Welcome. I am Mike Hendrix from smbGOLF. And today I have Bodo Sieber and Craig Kleu from Tagmarshal And this is the Tech Caddie podcast. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Mike. Thanks for having us. It's great to have you guys. I think you're both in South Africa. You're both in Cape Town today, if I have that correct. Yeah, that's right.

We are an international operation. So we have an office in Atlanta, Georgia. We have an office in Ireland and we have an office in Cape Town. And right now this is the sunniest. So Craig and I choosing to be here. Yeah, yeah, of course. Why wouldn't you? Well, I'm in the States. I'm in Columbus, Ohio.

thanks for coming on the show. Really, you guys got my interest because Bodo, you wrote a piece and we actually published it on our site. You wrote a piece in which you're taking issue with some new pace of play rules that are being put into place with the PGA Tour. And those rules I should mention

I don't believe they go into effect until 2026. So it's not like it's, right around the corner. So I do want to ultimately engage on that, but we have a ton of founders that watch this podcast. have a ton of golf tech geeks that watch this podcast. And so why we talk about Tagmarshal initially, just so people can understand who you guys are. Craig, I think you were employee number one.

and as I understand it, you ultimately Tagmarshal was created because of some experiences you were having on the golf course without going into great, great detail. know founders love to tell their origin story, but let's just get the, a quick origin story on, Tagmarshal and what, what made you want to do this, Craig? Yeah. Well, as you said, it's born from a personal experience. myself and.

our third co-founder John Wilmore, were playing at a very, very expensive South African course on a beautiful day with our mates. And as all of us do, right, we go on these mini golf tours and we pretend we're professional and we put a lot of effort into that. Needless to say, we got stuck behind a couple of groups, two in fact, with a group on the green. So there were three groups on a par three tee box and that really impaired the experience for us.

So much so for the rest of our round, were talking about why can't technology help these golf courses manage, know, the traditional courses, the the marshal or the managers driving around the course backwards, trying to identify where the bottlenecks are. So that that sort of set off a thought train. Spin that forward 10 years. We now have 50 of the top 100 courses in the world using Tagmarshal, many of which

We're looking for a solution. And when the best in the world started doing it, Erin Hills Whistling Straights so as well, first two clients. Valhalla was number three. Quickly, the rest identified the opportunity or the solution to a problem, an industry-wide problem they'd had for years. So yeah, that's a short pricey on what Tagmarshal does.

I appreciate that. Erin Hills actually has a connection to Columbus because Erin Hills architect is Dr. Hurdzan who of course lives here in Columbus. And so really at the end of the day, think Tagmarshal took away the, or at least reduced the Ranger saying to the general manager, man, they're all playing slow out there, but you couldn't really prove it probably. And you needed more data to really be able to zero in on this bottleneck or that bottleneck.

At the end of the day, is Tagmarshal a data company? 100%. I think we're a tool set for day-to-day practical management, as you say. You've now got FACT. However, the greatest benefit to having it is really understanding your course. And is that old saying that you can't manage what you don't monitor? You can't manage what you don't monitor, right?

Well, Tagmarshal's doing that and it gets smarter and smarter as you collect more data, both on your course flows, but also on how your membership plays or, you know, your, if you're a daily fee course, understanding where your best impact areas on your golf course for interventions. And yeah, it really gives you the tool set you need to optimize. And so as I understand it for

your clients, your golf courses, and you really, you are a B2B company. Let's, should say that upfront too. You don't really have golfers as customers, which is why I think you're such a great fit for this podcast. Cause we typically don't talk to companies like that either, but, some of your customers have a fully installed unit in a golf car or in a buggie, as you all might call it. Some of your customers, the caddie might be wearing a clip and then some of your customers might be using

a screen that comes from Club Car or EZGo but you've ultimately added some type of a tracker to each golf car so that you can ultimately provide the service to the golf course. So I have that right. Yeah, no, that's a hundred percent correct. We, I don't know, if you mentioned it, but we have our own screen now, which is called the Tagmarshal 2Way And it's our fastest growing product.

And then let's talk about that a little bit. Are you seeing clubs pull screens out of golf cars and put yours in or they're bringing in a new fleet? And when the fleet comes in, then they install your screen. Like what, how is that working at the, at the golf course level? So typically clubs will make this decision when they bring in a new fleet. However, we have seen clubs.

take out whatever product they have to put to Tagmarshal is. We're agnostic, so we've got a major advantage we can install onto all three of the majors, Yamaha, Clubcar, and EZGo It's a really simple process. Yeah, and basically once we've done it, they've got this really great two-way mechanism to one, manage B2B on the backend side, how the course is doing, but also two, to cut out the need for somebody to interact.

that group, can send it straight to the screen. We've got a, we've also got a smart algorithm that runs on the screen that tells people where they're on relation to the rest of the field. It's different to the other operators who basically tell you are relative to when you started because we're ingesting where the whole field is. can tell you whether you're in or out of position as well as how you're doing against your goal time. let's talk a little bit about your customer base. Do you, by chance, are you the provider for the Robert Trent Jones trail?

in Alabama? I think we are the one in Virginia. So the one the Solheim Cup was played on? I say that because I was recently there and we, you know, the cart was barking at us a lot. So I wondered if that was you all the way.

And so I actually worked in Ireland in golf for several years. I covered the GolfNow business in Ireland. And, you know, obviously in Ireland, we don't see a lot of buggies, right? There's plenty of courses that maybe have three buggies or something like that at the facility. So I'm thinking early days, Tagmarshal was built in a way that it was really going to be friendly with walking only courses.

Yeah, you're quite right. So when we started out, our first customers were indeed walking courses, right? And then we saw a need in the cart space because there were a few legacy solutions. But maybe just also to differentiate, what we've built is a real business tool, right? Where the legacy GPS systems, they're primarily built for golfer value, right? So yeah, you can see your yardage, you can see the hole ahead.

But as a business tool, it doesn't really go very far. So we started our journey on the flip side where we wanted to create a business tool that helps the operator make smarter decisions based on data. So if you think about it, it's like a Wayz or Google Maps. It was really accurate live management out on what's on the golf course. So Wayz and Google Maps, everyone relies on. And what you must remember is that the golf industry is so underserved by technology when it comes to live management of their course.

they're still operating with a paper map and waiting for the traffic radio on the hour, right? That's what it's like if you're operating with radios and people out there trying to make sense of the course. yeah, so we found there's a real opportunity to bring data into the day-to-day management. And we built a very smart data backend solution. So it's a backup host analytics.

that really teaches the golfers, the golf pros and the managers about how to run the golf course better and optimize and incrementally improve their results when it comes to the throughput optimization and when it comes to the quality of play optimization. Right. When you start talking about throughput,

That gets me excited. I'm thinking of my revenue management guy at heart. And that's what really drew me so much into the tee time space. It's one thing to kind of work in tee times, but then when you fall in love with the math or the economics behind tee times, that's when I really got super interested in this business. So I love when I hear things like throughput. It is interesting though, your exposure to Ireland, certainly I'm going to guess that, know, England as well.

and your success there must have played a role in, in where you are today. Today, you are the technology partner for the DP Tour when it comes to pace. I'm very interested in that, Bodo, because that's one, that's a hell of a partnership to create, but two, I'm, I'm really interested to understand how they use it in real time.

We know a player is penalized. I think this past weekend was the first Tour event of really the 2025 season. We've already seen a penalty doled out, but explain how that partnership came to be and really how they use your technology today. Yeah. So the technology that is in play here obviously travels with the event, right? Where our standard technology stays on site and we're tracking everything that moves out of golf course for three to six year period.

is the Tour space is a bit more lightweight. So we're tracking playing groups, and we want to understand on a gate system, when does this group cross into a new gate, into a new zone, so that the Tour tournament officials can see this group is on pace, this group is falling out of position, and this group needs potentially an intervention on the pace.

The technology works in providing line of sight to the tour operators, but they also use it extensively to make faster ruling decisions, right? Because they want to know where our officials and which officials can we deploy to a ruling site, say on hole seven, the quickest. And I'll give you an example where we were at the R&As World Amateur Championship that was played at Portmarnock and another golf course in Dublin, and they did a double test.

where they ran the Tagmarshal system on the ladies event and no system, basically the classic manual effort on the other event. And the classic manual effort ran on walkie-talkies the whole day, lots of chatter, where's this group, when they're there to tee off, where's so-and-so to make a ruling, can we get somebody out there quickly? It was talk-talk-talk all day, and it's really difficult to, without line-of-sight, to manage your tournament space, right?

And you need to keep track manually of everything that moves out there, trying to get stage gates going, manually tracking, sharing information, of chatter. Whereas the other event that had our line of sight and real data to back decisions was virtually quiet on the walkie talkies. All that their managers needed to do was look on the screen, and they could see in real time, much like you do with Wayz of Google Maps, what's happening out on the course. And they could see where their critical people were, and they could deploy them very quickly.

So it helps them immensely from a Tour point of view on understanding where the choke points on this particular course as we go through the tournament sequence of events and also which other players that we need to keep an eye on, right? Because they're potentially struggling with certain sections on the golf course and we need to make sure that they move along so we don't have delays. And thirdly, really deploying rules officials effectively and quickly.

because sometimes that causes a five to 10 minute hold up, right? And we had one of the Tour managers on a webinar with us and he was asked the question, does it work? He said, well, we wanted to play this course last weekend that we played our event at to four hours and 18 minutes and Tagmarshal helped us to get it through in four hours, 17 minutes and 55 seconds. It works, right? Whereas on Tour, you see that the day spilled into the next, right?

and five hour rounds is exactly why there's so much buzz and chat on social media, right? That's great. Portmarnock is the first course I ever played over near Dublin. So it's cool that your story comes from there. And how long has the DP Tour been a partner of yours? Yeah, when they were called European Tour. And maybe Craig, you want to jump in and take this one.

Yeah, sure. So I'm not mistaken, around five years, I know that their principal, Mike Cole,

was a massive proponent of Tagmarshal in the early days. He even said that Tagmarshal and the European Tour, what we created together was the single biggest achievement from a technology standpoint in a decade. Wow. Which is high praise.

Yeah. And now you got to get Mike Whan you get Mike Whan on board over here in the States and, that'll be a little bump for you guys. So, so Bodo, let's talk about this white paper, that you put out where you really are taking issue with the PGA Tour and, some of the pace of play things that they're doing. I thought it was interesting. Some of the parallels you, drew there to baseball. And so maybe we can talk about that a little bit, but,

As we get into this part of the conversation, do we know if the PGA Tour has a really good data partner when it comes to Pace or do you think it's more of a manual approach? We don't know, to be honest, if they have any sort of technology. We know that they have a keen interest in looking to monetize and own the data around real-time betting, right? So there's some level of data collection.

But as far as we can see, they don't seem to utilize it to manage the pace. I'm surprised that the Tour hasn't reached out and said, you know, for only a quarter million dollars a year, Tagmarshal could be the sponsor of our pace of play issue here on the Tour. And CBS would do an amazing job of elevating your brand for that. But maybe that's maybe that's down the road. So, OK, so you don't know. I totally respect that.

What's your issue? What don't you like about the rule changes that they've proposed that they're putting in place? Yeah, Mike. So in simple terms, it's twofold, right? So the first one is reducing the field from 125 to 100 players, right? And the second one is reducing pace related fines from 50,000 to 10,000. And I think it's a shot related fines from 10,000 to 5,000.

Okay, let me just let me just jump in there. So for people that aren't familiar, you know, totally right. They're moving down to 100 players. They're I don't want to speak for the Tour, but it feels like they are making pace be a scapegoat for why they're moving to 100 players. Well, if we move down to 100, everybody will play faster. I think part of your contention is you can get people to play faster without limiting play. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. So the two sides of it, I feel, are problematic. The first part is that golf obviously is as hot as it ever was right now, right? The largest contingent of players right now is between the ages of 18 to 36. It's fantastic. Golf is younger than it's ever been. We had 3.4 million people play golf on an 18-hour golf course for the first time in their lives.

last year, that's a high watermark when it comes to new players. 66 % of them have come through Topgolf and the likes of Topgolf as a first experience. So golf has an amazing opportunity to be the game of a lifetime for a whole new generation of players. But now this generation of players, they are used to on-demand instant gratification type technologies in their lifestyle. So that is your

Amazon Prime, that's your door dash, that's your, I can binge all of my Netflix episodes if I want to today. I don't have to wait for next week's episode. Sure. And listen, a parallel in golf on that, you don't hear a lot of people talk about this, but I've been playing golf for a long time and I felt like I got really good at stepping off my yardages, right? You find the 150 marker somewhere in the fairway and then you step to your ball and the people that could really get their paces down to a yard would be really dialed in. Today,

If I asked my 23 year old to step off his yardage, he would look at me like I had three heads and he'd say, I'm just going to shoot it. And then he gets his yardage instantly. that's the, I think that that's the analogy or the parallel that, that you see with this instant gratification point that you make. Yeah, absolutely. But also remember this generation, they do not want for golf to be slow, right? Golf has to be fast and entertaining for them.

So that is where the tourism are going, well, how are we gonna do that? Well, let's just reduce our field size by 25 so we can extend our intervals, right? And then there's no holdups. Well, that to me is a cop out. And I'll tell you why, because if the rest of the industry did that as a solution, we would reduce our tee sheet inventory by 25%. That means 25 % less people can play. And there's already jammed up tee times where as an industry, we have an opportunity now to

to make a lot of players happy and make them fall in love with the game, right? So the moment we're saying, well, let's reduce our inventory, firstly, we're making less money, but well, we can say, well, let's just up the rates. Now we're making golf more exclusive. Where golf for the first time actually is becoming more inclusive and we're more welcoming to women and we're more welcoming to diversity. So I do feel that golf has done a lot of work on the green grass side to be more welcoming, more open to the game. And the Tour is,

seemingly flipping this on his head and saying, well, we can just make a decision and make it more exclusive and reduce the field size. And to us, we know based on 75 million rounds of golf track, based on 10 billion data points, that it's possible to solve this problem very easily with the right technology solution. Let me play counterpoint here. We just had two different CEOs write white papers for us, I think a week or two ago.

And it was a point counterpoint kind of thing. Let me play counterpoint for a second. if I provide more time or more space between shots, more people can bet on those individual shots. You know where I'm coming from? How people today are betting on if Rory is going to hit the fairway on 12 Tee, right? And if there's a little bit more time for more people to place a bet,

That's ultimately a good thing for the PGA Tour that more bets can flow through that sport. Any consideration to the betting angle and how much betting has really exploded in the States when it comes to these experiences? Yeah, obviously the law and regulations changes opened up this world, right? And it's huge from a revenue and opportunities point of view. We fully understand that. And we fully understand that the Tour needs to be self-serving here, right?

and exploit and explore and maximize that opportunity. At the same time, our angle is that the Tour has a responsibility towards the rest of the game, right? It was the game as a whole. And I'll give you an example. I was talking to an operator from Michigan the other day about this very topic. And he said, you know what happens at my course when you play a junior event, and those kids, because they're watching on the big screen, what a pre-shot routine might look like.

Once you're good enough and you play on the Tour, they're emulating that. Do know what happens to our arms? They're five hours 20, right? Because these young players are watching on the big screen and they're taking on bad manners and bad ways of managing. Listen, I will say, you know, I mentioned this trip I went on to Alabama with Robert Trent Jones. It's not just kids. You are seeing 30 and 40 year olds emulate

what they see on the Tour, you know, just like a guy that plays basketball and sees a new way to get to the hoop that now maybe you can extend it to almost two full steps. And then they want to go implement that on their, in their own game on the playground. Same thing in golf. It's not just 12 year olds. is 30 year olds, 40 year olds, 50 year olds that have fallen in love with Patrick Cantlay for whatever the reason might be.

and they're gonna take their time. And so I have experienced that myself. And so I believe what you say about your conversation out of Michigan. I think you made a great point in your paper when you talked about how baseball, this sport that really is steeped in tradition, was willing to put in a pitch clock and how much more enjoyable that made the game for me. I did not enjoy game five of the World Series.

but I did enjoy the last two seasons a lot more because the games are so much faster. I think I thought that that was a good analogy. will also say baseball today is talking about moving to a robo strike zone again, because of betting that they want strikes and balls to be more consistent. So more people are willing to bet on strike and balls. And so this, this betting component as it relates to TV sports,

is really having more and more of an impact on rules and how the games or the sport is essentially produced? Yeah, I would agree with you, golf is so much easier to change, right? Because in baseball, because tactically and from a fitness point of view, it's a very different game to play with a shot clock, which is why they had to filter it into the minor leagues first to create a generation of players that was ready to play like that. And also coaching needed to be adjusted.

because it's a major difference to play four hours versus two and a half hours, right? And tactically it makes a big difference to how the game is played, whereas golf is so much easier. And I'll tell you that based on our data, five to 10 % of playing groups on a golf course are delaying and are slow and are delaying other players. So that means that 90 to 95 % of playing groups are able to play on pace. And I can tell you for free that it's the same on Tour.

So you do not need to change the playing behavior of everybody. You just need to get a handle on the 5 to 10%. And they might not always be the same, but you need to get a handle on any day on those 5 to 10 % of players that are delaying others. Because that is exactly the issue. And that is why days spill over into the next, right? And that's why sometimes, tactically, it gets really hairy to play an important event. You mentioned Portmarnock a minute ago.

I want to say in the years that I was over there, I believe they were using Club Profit for their tee sheet. And the reason I bring that up is does Tagmarshal need to, or do you integrate with tee sheet systems point of sales, or can you live outside of that space? Yeah, we do. I'd love for Craig to actually jump in here because that integration space is very dear to him. Yeah, absolutely. So we're integrated with

20 of the major tee sheet providers in the industry, Mike, Club Profit being one of them. It's a really important feature, largely because if you're trying to build data and statistics on anything, you need to level it correctly, Well, our integrations allow us to do that. We build profiles on all of our private clubs' player bases. And in our daily fee section, we're doing that as well.

But not only does it allows us to do that, it also allows us to more readily integrate the start times and assist the starters around how they operate TagMarshal. If they were to have to put the start information manually in each day, that would make the system a little bit more difficult to manage. Well, bring in an integration and it's done for you. makes...

the compliance and the ease of operating Tagmarshal a lot better. then you would have a good I think, view into optimal intervals that you're seeing from tee sheets. do you integrate with Cap Patrol the handicap police over here in the States? No,

So on the optimization point, you make a great point. So I think they call it dynamic pricing in the States is becoming a very popular, I guess, trend. People are starting to charge more for the premium rounds and the tee times at the sort of premium times of day. Well, I'd like to challenge that people are tired of

paying more for something if they don't get more value from it, right? And the challenge in the golf space is that if you charge more for your rounds during the premium times a day and you don't provide them a better experience or at the very least a similar experience to the rest of your premium times, you're gonna run into a problem, right? So if you don't have a system that is managing your pace of play and telling you that you're providing at least an equal performance

experience, if not a better one, well, you're to have people complaining. They're paying $40, $100 more. And now they're running into an experiential factor that people don't consider. cannot agree with that more. That's one of the smartest things that we've heard on the podcast for the year, because dynamic pricing does work. However, it will go away quickly. If at the most expensive time of the year.

I played in five hours and 20 minutes. So I think, I think you are spot on there. It's all, I mean, you could almost make the case that if you have done a great job of adopting dynamic pricing, as we saw, had, had a Chad Penning on from the ledges out in Utah. He says, because he moved to dynamic pricing, it's worth over 200 grand a year to him. Well, he's a guy that has to make sure he monitors pace of play then so he can keep that 200 K or move to two 50 or 300. So I,

I love what you said there. think that that's super smart. I think for the long-term sustainability of it, you have to implement a monitoring process alongside it. And if you don't, you're going to run into problems down the line. we've developed a program within the Tagmarshal system called Variable Goal Times. We're basically applying a different standard of play in the mornings to what we are in the mid mornings and the afternoon.

largely to make sure that by the time you get to your premium block, the pace of play is still running smoothly. All right. And what we've seen, and we call it Fast Lane Golf, we've seen people actually wanting to pay more to play in those earlier times that are running more efficiently and being measured at a faster rate. Do you have integrations or I guess you'd almost call them communication widgets? Do you have ways that clubs can advertise on their sites or within their app?

what pace is running at right now, you know, just so they can give the consumer some peace of mind. Yeah, we have a lot of clubs that actually put our system on a live TV and they clubhouse, right? And it's almost like if you're in an airport, you get an update. So they would see the live map, which has a bit of a policing effect as well, right? Because nobody wants to be that big purple group that's approaching clubhouse 10 minutes, 10 minutes slow.

And then that alternates between here's our goal time for the day and here's our current run time out there. And very often that that helps with setting expectations for the golfers, as you say. To give an example where we have a partner and again, that's a 50, 60 dollar green fee club in Michigan in Auburn that you've never heard of called Fieldstone and they have up to photo photo. How long do you think I've been in golf? I've never heard of.

You know them, of course you know them. honestly don't believe that there is a public golf course in the United States that I haven't heard of. I am Mr. CRM. I've heard of them all, Bodo. 16,000 managers by name have them on speed dial. So this one is in Auburn. And you've heard of them? Amazing. their manager, Chip, he's saying, obviously they're excited to get Tagmarshal on board. And then they turned on dynamic pricing. And they said,

dynamic pricing and five hour runs do not mix right exactly to your point if we do that people will be twice as aggrieved and we get one star ratings on Google twice as fast

I don't know if you're familiar with the Ohio State University club, there's the Scarlet course and the gray course 36 holes that I can walk to from here. 12 minute intervals, right at the Scarlet course 12 minute intervals. Go back to when we were starting to talk about interval optimization. mean, is there a global number that you all feel like this is the number? Or is it very much course specific? Where where do you all fall on on intervals and trying to find the right interval?

Yeah, it really depends on the course, you're right. But this particular one, they have up their green fees revenue by 85 % over three years. So that almost doubled their business by getting it right. dynamic tee times done well with good execution on the quality of play, right? So it is, like I said earlier, printing money time if you do it right. But to your question, we have really made it a science to understand what is optimal in terms of the intervals.

And as to what Craig was said earlier, so we are running the golf courses that work with us at a variable goal time. So according to the data, we know that Fieldstone can run in the morning at 3 hours 20. That is your play time. Then the next slot, an hour in, we can play it at 3 hours 40. And the next slot, closer to mid-morning, we play it at 4 hours. So we stagger that goal time. And if your play time is significantly quicker,

At some portions in the day, you can control and manage that. You can then reduce the interval quite considerably. Why? Because the group ahead of you is moving out of the shot zone because they're playing more quickly, right? So we can get a shot in behind them without a 10-minute interval. We can reduce that to eight. So very often, and to your question, we've seen anything from seven minutes, which is a problem in the making generally, right? That is too tight, to 15 minutes.

which is what the PGA Tour would favor, right? So if you're running 15 minutes, you're basically eroding your capacity by 30, 40%. That's bad for business. You can maybe do it at a really, really high-end private club. But normally clubs would go at the top end, it's the 12 minutes that you just mentioned. At the tight end, it's eight minutes. A lot of clubs have settled on around the 10 minutes. But we would say use the 10 minutes as a start base, and then look where you can practically squeeze it down to eight minutes.

and you would find another two or three tee times, especially in your morning slot that are worth gold to you, right? But you make sure that the quality of play is at tier too and is at a very high standard throughout the day. You know, this conversation makes me think of two development ideas. One, build a plugin for WordPress so that golf courses can easily bring the Tagmarshal...

visual onto their website and show people whenever they want to, you know how pace is performing. So a plug in for WordPress. But then secondly, wouldn't it be interesting if at the end of every 60 day period, quarterly, what have you, Tagmarshal could actually make a recommendation of here's what the interval should be for the upcoming 90 days or here's what, really start to actually make suggestions on here's how intervals should change. And I know that,

customer service reps and account managers do a really good job of that. But to use AI where I could just get a notification if I'm the general manager of here's our recommendation, that would really be something. Yeah, you're quite right. And you had me mentioned 75 million rounds tracked, right? That is perfect baseline data for any AI and machine learning driven optimization, because we have historic data, we have live data, and we have future data.

And what you're saying is exactly the route the Tagmarshal is taking, being more and more predictive and preemptive around recommendations that our system can make, both on a day to day, but also on a periodic basis. And it really comes down to your better management practices and dialing into these small nuances and variables that make all the difference, especially if you make them better 1 % at a time over time, It's incremental improvement in practice.

talk a little bit if you can about certainly that's that's a little bit of a look into the roadmap. But like, what does your road your tech development roadmap look like next 12 to 24 months without getting I don't don't give us proprietary info. But you know, how does the product evolve? What will it be doing 12 months from now that it's not doing today? Craig, this one's for you. I know how excited you are. But I might need to filter outside of

some of what I'm going to say, but I think from our perspective, it's very much around how we can use our data, core understanding of golf courses of all different types and all different locations with all different players and bring a product to the market that really benefits the average Joe golf course without needing to put too much tracking hardware onto their golf course. We call this Tagmarshal AI Optimizer.

And that will be in the market in the very short term. Essentially, what we're going to do, Mike, is we're going to integrate with all of your data sources, your tee sheets, your weather, your superintendent data, your survey data. And we're going to give you an optimal set of setup steps that you as a golf course of this length, in this area, with this type of seasonality, need to do to make sure that you're optimizing the flow and pace of play on your golf course.

What we're also going to give you along with that set of advice is a means to measure it. You'll be able to measure how your flow and pace of play is going and a means to actually track how your team that operate that course are able to improve and follow the tips that we're giving so that we can give you a framework that is really easy to understand and intuitive to improve performance on your course.

Just to give you an idea, we've got a team of business analysts that do do these analysis of all of our member courses. We offer interactions with them on a seasonal basis. At end of every season, guys get a report. But we're open to doing this at a much higher frequency if authors want to interact with us. Well, this AI optimizer product that we bring to market will

do exactly that. It'll give it to you on a almost instantaneous basis. that is for us, the Holy grail of, bringing, of sort of culminating what we're doing in a product that aggregating lots of different data points, frankly, from different sources to come up with this ultimate answer. Does, ultimately does Tagmarshal and other things like tag.

Does it need to live in the phone? is, the ultimate evolution here that like, well, we know every golfer is probably has a phone in their pocket as they're going around the course. This thing needs to ultimately find its way into the phone or is that, is that not the strategy long-term? I'll hand that one back to Bodo cause he's very well-versed at answering it. Yeah. So yes and no, the answer is yes and no. Right. And, firstly, not every golfer has their phone on them and a lot of golfers are using

their time on the golf course to escape from their phone. So it's not as reliable a data source as we would think. But ironically, when we launched our program into the PGA show 2015, our brochure said the Tagmarshal app would be available in quarter four of that year, because we thought the same as you now. We thought the same. Surely this is to live on an app. But what we found was that the operator said, no, we don't want to live on an app. We want to be in control of the data source.

We don't want to rely on our golfers to keep their phones on and keep the app running because the moment their battery runs out, the moment they don't have connectivity on the golf course, the moment they're getting 15 phone calls they don't like and they turn their phone to flight mode, we're losing line of sight. So over the years, every single year, we've prompted this opportunity again with the market and the operators saying, we want to control the data sources. We need to own.

and run these IT units because we cannot rely on our golfers. But second part of the question is, yes, absolutely. It's a great data aggregator, right? So this is where we, again, relying on and working with integration partners that have a footprint. Because think about it, at Fieldstone,

If there's 200 players out there, 10 will be using 18 birdies, 15 will be using this range finder, 50, 60 will be using nothing at all, right? 20 will be using their own little range finder that they brought as hardware. 20 will be using some sort of smartwatch, right? So it's a very mix and mash bag, right? So we don't really want to rely on

an operator like that, which is representative 70 % of the market to saying, if you want to play here, we need you to download the Tagmarshal app, right? Because quite frankly, that doesn't happen. hear you. I, know, I have different companies that I consult for and go in, participate in strategy sessions. And one of the number one, goals, questions, topics, however you want to frame it is how can we provide so much value?

that the golfer can't help, but have his phone on during his round, you know? And honestly, I don't know that anybody's figured it out. There are food and beverage people that believe maybe there's a way that the experience could be so much better if your phone is on so I can deliver the food to you that that does it. But I will say, I totally hear what you're saying, Bodo, because I've not seen a company yet figure out how to convince 90, 95 % of golfers

to use their phone on the course. So I understand what you're saying. Yeah, so our solution here is that yes, in the private club space, we can mandate the club's app usage in a much more compliant way. That is a way to go, right? So that's why we've got a nice integration with the likes of Whoosh. I know that you know the world. Colin's been on your podcast. That is an opportunity for us.

But in the data fee space where there's lots of first time visitors, lots of all sorts of players, it becomes a bit more difficult. But again, the fact that we have years of history and historic data to train machine learning and AI systems and to give us a really high accuracy predictive outcome, even if there's a partial data source, right? Even if we have half the field covered with live data, puts us in a really strong position to provide a solution that adds a lot of value.

to a really broad base of operators without the reliance on hardware, which as you're saying, it does make so much sense. Why can't the phone just be the data source? Yeah. Well, listen, I appreciate you guys coming on. I don't even know what time it is in Cape Town, but I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Craig, this whole concept around dynamic pricing married in.

with ensuring that the experience doesn't get bad as the rate goes up, I think is outstanding. We could probably write about that for days and days. I think hopefully a lot of operators hear that and it resonates with them. I know some operators push back on me. have clients that push back on me about dynamic pricing. I still am convinced that that is the way to really significantly grow revenue at the golf course level.

and so I'm going to, I'm going to stick with that for now. So, but gents, I appreciate you coming on or wish you all the luck in the world. maybe we'll bump into each other.

Yeah, we have some great partners in in Ohio. Obviously love the state of Ohio. we actually also partners with the Ohio PGA section. See that is how we invest in golf in your area. That's good. I'm sure Jack Nicklaus will appreciate that. I'm sure he's listening today. So appreciate that. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Mike OK. Cheers.

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