Golf equipment entrepreneur Barney Adams sold golf clubs on the Home Shopping Network and infomercials when he had trouble breaking through to regular retail channels. He grew Texas-based Adams Golf Inc. from $1 million to $85 million in annual sales in three years. But he didn’t do all that by selling golf clubs. Adams did it by providing a service— clubs that would get those golf balls to go the distance.
“In the first place, I think everybody is in the service business. You have to define what service that product provides the customers,” says Adams, 70. “My job was to improve the flight of the golf ball when you hit it.”
To tackle his customers’ biggest problem, optimum ball flight, Adams applied everything he knew to develop clubs that hit well and felt good in the hand. He sketched out his design on a yellow legal pad—no computer, not even a slide rule. Using this approach, Adams developed his signature Tight Lies fairway wood.
For several years, while running his small golf club business, Adams custom-fitted clubs at a nearby course, working 12 hours a day or more. He tested the clubs with his customers at the range. That’s where he came up with the concept of the wow factor, which became embedded into the business culture at Adams Golf. Testers’ response was “Wow! That really hits good.”
Adams says you must first determine the most important service you provide to your customers. The same concept applies to any business, whether you’re a parts manufacturer or a tailor shop. “That, to me, is the difference between some outfits that are pretty good and some outfits that are outstanding,” Adams says.
Adams’ love of golf started when he was a caddy at the Onondaga Golf & Country Club in New York in the 1950s. He went on to get a business-management degree from Clarkson University and started working for Corning Glass as a quality engineer, analyzing product defects. But Adams wasn’t much of a corporate man.
What he really wanted to do was work in the golf industry and eventually run his own outfit, but he couldn’t get his foot in the door. Despite the rejections, he didn’t stop analyzing why one golf club design felt great while another was all wrong. Was it the head, the shafts, the materials or a combination thereof?
In 1982, Adams got a call from Dave Pelz, known as the “short game guru.” Pelz had found backers for his invention, called Featherlites. He called in Adams to run the company. Adams was so excited about his big break that the extent of his investigation into his new job entailed playing a round of golf and taking a quick tour of the plant.
Big mistake. A design flaw caused the clubs to snap at the grip, especially when played during tournament pressure. The company fixed the flaw, but the damage was done. Adams’ task wasn’t so much to increase sluggish sales as it was to reverse negative sales. Customers wanted their money back, and there were threats of lawsuits. Then the banks were calling in their loans, and Pelz Golf was imploding.
But Adams hung on. He sold out Pelz’s inventory on the Home Shopping Network. In his book, The Wow Factor, Adams says he stayed because people were counting on him. And, most important, nobody lied to him; it was his fault for not investigating properly. But the cuts went deep. It got to the point that he and Pelz were making the clubs themselves.
When Pelz Golf closed, Adams bought up its remaining assets and started his own company. To finance it, he took a job in Silicon Valley and hired others to run the golf company. After he banked some savings, he returned to Texas and set about the task of running his new business.
On his first day of work, Adams came in early and sat at the desk where the company kept its books. Within 30 minutes, he was gut punched. He found a drawer full of past-due notices and collection letters. All those glowing financial reports were lies. He didn’t have enough money to cover it all.
Adams blames himself, saying he asked to be cheated because he was so full of himself, being president. As the owner, you need to take blame as well as credit. “It goes with the gig. You’re the top person. You’re going to get credit for some of the successes. I get credit for things I didn’t even know were going on,” he says.
Instead of shuttering the business, Adams kept at it, moving money back and forth between his lines of credit and credit cards to pay his bills. He kept this up for years. Meanwhile, he plugged away, doing custom fittings and developing new golf products. He collected six patents but few sales.
That changed in 1996 with Tight Lies, which sent balls and sales soaring. Adams Golf earned two placements on the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Small Companies list and took the IndustryWeek Top 25 Award for Growing Manufacturing Companies, among other awards. In 1998, Adams Golf went public with the largest IPO in the history of the golf industry.
Adams learned more than a few things about running a business in the meantime. He says it’s critical to lay down the proper culture for the kind of company you want and to make sure everyone understands the goals of the business and what’s expected of them.
The interests of the company founder and the employees will never be the same, but fairness goes a long way, Adams says, starting with executive parking spaces, for which he has a personal distaste. “It’s raining cats and dogs, and your car is parked right outside the door and your employee has to run 85 yards in the parking lot in the pouring rain to get to his car.”
And although Tight Lies remains one of the best-selling fairway woods of all time, Adams says there’s more to it than money. “If you’re going to start a business, it has to be something you’re passionate about. If it had been about money, I would have quit 40 times.”
“In the first place, I think everybody is in the service business. You have to define what service that product provides the customers,” says Adams, 70. “My job was to improve the flight of the golf ball when you hit it.”
To tackle his customers’ biggest problem, optimum ball flight, Adams applied everything he knew to develop clubs that hit well and felt good in the hand. He sketched out his design on a yellow legal pad—no computer, not even a slide rule. Using this approach, Adams developed his signature Tight Lies fairway wood.
For several years, while running his small golf club business, Adams custom-fitted clubs at a nearby course, working 12 hours a day or more. He tested the clubs with his customers at the range. That’s where he came up with the concept of the wow factor, which became embedded into the business culture at Adams Golf. Testers’ response was “Wow! That really hits good.”
Adams says you must first determine the most important service you provide to your customers. The same concept applies to any business, whether you’re a parts manufacturer or a tailor shop. “That, to me, is the difference between some outfits that are pretty good and some outfits that are outstanding,” Adams says.
Adams’ love of golf started when he was a caddy at the Onondaga Golf & Country Club in New York in the 1950s. He went on to get a business-management degree from Clarkson University and started working for Corning Glass as a quality engineer, analyzing product defects. But Adams wasn’t much of a corporate man.
“Everybody is in the service business.”
In 1982, Adams got a call from Dave Pelz, known as the “short game guru.” Pelz had found backers for his invention, called Featherlites. He called in Adams to run the company. Adams was so excited about his big break that the extent of his investigation into his new job entailed playing a round of golf and taking a quick tour of the plant.
Big mistake. A design flaw caused the clubs to snap at the grip, especially when played during tournament pressure. The company fixed the flaw, but the damage was done. Adams’ task wasn’t so much to increase sluggish sales as it was to reverse negative sales. Customers wanted their money back, and there were threats of lawsuits. Then the banks were calling in their loans, and Pelz Golf was imploding.
But Adams hung on. He sold out Pelz’s inventory on the Home Shopping Network. In his book, The Wow Factor, Adams says he stayed because people were counting on him. And, most important, nobody lied to him; it was his fault for not investigating properly. But the cuts went deep. It got to the point that he and Pelz were making the clubs themselves.
When Pelz Golf closed, Adams bought up its remaining assets and started his own company. To finance it, he took a job in Silicon Valley and hired others to run the golf company. After he banked some savings, he returned to Texas and set about the task of running his new business.
On his first day of work, Adams came in early and sat at the desk where the company kept its books. Within 30 minutes, he was gut punched. He found a drawer full of past-due notices and collection letters. All those glowing financial reports were lies. He didn’t have enough money to cover it all.
Adams blames himself, saying he asked to be cheated because he was so full of himself, being president. As the owner, you need to take blame as well as credit. “It goes with the gig. You’re the top person. You’re going to get credit for some of the successes. I get credit for things I didn’t even know were going on,” he says.
Instead of shuttering the business, Adams kept at it, moving money back and forth between his lines of credit and credit cards to pay his bills. He kept this up for years. Meanwhile, he plugged away, doing custom fittings and developing new golf products. He collected six patents but few sales.
That changed in 1996 with Tight Lies, which sent balls and sales soaring. Adams Golf earned two placements on the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Small Companies list and took the IndustryWeek Top 25 Award for Growing Manufacturing Companies, among other awards. In 1998, Adams Golf went public with the largest IPO in the history of the golf industry.
Adams learned more than a few things about running a business in the meantime. He says it’s critical to lay down the proper culture for the kind of company you want and to make sure everyone understands the goals of the business and what’s expected of them.
The interests of the company founder and the employees will never be the same, but fairness goes a long way, Adams says, starting with executive parking spaces, for which he has a personal distaste. “It’s raining cats and dogs, and your car is parked right outside the door and your employee has to run 85 yards in the parking lot in the pouring rain to get to his car.”
And although Tight Lies remains one of the best-selling fairway woods of all time, Adams says there’s more to it than money. “If you’re going to start a business, it has to be something you’re passionate about. If it had been about money, I would have quit 40 times.”
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