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ORLANDO, FLORIDA | Bart Patterson smiles when he thinks of his late father, Ed. “Dad was a serial entrepreneur,” says the Pittsburgh native. “He had his own auto body shop when he was 14 years old. Later, he got into restaurants, and game rooms. There was even a time he had a company that did marketing and merchandising for the Pirates.”
Patterson also chuckles when he considers that in his case, the apple did not fall very far from the tree.
“I was the kid who cut everyone’s grass in the neighborhood,” he recalls. “I was the paper boy.”
Patterson was that way even after he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989 with a B.S. in managerial economics and began working in the golf business. He started by taking a pair of fairly traditional jobs as an assistant professional, at historic Allegheny Country Club in the Pittsburgh suburb of Sewickley, Pa., and after that at Haile Plantation Golf and Country Club in Gainesville, Fla. But then Patterson veered down a totally different path. First, he built and began running a driving range in Gainesville. Then in 1999, a year after he had become a member of the PGA of America and long before most people in the golf world had ever heard of the word “e-commerce,” Patterson founded an online retail store. Now called GolfLocker.com and staffed largely by fellow PGA members, it offered a wide range of shoes, apparel and other soft goods. In time, the business grew into a thriving online operation with hundreds of thousands of customers as well as a 35,000-square-foot superstore and fulfillment center in Tampa, Fla.
“Like father, like son,” Patterson says with another smile. “I love being an entrepreneur as well.”
As much as he loved sports as a youngster, he did not get into golf until he went to college. “I played football at Carnegie Mellon, and the offensive coordinator for the team also happened to be the golf coach,” Patterson recalls. “He convinced me to join the golf team as well, and once I did, I was hooked.”
In fact, he was so smitten by the game that he decided to make his living as a PGA professional. “But I had no idea how to go about that,” says Patterson, who left Carnegie Mellon as a single-digit handicapper. “So, I went looking for advice. Being from Pittsburgh, I knew that the best person to go to for that was Bob Ford at Oakmont. I gave Bob a call, and he was very encouraging. He suggested I find a job as an assistant and recommended Allegheny as a possibility.”
After two seasons at Allegheny, Patterson moved to Florida to help open Haile Plantation, which featured a Gary Player-designed course. The facility opened in autumn 1993, by which time he was a PGA apprentice.
The following year, Patterson hatched the idea of a driving range in his newly adopted home of Gainesville. “I liked the concept, especially given that there was no other stand-alone range in town,” he says. “I drafted what I thought was a solid business plan. But the banks kept turning me down for money. Eventually, I received a loan from the SBA (Small Business Administration) as well as some funds from my older brother and several members from Allegheny. That allowed me to buy the 50-acre site for the range and get it ready. We opened in February 1995, and I remember that we did $700 in range-ball sales our first day of operation. I was ecstatic about that because that meant I could pay the electric bill.”
It wasn’t long before Patterson’s driving range was prospering – and before he was coming up with other business ideas. “I came back to the office one day after mowing tees to find that someone had put a Yahoo sticker on my filing cabinet,” he says. “That got me thinking about the internet, which was called the World Wide Web back then, and the ways you could make money on it. (Auction site) eBay was still pretty new, and I started putting things on that site for sale. I started with some Nike golf bags that we had in our shop, and I sold 30 of those in an hour.”
“Like father, like son. I love being an entrepreneur as well.”
Bart Patterson
That experience led Patterson to creating in autumn 1999 a website on which he began peddling other gear. “What we did was create a virtual golf shop selling closeouts because the major golf brands in those days were totally against their wares being sold on the internet. We called our business golfequipmentcloseouts.com, because those three words were the most searched golf term on Yahoo. And things really took off. We had to rent warehouse space to handle all the soft goods we had, and I remember more than a few days when we sorted shoes and golf shirts in the parking lot of the driving range when shipments came in.”
Eventually, Patterson moved his e-commerce operations to Tampa and in 2006 changed the company name to GolfLocker.com. Now the father of two young children that he is raising with his wife, Tara, he closed down the driving range five years ago and is getting ready to develop that Gainesville property as he continues to build up his online business.
“We’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, and it still feels like we are just getting started,” Patterson says. “Things move so fast in e-commerce, and that certainly keeps things interesting.”
It also keeps him thinking of how he can do things better as he considers other ways to make a buck in golf. A serial entrepreneur to the core. Just like his dad.
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