In July 2005, as Glenn Swader looked out at the barren land in front of him, he superimposed his vision of Swaders Sports Park on the 35 acres that once served as a landfill. After an eight-month delay caused by financing setbacks and a longer-than-expected site evaluation, it was nearly here—groundbreaking day. The engineered site plan was complete and Glenn was eager to finally get down to business, digging through the dirt and shaping the land into the first family enter-tainment center for the Tri-Cities of Petersburg, Hopewell and Colonial Heights, Va. He knows that soon he will need a right-hand man, someone to manage the park’s operations while he tends to the dirty work. Glenn may be an entrepreneur but he’s a reluctant businessman. Designing an FEC and managing the construction process is no problem for this second-time range owner, but he abhors the daily minutiae of marketing and human resources.

“I hate putting operational manuals together,” Glenn says. Younger brother Ken, however, thrives on such details, so it was a “no-brainer” to bring him on board to balance the management team.

“Kenneth is a detail-oriented person,” says Glenn. “The kind of guy you have to have; plus, I trust him.” At first, Ken didn’t share Glenn’s enthusiasm for the project. “It took me almost a half a year to convince him this is where he needed to be,” says Glenn. “When I finally had a construction trailer out here, and he saw it really was going to happen [he signed on].” He saw that “it wasn’t another one of my hair-brained business ideas.”

Ken, who had been working as a consultant after breaking away from the publishing industry in April 2005, admits he needed tangible evidence before making another career move. “I wanted him to have his financing. I said, ‘When you get a construction trailer, telephone, Internet access and AC, I’ll come up.’”

Glenn held up most of his part of the bargain: an air-conditioned trailer. It was up to Ken, the new director of operations, to furnish it and get temporary phone and fax lines and Internet access. He also posted signs outside each of their offices so that visitors would know whom to bug for what. The markers demonstrated the yin and yang of this brotherly relationship. Ken’s responsibilities: computers, accounting, web site and “what kind of mood Glenn’s in today.” Glenn’s were threefold: money, construction and “how you #%@* up.”

The wrong direction
With the primary management team in place, the brothers broke ground Aug. 5, 2005, and not long after hit their first roadblock: getting an address.

Construction crews enter the site from Puddledock Road, but the plans are for the dirt road coming off busy Temple Avenue to extend 335 feet and become the new Whitehill Boulevard, flowing into the business’s parking lot. “There’s lots of things you have to go through when building on an undeveloped parcel of land,” says Ken, and getting a legal address is one of them. “Because we were a new road, we had to wait until there was a recognizable address for Verizon to give us access.” So for three weeks the business operated off cell phones.

“The cable for high-speed Internet has been a bigger challenge,” notes Glenn. The plan was to use Verizon DSL, but the phone lines don’t support that service. Plan B is to bring the cable line in from the road. “It will end up costing about $8,000 just for that one aspect, but it’s necessary for credit card processing, our POS systems and to be as efficient as we need to be with the Internet and communication,” Glenn says.

In another location-based glitch, MapQuest plotted the business on East Whitehill Road instead of Whitehill Boulevard. “That was two miles away in a completely different area,” says Ken. He was told it would take 90 days to correct. It took five months. The mix-up wouldn’t have been such a nuisance except that www.swaders.com launched in September with a MapQuest link for directions—to the wrong location.

But in this tight-knit community, everyone already knows about Swaders. Two local dailies wrote front-page articles about the park, adding to the early buzz, and the oversized, temporary Swaders Sports Park sign facing Temple Avenue attracts curiosity from passers-by. Also part of the early promotional efforts, Ken ordered logoed shirts, jackets and ball caps, which he, Glenn and Glenn’s wife, Tammy, who co-owns the business, wear around town.

In control
While Ken was busy building a brand, Glenn was lining up vendors and overseeing construction.

“After building Windy Hill, I thought I would be able to save a considerable amount of money by handling the general contracting duties myself,” Glenn says, referencing his first range in Midlothian, Va. He admits it was difficult to develop a master plan for a 35-acre sports park with multiple amenities, but says acting as his own contractor gives him the flexibility to “make decisions on an ‘as-built’ basis, reacting to changes and construction needs.”

In the beginning, Glenn’s tracking system consisted of a weekly planning calendar and “lots of piles of paper on my desk.” Ken quickly replaced Glenn’s “system” with a combination of paper-based and computer files.

Another key to managing the construction process has been vendor “compartmentalization.” For example, when America’s Nationwide Netting Inc. arrived, it brought everything it needed: people, materials and supplies. It was the same deal with the go-kart track, batting cage and miniature golf course builders. Glenn didn’t have to outsource anything but the suppliers. “I ended up having to deal with about 15 people for most of my communication,” says Glenn happily. “We implemented a weekly construction meeting on Tuesdays at 9 a.m. to facilitate communication and coordinate efforts.”

The more difficult aspect of serving as general contractor was working with companies whose competencies crossed. “Because I had so many people out here working on the projects, contractors overlapped each other,” says Glenn. “Trying to keep everybody happy and on the same page was a problem.”

Surfing for suppliers
Some of the vendors, such as site engineer the Timmons Group, Branders Bridge Landscaping and Southern Construction, which is grading the site and eventually will build the parking lot and the concrete pathways and patios, were local referrals or phone book finds. To locate national vendors for the various amenities, though, Glenn turned to the Internet.

“It’s amazing what you can do on the Internet,” he says. “Ten years ago we didn’t have this information available to us. There’s so much you can research—finding people and looking at things. There’s almost nothing you can’t download or get.”

America’s Nationwide Netting Inc. in Cypress, Texas, is one of the companies Glenn found on the web. He followed up his online evaluation with a phone call for references. He got a pretty good one: Pinehurst. “If you’re going to do work at Pinehurst, you must do good work,” says Glenn, who promptly called the legendary North Carolina golf resort. The netting company was still on-site and the foreman drove up to meet with Glenn. “From talking to the guy and getting a read on him, I knew he was the guy for the job.”

By October, the 45 engineered steel poles—18 down each side and nine at the end of the range—were already soaring above the site. The poles are black powdercoated with a 2-foot-tall chain link surrounding the bottom to protect the netting from edgers. At its peak, the netting will be 75 feet high to keep balls from raining down on the batting cage and go-kart tracks, both of which sit to the left of the range.

Tim DeBord of DeBord Enterprises out of Rockspring, Ga., is building the tracks and the monopole batting cage. The two tracks—a slick track wedge and a meandering Grand Prix—are outlined with NASCAR-size tires, which are bigger than the tires typically used for a perimeter rail system. The karts from Shaller Enjuneering in Schulenburg, Texas, will be housed in the metal pit building that divides the two tracks. Customers will enter the building on a concrete sidewalk, which is flanked on the left by eight slick track karts and on the right by 16 single-seater and six double-seater karts. There also will be eight rookie karts for riders who are not tall enough to drive the regular karts. For safety reasons, these karts can’t run alongside the other karts, so Ken says they will be used mostly for group outings and birthday parties. As an added layer of safety, Glenn is investing in a wireless system that puts each running kart in idle mode with the press of a button, allowing spun-out cars to be put back on the track safely or to bring dangerous drivers to a standstill.

Glenn isn’t worried about noise complaints, mostly because the business is located in a retail-populated area. “Early on there was talk about a sheriff’s deputy or police officer that was very particular about noise, carrying around a decibel meter. Nothing ever came of that,” he says. “Our closest neighbor is the Harley-Davidson shop, and they produce much more noise. Keep in mind, we haven’t fired up any engines yet.”

Standing in pit row, customers will be able to see batters swinging away in the nine-slot hitting cage. When choosing a pitching machine manufacturer, Glenn relied on his first experience with batting cages at Windy Hill. “I put ABC cages up at Windy Hill. Hilton [the current owner] says he still has those same machines there and that was from 1989. If the machines are going to last that long, ABC was the route I was going to go.”

The four softball (two slow pitch and two fast pitch) and five hardball machines (40, 50, 60, 70 and 80 mph) will also have a remote-control function tied to the POS system, allowing staff to start and stop the machines, or to set them up for rental in half-hour or one-hour increments.

Of all the amenities, the two 18-hole miniature golf courses are closest to the road so that drivers along Temple Avenue can see the two central 8-foot-tall waterfalls. Harris Miniature Golf Courses Inc., another one of Glenn’s Internet finds, was one of the first companies on-site. “They were here in late August, and stayed until early November,” Glenn says.

With two layouts, the “hill,” as Glenn calls it because of the natural elevation, is designed for maximum profitability. “If you have the land and the budget, you can put 144 guests an hour on the hill instead of 72,” he notes.

The courses will incorporate Harris’ signature natural design features: two waterfalls, six fountains and streams throughout, complemented by elevation changes and lots of landscaping to create fun and interesting play. Each course also will have a practice putting green “to give the guests a better idea of how the ball will react on the carpet with the undulations,” says Glenn.

Good planning, good weather
Careful planning spared the brothers from any major construction delays. And the mild winter didn’t hurt either. Central Virginia saw some spring- and summer-like temperatures as early as January.

“We’ve had as nice a winter for weather as possible,” says Glenn. “Very few days were lost because of weather.”

The bigger issue has been the budget and making decisions quickly to keep the project moving forward.

“The budget is more of a moving object than we expected initially,” says Glenn. “We’ve added two buildings that weren’t in the original plan: a 40- by 80-foot steel building that will house a mechanical area for go-kart maintenance, and a 12-by-12 starter shack at the entrance to the two miniature golf courses. It will allow us to have an outdoor POS station so guests don’t have to go back into the clubhouse to buy tokens or go-kart rides.”

Another unbudgeted line item was the crawl space underneath the 3,700-square-foot clubhouse, custom designed by Jamestowne Builders Inc., which also is building the starter shack and a caddy shack for the range. The clubhouse was originally going to be built atop a concrete pad, but because of the landfill underneath, the foundation was changed to a crawl space “because the engineers felt that in the event of any settling or shifting, it would be easier to repair or reconcile,” explains Ken.

That change alone added $53,000 to the cost. “We are over budget, but it’s a manageable number,” says Glenn.

More money is also being poured into correcting drainage problems on the driving range. Even after shaping the land according to plan, rainwater isn’t running off the site. Part of the problem is the landfill. “The water only goes down so far, then hits a clay cap and it won’t go further,” says Glenn.

Just weeks before opening day, crews were out creating swales to help the field drain properly. Compounding the problem is the pressure to get grass seed down.

“The time of year that we started dictated much of what has happened so far,” says Glenn. “We initiated construction in mid-August. Site work and grading of the land, drainage plan, irrigation plan and installation, and setting the poles all took a couple of months. We sent soil samples to the experts at Virginia Tech and consulted with them and others about planting before winter. The consensus was that it was a huge risk, and we might lose any seed or sod before it could take hold, depending on the weather.”

Rather than take the risk, Glenn and Ken have decided to delay the range’s opening until the grass is well established.

“I will not open the driving range up until the grass is where it needs to be,” Glenn says. “If you don’t have it [the grass] established, you’re going to fight it the rest of your life. I could go out and throw out rye and fescue and have the range open in March but I want to cultivate the range so it may be May or June until the range portion opens up. Everything else will open as soon as the season breaks.”

In Virginia, that means an early spring opening. The brothers are more specifically eyeing the second week of April—spring break for area schools—to make up for lost time in the planning stages. “If we can get 35 weeks of business, we’ll be ahead of the game,” says Ken.