Hello, I am Mike Hendrix from smbGOLF and today my guest is Martin Ort from Desert Canyon Golf Club. Martin, welcome to the show. And for everybody, this is the Tech Caddie podcast. Martin, thank you for joining us. Thank you. You know, we were talking off camera about

how much technology you guys use. And this podcast is all about golf technology operations, that type of thing. Not so much for the golfer, but really more about how operators use technology to help their businesses and strengthen their businesses, grow their businesses. And I've really have never come across a golf course that uses as much tech as you guys do. So I thought for our first episode of 2025, you would be an amazing guest to have.

But before we get into the technology, you guys do have a cool family story. Just explain to everybody, know, the ownership, know, the ownership at Desert Canyon, how it came to be that type of thing. Yeah. My family's been owning and operating the golf course since the late nineties. My dad at the time was the one who took over. I've been here now. This will be my 15th year. started here in 2010.

it was right after I got done with, getting my degree in video game design that my dad came to me and needed someone to revamp the website a little bit. so I did that and ended up seeing some holes in other areas and, know, 15 years later, here I am. Yeah. and then, two of my sisters work here as well. All of our, all of my siblings, there's five of us total. We've all worked here at some point. one of my sisters were originally from Germany.

Our oldest sister is still back in Germany. our oldest brother is currently in California overseeing some, some restaurants, not ours. he works for a different company now, but, yeah. And then myself and, and two of my sisters run here the day to day here. I think that's great. I, know, that I think there's, there's, different families throughout North America that.

that are really synonymous with golf and golf operations. And I think it's really cool when families can work together and grow something to be successful. that's great. Talking about the gaming design piece, are you doing any of that work on the side? Is there a side hustle that kind of scratches that itch for you at all? No, no, but I think that's probably why we have so much technology here.

Cause I'm, I'm a big fan of the technology. And anything that can help our, our staff or, make it little easier for our customers. I'm always kind of looking to see what's out there. But no, besides maybe the website, there's really nothing being done on the side for, for gaming. it. Okay. And of course the website's a four up website. And you're using a four up then obviously for your T sheet as well.

let's talk a little bit about four up four up actually, you know, had our, had a, an interesting 2024. How was it for you all? Did that impact operations? Were there days that were difficult for you guys? no, for us, it was fine. I mean, here and there we might have a little outage. but it was never for an extended period of time. It was maybe a couple hours if that, and it was very, very rare that we had outages.

so we really weren't impacted negatively. from having four up and I mean that they, their tee sheet is, is really good. there's a couple of things that we've just gotten used to kind of building some workarounds. but the, nice thing with them too is that they're very open for feedback. So I've, I've submitted more than my fair share of, of, submissions for feature requests. Yeah. it's, it's interesting. You also use Sagacity.

And of course Sagacity and four up work really well together. I'm curious to know, um, when it comes to Sagacity, do you prefer the four up booking engine or you, or do you prefer the Sagacity booking engine? So we only use the four up. Uh, we use Sagacity just for their dynamic pricing. Um, I've looked at their T-sheet and they have some really nice features that four up doesn't have, then at the

same time, four up has really nice features that's the gas he doesn't have. And for our operation, the four up, um, TG just makes more sense for what we do on a daily basis. Uh, but the, the dynamic pricing that Sagacity offers is, is great. Yes. I think a lot of people would agree with that. Now I think you also use, well, it gets a little gray here.

I think you use Sagacity on the app side as well, but when we look in the app store, we do see a gallus app for Desert Canyon and we see a Sagacity app for Desert Canyon. Talk about, mean, is that intentional? Is that one is getting wound down while another one's getting spun up? Just talk us through that a little bit. Yeah. So we have our gallus app, which we've had for a while. And with Sagacity, that one's new. They've again, some

some interesting features that we can't get through Galas. Currently, we are in the process of phasing out Galas. We're waiting for a couple features to get built into the Sagacity app before we can completely move away from it. The Galas app is great. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just for us and what we do here. The golf cache that Sagacity offers has been a great addition for creating some...

I thought you would mention golf cash. think, I think for the people that really understand the Sagacity app, golf cash is a game changer really for a lot of people. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about golf cash? Can you tell the listeners, know, how you guys use that and what you think about that? Yeah. So I'm, I'm in the process and it'll kind of be more on the Sagacity side of making it more, um, available outside of the app, but I would love to turn.

We call it Canyon Cash. would love to turn that into essentially our gift card, with having our current setup with a different point of sale in the golf shop and a different point of sale in the restaurant. Our gift cards can't work in both places, but with Canyon Cash, we would be able to. So my hope at some point is that, guests would be able to buy somebody Canyon Cash gift cards and they could just load it into their app, kind of like, you know, like Starbucks does, or some of these other big companies.

but we have, discounts that we give for, loading Canyon cash. And we ran a big promotion on black Friday, where we had a couple of different, dollar increments where they get a substantial amount, back on it. And it's, it's interesting because you mentioned different point of sale on the restaurant versus versus golf. Let's just talk, touch on the restaurant for a second.

Is the restaurant a significant amount of your revenue? is it a, you know, yeah, it's more than 15 % of your revenue or something like that. It's probably close to that. We have a lot of banquets. Our restaurant is a lot bigger than maybe most public golf course restaurants. It can see a little over 300 people. So it's a very large and the foreUP has a food and beverage module.

We tried it for a little while, for what we were looking to accomplish in the restaurant, we just needed something little more robust. Because we do banquets, we've done wedding receptions, we'll do buffets, fine dining at times, we'll do wine tasting. So we have a lot of different things that we're trying to offer our membership base. And so having a...

a more substantial restaurant platform was important for us. Yeah, you at one time, you were using Toast for your restaurant point of sale. And it's and I know you all left Toast less than a year ago, let's say. And you use today use GoTab. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. GoTab for your restaurant. But it's interesting.

there now is an integration between Sagacity and Toast. And I just wonder, you know, had that existed in the summer of 24, would you have maybe stayed and maybe that would have made your life a little easier? Um, I definitely would have considered staying more. Um, if I had known that integration was coming, um, I know when talking to Sagacity about it recently, it's more based around, um, like hitting days for the driving range. Um,

because for a lot of that stuff, it's easier to manage the hitting bay if you treat it like a table in a restaurant. So they can have an open tab for, which we'd be able to do something similar to that with GoTab. But the real reason that we decided to leave Tost one because it wasn't working. It's a great, point of sale. There were just really two things for us at least that made it tough, which on the beverage cart, she would have a handheld.

and then a lot of times in order to get the sale to go through, like you could process it on the golf course, but then it would need to connect to the internet and then hope and pray that every card goes through. So we would have instances where a car would decline and then we'd have to call the guest and it just wasn't a good experience. it didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough to where it was not something we really wanted to have to deal with. You're talking about the Toast go.

the hand. correct. Yeah. And so and I think if I'm hearing you correctly, so it would go to an offline mode is what I'm guessing. But it stores all the transactions that take place. And then as soon as it gets back online, it tries to put them through. But you're saying, yeah, and I had 15 transactions I had to go through and one or two of them got declined. And then that was a problem. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So that was an issue for us. It didn't happen a lot. But when it does happen, it's annoying and then more so for the guests and then really for us because then

We'd have to reach out to them and a lot of times they've already left the property. so it wasn't good. It wasn't good for them. Um, and then we have two bars in our restaurant as well. have a bar in the front of the restaurant, which will handle the traffic. Uh, when golfers are on the turn or when they come in or before they tee off. Then we have another bar in the back of the restaurant. Um, that's overlooking our 18th hole and has, uh, seating on the patio as well. Um, so with Toast, I had to have two different bar menus.

which were the same, however. And then it looked at the server to pick which bar to send the drinks to by picking that menu. And with GoTab, I can just hit a switch and say, every patio table drinks automatically go to the back bar. So it took that potential user error out of it and the human error. And just, you if we're having the back bar open, we dictate which tables are designated for the back bar.

and then it's service as usual. There's not much for the staff to have to worry about. that's a, you're getting into, know, a pretty specific thing, right? That's very specific to your setup, which I think there's thousands of operators, frankly, that have these specific things to their setup. And it sounds like you found a great solution. And I think that's excellent. What I'm, what I'm interested in knowing is, how did you find GoTab? Like you had this unique issue.

Did you get lucky and a rep happened to call you or did you have to go search for that? I ended up searching for it. I went actually through, we use OpenTable as well for our reservations and for specialty nights that we do. I actually went through their integration list of companies they work with or point of sale they work with. And then just kind of one by one went through the, took about a week to kind of get through everybody and to do the research. then that's how I

I came across GoTab was because they were integrated with OpenTable. Excellent. Excellent. All right. Well, that's good. Okay. So let's go back to foreUP for a second, specific to marketing, because I think you use Campaign Pilot. so Campaign Pilot, as I understand it, was acquired by foreUP. What else do you use specific to marketing? And I guess part of my question is, are you using

the service provided by foreUP or just the marketing tech provided by foreUP? For the most part, I just use the tech. I get impatient at times. with my background in game design and with the more design part of marketing, for me, a lot of times, it's just quicker to build the email myself or build the campaign or the post or whatever it ends up being.

So yeah, we use Campaign Pilot a lot, which is great. It makes it a lot easier kind of blasting one message out to multiple platforms at the same time. And then we use Singed for our emails, which the integration with foreUP there is great because I can really pinpoint the demographic or the customer list I'm trying to market to if it's just our members or just Arizona residents, whatever.

the campaign needs in terms of the, the list I can, I can pinpoint it. Yeah. Okay. okay. So sanction campaign pilot. Do you ever find yourself in need of a real CRM, like of a, a hub spot or something like that, or, or that's overkill maybe for y'all. Yeah. I think for us, what we currently have, does just fine. And with me kind of being at the head of it, you know, we have a small operation anyway, so.

There's not, it may be if we were bigger and there was more, more, people that were involved in the marketing side, then it might be something that we could look into. But for the time being, no, I haven't found a need for it. How do you manage your sales opportunities? Right? I you're talking about these banquets and a 300 seat restaurant inbound theoretically comes through your website. How do you manage these individual opportunities to sell events?

So for events in the restaurant, we utilize Tripleseat, which I came across them actually after we got set up with GoTab. And the great thing about Tripleseat is really the customization for the events themselves, but then also the organization. So every single event lives in its own hub. And then all the communication is in one spot. You don't have to search through emails to try to find

something specific and same thing for the guests. They get a customer portal. They can log into that whenever they want. They can see any contracts, any proposals, and also any communication back and forth. it streamlines that process a lot. That kind of serves as your BEO, Yes. Okay. And that's Cripple C. Yep. Yep. Okay. It's amazing. Okay.

I noticed on some of your LinkedIn profile, you did mention with Sugacity. So you are a believer in dynamic pricing, right? That makes sense to you. We had a guest on Chad Peddington from the ledges in Utah. He says that this is worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to him. How important is it for you guys? And well, let's start here. How long have you been using dynamic pricing?

We've been using every pricing probably since 2015. We were with EasyLinks before we switched to foreUP and we utilized their dynamic pricing module that was built into their Tsheet, which worked really well to kind of get us started in that world. And switching to Sagacity for being able to pinpoint every single tee time and being able to

base those rates off of historical data is huge. Rather than just what's kind of happening currently, then that way we maximize every single tea time rather than just you know, any specific day part of depending on how you set those up. If it's 90 minutes or two hours, being able to have every single tea time get maximized is crucial, especially for us being a family business. Yeah, listen, I'm a

long time friend of Michael Austelotte and I know Brett Darrow and Andy Seitz. I don't know if you know Andy because he was really the brains behind a lot of that algorithm. There's no question that what they have built is really, really good. There's Pricewing that tries to compete with them. Golfnap rolling out Athena, which is the, you know, it's interesting to name a pricing module after the goddess of war, but

but we'll see how that goes. But yeah, I have my own feelings with GolfNow And so that to me, that kind of makes sense. Yeah. But but you do use GolfNow. I noticed we we did. So we're actually going to be leaving GolfNow once our agreement is up in April. Interesting. Yeah, we were with GolfNow for those probably since they started. So, Martin, this is a big thing to be in the

the greater Phoenix market, right? And to leave GolfNow is unusual. and this is news to me. I didn't know that you were leaving. you know, what do you think about that? I mean, you've, you've probably done the math and figured out, you know, you can afford to leave, you know, you can fill these spots on your own. It's, an interesting, step to take. Yeah. Yeah. It, yeah, me and GolfNow we've, been back and forth.

Probably since I started when I first started here, GolfNow was about 80 % of our online tee times. And if we go back to last year, they were about 5 % of our online tee times. Oh, goodness. So yeah, so you're ready to leave then you've done the work, you've seeded the market, so to speak. Makes a lot of sense then. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And we wouldn't have left if they were still a more substantial part of our business, then we definitely wouldn't be leaving. The only reason I'm considered or I considered it. And we are taking those steps is because I know I can make up 5 % of our, of our rounds. I'm sure you can. Yeah. Yeah. And in today's world with, social media and with Google ads, it's, way easier to attract more players than it was 10 years ago. No question. Um, and we'll get into Google here in a second, but

But just for the, people are out there and you're, you know, my gosh, this guy in Phoenix, he's leaving. There are steps to take, right? I'm sure you sent in your letter and you said, I don't want my con, you know, that's one of the things, and this is not, this isn't specific just to GolfNow. Really most software providers in golf, there's this auto renewal that really sneaks up on a lot of operators and you know, having lived on that side of it, having,

been in sales and, and, and understood those renewals really well. You know, best practice frankly is to always notify your software provider that you do not plan to renew and they should not auto renew you. And then you always have the option to renew it manually. If you will. That's really a best practice at any rate. I did notice that very recently for up completed their integration with Google Reserve.

and so that was really exciting and you, you're already taking advantage of that. So when your Google map listing, if someone clicks on the book now button, it immediately goes to your booking engine. and, and, I'm sure as a four up customer, you're appreciative of the fact that they did that integration. Yeah. Yeah. yeah, I mean, for a Google business page, it should lead you to that business. should, that's not how things work this summer.

Yeah. And honestly, that was for me, the last nail in the coffin for GolfNow. and it was the lack of the communication, by not telling us or informing us that would happen. and so yeah, that, that ultimately is what made me say, okay, we're done with GolfNow. And, and really through the technology that we have is what led me to have the confidence to leave GolfNow. because when we first started with Sigacity,

I think it was our, maybe two or three months before our, GolfNow agreement was coming to auto renew. And I, with the reporting they gave me, they showed me what we were potentially losing on barter times. And since we had EZLinks and then we were also with GolfNow GolfNow bought EZLinks and now GolfNow was getting double from us than some of the other properties. So after we did the math,

with the data that we got from Sagacity. I told them we needed to change some things. We went on to a commission system with them instead of the barter. With GolfNow, saying you went on commission. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which worked better. But it was still, you know, we're at the point where we don't need to give up as much. Right. Which is we're fortunate to be in that spot. But the technology that we have has helped us get to that point by really understanding.

just our clientele or where the golfers coming from and how to attract them. And then also maximizing what we can get. Well, it's interesting to hear you say that the, that the Google thing was the last straw for you. I don't know. You and I have not met until today. I was the one that wrote that article and discovered what was happening there. and you now are the, you're either the 11th or 12th operator that I have spoken to that says that was what pushed them to ultimately to leave. So

Costly mistake. I have a lot of friends there. I root for a ton of people that work there. and we all make mistakes and, you know, some are just more costly than others. So, you know, what I have said to people is I know that, they didn't do it intentionally, but at the same time it was, it was a, it was a mistake and sometimes mistakes are costly. yeah, that was just the lack of communication and the lack of transparency. mean, there's nothing wrong with GolfNow. I mean, we,

They were extremely helpful for a long time for us. We just, got into the point where, where we don't need them anymore. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about, you know, you were talking about dynamic pricing and I, and I inside and out, I completely understand how Sagacity looks backward. I think they love to look at the last three years. They want to know every single tee time. It's, it's, it's really, really great. What I became really interested in in the last few months and just for some context.

I have built some dynamic pricing technology back in my golf nowadays. So I was an early adopter of dynamic pricing. This concept of wait list and understanding future demand. It's really interesting to me how that will start to work itself into pricing algorithms. And so you have been using notify for wait list.

but now I see you've added Golf District and I think Golf District has a competing a waitlist thing and we can, we can get into the waitlist thing in a second, but I did think it'd be interesting. You're one of the first five golf courses to use Golf District. There's going to be a lot of people that listen to this. I have no idea what Golf District is. It's an idea frankly that I have thought of for probably at least the last five or six years that I thought this should probably happen.

Why don't you explain to everybody what Golf District is and then why you guys decided to become a customer? yeah, it, it's a very unique booking engine. they offer, can offer two times out as far as you want. offer 120 days in advance. anything beyond 30 days for us is prepaid. the thing that really sets them apart, I feel is the weather insurance that you can purchase as a golfer.

and then if you have a tee time that you prepaid for and you can't make it, you have the ability to resell that tee time. so very similar to, to stub hub or concert tickets or, so you own that tee time and then you can sell it for less or for more. You, get to pick the price that you sell that tee time for. but the golf course gets the revenue regardless.

And then the golf course will also get a percentage off of the resell fees as well from any tea time that gets resold. Yeah, that was always, you know, my idea for this was that it would live in a blockchain. And if you, if you thought of a tee time as a piece of art, that every time the tee time resold, the artist should benefit from that. You being the artist, you own, you are the original owner of the inventory. And I always felt like

the owner of the inventory should always get a share of every single sale that happened thereafter. So I'm glad to hear you say that you do participate in the resale of it. That's good. Yeah. And then the weather insurance is great too. If, um, cause in that situation we keep the revenue and the golfer ends up getting reimbursed from the insurance. Um, so if we have, instead of having that, we'd have to have a lot of people prepay and do the, uh, weather insurance, but you know, there could be less.

complete zeros if we have a rain out, which we've had over the years. Even in Arizona, it's a little rain enough to where people can play golf. So we've had zero dollar days. And if we had a lot of people with weather insurance that day, we would at least have some revenue that would be able to retain and maybe we'll get their money back as well. Right. Yeah. So, so have you seen someone resell a tee time yet? Has it happened? We've seen someone try. I don't think it ended up selling.

But yeah, we've seen, we've seen someone, one person put it up for sale. But yeah, don't, I don't think it went anywhere. And of course this will kind of get put to the test when the waste management tournament comes around, right? When there's significant demand in your market and will people try to flip it? then obviously you only have to have like a half a brain to then think about where, will, will there become speculative buyers?

Will people start to buy chunks of tee times with the thought that they can resell them and make some money? I assume because you're a customer that's you're fine with that. Yeah. I mean, for us, yeah. I mean, cause we had that discussion internally before we kind of decided to jump on board and ultimately, yeah, go ahead and buy our whole tee sheet. Cause we get the money anyway. then somebody does end up buying it.

from that person, we get a percentage of that. yeah, by all means, if somebody wants to buy every single tee time, the Saturday of the open, that'd be great. That's right. That's right. You know, I don't, I don't know why change sometimes is synonymous with bad, but just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad. mean, honest to goodness, you could stand to have a faster rounds of golf.

And, and, and they were all sold out. doesn't mean they all showed up, but they were all sold out. So I don't see the downside there. Yeah. No. And there really is no downside to golf districts for that reason is that if you have someone's trying to poach every time, like it really doesn't matter because you're getting the money for it. So if someone wants to do that and your tee sheet may be empty because they can't resell them all, but you still have the revenue for it. Um, so, then the, um, the other nice thing too, is that from their side, they don't, they don't charge golf courses.

so we don't, we don't pay them. They just get a, their fees that they charge on their site and that's it. So to become a customer is it doesn't cost anything, which is ultimately the, the final reason that I said, yeah, let's give this a shot was just because we weren't investing anything in it. Well, so, okay. Let's talk through that a little bit. so essentially there are booking fees that the golf golfer is really funding the Golf District company, if you will. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, pretty much. They, um, I think for, for us, I'm not sure how the agreements are with the other courses, but for us there's additional $3 on every tee time. So if the tee time for us would have been 125 on there, it's 128. So they get those $3. And then how does that impact the phone, Martin, if people call for that tee time, are they going to pay 125 or they're to pay 128?

So if they call us, they'll get whatever the rate is in-house. Yeah. So it'll be the 125. Yeah. And we've always had a 30 day booking window over the phone. And now anything above 30, we'd send them to Golf District and they would just have to prepay it, which is something that we were starting to implement anyway, because we've gotten burned a good amount of times on groups booking months in advance and then not showing up or...

You know, a couple of the tee times falling off last minute and then we can resell those times. So we're already planning on going to more of a prepaid policy, the further in advance. And now this has just made it a little easier. Talk to me about why you wouldn't do prepay from days zero to 30. Um, for us, at least in our market, um, we thought about it. Uh, Golf District was pushing for zero to seven days non prepaid.

Um, but for us, as far as I know, we're pretty much the only one that's requiring repayment beyond 30 days. Um, depending on everyone's looking windows. So I don't, I, was a little concerned of pulling the trigger right away and closing the gap on that non repaid window and potentially having them go up the road to the other 15 golf courses that you can find within 15 square miles of.

So really, in short, the answer to my question is competitive pressure, right? The other guys haven't gone to prepay. You're concerned that that could cause some attrition in rounds. And so you're just not going to do it right now. OK, fair enough. What's your cancellation policy? How far in advance do I have to cancel and not, you know, it doesn't cost me any money as a golfer. So our regular policy is 24 hours. OK, OK.

canceling 20 or short show to cancel or short show. need to know 24 hours in advance that gets us into notify, right? And and maybe you can compare notify to Golf District, but you certainly use notify for the like the last six months, at least maybe longer is notify really a great solution for those. the guy just canceled and only have 30 hours until the thing, you know, expires is notify the solution for that.

Yeah, it's a great solution for that. Those last minute T times, you'll have groups all the time drop off a day or two before if someone gets ill or they can't make the flight gets canceled. So yeah, they've been a great solution for that. it's a pretty simple process as well. It's pretty straightforward in terms of setting up your parameters that you're trying to find. And then it's pretty simple. It just sends you a link and then

the golfer clicks on the link that takes into our booking portal, which ends up being four up. and then they booked their tee time from there. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I noticed in doing research on Golf District, the Golf District has a wait list. What will happen there? Will you, will you use both or how will you manage that? Yeah. So the plan now is to kind of utilize both. So for our membership that we sell, have three different tiers, two of them have a monthly fee attached to it.

and the booking windows change for all of those. And then their rates are obviously lower, but then their guests pay a slightly higher rate, still lower than if they were a resident or public. so by having those rules in place, it's tough to validate who's, who has the membership through Golf District. So for the time being, we're going to really just utilize Golf District for public play and.

we'll also push the public player towards that wait list where we will more utilize notify for our members. Okay. And so that actually, now that I'm learning this about membership, that's probably part of the reason you're able to cut ties with golf. Now you've got enough built in, revenue here that you're, you've got it to a pretty good place. That makes, that makes a little more sense. And speaking of, you know, things that are,

improving at the course and the benefits for the players. You've just opened this brand new huge putting green, I think. Was that a big labor of love or tell us about that a little bit? Yeah, it's I mean, our properties old. It was the original golf course in Fountain Hills, so it's been here for over 50 years. And certain areas that just it needs a facelift and our practice facility was next in line and the putting green we had by our first tee was maybe 2400 square feet.

And now it's a little over 15,000 square feet. so we just maximized the amount of space that we had available to us. and that'll be nice when we have tournaments, everyone can fit on the green and kind of get warmed up or we'll be able to set up a nine hole putting course as well, and hopefully draw some more, traffic from the community, not just golfers, but maybe families want to come out and, and take their kids on the putting course and then come up in the restaurant afterwards and have a drink and something to eat. Yeah.

Any, any room for a top tracer ultimately or something similar to that? Yeah. So we're hoping actually to, um, we're waiting on permits and, and drawings from architects and things along those lines, but we're hoping to have our, our driving range remodeled this summer as well. And then we would have 18 days, uh, covered. and then, uh, we'd be helpful to.

to install top tracer there and provide that technology as well. Well, that would be cool. Have you been up to, um, Augusta ranch and, seeing that installation or whatnot? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. was, it was the president. think it was one night when I went out there in May, I think it was last year and I came by on a Tuesday and they, mentioned that the day before they had a, I think a 45 or 50 minute wait on a Monday afternoon. So yeah, it, it seems like it.

It does pretty well wherever it goes. Um, and yeah, I'm really hopeful that we can get that done this summer. Cause then it'd be something nice to offer when we're closed for overseeding as well. Cause we don't really oversee the driving range. So we'd be able to keep the driving range open and hopefully you'd be able to still have some foot traffic at the course while the course is being seated in October. Right. Exactly. Okay. So let's, let's see if we can recap this thing. So, uh,

You, you are, I would say a strong user of four up. You're using four ups marketing technology. You're using a four up website. there that's locked in. You, you really like Sagacity because of dynamic pricing and your, your, sun setting, if you will, the gallus app in favor of the Sagacity app. and you are leaving the GolfNow marketplace.

Now we didn't talk about this, but I'm assuming you will stay in the daily deals marketplace, which is the Sagacity marketplace. You'll have some inventory available there. Yeah. Yeah. We'll be staying there. Yeah. And then actually with Golf District, the conversation of them is their, long-term goal is to have a marketplace as well. to where once they get more golf courses on board, you'd be able to, how I understood it, you'd be able to go on and sell RT time and then buy someone else's in the same place.

Yes, makes sense. Yeah, because that's really what the ticket guys are doing, right? They really have, you know, created a market. So that makes a lot of sense. You will it. It sounds like you'll stay with notify and and continue to use that for specific people and maybe offer another waitlist option for other people. No, go tab on the restaurant side, OpenTable on the restaurant side.

And then triple seat, which helps with, with events and that type of thing. Did I miss anything? don't think so. When, when you asked me to come on, yeah, I went through our list. I was like, yeah, we actually, we do have a lot of, a lot of stuff that we, that we utilize. You know, so part of my business, Martin is we literally track the software that all of you guys use in North America. And as you can imagine, there's a lot of people that are interested in that because

it helps them to understand what sales opportunities they might have or et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, when I really started to become familiar with your golf course, I literally was getting notifications from my software saying there was an error because of some overlapping technology. And I thought, what is the error here? And the more I dug in, was like, this all looks intentional. I don't think there is an error. Yeah, it's yeah. Yeah. It's organized chaos to some extent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, geez, it's a cool story though. I'm, I'm really glad to learn that's a family business. think those are amazing. you've obviously served the community really well. and, and so hopefully you guys are reaping a lot of rewards from that and you're building, you know, this will, this will continue on for generations, which I think would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. So far we've been, we've been fortunate to be surrounded by good people and have our family.

support one another. and have the support from the community has always been, always been great. Yeah. Well, you deserve it. Think of all the jobs that you guys have created over the years, you know, and you've impacted people's lives. And so you deserve to reap the rewards for sure. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Well, thanks for joining the Tech Caddie podcast. you are, episode one of year two for us. So I appreciate you coming on and, I don't expect you'll go to the

to the golf show in Orlando. Most guys in your area of the country do not. No, no, no, I won't be, I won't be going. I've, I've always wanted to, but that's also our, our busiest time. So it's tough to get away from here and, and leave everyone on their own for the most part. Exactly. I'm waiting for Don Ray now that he's the president. I'm waiting for him to spin up some amazing show for all of you guys in that Southwest section. That would be great. That's your schedule. That would be fun. Yeah, that would be. Yeah.

Okay, well thanks for coming on and I really appreciate the time and the conversation. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you.

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