How did Direct Golf start?
I started with one shop in 1993 at Crosland Heath Golf Club in Huddersfield but I struggled to pay the bills. I was doing a lot of custom fitting and coaching, and I was one of the first pros to invest in a golf simulator – the graphics were like the old Space Invaders game.
Summers were great but winters were really bad, so I opened my first store in Huddersfield – 1,000 square feet – with £2,000 borrowed from my father.
I already had a customer base in the Huddersfield area, and I had an indoor net so I could coach and sell equipment. I worked 24/7. After two years I opened my second store in Bury, and a year after that in Doncaster, which is where I am from – that was 5,000 square feet.
Then I got into the mail-order business, and I was at the right place at the right time - golf was booming. In 2000 I produced my first catalogue, and I would have one person in the shop and five or six people on the phones taking mail orders. We now produce over three million catalogues a year.
How many retail outlets does the group own now?
We are up to 17 stores in the UK now. We have just opened four new ones, which are ex-Nevada Bob stores, and we have further plans for expansion in the North. The goal is to have 20 stores open by the end of 2011. I have still got my arms around the business and I don’t want it to be out of my control. I don’t want too many stores because there are a lot of overheads with every store, and more people are buying online. We are very careful where we open stores.
Direct Golf has been a pioneer of internet retailing in golf.
We were certainly one of the first golf retailers to launch a website. All of sudden we were receiving 60 orders overnight from the website - promising customers 48 hours’ delivery – we just had to pack parcels through the night. This began to happen on a daily basis so my social life went out of the window. Eventually I took on a warehouse.
What proportion of your sales is online?
60% of sales come from the stores and 40% is online, and gross turnover for Direct Golf was £26 million in 2010. I estimate the new stores will add £3 million to turnover this year, so I hope we can top £30 million. Unfortunately I have to give the Government 20% of that! Even with 20 stores, I believe the internet sales will out-strip the stores over the next two to three years.
What’s the future for the green grass pro?
Not all club pros are struggling. A lot are selling their goods on Ebay now and some of them are doing reasonable business online. Club professionals need to grasp technology. I have been told that, apparently, Ebay is the UK’s largest golf retailer.
Golf clubs are probably not going to pay retainers for much longer, and pros need to offer more to their customers. I still go into a lot of pro shops and they don’t have a loft and lie machine. The loft and lie machine is my biggest selling tool – it’s a great way to engage with customers: ‘Have you had your lofts checked recently?’ You charge £3 per club on the machine, and then you can get talking about their equipment and custom fitting. Every pro should have a loft and lie machine – and not in the back room, but in the middle of the store.
