We were lucky to catch up with Greg Lipper recently and have shared our conversation below.

Greg, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I lived overseas for 30+ years, returning to San Diego because my parents are here and in their 90s, and it was time to be present.

I got back into golf after 25 years of not playing and fell in love with it all over. I wanted to use golf for business development, but there were two problems. First, getting tee times at courses I would want to bring a client was a hassle and unpredictable. Second, I was new to town and didn’t know a lot of people to invite.

I went looking for a service that could solve both the problems of access to tee times and access to prospective clients to play with and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t believe that it didn’t exist. Everyone I talked to about it agreed that 1) it doesn’t exist and 2) it would be great if it did. So, I created a very simple version to invite non-technical founders to play golf with me because I was selling software development services at the time.

Sometimes you have an idea, and sometimes it has you. In this case, the idea had me. It just took over and became the only thing I could think about, so I decided I had to try to build a global golf networking platform.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

PrimeTimes.Golf is a golf networking platform that enables members to grow their business by playing golf with curated groups of prospective clients, partners or teammates. We solve both the supply side problem of convenient and predictable access to tee times far in the future and the demand side problem of groups of 16 business-relevant people to play with. Our format ensures that all 16 players meet each other and can continue their relationship after the event.

Members can also bring their own clients and partners to events or use our prospecting service to invite ideal clients they don’t yet know to be their guest for a round of golf at a beautiful course.

We currently operate in San Diego, California only and will soon begin our nationwide expansion through a network of operation partners in the top 20 markets across America.

The vision is to enable members to play locally or when they travel nationally or internationally at prime courses and tee times with a vetted group of business people who they can research before they arrive at the course. How much fun would it be to plan for a day of golf before/after business on a trip and invite prospective partners and clients in that city to play with you all with a few clicks of a mouse or taps on a screen?

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I began this project as a side project while employed with another company that was paying me a salary while I was paying them to develop the platform. Then the job went away, and I had the Cortez moment of deciding to burn the ships, forego another job, and invest my time and money into the completion of the vision. At 58, it was not a light decision to invest my savings. I have been through the fundraising process for startups before, and I learned that taking outside money too early relinquishes control and ownership before the concept in your head can be seen, understood and appreciated by others.

Employment offers the illusion of security. Entrepreneurship offers the illusion of control. They are both illusions, but you have to be honest with yourself about which illusion is important to you. If you want security, then don’t start a company. If you want control, then don’t take on investors too early because then you are essentially just taking a job that offers lower pay and less security than you could get from an established company employment. give up control without getting any security in exchange.

So, I decide to invest the money and time I had to accomplish three things: 1) create the platform, 2) recruit a reasonable number of target members, and 3) prove product-market fit with both their feedback and repeat play. In 4 months, 174 members were recruited, they played in a total of 12 events, reported 93 new relationships made, and we can point to $500,000 of opportunities originated from our events on our members’ pipelines. Ok, phase 1, mission accomplished.

Now, phase 2. Raise a little bit of money to optimize the platform and marketing to achieve positive cash flow in home market and prepare for nationwide and global roll out. There are two kinds of people in my world: golfers and everyone else. Golfers will understand this business before I finish the explanation. Everyone else will question it until I am blue in the face. Don’t have time for that. The beautiful thing in my case is that I had over 100 business people who had tried the service and fully agree with the premise. So, bring them into a partnership where they each provide a small amount of capital, participate in the profits and exit, and some can provide expertise or capabilities the business needs for a reasonable fee in addition to their profit share.

This makes them feel like insiders (because they are!) and encourages them to be ambassadors of the business. It offers them dilution protection (LPs, unlike shareholders, can’t be diluted), and I keep full management control. I once ran a company with 19 shareholders that had multiple and changing opinions. It was very hard to make and implement strategic decisions quickly. I want to avoid that problem and the LLP structure enables this while still providing the Limited Partners with great benefits.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The worst advice I ever believed is “never give up”. I had that attitude with my previous business and held on much, much longer than I should have. Businesses fail for 1000 reasons, some in the entrepreneur’s control, some not. Some they can fix or avoid, some they can’t.

The failure of a business doesn’t equate to the failure of the entrepreneur unless the entrepreneur allows the business failure to consume or ruin so much of their capital, reputation, relationships, health, motivation and confidence that they can’t start again. So, “never give up” is great advice if you interpret it as never give up on yourself, but it is very dangerous advice if you apply it to your business. You have to force yourself to regularly and honestly ask yourself if you would invest today in your business knowing everything that you and only you know about it. If the answer is no once or twice, keep working it. If the answer is no month after month, figure out how to preserve your reputation, relationships, capital and confidence to invest into another business by exiting or ending the current one.

Venture capitalists invest in a tiny percentage of the businesses they see and all they are risking is a virtually limitless supply of other people’s money. Entrepreneurs are investing their most important and limited resources: time, energy and reputation and they usually apply a much less stringent evaluation criteria. They love an idea because it is their idea or because they don’t know what else to do, but that doesn’t mean it is a good idea or that they have the resources to implement it. The value of an unimplemented idea is zero. If you can’t implement it, don’t let a beautiful idea ruin your life. Move on to an idea you can implement whether it is an original idea you thought of or not.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.primetimes.golf
• Instagram: primetimes.gol
• Facebook: primetimes.golf
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primetimes-golf
• Youtube: primetimes.golf
• Other: [email protected]

Image Credits

No credits. I took the picture