The response was exactly what you’d expect from those who know you and care about you; what you, yourself, would say if a friend told you he’d quit his job to buy a public golf course.
When Brooks West told his buddies he’d walked away from a career that had him on the fast track to the CEO’s office in order to buy an 18-hole facility on the Harpeth River in Franklin, Tenn., they all said, “You did what?” with no small sense of alarm.
“There were a lot of people, a lot of friends, and people I’ve known and trusted for a long time, who said, ‘What are you thinking?’ ” West said.
Those friends were not admonishing West for getting into a business he didn’t know. They were chastising him for getting into a business he knew all too well. “They were all like, ‘You of all people, given your background, should know better than to buy a golf course,’ ” West said.
That background, one steeped in years of upward mobility and success, is what makes West’s recent purchase of The Crossing Golf Club, a course he rebranded as Franklin Bridge, a fascinating and inspirational story.
West is a former college player who went through the Professional Golf Management program at Mississippi State University. After finishing school, he worked at some of the best clubs in the world, including opening the clubhouse and managing a staff of 26 at Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico at the ripe old age of 26.
From there, he went into headwear sales at Ahead while playing well enough to win a PGA section championship and qualify for a Web.com Tour event. That convinced West that he should give the PGA Tour a whirl, which he did for the better part of a year. Then he caddied on the tour for a while. By 30, West had dabbled in just about every aspect of the golf business. He knew the pitfalls. He had also seen the Great Recession and what it did to golf.
To summarize, a lot of developers overbuilt golf in the cheap-money days of the 1990s and early 2000s. According to former PGA of America president M.G. Orender, who owns Hampton Golf, a successful management company in Florida, “There were a lot of golf courses built that, from the moment the doors opened, were going to lose $500,000 a year until the end of days.”
“I decided to go from something really big to something small, something where I could build a family business, be out with the people and have an impact in our community.”
– Brooks West
The lack of equilibrium in the industry put a lot of downward pressure on pricing – great for consumers but a struggle for those trying to sell enough green fees to pay the bills and make a living. It took the better part of eight years for the industry to bounce back from the recession. During that time, courses closed at a brisk pace, many being sold for residential or commercial development, some being repurposed into parks or gardens, and others simply going to seed.
West knew that. He’d done more than see it, he’d lived it. After realizing that he wasn’t good enough to be a tour player and caddying was incongruous with the family life he hoped to lead, he settled in as a salesman for Yamaha Golf Cars in Tennessee and Kentucky.
Because West is one of those guys who has never met a stranger and can make friends anywhere, he quickly moved up to regional and then national sales manager for Yamaha. At age 35 he was in line to become the president of Yamaha Golf-Car Co., one of only three golf-car fleet manufacturers in a $1.1 billion industry.
“That’s when I realized that I didn’t enjoy what I was doing,” West said. “I thrive on relationships and interactions. When I got to corporate, I lost all of that. You spend time with people, but they are other employees. And you don’t have the same relationship with someone working for you that you do with someone who is just around.
“I’m also not suited for an organization that works out of a meeting structure, with P and L’s and silos. There’s nothing wrong with it – there are people who are wired for it – but that’s not me.
“So, I decided to go from something really big to something small, something where I could build a family business, be out with the people and have an impact in our community.”
As for the friends who thought he was certifiable, West said, “I told them I wasn’t interested in buying ‘a’ golf course. I wanted to buy ‘this’ golf course.”
The Crossing, located about 30 miles south of Nashville, was one of American Golf Corp.’s best-performing public courses. But Drive Shack, the Topgolf-type company and parent of American Golf, was seeking to sell most of the corporate-owned courses to pay down $102 million in debt. “So at exactly the time that I was looking to get out of the corporate world and buy a public course, American Golf was looking to sell its best-performing course in the area.”
It seemed like destiny. At least that’s what West thinks. He is in his first year as a course owner. The future is still uncertain. But as he said, “We are connected to this area. Our church is here, our friends are here. This is our home. Now we have the only 18-hole public course in the county, one of the best in the fastest-growing area in the region. I couldn’t be happier.”
And, if work is for anything, isn’t it the pursuit of happiness?