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From the outside, Games People Play looks like a typical driving range. But this Beaumont, Texas, facility is anything but. A 41-acre practice and teaching center with nearly $3 million in assets, Games People Play doubles as one of the top golf retail stores in the eastern part of Texas, and possibly the U.S.
Golf Business World magazine recognized the facility for three consecutive years from 1999 to 2001 as one of the Top 100 Golf Shops in the U.S. Likewise, Ping, TaylorMade and Callaway have all honored the facility for club fitting in recent years, and for the past 10 years, the local Beaumont Enterprise newspaper has given Games People Play a Readers’ Choice Award as area “golfers’ favorite place to shop and practice.”
“The success we’ve had is really based on the employees,” says Jeff Williams, who with his wife, Marilyn, purchased the facility in 1984. “I have a wife who’s been a fundamental part of the business and I have so many key people who make this place run.” Today, that list includes a staff of 20, a huge jump from the two employees who manned operations 19 years ago when it was still a mom-and-pop outfit.
Since that time, Williams has created a profitable retail enterprise by stocking all the top brands and taking customer service to a new level in the pro shop, where his simple philosophy—treat people the way they like to be treated, with respect and courtesy—has taken root. Cross-promoting the range and retail side of the business has been another successful strategy, one that Williams says many golf range owners often overlook. “People who come out to hit range balls, potentially every one of them is obviously a golf customer,” he says. “The added attraction of a range that draws customers in on a daily basis, that’s what every retailer wants—to try to get traffic through his door. The driving range is a built-in traffic-builder.”
It’s this type of business acumen that dominates Williams’ decisions. And each one makes Games People Play bigger and better.
Something to Build On
Before entering retail, Williams was a partner in a steak and seafood restaurant with the original owner of Games People Play, an old-time golf range that opened in the 1960s. When his business partner decided to sell his interests in both food and golf, Williams took the reins at both companies, eventually leaving the restaurant for the range. In 1986, he made the first major improvement at the facility when he doubled the size of the pro shop from 600 to 1,200 square feet and installed batting cages.
It was at that point that he also decided to keep the facility’s name, despite its general overtones. “Every now and then we still get a call from somebody asking us if we’ve got a checkerboard or a pool table for sale,” says Williams. “But we’re well known locally and that means a lot.”
By 1988, Williams was completely out of the restaurant business and putting more and more of his time and money into the golf facility. In 1992, he remodeled the retail store, expanded and rebuilt the range and target greens and made major drainage improvements to the landing area. In addition, a 4,000-square-foot maintenance building was added just to service the range. “A lot of times I’ve seen people neglect maintenance but if you want to have a good-looking facility—and that’s very important—maintenance is something you have to address,” he says. “I built the maintenance facility first because that’s how important I felt it was. We have two employees that handle all that for us.”
Williams purchased the land that the facility sits on, a total of 41 acres, including some rental properties, in 1996. The decision to acquire the land and the financial appreciation of that property across time has been one of the business’s greatest assets, says Williams.
In 1998, Williams really began putting his mark on Games People Play. He added 16 covered hitting stations and some netting. He improved the parking lot, built a teaching and short game center, redid the target greens (again) and added a new centerpiece—a 9,500-square-foot retail center that replaced the old pro shop.
By the next year, those Golf Business World awards for retail sales started rolling in, and the facility’s reputation as one of the top golf retailers around was growing. Today, Games People Play is the region’s largest retailer and fitter of name-brand golf equipment, including Ping, Wilson, Titleist, TaylorMade and Cleveland. In addition, Games People Play is the only computerized fitting cart dealer in the eastern part of Texas for Callaway.
Williams gives his suppliers a boost with demo days held monthly during the prime season and once or twice in the fall. As many as 12 or 13 manufacturers attend, setting up tents and demonstrating the latest in equipment, while Games People Play supplies free food and drink. A lot of marketing dollars are put toward advertising the demo days in local media and through on-site promotions. The return on investment is usually several hundred attendees, like the 300 who came out for an event this past May.
Retail Is Detail
So what advice does one of the country’s leading golf retailers have for other ranges and golf practice facilities looking to enhance that portion of their business?
“Start small and just go with one or two particular vendors and get in very good with them,” says Williams. “I’ve known a lot of people who have been successful like that.” Because the marketplace offers such a wide product selection, Williams says taking this more narrow approach is a better bet. “Unless you have a lot of square footage and lot of capital to invest, it’s almost impossible to stock a broad selection.” Williams says manufacturers’ increased variety of club offerings, including customized flexes and shaft variables, makes it more difficult to stock exactly what a customer might want. Instead, he says, “try to pick one vendor or maybe two and really try to do a good job with them rather than doing a so-so job with a bunch.”
With space to spare, Games People Play has tried to win customer loyalty by offering the biggest selection, the best price and quality service. In addition, the business earns customer trust by offering a 30-day guarantee on its custom-fitted clubs. Even after customers have taken clubs home and hit with them, they can return the clubs and get a store credit. If the clubs have been misfitted, Games People Play will make appropriate revisions at no expense to the customer.
“Retail is hard,” Williams says. “Retail is a lot of detail, not to say the driving range isn’t, but it’s not the same. There are a lot of little things to consider and the execution is challenging. You have to buy an item. You have to put a price on it that’s competitive. You have to figure a margin. You have to receive it properly. You have to check the invoice for accuracy. Does the invoice amount match the amount on your orders? We see that discrepancy a lot between us and the manufacturers. People make mistakes and there’s a lot of checks and balances in retail that have to be performed because if you don’t, in the long run, you generally pay a price for it.”
The shorter life cycles of clubs also is an increasing concern for Williams. Retailers who don’t stay on top of the latest trends can get stuck with devalued inventory, he says. “Used to be that you’d get a life cycle that was three or four years,” he says. “Now some life cycles are 12 months and some are even less on big clubs. That makes it tough.”
Williams and his associates are keenly aware of the shelf life of the products they sell. That awareness has allowed Games People Play to maintain a solid trade-in and used-equipment business through the years. Williams says that part of his business relies on staff knowing what incoming clubs are worth and how to price them. “If you’re good at it, you can do some good,” he says. “If not, you can get crushed.”
For instance, a used Ping driver might go for $150 when new ones are selling for $399. But if the new club prices drop, used prices must drop proportionately. Now, that shorter life cycle on new products is also coming into play, affecting used club sales, too.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m almost getting into the produce business; some of this equipment is starting to get perishable,” Williams jokes. “That’s what you have to watch out for with used equipment. That’s where we get caught every now and then because if you start handling a whole lot, it’s harder to keep up with.” The trick, Williams says, is for staff members to stay active in trading so that they know the market. “If you’re out of it for 60 days, you have to start asking somebody else what something’s worth,” he says. “You lose the feel for it that quickly if you’re not staying involved.”
Bricks and Clicks
To further enhance new club sales, Williams says Games People Play is looking into building a permanent, enclosed outdoor fitting bay along the tee line. Currently, fitting carts are rolled back and forth between the retail center and the tee stations.
Williams likes the idea of a visible, permanent center for club fitting. He’s big on the visual side of retail, borrowing ideas from department stores and other retailers to position the facility’s wares and keep customers interested. Simple ideas, such as having customers purchase ball dispenser tokens at the retail counter, keep potential shoppers moving through the space. Staff also frequently change the main displays in the front of the store and around the cash register.
Just five months ago, Games People Play took its thriving retail business online. Customers can browse and buy merchandise at www.gppgolf.com, which also features basic information about the facility. Williams hired an outside contractor to build the site and then went to nearby Lamar University to hire a net-savvy student to update and run it.
“I’ve heard people say they regretted their investment in their web site because they didn’t sell enough off of it,” Williams says. “That’s not how I look at it. I don’t sell enough on the web site to pay for it but you can’t always track how many people may look at your site and then come out here and buy something.”
Williams says he also sees the site as a tool to help new sales associates master the job’s learning curve. During downtime on the retail floor, instead of going back to the offices and searching through brochures to become familiar with merchandise, employees can use the web site to study products and learn nuances without leaving the counter unmanned.
“We hire sharp, young people and this is a learning tool for them,” Williams says. “You get a new employee on board and it’s hard to get them schooled up in a short period of time unless they’re very golf literate or an avid golfer. It can be very overwhelming with all the brands.”
Decisions and Directions
It’s interesting that Williams, a former restaurant owner, opted never to add food service. Cold drinks are sold in the store, but other than experimenting with some food vending machines in the early years, Williams has never thought to delve into a more expansive food and beverage operation.
“We tried outdoor vending machines but it gets so hot here in the summer, anything you put in there tends to melt,” Williams says. “Snacks may be something we missed but it just never seemed to be a real big part of the business so we just didn’t mess with it.”
In fact, if it doesn’t directly affect the practice and teaching part of the business or the retail side, Williams has pretty much shied away from it. The exception to the rule is the covered, nine-station batting cage that Williams had installed in 1986. He’s not exactly unhappy with that end of the operation, but revenues at the cages have been dropping annually. Williams says the most disappointing aspect of the batting cages is that there’s no “territory protection.” Not long after he built his batting facility, several more popped up within a 30-mile radius.
“Revenues have gone down to the point where I wouldn’t do it again,” he says. “People think the Putt-Putt [which Games People Play doesn’t offer] and the baseball cages are a great add-on, and it may be for some people, but I think every market is different.”
By comparison, the facility’s 76-station tee line is much more than just the “traffic builder” Williams calls it. Sixty of the tees are 419 Bermuda grass, and so is the 1,000-foot-wide by 1,200-foot-deep landing area. Another 16 covered tees use Fiberbuilt mats, and the entire tee line is laser-distanced to six raised target greens, ranging from 80 to 250 yards. The distances are displayed on insets in granite blocks placed every 10 yards along the back of the rotation area for the grass tees.
There’s also a 4,500-square-foot chipping green with a bunker in the front. Ground lighting in the field and pole lighting on the line allow play into the warm Texas nights, and likewise, a completely separate teaching area along the backside of the facility is also lighted. There, PGA Class A Professional Don Keen has 22 stations on a double-tiered tee line to afford students privacy as they practice, hitting onto the same big landing area, but from the back and from the side of the facility. Customers who purchase an annual membership for $1,500 also can use the secluded tees and the accompanying 1-acre short game area.
Keen offers a variety of packages for adults and juniors, including private and group lessons, clinics and schools. A summer Junior Club package is one of the most popular options, and Keen takes students as young as 7 years old. He also offers regular corporate schools and a variety of adult lessons for players of all levels.
As the teaching end of the business grows, Williams is considering adding another building just for that purpose. Like the expanded practice offerings and retail space that have grown incrementally and garnered the facility so much attention and so many accolades throughout the years, Williams sees the addition of a dedicated teaching building as a natural development in the business’s evolution.
“We’ve kind of evolved into what we are today and what we offer,” says Williams. “I can’t tell you where it’s headed, exactly. We just keep coming out and keep working. I think we’ve built something with a little substance to it, and we’re proud of what we do.”
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