As far as Tour Edge founder David Glod is concerned, the two best things his father, Jim, ever did for him were introduce him to golf as a youngster and tout the virtues of working for oneself.
“My dad was not much of a player, but he did like the game,” said Glod, who grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, just west of Chicago. “He also moved us to a house next to a nine-hole municipal course when I was 4 years old. I used to scrounge for golf balls in a field by our home and sell them to golfers across the fence. I also started playing at that course and also another one in town, called Village Links. And it was there that I started repairing and re-shafting clubs. Eventually, I became so busy that I set up my own shop in my parents’ garage, for customers from that place and other clubs in and around Chicago.”
Jim Glod liked that son David had fallen hard for the game. And he was just as pleased that the youngest of his two boys was smitten by being an entrepreneur.
“My dad was an artist and designer for National Can,” said Glod of the Chicago-based corporation that became a major beverage industry player with the introduction in the 1960s of the pull-tab opener and the so-called “six-pack” revolution that followed. “And he told me on more than one occasion that it was better to work for yourself than for someone else.”
So, in many ways, it is not surprising that the now 59-year-old Glod finds himself in the position he is today, which is running a privately held golf equipment company that produces estimated annual revenues of $100 million. Founded in 1986, Tour Edge has also become a true force in the game, not only for the thousands of recreational golfers who use its clubs but also for the dozens of professional golfers – major champions Bernhard Langer and Tom Lehman among them – who have employed Tour Edge gear to capture 16 titles on the three PGA Tours over the past four seasons and amassed 92 top-5 finishes.
Glod is doing exactly what he should be – and doing it quite well.
While it was his father who brought Glod to golf, it was his mother, Retta, who nurtured his interest in repairing golf clubs, which ultimately led to his making a living in the game. “She refinished furniture and taught me how to do the same sort of thing with woods,” said Glod, who now holds numerous design patents and trademarks in golf. “I really enjoyed taking the old, persimmon clubs apart and putting them back together. And in time, I created my own style.”
Glod also developed into a pretty fair golfer, good enough to make his high school team and to play the sport first at the College of DuPage, a community college in his hometown, and then Florida Southern, where he competed on a squad that included Lee Janzen and Rocco Mediate.
“I worked my handicap down to a plus-2 and regularly shot in the low 70s,” Glod said. “That was good enough for college back then but certainly not good enough for a tour professional.”
But rather than going for regular PGA Tour players, Glod turned to those competing on the PGA Tour Champions. “It was more affordable, and I also liked it because so many of our customers are 50 and older.”
Glod moved back to Illinois after graduating from Florida Southern, where he majored in marketing and finance, reviving his club-repair business upon his return as he also went to work at Village Links as a professional. But in addition to discovering that he was not wild about teaching, Glod was also reminded of how much more he preferred working for himself. So, he left to start Tour Edge. He was 24 years old.
Glod peddled custom clubs for a spell and then began creating his own designs. Among the first of those was an investment-cast, cavity-back iron with a wide sole modeled in many ways after ones Ping was bringing to market. Tour Edge then started producing metal drivers with graphite shafts once TaylorMade introduced those to the game. After Callaway had brought out the first Big Bertha with its oversized titanium head some years later, Tour Edge released a driver of its own, called the Bazooka.
“We were Midwesterners and tried to operate our business with that in mind,” he said. “We wanted to produce high-quality, technologically-advanced clubs at prices that in many cases were as much as half of what the top equipment makers were charging. We picked our battles and did not do much at all in terms of advertising. And we did not pay tour professionals to use our products, which allowed us to keep costs down.”
“We just concentrated on growing our business, and doing so day by day,” added Glod, who brought in his older brother, Gordon, to handle sales.
(Gordon remains with Tour Edge as its head of sales and owns 20 percent of the company.)
Tour Edge has come a long way since those early days. It now operates largely out of a 55,000-square-foot facility in Batavia, Illinois, which is a couple of towns west of Glod’s childhood home, and boasts some 80 full-time employees, six of whom are engineers charged with club design and development. Tour Edge also employs a handful of in-house sales representatives and relies on two dozen independent reps to help move product, most of which is sold off-course, with some direct and green-grass sales mixed in. Though Glod is described in company literature as president and chief club designer, he devotes more of his time these days to product design and development, relying on an Australian named John Craig to handle most managerial duties as the executive vice president.
“That allows me to devote more of my energy to what I really enjoy doing,” said Glod, who splits time between his office at Tour Edge headquarters and his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he has long kept a residence with his wife, Maria, who is from that city.
Craig came onboard in 2017, which was the same year that Tour Edge first started paying tour professionals to endorse its products.
“We had started to get some attention, and some play, on tour with the release of our first Exotics line in 2005,” explained Glod, a father of four who describes himself as a “terrible 8 handicap” and these days plays a couple of times a week, either in casual rounds with his wife or product-testing sessions with colleagues at work. “And a number of professionals started playing our clubs without getting paid to do so. We even had some wins on the PGA Tour. So, we started to re-think our policy on not spending money on tour players.”
But rather than going for regular PGA Tour players, Glod turned to those competing on the PGA Tour Champions. “It was more affordable, and I also liked it because so many of our customers are 50 and older,” he said.
Currently, Tour Edge offers three distinct sub-brands: Exotics, which Glod describes as a “tour-preferred line of ultra-premium equipment featuring next-level innovation and materials”; Hot Launch, marketed as “the highest level of performance and game-improvement innovation design at a mid-tier price point”; and “Get In The Game” products, which feature complete sets and individual drivers, putters, wedges and golf bags for casual and beginning golfers on a budget.
Together, they are taking David Glod and Tour Edge to new heights.
He has come a long, long way.