Golf empire employs 1K in Orlando
NBC Universal’s golf empire — founded by Arnold Palmer — has conquered thousands of golf courses, taken over a sprawling corporate park in Orlando and now employs more than 1,000 people in Orlando.
Palmer, who passed away on Sunday, founded The Golf Channel in Orlando in 1995 with Alabama businessman Joe Gibbs. Media pundits lampooned the idea as boring. Gibbs and Palmer sold to NBC in 1999, but Palmer’s name is still on a dedicated parking space at Golf Channel. A makeshift memorial with a photo of Palmer and flowers has appeared there.
The recent growth at the company is powered by GolfNow, a website and mobile app for tee-time reservations and score keeping that now has 9,000 golf course clients. Just last year, GolfNow decided to stop outsourcing support for golfers. It’s now the in-house golfer care team.
In their offices, you can hear employees answering calls from
golf courses around the U.S.
“We had a goal of golfers helping golfers,” says Charlotte Daughan, who leads the team with fellow golfer Kyle Earley. “It’s not a requirement that our employees golf, but it helps, and 90 percent of them play or have worked in golf industry.”
Earley recalls when a customer called in and told employees that the app said it was raining and blowing 40 mph on a local course. The caller was upset and wanted to know what he should do.
The answer, from an experienced golfer, was: “Unless you’re preparing to play the [British] Open championship, it’s probably not the best time to play.”
According to Earley, the golfer loved the response and started laughing. GolfNow credited the tee-time reservation back to the golfer’s account, he said.
GolfNow matches the employment base of the Golf Channel, just across the street at 7580 Golf Channel Drive; each segment of the business has about 500 employees and is growing.
“Whatever we do, it’s about golf,” said Will McIntosh, senior VP of business development and strategy at GolfNow. “We may be the only example, or at least the most successful, of a traditional media company that is now blended with an e-commerce platform.”
GolfNow not only allows golfers to search golf courses around them for open tee times, price and weather conditions, but also provides golf-course-management software to course owners.
GolfNow takes a cut of the reservation fee, but the cut varies widely depending on whether the client does a barter exchange — whether GolfNow takes the revenue from one foursome fee per day or pays a commission per round.
Internet companies have been trying to create greater access to golf since the 1990s, said Scott Kauffman, an Orlando-based golf consultant and writer.
He said GolfNow has been successful because of its roots in the Golf Channel, and has no real competition, except for some independent courses that haven’t embraced technology from a third party to book their customers.
“Historically, the resistance in adopting tee time software and apps has been that it would cheapen the product. It opens the country club doors to a lot of people who would never have been there before, and created greater access to some of the sport’s greatest properties,” Kauffman said.
GolfNow has been criticized in online golf forums and blogs for taking revenue away from pro shops, especially for independent operators, as well as for driving down greens fees across the industry by creating competition. But the company says it also drives sales and traffic to the courses.
“In the past, the pro shop was often busy handling tee times, but GolfNow frees them up to focus on sales,” McIntosh said. “We’re a tech company. We do product development and customer service.”
So far this year, GolfNow says people have booked 12 million rounds of golf across its entire portfolio, including 505,000 rounds of golf at 157 courses in the Orlando market, which ranks No. 3 behind Phoenix and Chicago.
Local courses using GolfNow include Tranquilo Golf Club at Four Seasons Resort Orlando. Kimberly Chase, director of golf sales and membership services there, recently told the Sentinel that revenues were up more than 100 percent compared to 2015.
GolfNow has been hiring furiously in Orlando in recent years. It expects to fill another 40 openings during the next 12 months. The company has moved technology and customer support operations here from California and New York.
“We have entry-level jobs and highly skilled positions,” McIntosh said. “We have a lot of UCF and Full Sail graduates. There’s a tremendous amount of local technology talent.”
In 2013, NBC Sports invested $1.9 million to expand Golf Channel in Orlando, consolidating digital-media operations for GolfChannel and GolfNow sites and creating at least 75 jobs. The company was approved for $450,000 from the state’s Qualified Target Industry Tax Refund program and $133,000 from the Quick Action Closing Fund.