewarding thing you'll ever do.

I'm five years in plus, and I still

haven't taken my wife on a honeymoon.

I owe her a lot.

I haven't had many days off.

I mean, when you're an entrepreneur,

it's not 95, it's 365.

It's every day, every day, every hour.

There's always something going on.

There's always something that you have to be doing,

especially if you're doing something new and that hasn't

been done before, especially if you're capital constrained and

can't just hire a squad of exceptional people that

have been there and done that.

There's no way I could afford that with payroll, I

have to hire what I can afford, and I can't

hire people that have started businesses and we're CIOs or

ctos or I can't bring on huge sales and market

or marketing and advertising firms, and I can't afford that.

So you have to figure it out, and you have

to do the best you can with what you have.

So anyway, the first year was a lot of figuring it out.

My first employee, we weren't

making enough off the beginning. I couldn't pay him.

I was paying him way more than I still think

I was, probably the most I've ever paid any employee.

I paid him way too much because I was

desperate, because again, my wife is several months pregnant.

We're getting close to opening.

I'm like, I need some help.

That's another thing, is I

didn't really have a partner.

It was me.

And a lot of the podcasts I've

listened to about entrepreneurs is my founder,

co founder, my co founder, my partner.

Yeah, I wish I had that.

So I hired him because I need somebody that can help

me because I just literally can't do all of it.

So he was with me for I forget how

long, but he needed, in the end, he needed

to make more money, and I couldn't pay it.

So he went off.

And I think he's selling pools now.

Very successful at it, but brought

in my second employee rate.

My second employee found me soon after

or right when my first one left.

And then he was the first kind

of golf instructor that I really had.

So that kind of started.

The things started.

It was steadily going better.

Word of mouth was good.

And even from the get go, the thing that kept

the hope alive was the feedback we got was awesome.

Even as terrible as that first prototype is compared

to what I have now, everybody loved it.

They came in like, this is awesome.

I always hoped something like this would be

like, I've always wanted something like this.

So still to this day, we get that feedback.

If we can get somebody to walk in

the door, they will become a customer.

It's just getting people to walk in

the door is the hard part.

You were giving people what you wanted yourself, which is,

I want to be able to come and get in

this bay and learn what I'm doing right, what I'm

doing wrong, and it not be in the context of,

yeah, we're here to sell you some clubs.

Get in, get out.

You gave people what you were looking.

I had visions of what it would become, but in the beginning,

I just wanted to get it out there, have people come in

and see what they wanted and see where it went.

My model kind of revised as I was getting

that feedback and seeing what direction we wanted to

go in and what direction it could go in

and what the demand called for.

Because I don't know if you've ever.

Do you listen to the.

How I built this podcast?

That was the inspiration for this podcast, actually.

So the five guys, one drew, do you listen to that one?

I think I have.

So their first store was, I think, like

45 minutes or so outside of DC in

the middle of nowhere and some shack.

And they basically said, if we can get people to

come here to buy our burgers, then we have something

and then we can make it work anywhere.

So similar to my model is Austin's not exactly

a bad weather city, and most people kind of

equate indoor golf to bad weather golf.

You only play when it's bad weather,

and that's not a successful business strategy.

It's funny, I laugh at times.

Well, I always have the customers that come in.

You know where this would work really well? Where?

Let me guess, Minnesota.

Yeah, where it's cold all the time.

I guess it would.

But there's a lot of markets that don't have that.

So if I can make it work here, where

most of this year is nice weather and playable

golf weather, then I can make it work anywhere.

And that was kind of an early on, kind of focus

of my model and vision was to turn this into something

that wasn't just the place to go when it's bad weather.

Now, obviously, our business spikes when it's bad weather, but

it needs to be the place that you go to

to get better at golf all the time, anytime.

Because the atmosphere, the equipment, everything you need

to get better at golf is there.

Originally, it was just the track, man, because I

wasn't a golf instructor and I didn't know really

how to achieve that goal, but I knew that

this was a big part of it.

And since then, now I have a team of golf instructors.

We are very good at making people better at

golf, and that's at its core what we are.

But you also have a good time while you're doing it.

Part of you're not going to get better at golf or

anything if you don't enjoy going there and enjoy doing it.

Like if you go to a gym and it's not a gym that

you like going to enjoy going to, you're not going to go.

So the atmosphere is the thing that we've nailed

the most is that the atmosphere, that's what we

hear all the time, the atmosphere, and here's awesome.

It's kind of a sports bar, it's kind of a country club.

It's kind of just golf nerd utopia.

It can be all those things.

It doesn't have to be just one of them.

And that's kind of what we achieved.

And now we're bringing in, there's a couple

of different facets to getting better at golf.

You have to obviously do the swing and

understand what you're doing wrong, what you need

to be doing to do it right.

You have to burn it in.

You have to practice a rule of 10,000.

It's just reps and reps and reps and reps and

reps to actually burn in any change in a golf

swing or anything else you need a place to practice.

But a lot of times people practice on the range.

Just no technology, no idea what's going on,

no idea if the ball is going this

way or that way, for whatever reason.

And another thing is, feel isn't real.

What you think you're doing versus what

you're actually doing is oftentimes very different.

And when people see their golf swing

for the first time, it's eye opening.

It's like, oh, my God, I thought I

was doing this, and I'm really doing this. Yeah.

So practicing inside of a ROK facility is

far superior because you can see it.

You have the numbers to kind of confirm what

happened, and you can actually practice the right way.

And you get good reps.

Not all reps are good reps.

So at ROK, they're all good

reps, and you get better faster.

And now we're rolling equipment into it as well to.

I think in a lot of ways,

the golf equipment business is highly unethical.

People try to buy a good golf swing, and the big

oems are more than happy to sell it to them.

But in the end, that's not what makes you better.

You're not going to get better by

just buying your way into it.

You have to do the work.

That's one of the reasons I let golf.

There's no shortcut.

You have to do the work to get better.

Photography is a hobby of mine.

It has been for a long time.

And I equate what you just said to,

oh, that looks like a really nice camera.

It must take good pictures. There's skill.

There's things that you have to learn that go into it.

It's not just about having an

expensive camera and a nice lens.

Talking about the instruction for a minute, you kind of

said yourself you were an avid golfer, you loved it,

but you knew that you needed to work on it.

Day one, first person walks in, are they asking

you right out of the gate, like, hey, Brian,

can you help me with my swing? Yes.

I have turned into a golf instructor to an extent.

So I'm more of a golf coach now.

I've learned, initially it wasn't.

I mean, initially, I fake it

till you make it type thing.

I wasn't a golf instructor, but

I understood the golf swing.

I understood enough about it where

I could help certain people.

And both of my first

two employees were golf instructors.

They had backgrounds in golf and teaching, and so

I knew that was a weak part from my

background, so I paid attention every time they were

giving a lesson or working with somebody.

And I had them work with me, so I knew the

basics, if you will, so I can help a lot of

people, but there are certain cases that are beyond me.

I would be one of those cases, honestly,

the hardest ones are the good golfers.

There's guys that come in that are really good and it's

like, I don't see anything wrong with your golf swing.

They want to get 1% better and you're like,

man, I'm here to help the guy that's trying

to get 30% better because he's way down here.

I can do the macro things like

I see are you turning right?

The very core basics of the gospel.

I can get somebody who's not very good or has a

very bad swing and kind of at least make them feel

what a good swing looks like and feels like.

But the real fine tuning with really good players,

there's a lot of components to the golf swing,

and it takes the really good instructors to see

this little thing that will make a huge difference.

And the really good instructors are.

One thing I found too, is that they say the least.

If you go to an instructor and they talk

a lot and tell you more than two or

three things, then they're not a good instructor, because

then you're thinking about all these things.

And the good instructors, they may see a through f

is wrong in your swing, but they focus on a

and know that's going to fix b through f.

And then they went without even mentioning it.

And then you work on the next thing

once you got a down because it fixed

five other things because you just did that.

And that's what really good golf instructors do.

And they have the confidence and the experience to not

mention all the other things when a lot of times

younger golf instructors will just this and that and this

and this and this, and it's way too much and

it confuses and you don't get better with that.

As a kid, my dad would take us to the driving range.

Dad was playing golf since he was five, six years old,

loves it and he always wanted us to play too.

And I didn't have the interest, but I also

got frustrated really easy because we would go out

and not to take anything away from my dad

at all, but he would give me the.

Here's twelve different things you need

to do on this swing.

I can't do all of those at one time.

I need to focus on one, maybe two and get

that down and then start working on the rest.

What you said about forget a through f, let's

just get a that totally makes sense to me.

It's hard, but the hard part is I can see a

through f, but I don't know which one a is.

I don't know where to start. I don't know.

Because in the gospel and many other things, but the

gospel specifically, one thing that seems like it's not a

big deal can affect all the other things, whether it's

your takeaway or your stance or your setup, or how

you're turning your shoulders, your hips, whatever it is.

One thing leads to a bunch of other problems, and

you have to understand which one to start with.

And that's where the guys that have just

years of experience, they understand that and they

know that the ones that don't, they're giving

you things that aren't going to really.

They're not the root cause of the problem.

A lot of it's got to be muscle memory.

And what you were saying earlier about it doesn't do you

any good to go do more reps with a bad swing.

Changing your muscle memory is hard.

That's really hard.

It's very hard, and it just takes time.

And that's the other reason I wanted to

create the business, is it's about practicing better.

I see guys at the club I belong to that

they're just out there just hitting balls every day, hours.

You're not getting any better,

you're getting worse, actually.

It just takes practicing right.

And, yeah, the right reps are

way better than the wrong reps.

I mean, a lot of guys, they're

hurting themselves by the way they're practicing.

At what point did you decide

to open your second location?

From the beginning, when I did the original kind

of market analysis, and there are a lot of

places I found that were very localized, that were

somebody's golf shop, Bob's golf performance center.

And I knew from the get go

I had very big aspirations for this.

I want to do this to create a very profitable business.

And I knew one store by itself is not going to do that.

So from the get go, and to this

day, we're structuring this to scale it.

So I knew from the get immediately

I wanted multiple locations and multiple markets.

Eventually.

I want ROK Golf everywhere.

We're trying to get it to where it's a business in a

box, which is, again, part of the need for the software.

Like a franchise model?

Yes, whether conceptually, but yeah, we want to go

to a market, say Atlanta, and find a bunch

of investors who are golfers, avid golfers, who want

to invest in a golf business.

Get together the capital, open six at a time,

and that's really all they need to do.

We'll do the rest.

You will have the software, we'll know how to

find the locations, how to build out the locations.

We'll have a crew that comes in and does

all the work or finds the local subs to

do all the work, manage the construction, install the

bays, has the relationships with the vendors.

We need to get all the equipment in.

You don't have to solve all

the problems that I've already solved.

So basically make it a turnkey business in a box and

then just go in and start firing them up all over.

But there's a lot of things that need to

be in place before you can scale like that.

And that's what we're working on now.

I got to believe that going from one

to two locations, that was a big jump.

And yeah, you had a lot of

lessons learned from the first one.

And you probably had fewer lessons

to learn from the next one.

But I'm sure that there were still some.

But even just the idea of having to manage

two locations and this is a business to consumer

kind of a business, I imagine you're open typical

retail hours, you got two places.

How has that aspect of it been?

Just the actual management of two separate locations?

Yeah, it's definitely a challenge.

The first one was just pure prototype.

Will this work?

Will people pay to come in and rent one of these bays?

That was the problem.

The first location was viability test.

More than this is going to make a lot of money.

We pretty quickly got that answer.

We started really cooking until Covid hit.

We realized pretty quickly that we had something

and then we started wanting to expand it.

So the first one was about just Willis work.

The second store, B cave, was

about getting the store right.

So B cave, the second location is

what I always wanted but couldn't afford.

So it's the size I wanted, it's where I wanted it.

It has the things in it that we want, the

bar, the bays that I originally wanted to build.

So it's the first prototype of the future. If you. Yeah.

So I learned a lot in this one.

And moving the original one to Westlake will be the

second iteration of kind of that style of store.

So the bays have improvements.

Everything will have improvements. Each time.

I should personally be doing less.

So the first one, when we moved to Bkave, I did a lot.

I designed and built all the bays myself.

Figuring out how to attach steel column to the

floor and the spacing and what materials go everywhere.

And how do you hang the screen, and

how do you keep the screen down?

And I already knew suppliers, so it was a

lot of work just to figure all that out.

And eventually we'll be in a position where all

those are just prefabbed parts sitting in a warehouse.

And when we want to fire up

location, we just send a truck.

Here's all the columns, here's all the screens.

Here's all the beams.

Here's all the jewelry.

Here's the manual of how you put it together.

Here's how you change the screen.

So we're much closer to that now.

And each time it should get progressively better.

But I think one of the hardest things in

this journey for me so far is delegation.

I don't want to say I'm a perfectionist,

but I like things done the right way.

And it's been very challenging to trust other people,

to employees to do things and do them the

way that they need to be done.

That's been a very challenging thing.

But you have good hires and bad hires, and

I have a really good team right now who

I barely ever go to the original store.

So they have been pretty much independent

for a year now, and I have

decent visibility into how that's all going.

There have been some problems that were.

I should have been going there

more often, but it's been challenging.

But again, you have to learn how to delegate.

You have to trust people to get it done.

I was listening to something, and there was a book called,

I think it's called the lazy CEO, and he said, if

you can delegate a task and it gets done, 70% of

what you would do it, then delegate it.

That's sad, but probably true.

That's a hard thing, because this is like,

as an entrepreneur, this is your baby.

You want it taken care of, and

you want it in good hands.

What you just said, I've got chills

because I haven't read the book.

But in the very early days of my business, I wouldn't

let other people do things that I had hired them to

do, because nobody can do it as good as I can.

And my original people had to have been so frustrated.

In fact, they're still with us now, and I'm sure that

if we walked over to the office and said, hey, what

was it like working with Scott that first year?

They would have said, oh, my gosh, it was infuriating.

And I literally, I swear I've never read the book.

I literally thought to myself one day, if somebody else

can do this, 70% as well as I can.

The amount of leverage that that gives me

to go on and do that next thing,

that additional thing, it's totally worth it.

And when I finally did give up some of

that control, not only could they do it 70%,

but most of them could do it way better.

And they may have gone about it differently, but it got

done, and it got done better in many, many cases.

And what that freed me to go do, I was

able to exponentially do more because I had people that

were empowered to do what they were hired to do.

You're not going to grow without that.

You can only do so much as one person.

That's what I talk to a lot of my

employees about, is like, the concept of leverage.

If it requires your blood and sweat to make

it happen, you are always going to be limited.

Until you have other people doing

things, you're never going to grow.

And in the goth instruction world, that's a big

thing that a lot of the golf instructors don't

fully realize is if you're the one teaching the

lessons and you're the only one teaching the lessons,

all right, so you can do six a day.

How do you do more than that?

You have to figure out how to expand your capacity.

And I look forward to the day where everything is

running smoothly, and I can go into a hole for

six months with hopefully two or three other ninja programmers

and build the software platform where I don't have to

worry about anything about the business.

And it's not just the business

can't just survive without you.

It has to thrive without you.

I can't just go away and hope

that the business just doesn't burn down.

You need to get the point where the people you

have are growing the business and looking at it from

all the angles, and we're not there yet.

But I look forward to that day.

One of the things I always like to

ask about is, what have been some surprises.

And you kind of touched on Covid a second ago.

So take us through what, 2020, and

I guess 2021 was like for you.

It was extremely hard, and I

thought we were going to die.

I mean, basically, business just stopped.

Everyone's like, oh, Covid was great

for golf, not indoor golf.

The scary thing was, as a small business center at that time,

and I was a year into it, a year and a half

into it, nobody knew what we were supposed to do or not

supposed to do, or what the rules were, what the laws were,

what the penalties were, what it was just chaos.

And what we were supposed to do with employees

and what we were supposed to do with if

they got sick and social distancing and masks.

And it was terrifying, to be honest.

And I thought the business was going to fail.

So I had some friends that were trying to do some things

on the side and sell masks and hand sanitizer, and I tried

to do a little bit of that just to try to make

some money, because our business basically went to zero.

We were doing 10% of the revenue that we were doing.

That wasn't enough to pay the bills.

And because, again, the PPP was, in theory, it was a

good idea, but how they implemented it was so terrible that

I was going to say, I thought that there were some

requirements about how long you had to have been in business

before, and you had to have payroll records. Exactly.

And I think about my first couple of

years in business and the way that I

paid myself, and it's very different.

As an owner, you may be paying yourself as distributions

instead of w two income, so you didn't have much

to go to them and say, please fund me.

I was paying myself $500 a week for the first year.

So, yeah, my payroll was, like zero.

So when the PPP came along, and it's like,

based on your payroll, I'm a new business.

I don't have payroll.

Like, my payroll now is five times

what it was when I first started.

And I think I got, like, $25,000 or something from PPP.

And it's not nothing, but it

doesn't go that far either.

And then meanwhile, I know guys that have

their wealth managers or whatever working out of

their house with zero costs, no office, no

staff, nothing, and they're getting like, $100,000.

Are you kidding me? That don't even need.

Oh, yeah, we're going on a trip because I just got

this PPP money, and I'm like, I'm about to go bankrupt.

And here's all these other companies that have the legal

teams and accounting teams to know how to manipulate that

system, and they were first in line to get their

big, huge check when they didn't need it.

And the companies like us that needed it to

actually survive where we didn't have the resources or

know how to actually get it, or we didn't

fit the right checkboxes on the requirements.

So we got peanuts when you fell through the cracks.

Yeah, it was extremely frustrating.

And then our landlord worked with us.

They deferred our rent for a couple of months.

They didn't give it to us, but we had to pay it back.

And the next year, that hurt 21.

So I think they deferred four months rent,

three or four months rent, something like that.

So I had employees get Covid, and

then, so they were out for.

At that time, it was like 14 days or 21 days.

I only had a handful of employees at that time.

So you have to pay them.

You can't fire them.

So I paid all my employees.

I didn't fire anybody or didn't let anybody go.

And I paid all my employees all through Covid.

So I didn't pay myself, but I paid them.

But I dug into a very big hole

that we're still in because of that.

So it's things, because I look back at numbers now.

I'm trying to do projections of there's a certain seasonality

in our business, and I'm trying to figure out what

are our slow months, what are our quick months.

But then you overlay Covid one,

and really there was another Covid.

I kind of say there's two Covid.

There was the original one in 20, and then

there was the Delta variant or whatever it was.

That was another big hit, and people got scared again.

And I've tried to figure out in my numbers for

those first couple of years, how much was it with

seasonality versus how much of it was Covid versus.

So I don't really know.

I still don't really know.

But another frustrating thing was I saw

my little business struggling to survive and

start off in that environment.

And then I walk into Home Depot or

Lowe's, and they're just running full tilt.

I'm like, so explain to me how this is

okay, but that isn't like, how is somebody buying

a light necessary and I'm not necessary?

So that was a very frustrating time.

You made it through, and here we are today.

Were there some just, like, faithful, loyal

customers that just kept coming in constantly,

or was it really hit or miss? Really?

My observation throughout Covid was

that it was very polarized.

There were one of two mindsets.

There was the, I'm going to be in a

bubble and cover up and not go anywhere.

And I think this is going to

be the downfall of human civilization.

Or there's a guy, or there's the other side

that was like, this is just the flu.

And those people were in one of those two camps

and the ones that were in the prior camp and

thought that it was the end of civilization.

They didn't come in. They stopped. They canceled.

They stopped from the other ones.

They came in and didn't care.

So it was really just dependent.

It wasn't a loyalty thing as much as in my experience.

It was a.

What is your opinion of COVID There were a

number of surprises that you talked about early on.

Like the, oh, it's three days before open.

We need to figure out how

to take a credit card payment. Covid happens.

You're trying to figure out, okay, wait, what

do we do when somebody gets sick?

How long do we have to wear masks?

Do we have to do this?

What are our cleaning procedures?

What were some other surprises?

I spoke to it earlier.

The biggest surprise is how difficult finding

a lease, finding a place would be.

That was a big surprise.

Hiring people, finding people is a very challenge.

One of the reasons I saw an opportunity in

this space was most golf jobs are really bad.

It's a vanity industry.

People want to work in the golf industry.

It's a dream job to do what you love.

And there's a lot of people that love golf

and they want to be in the industry.

But assistant pros at country clubs,

they're really not great jobs.

You're getting up at five in

the morning, you're working crazy hours.

You're making very little money.

So one of the things I saw was that we could make

a better golf job and if we succeeded in that, we'd get

the cream of the crop as far as golf industry talent.

But it was surprising for me in the beginning.

Just finding good people is hard.

And like you said, finding people you can trust and

finding people that can execute to the level that you

as the founder are okay with and accept, it's hard.

It's really hard to find people that

care as much as you do.

That right there, I've said this before and it'll come

up again and again, but hiring my first employee was

one of the absolute hardest things I've ever done.

And he's still with me.

In fact, just crossed seven years

together a couple of weeks ago.

But once I got over the okay, I've just now got

to the point where I feel comfortable feeding my own family.

Now I've got to feed somebody else's family.

And, oh, by the way, we last.

The next hurdle I had to get over was are

they going to care as much as I do?

Are they going to care about the success

of our customer as much as I do?

And thankfully, he and almost everybody we've

ever brought into the organization have.

But that's a real thing.

You have to bring in people that

care as much as you do.

And I've had some good hires.

I've had some bad hires, and I've refined my pitch

a bit to be like, listen, we're a startup.

It's not structured.

If you need a very detailed list of,

this is what you need to do.

It's not that there's going to be chaos.

There's going to be things that you're

just going to need to figure out.

And there's certain people that

can exist in that environment.

There's certain people that can't.

You need to find somebody like that and

say, hey, you get to write the manual. That's what.

Right now our payroll is really high because I see it

right now, I'm employing the leaders of what will be.

So I could run the business a lot leaner

than I'm running it right now, but I'm trying

to build the leadership team for what will become.

You're investing ahead of the cash flow.

I'm investing in, hopefully, the future

leadership of business and the corporation.

So that's kind of how I see it right now.

I could run it way leaner, and I could make a lot

more money right now if I wanted to get rid of four

people, and I could take their salaries and keep it all for

myself and my business partner and start paying him back.

But that's always been a big picture vision for me.

And the progression is master your area,

hire somebody to teach what you mastered,

move up, and master the next area.

You're always building the manual for people

to follow and building the process.

So that's kind of what I'm trying

to instill in my team right now.

And that's the other thing.

Talking a little bit earlier and having a team when

you're working for a big company and having employees when

it's your company is a completely different thing.

When it's you're paying them and

it's coming out of your paycheck,

really, in essence, that's what's happening.

Like, every dollar I pay to another

employee, I could be taking for myself.

Back to the other thing that we talked about.

I'm still paying myself minimally, and it's very hard.

And there's credit card bills, and I have

two kids in school, and it's expensive, and

eggs are $20 a dozen now.

So we jump from COVID to Covid, two

to ridiculous inflation, and it's been a fun

couple of years to start a business.

But when you have an employee and you're an

entrepreneur, you can't help but think, okay, I'm paying

this employee this much money for something that they

need to be doing for me.

If I didn't have this employee, I could probably do it

and take that for myself and be more comfortable at home

or be more comfortable or actually go on a vacation.

But I'm always seeing this as

I'm investing in the future.

So you don't have HR issues,

really, when you're running a team?

When I was managing my teams, when I

was an IT consultant, I didn't know what

they were making and I didn't care.

And if I had to fire somebody or if I had to

get somebody off the team or it didn't matter to me, really.

But on the other side, it's a whole different experience

when it's your company and your PNL, if you will,

and you're the one that's got all the risk. Yeah.

And that's something that a lot of times

the employees have to be reminded of them.

Like, look, if this fails, you just

have to go get another job.

If this fails, I'm bankrupt.

And now, initially, too, it was just my money and mine

and my father's money, to an extent, my parents money.

But now, bringing on a business

partner, he's made significant investment.

Now it's a whole different game

that it's somebody else's money.

And the sense of responsibility of making sure

that this does not fail and this works

is a whole different level when you start

bringing on other people's money and investment.

And that's what I think of other hear about these guys, oh,

we're in our c round or D round or e round.

I'm like, at some point, don't you have

to start making money at some point?

How do you just keep taking money in,

losing money, being in the red and not.

I just don't understand that.

I could only eat what I killed from very early on.

So that's still my mentality in a lot of ways.

And I don't want to need more capital.

I want to make the money.

But then to grow and to grow

fast, sometimes you have to do that.

But there should be the companies that keep taking

on more and more and more and more capital.

I'm just like, how do you do that?

I just don't understand that mentality.

You had a business before this, and it didn't work out.

It wasn't a failure.

Like, some people experience failure.

Market conditions effectively shut you down.

But that had to have been a

big gut punch when you started ROK.

You're married.

What gave you the courage to do it again?

And what was that?

Initial conversation, like with your wife, when you said, I want

to do this, I mean, she's been very supportive the whole

time, so I don't know if she fully knew what she

was signing up for, and I don't know if we went

back to that day if she would still make the same

decision to be supportive of it.

She's been very supportive, and I think that she's

been on board, she's worked a full time job

throughout, having two kids to support us, basically.

I mean, she's been the breadwinner

for the last five years.

Maybe I'm getting close to making more

than her again, but we'll see.

But, yeah, so she's kept the

ship afloat, honestly, and I've worked.

I mean, as any entrepreneur knows, there are

no weekends, there is no time off.

I can't tell you how many times I got home at three

in the morning and left at seven in the morning as I

was doing things, trying to build out the store and get things

going, and was up all night writing code or working on business

plans or whatever, and it's still this day.

My routine is crazy, but I

always voice it in, like, listen.

To attain a certain amount of wealth or a

lifestyle that I want and for our family and

for us, it's very hard to achieve that.

And I didn't see a pathway for me achieving that,

working for somebody else in what I was doing.

Yeah, I could be a partner at an IT consulting

firm at this point if I stayed on and be

making a lot more money than I'm making right now,

and we'd be a lot more comfortable.

But in the end, I don't have any equity in it.

It's not my business.

I'm limited to how much I can grow.

So I'm like, this is what to get

us to where we want to go.

We have to start a business and have our own

business and have our own equity in a business.

So that was the sale.

And again, back to my father and seeing the flexibility that

he had because he had his own business, didn't have to

ask for time off, didn't have rules for that.

That's always what I wanted.

Like when my kids, they're still young, we're starting to get

into sports and things like that, but by the time they're

fully in sports and things, my vision is to have the

business going to a point where I can take a couple

of weeks off here or there whenever I want, and go

to their games and go to practices and be the coach

and do all those things and that's really hard to do

if you're working a nine to five job for somebody else.

So that was kind of the genesis of my

pitch of why I wanted to start this business.

And also I was midlife crisis or whatever, I didn't

see a path forward for me in what I was

doing, where I was going to be happy.

I could see myself as an unhappy 50 year old working

for some company that hated getting up because I didn't want

to go to work and hated going to sleep because I

knew I was going to step and go to work.

It's been crazy hard, but I can tell you that I

haven't got up dreading going to work in five years.

So I love doing it.

I passionate and motivated and it keeps me going as hard

and as difficult and as challenging as it's been, it's an

incredible feeling to the one thing I wish my wife would

come into the store more and just hang out.

Because if she were there and when the

customers walk in and tell you how awesome

it is, this place is incredible.

We love it.

If she heard that more, I think she would be in a

better place and be more bullish on the future of it.

Unfortunately, she has to be the sounding board of

the frustration and the hard things and the stress

and the anxiety and all the things that go

with trying to start, build and grow a business.

I wish she was there for the good parts

more and I'm trying to get her do that.

But she's working full time, job, kids and all that stuff,

so she doesn't really have time to do that either.

But that's definitely been a challenge.

But there was a lot of doubt, especially during

the COVID times, there was a lot of fear. Are we done?

Are we going to be bankrupt? Are we going to be?

Because another thing people don't realize, when you sign

a lease, a commercial lease for five or ten

years, you sign a personal guarantee on that lease.

So I'm signed up for 10,000 a month for five years.

So if that business fails, it's

absolute failure, it's bankruptcy failure.

And then you go into bigger, nicer locations.

And that's a big barrier to entry for the

space we're in now is if you're not worth

multiple millions of dollars, high net worth, they're not

going to have anybody sign a lease.

If you're worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars, if

that's your net worth, that's all you have, you're not

getting a lease in a tier one retail center because

you're signing up for 2.5 million over ten years.

So there's no way that they're

going to do that to anybody.

So having a partner that has that kind of backing and

is willing to put that on the line to help grow

your business, that's a huge vote of confidence, number one, and

you have to have that to really succeed.

Recently, we put something out on LinkedIn and tried

to crowdsource some things, and so the request was,

what are some questions that we should incorporate into

our interviews that we don't typically ask?

And you are the perfect person to

ask this question to very first time.

Should you make a business out of a passion or a hobby?

And I'm going to add another little spin on it.

Do you still love golf like

you did five, six years ago? Yes.

I think that starting a business that you have

a level of passion about is critical to your

mental state in getting through the lows.

So, yeah, I think it's awesome that I get

to have a golf business and something I love.

Would I also like to have a

food business, probably, or a football business?

But golf is my business.

Everything I do for golf is business.

I go on a golf trip, it's business.

I go to Orlando, go to the PGA show, it's business.

Now, I haven't had, in the throes of entrepreneurship,

I haven't had time to take full advantage of

that, or even partial advantage of that.

But, yes, I don't know the other side of it.

I don't know.

Starting a business with something that isn't my passion, something

that I'm just good at, I imagine you have to

start a business with something you're good at.

At least that's actually ironic.

I started a business with something I wasn't good at,

but I was passionate about it and I liked it.

Do I still love golf? Yes.

I wish I got to play more of it.

That's the other thing that the misconception

is, oh, you own a golf business.

People say golf all the time.

Like, no, I have a five year old business.

I have a five year old kid, and

I have a two year old kid.

I don't have time to play golf.

I play a shockingly low amount of golf.

In fact, I've told my business partner, I'm like,

once we get kind of even remotely smooth sailing,

I'm going to take like a month where I'm

just going to play a lot of golf.

And there's an opportunity that every time I go

to, I'm a member of a country club.

It's extraordinarily expensive now because I

play, like, one round a month.

It's a very expensive round of golf.

It's a very expensive round of golf every month.

But every time I go play golf, I

probably pick up one or two customers.

I just literally hung out at the club all day.

I bring in a ton of customers, but

all the other stuff wouldn't get done. I love golf.

I love it more than I ever have.

I'm better at it than I've ever been.

Just for the golfers out there. I went from.

I was about a ten index when I started the business, and

I got it down to a two in about a year.

So that's a pretty big.

And that's without really knowing what I was doing.

That was just me practicing in

a much better atmosphere and environment.

Then I had the kids, and now it's gone back up

to, like, a four because I'm not playing that much.

But I'm a much different golfer now

than I was before I started it.

And that's one of the things that drives me.

I know that it works, and I think having

a business in a space that you're passionate about,

it just helps keep you going through the downtimes.

If I started an it consulting business or the

custom development business and there was a downtime and

I wasn't really passionate about what I was doing,

it would be very difficult, I think.

I'm glad it's in an area I'm passionate about.

What's next?

Short term or long term?

What's next?

Right now, we're projected to open

our Westlake location in March.

So it is now full chaos of getting all

that done and getting that store open, getting moved

out of the original store, and getting Westlake open.

So that's the short term.

The long term is get the team solidified,

get the staffing right, get everything operating smoothly,

and start proving the numbers, because the next

round will be opening a few more locations

in Austin, most likely all at one time.

So open probably another four locations.

That's always been the vision.

So the next wave will be open those locations

and hopefully in parallel, be doing the software.

So from a business perspective, that's what next.

Get it to the point where we're back above water

and I can maybe take my wife on a honeymoon.

That'd be a goal as well. Cheers to that.

We could both use it.

Well, Brian, thank you for coming

on and sharing your story.

Can't wait to hear about the 6th and 10th and

50th and hundredth location following your journey from here.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

That was Brian Borichevsky, founder

and CEO of ROK Golf.

To learn more, visit rokgolf.com.

That's R-O-K golf dot com.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of It,

email us at [e-mail].