Welcome. I am Mike Hendrix from SMB GOLF. Today, my guest is Jay Snider from Proshop Tee Times And this is the Tech Caddie podcast. Jay, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's good to see you. It's good to see you too. You know, you're one of these people in the golf technology space that a lot of people don't know about, but I think your story is kind of amazing. And I actually am

you know, proud to have played a tiny role years and years and years ago and that and we'll and we'll get to that. But really we crossed paths again, almost kind of unfortunately because of Helene, the hurricane. And you have a client that wanted to help the people up in Boone and Watauga County of North Carolina. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that client and how this thing came together? And then we'll get into the story of Proshop Tee Times.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Occoneechee Golf Course is run by a gentleman named Scott Ray, a super nice gentleman. he has a background from areas that are affected, by Helene. And, he basically, after he saw the devastation, he sent out an all call saying, Hey, if anyone can help, anyone can send, you know, diapers,

food, even asked for like dog, dog food, cat food, stuff like that. Any way that people can help. he said, you know, basically it sounds like he turned his golf course into a staging area and said, you know what? right now golf is not as important as getting and helping people that need to help. and I reached out to him and I said, you know, Hey, I'm like 12 hours away or something crazy like that. I can't get there, but can I send you stuff, order stuff on Amazon and

have it shipped to you and I was kind of concerned. He said he's gonna have stuff delivered to the course, he's gonna have a truck and then take a truckload of stuff up. And my thing was I wanna make sure that the truck doesn't leave before Amazon got there. he said, yeah, go ahead, send it and as long as stuff's coming, I'll make a second truckload. So I guess that was like Saturday, Sunday timeframe as we were going back and forth. And then,

I actually reached out to him again and I was telling the story to some of family that church I go to and one of our pastors reached out to me and said, Hey, we're trying to help people out. don't have, we're looking for a place that we can trust to send stuff to. got it. So I reached out to Scott yesterday and he said, okay, I now have three truckloads worth of stuff and we really appreciate it. But where we're taking it, they're having trouble distributing it from where he takes it to, the people that need it.

Though at this point he's asking, you know, more immediately some financial donations go to a couple of places. So, yeah, I I think I, you know, I knew that this was going to resonate with you not just because he's a customer, but I know Kentucky, I have family in Kentucky and I know some of the storms that have hit you all in the last, three to four years have been really unbelievable. And I know the governor, your governor's

been very engaged in that. I know everybody tries to help, at the end of the day, it's about, you know, people helping people. I'm headed down to Boone early next week. and I just think it's amazing, you know, what, what you all were able to do through pro shop Tee Times. then, and then it did grow into this larger, you know, your church helping and that kind of thing. And I'll, and I'll just say for people listening, one of the charities that I just, for whatever reason, I do trust a lot. is Samaritan's Purse.

is I believe a very, very, very trustworthy charity. And I know Samaritan's Purse is trying to help as much as they can. And so I just throw that out there for people that are interested, but I certainly do. Thank you for helping. think it was a great thing. And that Samaritan's Purse is one of the two places that Scott had mentioned that we could send financials and he trusted that the money would get to the right place as well. Yeah, Samaritan's Purse is great.

Okay, so thank you so much for that. Back to ProShop Tee Times and all these different golf technology people that watch this podcast and certainly there are golf operators that watch it as well. You have an interesting story. I'll give a little bit of background of how I came to know ProShop Tee Times. There's another, or there was a small tea sheet company called Coles, C-O-L-E-S, Coles Golf, based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

When I was at golf now and we did not own a single tee sheet, we didn't build a tee. This was early, early days. when we would come across an operator that wanted to work with golf now and was on paper and pencil, we started to always offer up Coles. And as a matter of fact, we would pay for the operator to use Coles. Coles was very inexpensive and they became Coles became a solution for us to get golf courses connected to the internet essentially.

Well, as Coles kind of started to dial back and it wasn't always easy to communicate and whatnot. One of the guys on my team, I, I believe it's Tom Barnhart. I'm not entirely positive, but somebody on my team said, do you know about Proshop Tee Times? And I said, no, I don't know about Proshop Tee Times. But what I loved about you guys was first of all, you were in Kentucky and I was in Ohio. So I felt like, okay, that's going to be easier to speak with these guys.

But what was great was how quickly you were able to complete an integration with golf now. And I think you still have that integration today. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And so you were able to complete that integration pretty quick. Now listen, on our end, we pushed it through too, because you helped us essentially grow our customer base in that Ohio Valley. And it mattered to me. So that's how I first came to know.

Proshop Tee Times, but I think you got started certainly before that. Why don't you give us a little bit of background about how Proshop Tee Times came to be? Yeah, so before 2009 and our our product now is called Proshop Tee Times. Our company name is Louisville Computer Guys. And before we got into this software, we were a tech company providing tech support for

small doctors offices and small businesses. And we did a lot of custom programming and, and just technical support in general. My father was on the board of directors at our home course. And after a board meeting, he goes, your dues are going up and it's a semi-private club. And again, this is back in the day where most courses are still paper tea sheet. I said, okay, instead of raising member dues, why don't we sell more greens fees? He goes, well, how do we do that? I said, well, you look at the tea sheet. If it's a slow day.

All of a sudden it's dollar beer night. And he's like, won't we sell a lot of beer? I go, yes, but we'll also be selling greens fees. We break even on the beer. We turn a, a slow day into a profitable day. And, know, and you'd only have so many playable days a year and you want to make all those days, as many of those days profitable as possible. so, but I said, we need a way of, getting a database of email addresses and we need a way of.

being able to send, you know, some kind of mass mailing out and let people know that we're having some kind of a special. So I said, we need an electronic T sheet and online booking. And this is 2009, Jay? 2009. Yes. Okay. All right. Go on. So I started looking around and I'm trying to come up with a proposal for, for the board of directors and general manager, but I wasn't confident how much

how much extra we were going to make off of doing these promotions and all the options at that time required a three year commitment. There's going be however much a month. And, know, I was like, I can't guarantee that we're not actually going to lose money on this. And we had a couple of people that worked at the club. And as we were talking about this, we had a gentleman named Terry goes, they're just doing this. So I'll quit because they're going to make me use a computer. I'm going to have to quit and I'll go, Terry, I promise that's not, that's not what's going on. So,

Anyway, after look going down that path and I wanted to learn a new programming language at the time. So I said, I'm going to develop something for our home course. because really I didn't like any of the other options out there where we had to make a commitment. It's interesting that you say this, Jay, the last podcast we did certainly different type of deal, but Cobalt software, which is really focused on, on private clubs, very, very high end private clubs, actually.

They were built as a solution because, because Boca West country club could not find what they were looking for. So it's interesting how these two origin stories really do, gel together. but, but, why don't you explain to people when you say you were looking to learn a new programming language, what was Louisville, computer guys doing at the time, before you wanted to essentially write this point of sale system? half of our time was spent.

I'm going to some small business office and hooking up a printer or fixing some kind of a problem. The other half of the time, since the late 90s, we've been doing custom software development. I wanted to start learning about the .NET framework. I said, I'll write this software for our course. One of the things I really have always enjoyed, whether it was

working for a small client or before that I even worked for some larger businesses, but I really enjoyed going and sitting down with someone and looking at how they do their job and say, how can I make a software change or what can I develop that's going to let this person, you know, get their job done faster, be able to do more or be something a lot less tedious. I'm not optimized their day. That's right. You're trying to, you're trying to simplify their day.

Right. Make workflows more accurate so that there's one of the great things really just about computing in general is that it removes a lot of human error. It removes a lot of typos and certainly mistakes in that paper key sheet book that can get made all the time. The computerization of that or the digitalization of that is it has been a big win for golf operations. Yeah. So anyway, we got the software done for our home course. They started using it and

when you got it done? Is it now is it a point of sale at this point? Or is it strictly a t sheet at this point? It was just the goal we were trying to accomplish was electronic t sheet online bookings and email marketing. Okay. Another course heard about it and said, Hey, can we use this? Sure. No big deal. Yeah, Then another course heard about it. And he said, we need we'd like to use it too. And it was but you know what, it needs a point of sale.

So I actually went and sat in a, at this golf course that was at the time flooded by a rainstorm. And we sat down and he goes, this is what it needs to do. This is what it needs to do. So I sat there with a gentleman and just basically at a table in his pro shop and the laptop coded the first version of our point of sale system. Wow. Over the course of a week and a half, two weeks. And then all of a sudden I'm like, wait a minute, we've got a sellable product.

Yeah. We didn't actually start out trying to make something that, know, a software package that we were going to sell and, the first just trying to solve a problem, right? Yeah. Trying to solve a problem for that initial club, that, that semi-private club that thinks they got to raise dues or whatever. And so this is a classic startup where, know, like Slack, Slack actually was started just to improve some internal communication at a company that was building gaming.

And then they realized, huh, Slack seems to be pretty good. So this happens all the time. This happens. And if you think about the golf industry back in 2009, 2010, you know, it's, it's in a decline and golf courses are hurting. So we're like, okay, we're going to, you know, start selling this. We're going to develop this. But even at that point we did zero marketing because this golf course is telling this golf course is telling this golf course. They're like, look, give it a try. He doesn't make you sign a contract.

If you don't see a profit, then he's not going to charge you for the software. And that was just kind of our mindset. And it just kind of word of mouth grew. But at the same time, every course we went to back in 2009, I thought a golf course was a golf course, was a golf course. I haven't met two golf courses that have the same policies and procedures yet. I have a group of courses here in Louisville. It's three courses owned by the same person. And if you join one, you can actually be members of all three.

and the policies and procedures of the three courses, we literally have places in our code that says, if this course, then do this, if this course, then do that. And so one of things that we do, and we're still a small company that allows us to do this is we get to know each course and we kind of customize our software for every course. Now, let me ask you something, because this came up recently too. When you say you customize it, does that mean each course is working off of a different code base?

Or there's some internal if thens that doesn't affect the other customers. Yeah, it's more of the internal if thens that don't affect other customers. Okay. And in some cases, it may be just on the main tee sheet. There's an extra button over here. you know, there was a golf course in, near Cincinnati and, they have a driving range and they had a deal worked out with a bunch of different schools. And as the students came in, they wanted to get buckets of balls.

that would then get charged back to the school. Originally, you know, someone comes in, gets a bucket of balls. You say start sale, bucket of balls. And then if it's to get charged with school, you say, want to charge this to the school. So that's six or seven mouse clicks to make that transaction happen. You have 20 of these kids coming in. So we made a button that they can click on this button. And then it comes up at the screen with all the different schools that the students can come in.

So one click to pull up the screen and another click that does everything else that says charge a bucket of balls to this school, give us the code for the e-range machine. So two clicks, they've completed the sale and then get to the next student. That's an example of an optimization that we'll do for, for a course. But, but your other, your customer in North Carolina doesn't even see that button, correct? That button's hidden for everyone else. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It makes no sense for the customer in North Carolina to

to sell a bucket of balls to whatever high school in Cincinnati. But yeah, that's the type of stuff that we do. And today, so for people that don't know, we track golf courses throughout North America and what technology they use. So we kind of we know who your customers are, right? Even before we began this podcast. And certainly, you you do have I don't know if you call it Louisville Metro or city of Louisville, but that's probably your biggest single account, I would think. Yes.

And that's a group of 10 courses, right? Group of 10 courses who I, you know, we sold to them. Like we knew those guys. And, for you to win that account as a, as a smaller entity in golf, think it speaks volumes about the functionality. I've been frankly, really impressed with your newer booking engine. and, and I want you to talk about it, but I'll just share what I am so impressed by. I'm impressed by a lot of it, but the speed of.

click to click. I'm not talking about number of clicks. I'm talking about lag. The speed of click to click in your new engine is kind of remarkable. I mean, there are some larger tea sheet companies out there that, you know, you might get a spinning dial. You might get a, a little bit of a pause. Now the problem with a pause like that is it does plant some uncertainty in the mind of the golfer. if the golfer is first time ever booking online, that's not great.

Right. We don't want that golfer to be like, I'm, I'm, there's, there's, I'm unsure of what's going on. and, and, but the approach at Tee Times is fast. mean, you are, and I don't know what you do to be so fast, but why don't you talk a little bit about this revamped booking engine. And by the way, for people listening, this isn't like a month old, this booking engine has been in use this newer one for at least a full season. isn't, yeah. Yeah.

We redesigned the booking engine probably four four years ago or so So it's it's battle-tested at this point right and I'm not sure what course you were looking at and the ironic thing is is if you go to One golf course and you book through this golf course here The booking engine may look different than it does for this golf course over here just depending on what they want Absolutely, and I had a golf course yesterday from near up near Chicago

And he said, look, we got a problem when people go online and book and this course wants their customers to prepay. So we got that set up for this course. He goes, but they're booking the tee time and they have no possible way of finishing 18 holes and they want to rain check. So he said, I want to make it so that we still have the tee sheet available so we can put names on the tee sheet, but we don't want the public to be able to put Tee Times. So we went in after a certain time. So we went in, some logic behind the scenes to keep their customers from.

not so they couldn't see those Tee Times. She goes, I don't want to change them to nine whole times. I just don't want people to be able to book online after this certain time. No problem. Get that rolled out same day. Next day he calls. goes, yeah, let me just interject there for a second. Cause this is one of the things in the circle of people that know you. This is one of the things people talk about with pro shop Tee Times. You literally just said you talked to him and you got it done the same day. That's kind of unheard of.

with a lot of developers. You all have historically developed very quickly. So then the very next day he calls, goes, yeah, my boss is called. Our members are furious. they can't book online after a certain time. And of course the members get to play for free and a lot of them get off work and they don't care if they're going to finish the round or not. They just want to be able to get a tee time come out. So while I was on the phone with them yesterday, we made another change so that

If it's a member, if the contact type is no member or whatever, then they see the Tee Times, but non-members don't see the Tee Times. So again, that's an example of customizations that we can do. literally while was on the phone with them, and I was, you know, on one side, I'm saying, Hey, how's fishing going? Are you cutting more fish? Cause this guy's always sending pictures of these monster fish he's catching. And then while he's telling me about the fish, I'm making changes and you know, testing it and copy it out and go, there you go. So it's just.

And so you really are a, and I think you have a partner if I'm not mistaken, but you really are a founder slash coder. You are, you know, you're, very comfortable coding. Yes. Yeah, exactly. That's, that's my background. And literally we're a small company. My, partner is my son. And we both have degrees in computer science and you know, he, he's the one that actually designed the second booking engine.

He came back from college goes, Hey dad, this is, this works well. Let me fix it. So, so you went to Western, right? Western Kentucky. Yes. Western Kentucky. Where'd your son go? he went to Northern Kentucky university, Sultner, Cincinnati. Okay. My nephew went to Western, went on to go to, went to the, there's a special program at Western where

high school kids can get through college quicker. Get an Academy. Yes. Yeah. And so my nephew went through that and then went to Purdue and it's about to become a big time pilot for our U.S. Navy. so I hold Western Kentucky in high regard based on how much they helped Caden get to where he is today. So awesome. so, so this is great. So it's father and son. now you and I have also talked in the past,

I don't want to scare anybody off, but you're not interested in adding 30 clients in one year. It does seem like you have a plan, a strategy of, look, we're going to grow every year, but we're not going to grow beyond our ability to service clients or et cetera, et cetera. Why you talk a little bit about that philosophy? Yeah, that kind of goes back to learning that every course is different. So, you know, when we pick up a client, you know, we don't want to pick up

a whole bunch of clients at one time. When we pick up a client, want to not just, we don't want to go in and say, here's the software, this is how you have to use it. We want to go in, we want to understand their course, what makes them different. So we're going to have a week or two where we're really learning about that client and we're going to customize our software. So at the end of those two weeks or whatever that period is, our software is completely optimized for that course. And again, the changes that we make don't affect other courses.

Unless they have a really great idea that I think, hey, this may help this course and we'll reach out to this course and their course. But the other thing that we do for each course or for a lot of our courses, we can pull up this folder for this course and see different information, but we also pull up, try to get a network map of their network equipment and whatever else. So most of our problems that our clients have.

It's not software related. Most of the time it's an internet issue or a hardware issue of some kind. So, you know, we have a course in Southern Indiana and most of the time when they're, when an employee calls, you know, I can say, okay, you're to go back into your storage room to the right where you keep your hot dog buns. There's a piece of network equipment, unplug that piece of network equipment, wait 10 seconds, plug it back in. There you go. Yeah. that's knowing our clients.

That goes back to your original days of you guys were a physical networking company, right? Going and helping people understand how to frankly plug things in and how to network different pieces of hardware together. those, you know, what you learned back then is really still valuable today. You mentioned previously, you've got a bit of a war room where you do monitor.

connectivity, if you will, among customers. Does that include your golf customers where you're able to monitor? it's primarily our golf customers. So why don't you explain that a little bit? I mean, you actually, you actually are watching from afar how their systems are performing. Yes. So we can, you know, we have this, large monitor or small TV or whatever on, the wall. And my son and I have, you know, our desks are side by side, whatever. I, and our, in our working area and the different part.

But we can always kind of look up and say, something's blinking or whatever. So, you know, we go kind of look, see what's going on. The other thing that we do is we found these really cool devices. It's called a Netgear LM1200. And basically we put this at a course and it's constantly checking, hey, is the primary internet working? Is the primary internet working? And if it fails, then it does two things. It auto switches over.

to a cellular connection and sends me a text message saying, this golf course's internet just switched from broadband to cellular. That's awesome. And then, and we've got so many courses using that now, we worked out a deal with T-Mobile, they're giving us a plan where each course, it's like 13 or $14 a month. Yeah. So for $180 a year, each course has, you know what, when our primary internet goes down, we're still gonna be able to process customers.

Right. And they have that peace of mind. But there's a lot of times I'll get a text message at, you know, five o'clock in the morning, 530 saying this course is primary internet is down and I can actually call the their internet provider. You know, if it doesn't come up within a few minutes or whatever, we've been known to call the internet provider. And some of these courses will, they'll give us, you know, the security codes or whatever. So then we call that provider, we're authorized and can say, Hey, what's going on? And you know,

You know, they will, a of times we'll get the problem fixed before they even get there in the morning. That's great. You know, I know there are other systems out there. Well, I won't mention names that they tout the fact that the tablet, if you will, you know, will work on internet or on wifi, or cellular, sorry. but what people don't know is it takes a manual toggle, right? It doesn't automatically toggle over. And so.

when the Bev cart is outside, then the machine comes back inside and they forget to toggle it back and forth. And I've heard a lot of nightmares about that. So it's great that you all have some automation there. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's nothing that we developed. It's the device is called a Netgear LM 1200 and the device itself is only like $50 on Amazon. So any course that, you know, is looking for more reliability, you know, this is something that we found that we really like, but any course can use it.

and it's amazing how often we get a text message saying, you know, this course is down, that course is done a lot of times and only down for 30 seconds before recovers. but sometimes it's down for days. Yeah. Now I think you also, maybe in the last 12 months, you have entered into the app game. If you will, I think, I think you guys have developed some apps for golf courses. Is that,

Is that a one-off or do you want to, do you want all of your clients to have an app? Do you believe you're building an app that, you know, can make a difference, cetera? Why don't you just talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah, we absolutely have an app. And just like everything else we do, we customize it on a course by course basis. So it depends on what that course is looking for. But it is, you know, at this point we're calling it fully functional. It's got all the GPS stuff in it.

we got, know, the geo fences. as they approach the course, they can send, get a message. We use the app to send push notifications of tee time reminders. golf courses are using it to, at the end of the day, before they throw out, you know, 20 hot dogs or whatever, say, you know, anyone that's played in the last four hours, send a push notification saying hot dogs are half price, you know, stuff like that. Yeah.

It's got the digital scorecard we integrate with Golf Genius. It's got the hole by hole. one of the cool things that we're getting ready to release is we've got a second app that's for Proshop Tee Times administrators or for golf course employees. And one of things we're doing is we're going to give the maintenance crew

An option on the app so that when they're on the hole number two And they're cutting the hole while they're standing where that hole is they can tap a button and now our system knows the exact GPS location of the hole on the green So we're not giving you distance to front center and back. We're giving you distance We're going to show you where the hole is on the green Wow distance to the hole. That's great. That's great. it's a

Not that that helps me at all, but some people would. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you, so you mentioned golf genius and I mentioned golf now earlier. what did, mean, how many integrations do you have? How many different systems does, does ProShop key times work with? gosh, we've, we've done quite a few. you know, we did golf now golf 18. we had an integration, we have an integration with a rev tech so that they can

update dynamic pricing at mutual courses. And RevTech now is owned by GolfNow, right? Yep. Okay. So we started, you know, we've, we're talking to Tag Marshall so that when they, people that use Tag Marshall, instead of just seeing a cart number, they can see the names associated with the cart. So we've got our part done on that. We're waiting for them to do their part on it.

We actually, we were talking to someone, can't remember, this was many years ago, but we literally, we were talking to someone, he wanted to do an interface. And while I was on the phone with him, just copied our, you another interface over, made this, made the points. said, okay, here you go. And sent it to him. And it took us, know, once you do the first one, the second one only takes, you know, 20 minutes or so to get it, put it out there. And it's fairly simple.

Yeah, that's what that's what a lot of people say. Yeah, you know, it'd be interesting. You could do a direct integration with Supreme, right, which is another marketplace. You could do an integration with different booking engines. There's there's whoosh that is a a booking engine. There's all sorts of options there. But I think to have Golf Genius is really good. And certainly, you know,

everyone knows golf now can be controversial, but just to have the integration as an option is, is, is a, is a smart thing to do. you and Tom were my biggest sales reps. yeah, that's right. Talk a little bit about, the point of sale, right? I mean, are there, are, do you have customers today that use the point of sale that don't use the T sheet or maybe some people use the T sheet, don't use the point of sale because you know,

To build a point of sale is a much larger endeavor than to build an online tee sheet, if you will. So I'm curious about the point of sale, how sophisticated is maybe like who's the most sophisticated customer you have me and sophisticated is a bad word, but like most demanding customer, they have all these different things that they offer. And so it puts a lot of strain on it. I'm just curious to learn about the point of sale. Yeah, the

The point of sale side of things, the most difficult part of the point of sale that we have found is the golf course that has the full service kitchen. So, you know, a lot of times, you know, a lot of golf courses just have a snack bar, you order a hamburger and every hamburger is the same. The full service kitchen where you have

you know, you're going to get an entree. Then you get to pick two sides and then that side, maybe a side salad. And you got to be able to say, no tomatoes or add this dressing or extra onion or whatever. And you have a printer in the kitchen. It's got to be able to hit the printer in the kitchen. And yeah, yeah. And we have one course that has three printers in the kitchen, a hot side printer, a cold side printer, and then a server printer. And each item you can specify this is gets printed to the hot side. This gets printed to the cold side. And then the salad that's cold side, if they add chicken, then it prints to both sides. So

The food and beverage side of things that's the most complicated. And then when you start enabling online ordering and you got to make it so that the members or the customers through the online interface can say, this is what I want. and then they can choose all their modifiers. So the first version of our software was, know, who the employee could type in whatever the modifiers are, but we had to make it super simple for online food ordering module for the members.

to be able to order something that makes sense and that's available. And so that's the actual most complex part of it. But you've done it. You've built it. yeah. Yeah. Interesting. But we also have we also have the mindset. And I told you a little while ago about a gentleman named Terry at our home course saying they're trying to get rid of me. I always have the mindset when a course says we want the software to do this. I always add

you know, at the end of that statement, we want to make the software do this in such a way that my mother could figure out. love my mother to death. Yeah. But we want to make our software easy enough that, you know, any employee, because a lot of times golf courses will have less technical people that are outdoors people that like, you know, playing golf, they've spent their life outdoors and a lot of them don't like sitting behind the computer and maybe a computer makes them nervous. So that's great. mean,

And that actually does speak a little bit back to the booking engine. So you clearly have an appreciation and you value the user interface, right? You want these workflows to be simple. Doesn't mean they're not smart, but you want them to be simple to use. You value speed, that type of thing. That's, that's, that's excellent. We have a course here in Louisville.

I don't know how they have any grass left on their teas at the end of the season. They do over 55,000 rounds a year and that's an 18-hole course. you know, they have, we set up a second point of sale station in their pro shop just in case one computer ever died, but they do a lot of their stuff just on one station. And I went in and, know, I just kind of stood behind the counter and just watched them work. So when we got it to the point where when someone comes into the pro shop,

They can double click on the name on the tee sheet. It brings up the sales screen based on the contact type, day of week and time of day, brings over the right green fee, automatically adds a cart. They hit another button to get to our checkout screen. And then depending on how they're paying, they can just tap the letter A for cash, R for credit card. We have too many forms of payment starting with a C. But anyway, so literally with, you know, they can either hit the keyboard three times and they've completed a sale.

or they can use the mouse and it's a double click and two single clicks and they've completed a sale. So they can get through that line very quickly. You mentioned credit card for a lot of companies in this space. whole business has just become about processing, right? How much money can the point of sale slash T sheet provider, how much money can they earn off of processing? I'm not looking easy now. You're looking out the industry secret.

I don't want you to share numbers with me, but just talk to us a little bit about who you do work with on processing or how, mean, I don't really know where ProShop Tee Times stands when it comes to the payment processing. Okay. Yeah. So that is, that is a huge thing for us. And we will, we will let customers use any credit card processor that they want.

Wow. So if they can find a deal, you know, we have some golf courses that someone on the board of directors is part of this bank. want to use this process. We'll have to use an external terminal. We get absolutely nothing in residuals or anything like that in that situation. And we're fine with that. Well, that's great. Let me just, let me just cite one example and then I'll let you kind of restate that. But you know, the, people at Walters golf in St. Louis, right.

the, the, the, the, the, the president or chairman, I'm not sure what the title is. Sorry, Jeff Smith. I'm not exactly sure what the title is, but he does sit on a board at a bank. so Wolters golf is always going to process, you know, through that bank. It's unrealistic to think that they would go in a different direction. And so really what you're saying is you've already accounted for that. You understand that that exists today. and ProShop Tee Times is flexible there.

Talk a little bit deeper on that and yes, so You know, we'll go back to Occoneechee That we started this conversation with and when they switched us they were with a company and I'm not gonna mention names But they were the company that said you can either use This processor, you know world pay or stripe or whatever. They had a choice between those two But at the end of the day

for every hundred dollars in sales that they did, they were only seeing 96 or 95 point something. So four point something percent of their money went to the credit card processing company. So we go out and we want our customers to get the best deal possible. So for a long, time, we worked with a lot of our golf courses and said, hey, do you mind sharing a statement with us? And we look at it.

okay. Yeah, you you're not getting great rates. You may want to look at this You're getting great rates. Who are you using then? I would contact this company and say hey, can I funnel these courses to you and Then all of a sudden my clients are happy because I just got them better rates Then this company gets you know bought out merged and I have to go through that process again or whatever So we're constantly working to try to get our clients better rates We've found a company now that we're working with that. We really like

or actually two companies, but, we've got, my, of our clients are, almost all of them are below 2.5%. Some of them are below 2.2%. And again, we're trying to, you know, this company still gives us a residuals and that allows us to, to a great extent set the pricing. but, you know, we got to set the pricing so that we don't get negative residuals. were going to lose money on it. Right.

but we're trying to get as close to breakeven as possible. And, you know, on the first of the month, this company allows me to go in and look at my customer's statements. So no longer have to ask my customers for their statements. And we've actually, you know, there've been one or two times not with the company working with now, but, we'll say, wait, why did your rate jump from this to this? they're doing something weird here. Call them. We've actually got refunds for our clients in the past.

Good for you. And then we'll also kind of monitor, make sure all their PCI compliance stuff is done so they're not getting hit with those fees. So again, we're very much looking to reduce the rates and a lot of people look at it and say, it's just an evil in the industry. Well, Occoneechee, when they switched us, they're saving over $10,000 a year in credit card processing fees alone. We only charge $3,600 a year for our software. that's just one way of, you know,

were earning or increasing their profits. So it's a huge win for Occoneechee really. You you met, actually mentioned statements, but I know it wasn't in, but it just made me think, talk to me about member functionality because I do know, you know, like I said, we, do our research. know you've got private clubs that are using a pro shop Tee Times. I'm, I know nothing about your ability when it comes to member management.

That's what I tend to call this management. Talk to me about what that, if I'm a private club and I'm thinking about Proshop Tee Times, what's my member management going to look like? So yeah, the group of courses I was talking about a little while ago, it's three courses here in Louisville. it's the most common by the way, and even stayed in the house or whatever on the one course.

Yes. So basically you can join either one club or you can join all three clubs. So the course, when they set up the member account, we have a concept of a member account and then they can, that can either be a single person or it can be a family. So from an accounting standpoint, the accountant can go in, a member account, and then they can assign one or more contacts to that member account. And then they can set up recurring billing.

And so maybe they have some things that are billed annually. they're, say a locker fee or handicap fee. They can set that up and they can say, we want this fee to be billed in January. We want this fee to be billed in March, whatever. They can set up other items that are either done monthly, quarterly. They have some things that it'll bill just May through August or something like that. Some kind of pool dues and stuff like that. So at the end of the month, they go into what's called END A MONTH TASKS

and from end a month tasks and each course again has different rules. basically they start at the top and they can say, we want to apply late fees. So when anyone hasn't paid, they click a button. A few seconds later, it says, you know, this amount in late fees is going be billed and it gives a list of people that are going to get billed. So they can look and just sanity check, make sure that maybe a new member that isn't supposed to get late fees isn't on the list or whatever, but it shows you what it's going to do. You click another button, it's done. Then

there's another button that says bill unspent monthly minimums. So any kind of food minimums that people didn't meet. Yep. That goes through. Then the next button is bill any kind of recurring fees. So it hits all the monthly stuff. Then, you know, if you're in January, then maybe it also bills locker fee or whatever. So it kind of looks at each member account and says, this is what's going to get billed. And can the member, can the member have a card on file and it just, absolutely. Okay. Yep.

So the next step is it's going to send out electronic statements. And then the next step, they, you know, they just click on that button and just create statements and send it to each member. Then the next step is you have just a very few people that want paper statements mailed to them. That's kind of what they demand. So then you can print out the paper statements and then they can mail those to them. The statements are then set up. This particular group of courses will send the statements out.

and give the customers a week or two to kind of review them. And if they have any questions, they can ask those questions. And then two weeks later, they go in and it says, do automatic billing. And they just basically pulls up everyone that owes as of the due date and it will go through. And if the person set up with ACH and bills their ACH account, if they're billed with a credit card, it'll bill their credit card on down the line. And through our app, the members can actually go in

and change, add a card on file, add an ACH on file, make this the primary ACH through the app they can view their statement. they can, you know, they're not set up for automatic payment. They can make a payment on their statement and stuff like that. And one of the other cool things that the Fleur-De-Lis courses asked for, this is a while back, is every time someone charges to their member account, the primary contacts, if they want it,

can either get an email or a text message saying, we just filled your member account this amount. Because you sometimes the employee types in the wrong member code. Yeah, or Junior gets a little aggressive. yeah, that could happen. Right. So but, you know, that way, if the wrong account gets charged, they can resolve that issue at that moment and say, yeah, that was supposed to go to Jay's account. Let's you know, let's change this and build to the right person.

Instead of in a month, this person saying I was out of town. I wasn't even there. Then they got to go back and say, we have no idea who ordered this sandwich or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's so okay. So you're, good on, on processing. You're good on member management. Do you have integrations with things like a, a, a, a quick books or a sage or maybe even a yellow dog? Do you have any integrations like that? So yeah, quick books. There's so many different flavors out there. Yeah.

that it's hard to do a direct integration with QuickBooks, but we work, it's a two-step process. So they basically say, within our software, they click on a button, says do QuickBooks export. Some courses do it on a daily basis, some courses do it on a weekly basis, but it just creates an IIF file. Then you go into QuickBooks and say, import this IIF file. Yep, though it's not a one-step process, it's not a single click.

It's a two-step process, but that allows us to deal with all the different flavors of QuickBooks. And some courses want it broken down to a lot more detail. What goes into QuickBooks? Some courses like want every transaction to go across. Where other courses only want, what was the total Greens fee sales to go across? Here's the accounting code for Greens fees. Here's the total. Here's the accounting code for, you know, food and beverage. And that goes across. So it's a much smaller file. So again, we, kind of customize it on a, you know,

whatever the accountant wants. And then when the course gets a new accountant, we recustomize it. Okay. Let me ask you as we, as we kind of wrap up here, look, the system is pretty full featured, right? And, it's, and for people that don't know, we're not talking about 20 customers. It's way beyond 20 customers. Okay. These guys have been around for awhile. it does lead someone to meet like me to think somebody's going to acquire this company.

And I'm just curious how often you get phone calls like that. I think this podcast, frankly, will, I mean, that's going to happen. And I'm sorry if you didn't want it to happen, but it's going to happen just off this podcast alone. But what are your thoughts on that? I mean, what are your thoughts on 10 years down the road? Are you open to acquisition? Talk a little bit about that. So no, that's not something that we've ever thought about. We have gotten one or two phone calls. And honestly,

we love what we're doing. We enjoy what we're doing and it's, you know, it's, and you're building something for your son clearly too, right? I mean, I'm sure there's a mindset with you of, this is going to be something that he can do long after I'm gone. Yeah. Yes. so yeah, it's, it's not something that we're, we're looking to sell. we, and but at the same time, we're still small enough that I'm not sure someone would really

be interested or whatever. know, still have less than 100 clients and, but, know, if you do the math, you know, we charge 300 a month per course. There's only two of us, you know, we're doing okay. we don't want to be greedy. You want to make a fair and honest living off of it. but honestly, we don't want to get to the point where when a course calls, we're trying to remember.

Okay. Who's the primary contact there? You know, we want to know each one of our clients and stuff like that. Talk a little bit about roadmap. like what, you know, what are you all thinking about for 2025? What's the, what's the next feature development is, is talk a little bit about that if you, if you want to. Yeah. So a lot of times, you know, we're a little bit different, you know, we don't say,

we're going to develop these features and sell these features. We let our customers kind of dictate to tell us this is where we want to go. and again, a lot of times, the features that the customer, the course asked for, you know, we didn't even think about, you know, some of these features and then we're, we're able to develop these features so quickly that we really don't have a, this is where our product's going. Again, we let our customers drive that completely. So for example,

One of the courses wanted a digital ID system for the lifeguards to use to check members into their, into their pool. So they use a tablet. I say, I'm the Snider family. They probably didn't my last name or my member ID. None on tablet shows my picture and everyone in my family's picture. And they just tap on my picture and my daughter's picture and say, check in. And it says, yeah, Jay, you have not paid your dues in months. You're not getting in, but we literally developed that, you know, in over a weekend.

And we worked with the lifeguards and we went back and said, okay, we're not a lifeguard. So after lifeguard told us how it should work, we made those changes. So again, it's, don't really have a roadmap of we're to do this feature, then this feature, then this feature. very much let our customers define that force as, the time goes. Yeah. You know, some people call that a train track roadmap and then people say, what's that mean?

Well, it's like when people used to put their ear to the train track and they knew if something was coming. Right. And so you all really just, your roadmap is about listening. Yes, absolutely. And, and look, there's no right or wrong way to do any of this stuff. Right. At the end of the day, the right or wrong way is, is are you profitable and are you sustainable? In other words, you're not overwhelmed with service calls. You're not on to, know, you can handle the support.

I would assume you all have some level of documentation for new users to learn how to use Proshop Tee Times or whatever. As long as you check those boxes, I think anyway, you're headed in the right direction. What about simulators, You have so many golf courses. That's another thing we track, but so many golf courses that put simulators in. Do you feel like your reservation system can handle simulators? Maybe it can handle pickleball. Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, absolutely. mean, a simulator is just, you know, another course. So maybe, you know, we have courses that are, have, you know, maybe there are 27 whole facility or 36 whole facility. The simulator to us is just another course. me challenge you on that a little bit, because I do believe similar, there is some differences in simulators. In other words, Hey, maybe this reservation is allowed to have six people for two hours. Right. And that

doesn't really fit into a traditional tea time approach. And so I guess that's what I'm asking is, have you built the system in a way that can handle reservations that are more oriented to what we see with simulators? Yes, yes. So and again, the simulator, the tea time interval on a course, maybe eight minutes or 10 minutes, the tea time interval on a simulator is, you know, depending on how the course once it's set up, maybe, you know, two hours or four hours or whatever it is, and then they can block it off in multiple sections.

but again, it's, we have maybe four or five courses that are doing simulator bookings online. and it's, you know, the course tells us how they want it to work. And then we make that happen. We even have a lessons booking module for online. Nice. A pro can say, Hey, these are the times that I'm to set aside where I can give lessons. So when someone calls the pro shop, just like they book a tee time, whoever's broken the pro shot can see that the pro is available at this day at this time.

and go and put the name on there or someone can book that online and it gives all the pricing, the time slot and whatever. And really cool part about it is as they're taking that lesson, the pro can use their phone, take pictures and upload either pictures or videos. And then the player can go back later and look at their lesson from six months ago to this lesson now and say, yes, I still have a wicked slice, but they can see what their swing looked like then now and how it's progressing. And you didn't use, you didn't.

like API into some lesson system. You built that? Yeah, we built that from scratch. That's amazing. You guys have really built a lot. mean, there are, you check some, like some, some courses could be working with four different companies based on, and it seems like you could, you could take care of all four of those things. The, the coolest thing we have that we just released, was, our beverage cart food ordering module.

So the traditional beverage cart just goes around the course backwards. You have someone interrupting every group. Do you want anything? Do you want anything? Where the group that actually wants something is still nine holes away and it's going to take an hour for the beverage cart to get there. With our food ordering system within our app, you basically just like ordering a mobile app, say from McDonald's. But the difference is, is as soon as they place that order and pay for it, the beverage cart person gets a message on their phone.

saying the group on hole number three wants this and this and this and they can take these items, put them in a grocery bag, drive to hole number three and just hand it off. So there's no longer this interaction of the beverage cart coming up saying, do you want anything while your group's in the fairway getting ready to hit their approach shots. There's a group on the tee waiting to hit, but now they got to wait for you to order your food. There's no expensive credit card machine because you just paid for it with your phone. And you did, you placed the order while you're waiting the tee off. The order gets there and is hand delivered.

And the beverage cart person is interrupting people. So it's a, to me, I think it's a very optimized approach to beverage cart management. and it just takes out all the expensive equipment. takes care of the issue of dead spots on the golf course. Yeah. of course that's not to say that we would recommend every golf course, not, I mean,

There is something to be said for selling to the golfer as well. Not waiting for an order, right? I don't think I would advocate not trying to sell beers or hot dogs. Well, not hot dogs from a Bev cart, but beers or candy bars. But I understand, I understand your point. Yeah. Yeah. Your beverage cart person is still kind of driving around, but it does always seem to get behind that group that every time the beverage cart person comes around, they're saying, what do you got? And then I'm waiting behind them for like 10 minutes to, yeah.

And I have noticed too, I think you're building websites for people. I've noticed a specific WordPress theme that a lot of Proshop Tee Times customers have. It doesn't necessarily say Proshop Tee Times like in the footer, but I recognize your theme enough to know like, think you're probably building those sites. Yeah, we, you know, some of the golf courses, that's not something we originally got into the business to do. But some of the golf courses has kind of demanded it.

Yeah. And so we just started doing it and we provide that as a service as well now. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. We're not looking to make a huge profit off of it, but at the same time it's, we're going to, we generally undercut what they would pay someone else or, know, someone else to do it. So, hey, look, once you've got the, the theme built the way you want it.

Right. It's, you can scale that pretty quickly. We have several different themes and you know, we will say, what do you like and whatever, and then we'll make it the way that they want it. the other thing that we give them is the ability to, they can go and make changes, but a lot of our golf courses say, Hey, we want this on the website. We want, they just call us and we make the changes for them very quickly. And that's, that's built into the model into the price. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, listen, I've enjoyed, catching up.

again, I can't thank you enough for the, help with everybody in Boone and, and with Watauga County, it's terrible that they need help, but, sometimes that happens. and I, and I just, wish you all the luck in the world. I hope there's, know, it would be great to check in on your son one day and he's got eight different employees, right? And, this thing is really, you know, powering 500 or 600 golf courses. that would be, that would be outstanding. Yep. Yeah.

So I appreciate the time. So be safe when you head down and help the flood victims or whatever. And if we can help out, let us know. Okay, we'll do that. And so everybody that's that's Jay Snider from Proshop Tee Times And this was the Tech Caddie podcast.

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