00:00.03 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Welcome to the ModGolf podcast where we speak with the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the disruptors, and the influencers who are shaping the future of... Golf. I'm your host, Colin Weston, and welcome back to Season 20 of the ModGolf Podcast. Wow, hard to believe we've been cranking away here. what is that 12 episodes per season times 20 i think if my math is right that's 240 plus all the bonus ones we've done we've almost done 300 episodes over nine years and we're just getting started here. 00:30.34 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Because the conversations keep coming and the people I meet they just keep getting more and more awesome. And today is no exception to that. I have two gentlemen here that are doing some really innovative, amazing things that are dear and near to my heart. 00:47.00 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Some of you know my background is in architecture. design, sustainability. Probably don't know this, but also with modular and prefab building construction. so That is right in the wheelhouse of what we're talking about today. And the company is Cover the Tees. And I have the CEO and founder, Matt Towell, and also the chief operating officer. Stephen Arnold with me today, and we're going to talk about all things modular in the hitting bays and the entertainment piece and the intersection of all those great things. So there, before I manage to screw that up anymore, exactly what these guys are doing, I'm going to bring them on here. I'm going to start with Matt Towel. Good to see you! How are you doing today? 01:30.64 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Good, good. Thank you for having us on. 01:32.97 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Absolutely. And Stephen, thanks for joining us also. 01:35.89 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah, thank you very much. Happy to be here. 01:37.14 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Absolutely. Okay, so I'm going to have a back and forth. We're going to dig into the Cover the Tees backstory. Because there's a lot of juicy things that I already know a little bit about, but we're going to dig deep into those. But hey, I'd love to start with this icebreaker question that I often ask, almost always ask. And Matt, I'm going to start with you first. And this question is that first golf experience you've ever had, that connection to golf and the power of invitation, that person that introduced you to the game at whatever age in some awesome. AHA! moment that you had that's hooked you for life. 02:13.85 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Sure, yeah. mines is a little a different little unique. So I wasn't really introduced to the game of golf by anyone in particular. my stepmother liked to try different things and not continue doing them as we were younger. 02:31.65 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees I think she bought some clubs at some point, had them in the garage. I watched them sit there for a really long time. riding bikes with my buddies. I think I was in fourth grade, maybe. 02:42.66 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees And I said. We were bored. It was a summer and we lived in a neighborhood where there's a lot of construction going on. So we had some construction workers across the street. and they were gone At the moment, I thought, you know what? Let's hit a golf ball to that area over there i wasn't trying to break anything i just want to chip it and just it was a safe area to hit it into. I felt like I wasn't going to bust anybody's windows or anything like that. 03:06.15 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Right, right. 03:07.52 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees took a seven iron out and I skied it right over the top of the house. Didn't know what I was doing. And I was hooked at that point. Like from there on, I was just like, yeah, I want to do that again. Now I want to do this. 03:25.86 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees I think that was my introduction, taking her clubs that I had no business doing and was probably not allowed to use and then going in the front yard and tearing up the grass. 03:35.41 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast The magical seven iron over the house. You probably saw those Bryson DeChambeau videos last year there. You probably thought, he stole my idea, man. I did that decades ago. 03:43.07 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah, I mean come on there was no YouTube back then so we weren't recording anything. 03:46.78 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Ha! There you go. Now, Stephen, we talked earlier that you've had a love of golf for pretty much all your life. So I'd like to hear your story of how you got introduced to the game. 03:58.26 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Sure yeah mine goes back to I was four or five and I got one of those three-piece plastic sets for my birthday, just a little big old plastic ball and a big plastic driver and Just walked around the house and we hit it everywhere. 04:03.26 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Love it. 04:09.52 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees but I didn't grow up playing golf or going on courses. It wasn't something we did in Western Kentucky that often, but I remember being about eight or nine and my grandfather and my uncle took me out on a golf course. and I got to ride in a golf cart for the first time. and that really was the best thing in the world. 04:25.59 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees driving around on green grass and they're hitting shots and they'd hand me a club and let me hit one or two and i failed miserably but That put the spark in me to keep chasing it. 04:36.46 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Love this. That reminds me when our kids were quite young and we were just on vacation, nine hole course. in the desert and allowed my daughter who was about all of six at the time and a speed demon so Matt you'd love this i know you are or were a race car driver back in the day. 04:55.10 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast And I let her drive right off of the first tee. And she just took off. And the marshal wasn't very happy with me. But yeah she had a good time. She doesn't play golf, but she remembers her best golf memory is dad letting her floor the power cart down the first fairway. 05:11.87 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees That's awesome. That is awesome. 05:12.79 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. Okay, so we're going to dig now into the Cover the Tees story here. So Matt, starting with you, I understand that you have experience in modular construction with schools and hospitals so obviously you've had some connection to this, to then port that over into the golf space. So why don't we start, Matt, being the founder, why don't you let us know the aha moment of leading up to creating Cover the Tees, how long ago that was, and what your first minimum viable product was, and how you came to believe this was a viable business. 05:51.87 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah it was a bit of an evolution to be honest right like so I was in the modulars. We started building modular classrooms on an assembly line. And I ended up becoming a production manager and moving up through the ranks of that company. And we were pumping out, we were doing In the modular business, we were referring to each half of a building as a floor. so we would we would get you know eight to ten floors a day so eight to ten halves a day out the building. 06:26.36 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. 06:26.66 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees on an assembly line that would move every 40 to 60 minutes. And so. I learned from some guys at a company called McGrath Corp. They're a publicly traded company. These guys came in and trained me up on how to on how to build modular construction. It's completely different. So I got thrown into the fire on that deal and just ended up running 130 guys. and learning modular construction, which then went into a company called Mobile Walkways and we would do temporary walkway systems. We created this anchoring system that didn't really require any concrete. It was going into the ground and we were doing it in Florida. 07:11.39 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees We started buying product and renting it out to hospitals. We did schools as well but starting to get into more rental stuff. i want to own this product and i want to lease this out. It really started to take some legs there. My wife got really sick when my daughter was born. she was nine months old and my wife ended up with a pretty rare disease called Addison's disease 07:42.22 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 07:42.61 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees So it was a blessing that we had this rental business because I didn't have to do that many jobs to support the family. i could be home And my son was three and a half. My daughter was nine months and my wife was laid up. They told me that she wasn't going to make it one night at the hospital. So it was a pretty trying time. 08:02.20 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. 08:04.26 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees we came out of that. she got her healthy and then a good buddy of mine owns Tee It Up. His name's Nick France. t's a driving range here in Oviedo, Florida. We started talking and I was like, listen, I want to start doing something other than what I'm doing. I'm going to apply these covers into something I like to do. I think it'd be cool to get into golf, right? I liked golf. I was hitting the driving range all the time. 08:30.40 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 08:31.33 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees And so at the end of the day, we went over to some properties and we pitched the idea and they liked it because Nick had increased his revenue by almost $100 ,000 in year one, just by having to cover. This is before there was a top tracer or any technology on the range. 08:48.96 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast So what year was this for context now? 08:50.77 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees So he did his in the late 90s. I think it was 99 or something like that. 08:53.64 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 08:55.23 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees And so in 1999, he increased his revenue. by nearly $100,000 by just covering and it was only took about 10 or 12 days to build. 09:03.13 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. 09:03.94 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees You think about that in the context of 1999 versus today's dollars and what that could be, right? Yeah, that evolved into that. That kind of petered off. It was hard to get people to understand the value. It really was, even in Florida. 09:18.21 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Just people looked at it like, yeah, I get it, but we like grass. And so the motive, it was Difficult to push the needle. so we stayed in our lane. covid came i lost $600,000 worth of contracts for for mobile walkways, they canceled them all 09:39.71 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. 09:39.99 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees So I had a lot of time on my hands. So Nick says, I want to put an artificial putting course in the back of this driving range because i want to redo what we got here and i'm going to give the community something else to do. At that same time, he had Top Tracer coming in there. 09:58.26 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees And I told him, I said, hey, my guys need something to do. well we never built a punting course, but we'll give it a go., so, thinking that we knew what we were doing and we did it. So he had Top Tracer going at the same time and i said Nick i think i got something for these guys. i've got my anchoring system I know this proprietary anchoring system. I think I can modify this in a way where we can to these existing ranges. and start popping in these things and putting this tech in there and give them a little Topgolf style. This feels like you're at a Top Golf, but you're not. You're hitting real golf balls and you can work on your game or you can have entertainment. So we had this idea, this concept, I said, introduce me to somebody. He introduced me to Mark Castor, who we were talking about. 10:43.55 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees And he worked for top Tracer. I believe he was the director of operations at top tracer at one point. From there, we just had an idea and we started. I started pitching it to him and he told me i need to walk before i run and I always hold that over his head now because now he works with us. And I bought into the company early on and we just started plugging them away. In our first project we did was in Austin, Texas, with a prototype completely different than what we do now. And it was received really, really well. 11:24.61 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast And before I jump over to you here, Stephen, so that first prototype, how did that come about with your first client buying in. Those early adopters are those pioneers that are taking a bit of a risk because they're partnering with you because you haven't got everything figured out by then. So how did that come about? I'm always intrigued to hear about that first one that you had the chance. They actually took that leap of faith and believed in you that you can pull it off. 11:50.67 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees I had a good conversation with the guy and I feel bad. We've done so many now. I know where it is. I don't remember the actual name of the courses now, which is really sad. I should have looked that up before we got on this podcast. So I apologize for that. But it was a great experience. The guy was really cool. He was open to what we were doing. He had the vision. He understood what it could be. So Top Tracer was already putting in tech into already covered spaces, trying to recreate this. 12:22.38 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees I just wanted to refine it a little bit and I wanted to come up with a way that they could scale. what they were trying to do because they were running out of space. to put these things into. And that's what I was told. And I said, "well, i think I think we can pull that off". And that was received well. It was a different structure, but it did well. So we knew we were on to something. 12:40.58 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. Well, before we then move forward on the and progression and the refinement and the innovation over the years with subsequent builds. I'm going to jump around the timeline a little bit here and Stephen over to you. So Stephen, I understand that you were first a client and were so impressed with Cover the Tees that now you're working as the chief operating officer. I love that story. 13:03.61 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast So obviously you were all in. You were so impressed that that. You basically switched teams here. So tell us about how you got involved and where you were before. 13:14.48 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah, so my journey in this space goes back to 2019. I was working at Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort on Hilton Head Island. We have three 18-hole courses and a ton of different amenities across the resort. but I came in and we I went to my first PGA show in 2019 and had a meeting set up with Alex Goodman who was running all of Top Tracer at the time. And went through the sales pitch of what it was and what they were offering in my mind, just immediately firing on what this could do for us. Being the new guy running a golf course at the resort, I was kind of hesitant to jump in full steam because This. it basically involves converting your driving range into an entertainment facility and I wasn't sure how the ownership was going to view that you know are we going to go away from our traditional use of the driving range or are we going to convert and build something really cool We stewed on it for six or seven months and then in 2020 obviously the pandemic comes around and Golf becomes very busy. South Carolina was open for business and golf was an outdoor recreational sport that saw faces we hadn't seen before at the resort. The 15 years I've been there were showing up and on the tee sheets. having a grand time and really falling in love with the game again. And we made the decision that if we were ever going to implement technology on our driving range we should probably do it sooner than later because the iron's hot and we need a strike. 14:39.70 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees And we were really focused on the experience for the guests. At the resort, We care about the guests and the impacts we have on their lives, especially during these times. Let's give them something else to do so we made the decision to put technology on the driving range, and as we're going through that operational playbook of what this looks like. We start questioning, what does a guest do if they're out on the driving range and a rain shower comes? or if they go out on the driving range and it's 100 degrees outside and the sun is beating down on them, how long will they actually stay on the driving range? 15:13.75 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees And will they bring people with them? And we wanted to create that Topgolf atmosphere where people can hang out, give them a place to come and gather and be in a safe space and enjoy the game of golf we knew that they were here on the island. Most people coming on vacation are bringing their clubs they're going to play two or three rounds of golf. 15:32.10 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees But that's maybe just half of the family. You have the whole other half that are going to the beach and riding bikes and doing kayaking. But we knew that that Topgolf market, that client was there, that we could build something and we could draw them in and just give them another amenity to the resort. That was the vision behind it. 15:48.37 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees I asked Top Tracer, I know you guys are doing installs all over the country. What do people do if they want to cover their driving? And they said, "well, we're talking to a company out of Florida. let's introduce the two of you and let you have a conversation". So I got on a phone call with Matt and I told him what I wanted to do and our visions aligned perfectly of what it looked like. So we immediately went into the design side and what was fantastic about the product is being modular and his anchoring system the ability for us to do this quickly. We pulled the trigger and decided to do it in November and we knew we wanted to be open by spring break in March. And construction, that's a tall task to get it through permitting and then to actually build. 16:26.60 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 16:28.98 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees We ended up with 14 covered stalls. We explored building it out of sticks,, building an up-arm or building something else. But we weren't going to get that done in time. 16:39.24 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees And we were going into a new market and I was concerned that if this didn't work, we need to be able to erase it from our driving range and just go back to the old way of business if it was a complete failure. 16:48.38 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 16:49.99 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees It was not a complete failure. It was the opposite of that. so That's how I got into the space. We broke ground in February and we opened the driving range the first week of April of 2020. one at the resort. 17:05.25 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. Good stuff. Stephen, I'm going to stick with you with this question here. So i understand that Cover The Tees is just celebrated your hundredth install your 100th build. So congratulations on that in the US. 17:17.47 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Thank you. 17:18.50 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Now I want to know about how big is this market as it's expanding? Of course, as golf now is not just considered an experience is Par 72, 18 holes on green grass, and Topgolf has helped accelerate that and what we have with indoor sims now and all of that. 17:35.04 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Why don't you give us an overview that 30 thousand foot level here Stephen of how big is the market in the US. I'm up in Canada and the market golf is big up here and we're about a tenth the size of population and the market here but let's just focus on the US right now. So how big is the as we call the total accessible market that you so you see the potential here? 17:55.49 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah, what's great about the product is its scalability, right? You can take it to any location. 17:59.50 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Anybody that has a driving range, you can easily convert it into an entertainment center. We're going to take your same parcel of land that you're already using it for to hit balls to warm up or give instruction and we're just going to convert it into a real revenue stream for you. 18:14.42 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees The market's huge. There's over 14 ,000 golf courses in the United States. And we've installed at 100 of those locations. And it's been a slow snowball effect. There were some early adapters with the technology and getting into this but with the success we were having at the resort, Top Tracer and Cover the Tees were sending potential customers our way. My phone was blowing up of t"ell us is this true is it working for you how did you guys do it what are the results you're seeing?" And I just kept telling people, I can't tell you why it works. I just know it does work. I mean, we built it. People showed up and we were able to take our revenues from $90,000 and do $300,000 in the first three months of being open. So it was a tremendous increase of revenue. 18:59.18 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees We didn't even envision that. We were hoping to double our revenues in a year. We ended up 4x-ing our revenues in year one. So it's extremely scalable. To take this experience i knew in Hilton Head we were never going to build a Top Golf on the island. The tree lines, just the way that the ordinances are and the way Hilton has developed, we're not going to get a $30 million, 60 bay system with big nets and lights and music. 19:27.98 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees But we can do a different version of it that gives you that hybrid of a driving range and a Top Golf on the same experience. What's beautiful about the product both on the technology side and Cover The Tees is again you can take it to the middle of Georgia you could take it to Utah you could take it to Redmond, Oregon. You can go anywhere and create this for any community and create an on-ramp for people to get into the game of golf. 19:51.62 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Absolutely. 19:51.75 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Love that. Love that. So Matthew, I want to flip it back over to you and talk more about the kind of the design process and the differentiator, your secret sauce. I'm assuming part of your secret sauce is your deep knowledge of modular construction from your previous career. 20:09.68 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast So why don't you let us know, Cover The Tees not only covers the tee line specifically, but also modular construction for hitting bays. Let's say I'm a client. Let's role play a little bit here. I'm the operator owner of a golf course here in Vancouver. The one I play at has been around for over 100 years. 20:30.54 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast The covered tee-line they've got 16 stalls, completely dilapidated needs to be replaced they've got another 50 open air tee here. Talk to me about, don't have to do the sales pitch, but just tell me about the the kind of the virtues and the value add and the design process that you would go through with a client like myself. 20:53.39 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees So if we're dealing with a client like yourself, then what you care about is how can I get from point A to point B, right? To the finish line, essentially. So what we want to do is provide a product for you that cuts out some of the BS and takes away some of the pain in the butt that you have to go through to get there, right? So we want to come in with it with our product and offer an engineering package for you, signed and sealed in your area. So our team of engineers are licensed in every single state. 21:28.09 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees So whether you live in California or Maine, you're gonna get a sign and sealed set of structural plans so if you're if you're just going to cover your range then that's going to be a pretty easy process for you because you're going to go in there with your structural set probably a site survey of some sort. You need a GC to pull the permit for you. Then you need to go get the permit process started. That's a pretty easy permit. 21:59.59 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees If you're going to add food and beverage and you're going to want a gable off the back of it, or maybe you want a teaching center on the right side of it, we have all of these packages to to add. So you have your base structure which is your hitting base, typically 10 to 12 foot wide. For your facility, I would say, let's start with 20. It's big enough. We would dive a little deeper into that. Stephen and the team would be asking them a series of questions about what are you doing in revenue? How many balls are you hitting? We want to get into your business model a little bit. We're not here just to sell you a structure. I think with our company why we're so successful is because we actually care about how you do because you're our best salesperson. Once you do well and we make sure that you make money and you've got four and five times your revenue from the year before, you're going to tell all your buddies. Anyone in the business is going to ask you how you're doing that and you're going to say this was a great experience. That's what we're going for. So we've done this in revenue, we've added a food and beverage aspect to it. One thing about us is we've built a team of golf professionals. So I came into this outside of the golf network. I love golf and so much about golf is really awesome. I didn't come from this world, i didn't come up through the PGA program and so it's just a little bit different for me to break into that golf world. But my relationships with Top Tracer early on in the partnership that we put together allowed me to learn and meet so many people in the network. And so we put together a team first. even who. 23:44.71 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees It's funny, you said, I'm going to jump on the timeline earlier. You didn't. It was actually a perfect transition because right after those first installs, we talked to Stephen. So he was the very next customer. 23:55.92 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Right, okay. 23:58.18 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees So it was actually a perfect transition into Stephen, who came on first and really It was that night. That missing piece that was the fuel that we needed. The operator that knows the business that understands the concept who came in really speaking the same language and we are so very similar in so many ways. Have the same vision and in so many different ways in what we're doing. And then we brought in Mark Castor who was already talking about coming on at the same exact time. So he came on board about the same time and he was the director of operations at Top Tracer. So we said, "OK, we got Mark coming in who was running. He helped build the first few Top Golfs". He was pegged to be. What i understand he was in line to be the director of operations for Top Golf. And then they ended up moving to Dallas. He stayed in Chicago and Top Tracer was actually in Chicago for a little while. So that's how Mark came on board. And then we I met Patrick Cherry, who was with PGA Magazine for over 20 years. And so he was our next guy to come on board, to come in to bring in more sales and those relationships and that network that he has. And then Mark Williams came on board from Top Tracer recently this earlier this year which was another great ad in the marketing. He has his connection to Top Golf and his experience from Top Tracer. Then we have Kathy Harbin and Don Ray who i lean on a lot and Del Ratcliffe and all these people. 25:42.31 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees So Kathy came on as a consultant. Don was one of our customers so we just really leaned on these people who are in the golf world. and put this team of people together. We want to get into your business. We want to see what your plans are. We want to show you what other people are doing that's working and not just say, "here's your structure". Here it is per square foot. Here's your engineering. Good luck. Here's this GC over here. Have a good time. 26:08.35 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees No, we want to try get you to from point A to point B, even if we don't have a hand in every aspect of it, we want to put a team together that can help you be successful. 26:18.05 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast It sounds like you try to make it a turnkey solution as much as you possibly can with the other partners that that you have there. 26:24.26 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah. 26:24.19 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Stephen, I wanted to ask you this. What i understand, what i see would cover the tees and you've got a bay builder that we're going to run through on the ModGolf YouTube channel. The three of us are going to jump over for a video conversation. So we're going to do a demo over there. So I really encourage all of our listeners here. Hey, if you're listening right now I'll include the link in the show notes. You can jump over there and you can see us in action looking at some visuals and playing around with their Bay Builder. So this segues into the into the Bay Builder a little bit here. The fact that what I can see, the real value and the virtue of what you're doing is the modular piece, the repeatability for speed for quality assurance. So how do you reconcile or balance between customization and making it as repetitive as possible? I believe the quote if i don't screw it up, that Henry Ford said back in the day with the Model T, you can have any colour you want as long as it's black. 27:24.87 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees We use that. 27:25.60 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast How do you reconcile that? Let's say, for example here your technology, you're working a lot with Top Tracer, but let's say someone wants to use inrange or someone wants to use Power Tee with their system for the mats and automated balls coming up and all these other things. So how do you reconcile between having it as modular and consistent as possible, but also allowing some customization? 27:52.63 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah, there's a lot of flexibility in the product, which is what makes it great and being modular. So our first phone call with the potential client and customer is we're going to look at their driving range on Google Earth and we're going to measure it out and say okay you have 200 feet here each bay being 10 foot wide. We can put 20 bays here, but let's right size this. What makes the most sense for you? 28:13.61 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees And we'll start talking about some layout. needs Is this going to be a straight line of 20 or do we need to put a bend in it to keep balls going towards the center of the driving range? Do you want to incorporate a space in this tee line for your ball dispenser? Do you want to have a concession stand? Do you want to have a storage space for your teachers to put their clubs? 28:32.12 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Do you want to have club fitting? So we go through the vision of what they how do they want to use this space when we get done. What does finished look like? And let's walk backwards from there. And being modular, if they have room for 20 bays, we can say, well, "let's start with 10". And then if that works out really well, we can come back and add on the next 10. It's a plug and play kind of thing. We can expand upon that if you have those successes. 28:54.90 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Then we'll come back and we can add to it. You don't have to build a monster driving range. If you're a little hesitant of what this is going to do, we believe you're going to call us back in a year and we're going to add. That's been the case with the Maine learning center, they wanted to do 20 bays, but they were afraid to invest that much capital into the tee-line so we came in laid out 20 bays but we only built 10 knowing that we would come back at some point and their numbers are astounding. They had more ball sales in the first month than they did the previous year on their driving range in one month so they were like "yeah we're gonna we're gonna be adding that second wing on at some point!" 29:35.99 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees The Bay Builder is fantastic and it's really there so people can understand the offerings because we work in a lot of different climates. You can be an open air structure like we have where there's no walls and windscreens we can hit year round. The weather's pretty nice down here but as we get into Chicago let's say, they're going to have a shoulder season where they're not having participation on their driving range because the winds are blowing and the snow is falling. 29:58.91 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees We did an installation in 2024 at New Linux. Park District at The Sanctuary. And they had the outdoor technology solution, the mobile version, and they had tracked over a million golf balls on their driving range with the outdoor solution. We built the structure and opened it January and in the first four months of the year, in their shoulder season, they tracked a million and a half golf balls. So before they even got to their busy season, the summer months and fall, they had already surpassed their previous year's of revenue. 30:30.34 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees And they were able to do that because of the modular design and our ability to put enclosures on the structure. We put sidewalls, windscreens that can block the winds. We can put in garage doors on the back. So on those nice days you roll up the garage door you get that full breeze but if the wind's howling, put the garage doors down. We have heaters that run through the roof line as well. 30:49.88 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees And just because it gets cold outside doesn't mean they want to put their sticks away. It's they don't have the option unless they're going to a Topgolf facility or an enclosed structure of some kind. Being able to really extend those seasons in the northern climates has been huge and that's based off the modular design. 31:09.29 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Interesting. You just touched on this with being in northern climates in the U .S. that looking at your website going through some of the pictures of the builds you've done i did see what an aerial shot. It has two feet of snow on the ground and on the roof there so you can build anywhere from south Florida all the way up to northern Wisconsin and everything in between. So with that, I want to use the analogy of like a Lego piece. So one Lego brick would be the equivalent of one modular bay. So no one can say, oh, I want each bay to be two feet wider or a foot wider. A bay is a bay is a bay, I'm assuming. And then depends if you want five of them, 10 of them or 50 of them, cranked on an angle but the bay width and the roof pitch is always the same. I'm assuming, to keep it nice and regular? Or no, you've got that flexibility too? 31:54.14 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah, it has that flexibility. Our standard will say 10 foot wide, but when we show up to the site, we're going to provide those plans, includes the structural engineering and the foundational and engineering. And when we show up on site and the concrete's been poured. We shoot the lasers and measure what's there. And then we're going to take your 10 bays and make it work on there. I think at Palmetto Dunes, we weren't exactly 10 foot. I think we went out to like 10 .3 or something. just because of that that fit best on the slab to make it look uniform. 32:22.87 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah. 32:22.98 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Everything is cut and it is modular but the flexibility of the product to be able to show up and like all right we need to make an adjustment this concrete is a hundred percent level. There's some ups and downs what we're shooting lasers across the slab and finding those imperfections and making notches on each of the columns to make sure that when we're finished. The roof line, it looks squared. Everything looks perfect, even though we may have a foundation that isn't necessarily. perfect itself. 32:47.62 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah. 32:47.88 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast got it got it 32:47.89 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees The same thing on the bay widths. They're 10 foot wide, but sometimes when we get into a structure and they have, let'll say 20 bays, they want to have a couple bays on the ends that are 12 foot wide. That gives you the ability to have instruction in there gives you a little more elbow room. And also when instruction isn't being done you can use those spaces as an elevated experience for your guests so you can make those your VIP bays you can turn those into a space that you can rent out for corporate events or birthday parties or league play. 33:16.30 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees It's just nice to have a little you can take two of those bays and i have 24 feet of a space for hosting parties. or doing trunk shows or whatever your your mind can imagine as an operator of having this space. We have a a really good customer in Louisville, Kentucky, Different Strokes. And they have been incredible. programming on their tee line it's not just the driving range but they'll have like ladies nights and they'll have arts and craft nights and they're bringing all these people when yes they're playing golf but there's so much else happening on the property as well. 33:47.83 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Which is huge for the customers. you know We call it that T-O-P, time on property. Give them a reason to come. hang out, give them a reason to stay, they're inevitably going to spend more time and spend more money with you as well. 33:58.79 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah, I learned that with my work with Topgolf. They call it that stickiness. You want people to to be there for three or four hours, not just hit a bucket of balls and and leave because then the average spend obviously goes up because the people are there even longer and they're having a great time. 34:11.52 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Great time across all those experiential touch points of their day or their evening. Hey a Matt, I want to flip it over to you here. I've learned this little fun fact about you that you were a competitive race car driver, . 34:25.64 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees in my younger days. Yeah. 34:26.48 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast I could do a whole podcast episode on this now because I love racing. I want to learn from you. What virtues or characteristics have you learned from competitive race car driving that's helped you as an entrepreneur and with the business now? Is there anything transportable or that you can say that you've brought over that you've learned from racing cars around a track? 34:51.50 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yes, so I played a lot of sports as well. And I think we do more team oriented stuff. Like, the racing for sure there's so many analogies and I do think if you come if you understand racing a little bit, you understand it's not the driver who's wins, it's such a team effort, the crew. 35:13.24 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yep. 35:14.35 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Your crew chief, the guys that are working on the car getting it ready and then the driver has to do his job and put out on the track. What you know what everybody else created, so it's funny that i've got a great analogy. We just did it the other day on the board. And I wish I could show you what we were doing. There's growing pains in every business and so orders are coming in we're making sure that we can keep these orders and really keep performing for our customers. We've got such a good reputation. It's so important for us to keep that. And so I drew on the board the other day an apex turn. And the apex of a turn is is the middle of the turn, it's the apex of the corner. 35:58.91 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 36:01.04 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees It's where you should be getting on the throttle. It's where you want your car to be turning the best and pointing the right direction at that apex. For us our sales force is coming down the back stretch. We want sales to be coming full speed down the back stretch. 36:17.15 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Pedal to the metal full throttle, we don't want to break in the braking zone. Our design department, we got to slow it down we got to make sure that we're designing for the customer what they want. They're going to be able to use and that we're doing this the right way so we need to let off the gas a little bit get into the braking zone and break properly. 36:36.01 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Now that we figured that out through design we now have a set of signed and sealed plans for this customer, now we're into production. So in that middle of that corner, when you're approaching that apex, that's the production. That's the guys out here in the facility. producing that product to get ready to get it on a semi truck to get it to that facility. 36:54.74 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees The most important part of the entire process which is hard to say because without every part of the process, you don't you can't make the turn, right? So you've got to nail it. You've got to hit that apex perfectly in production to allow your install team to full throttle again on the back stretch. So now you're coming through the corner, slowing down in design. You're coming through the corner in production and you're full throttle to get that install done. That's my best analogy for racing, only because we literally just put it on the board the other day. It's still sitting in my office. 37:24.87 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast I love that. That is awesome. So talking about productions, Stephen, I wanted to ask you this. So run us through the delivery. After design, everything's locked down, and then you're building, do you already have a kit of parts? Do you have a lot of these pieces? I'm going to show my age here. A lot of people won't know this. I think it's more of an English thing with Meccano. Do you guys know what a Meccano set is? It's like these metal pieces and you can build things. 37:51.100 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Oh yeah. Yep. 37:53.75 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Like an Erector said. 37:55.57 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah, yes, I'm really aging myself here. I guess my question here, do you already have a lot of the pre-built elements that you have constructed already, off to the side and ready to go? and where do you build and construct before you ship out? Do you have one location in the US or multiples? So tell us a little bit about that and once your design is done between the design piece and procurement, assembly and then shipping out and then construction. So yeah, can you quickly run through that piece, Stephen? I'm quite curious about that. 38:29.56 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Sure. Yeah, once we get our margin orders for the customer and then Caleb Metz does our design work on our team, it gives us the design and we know what it is, we're then going to hand it over to our production team and they're going to start pulling the components we need. So we're ordering materials from the mills and mass quantities of all the aluminum structures, but there's a lot of components that put this together and some of the proprietary pieces of what we have like the anchoring system. All of those things, yes, we have components sitting on shelves. 38:56.78 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees And then they're pulling on their order and saying, "okay, this is a 20 bay system. We're going to need this many fasteners. We're going to need this many gussets and this many anchoring systems and this many bolts". All the details of putting this thing together is a lot like a lego set so when the guys show up they have everything they need to build what's on the plans. 39:13.42 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees So once those orders are coming in, they're going to start pulling all the parts and start notching holes. and get as much done offline coming from that modular background that we can do on-site in Oviedo, Florida before we show up to the facility where we're just making small adjustments. And that really helps on the site for us to install a 20 base system. We're going to be on site maybe 10 to 14 days to install the whole thing because a lot of that work is done during that turn like Matt's talking about right that's where we're really putting all these pieces together. 39:41.81 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 39:44.40 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees The customer doesn't that. They just see the big truck show up to your site with all the materials for us to do what we do best which is install and get out and get it ready for the next portion of dressing it up. The production piece is strenuous on our guys. yThere's a lot of moving pieces that make this come together. I hope that answers the question. 40:11.15 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast It does? No, it does. 40:12.27 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast I guess one follow-up Matt, you can jump in on this one. So do you have in-house a team of installers and builders? Or it depends on what state you're in. Do you have accredited builders? 40:24.46 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees No, we've done everything up to this point in house. 40:28.67 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Nice. 40:29.60 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees With the rental company that I spoke about earlier, we already had a traveling crew. Another reason why I was so excited to meet Mark Castor and the Top Tracer team early on is because I already had a crew that was used to traveling, that was used to installing on the road. We did the same thing already. 40:46.97 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees We're pre-building everything in the facility. We're pre-notching. We're pre-punching. We're getting everything built to that plan. Which is quite easy because we're building it modularly, right? So it's rinse and repeat for the most part. And as we add different modular components to it, it gets a little more difficult for the team to prepare that, but we want to build that before it gets on the truck. So when we show up on site, it's shoot laser on the concrete there. Do the layout installer anchoring system. And then start directing the set. And we only want to chop the columns on site to the height that it needs to be after we shoot the laser. We developed this structure to not even use concrete to just go into the ground. And we have some out there. We've shown up on site the product is so flexible that we've been on site and we've had customers, Don, right? Decide to change exactly where he wanted it to go all together. I love Don. I'm messing with him, but he did. 42:00.01 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees and we changed it. We moved it. If you look at his site, you've got a structure in one spot and then the other one's up forward a little bit and cockeyed. That's where he wanted it for his own reasons. Our customers know their sites better than us, right? They know where all the balls are going. So it's like, hey, listen, that's fine. Same thing when they pour concrete, like Stephen was saying earlier. I want these a little bit wider. I want these to be 10 foot 8" bays, and we poured it a little long. And we're like, yeah, whatever. That's fine. Not a big deal because we're going to lay it out when we get there. It doesn't matter. You can change your mind, up to when we show up on those things, as long as it fits on that slab. It's a really flexible product. 42:47.51 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Oh, those demanding clients, Don. Well, I've had Don on the podcast before. Yeah, Don's got a lot of positive energy. 42:54.20 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Oh yeah. Yeah. 42:55.38 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah, I'm giving Don a hard time there. No problem with that. Okay, I want to finish up here because I love storytelling and I love to hear success stories and of course Stephen, you had mentioned earlier with your experience, the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort, and that was a success story. But Matt, I'd love you to finish up here before we jump over to the ModGolf Youtube channel in the video that we're going to do here. Can you share with us a story, perhaps a client, someone that was perhaps, how can I put this? Not fully bought in or perhaps thought that this wasn't the right solution. And now on the other end that they have this and they're over the moon with this. So someone that maybe was not fully bought in and now they're so happy. Maybe you can give us a unique story that you've had, one of your favorites along the way. 43:43.48 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees That Stephen might actually know this better than me. If anyone pops into your head Stephen, go ahead. 43:54.12 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah. I would say Nicole Inkle. 43:57.30 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Oh, there you go. 43:58.15 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah, that was a great one. 43:58.05 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah, Nicole. Yep. Yeah. 43:59.55 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Yeah, she has this driving range and she wanted to put it in. She was on a parcel of land that was owned by somebody else and it was being transitioned and being sold. 44:12.88 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees So we were under contract to build it. but She comes back to us. She's like, "I really need to pump the brakes. I'm really concerned about doing this for multiple reasons". We just supported her and said "i'll tell you what, we'll put this on the back burner and let the dust settle a little bit". And she was able to get through those things and work out a deal on the land and figure out a way to to make this work for her. 44:35.11 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees She came to the Tracy Awards at the PGA show last year where she was recognized for her successes at the range. And her ability to tell the stories of how it's impacted her guests that come, the people in the story. The way she gets to engage with her customers. And she said, "yeah, the money's great. We're making more money than we've ever made, but I'm able to connect with people that we weren't able to before because there's so many people just hanging out and socializing on the driving range. It's not just one or two people standing on a grass patch, getting in a bucket of balls and leaving". They have line dancing going on and there's music playing and bands set up. 45:11.74 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Love it. 45:12.33 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees So it's not just monetary successes, it's operational successes as well. She's built something that she's super proud of because the community comes together on her property. And you spoke to Don Ray. He would tell you the same story if you talked to him about it. He was concerned going into it. Of the investment he was making into it that this is quite an investment to make. But when the register started ringing and the balls were flying, he's like, okay. I'm okay. Everything's fine. We're going to be good. 45:40.60 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees We don't have a crystal ball for each one of our customers, their operation is completely in their hands. 45:49.11 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Right. 45:49.21 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees But if they're successful at running a golf course and operation-wise, you just have to take that same hospitality to your driving range, offer the same thing you're already offering, just take it and accelerate it a little bit. Pump it up a little bit, add in that food and beverage. And you're going to create something that is going to bring people back to the property and have multiples on your your bottom line. 46:11.75 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees I agree. 46:11.37 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah, that piece that experiential success also as you talked about. Keeping people there even longer to do things that are more than just hitting a golf ball. And it sounds like what you're creating there, you're just getting started, which is exciting. 46:20.56 Matthew Towell Yeah. 46:23.62 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast I ave a feeling the next time we're going to talk, you're going to be hitting that thousand install milestone. I don't know how quick that's going to happen. Maybe you don't want that to happen too quickly. 46:34.19 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Hey, bring it on. 46:34.22 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast It's that startup conundrum that you don't want to scale too fast. Careful what you ask for. You just might get it. To ybuild 1,000 in the time that you did 100, you definitely need more capacity to do that. 46:45.90 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees I need a bigger boat. 46:46.05 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast So, hey, to finish up here, because we do have so many listeners that are in the golf industry. So if listeners out there, if they have a standalone range. That's a daily fee municipal course or a private club or a golf resort, how can they best get in touch with you? Matt, I'll let you take this one. How can they get in touch with you and Cover The Tees to find out more to see if what you're offering is right for them? 47:10.39 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Yeah, sure. They just need to go to coverthetees.com and take a look at what we've got there. We've got some great content for them to take a look at, and then it's easy to reach out to our team and either Patrick or Mark or Stephen or somebody will set up a meeting with them. We'll do a team's meeting and take a look at what they got going on. That's probably the easiest way. You have all of our contact info on there. And then you're going to get thrown right into the process. We can start talking some numbers with you. We can start looking at what you're doing now and what you'd like to do. And what we haven't even discussed now is we're actually modernizing your range. 47:57.41 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees We're going to recommend a certain type of dispenser so you can track all your balls and control your point of sale and maybe a ball washing station. Different things that we'll recommend through the process, or if we're going to partner with them, which we do as well, we also invest in courses. That brings up a whole other conversation at that point there's anyone that's kind of Having a little bit of reservation on this, afraid to make that commitment. We've got a great temporary partnership program there where we will actually invest if we like the facility. 48:39.27 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees And then you can take us out of the deal. We want to get people involved in what we're doing. One thing and i'd like to say is I think with Steve and I both we talk about it all the time. I go to ranges. Our hundredth range, we're partners in that range. And it's been an amazing experience. I think for all of us. We're super excited. We got 40 bays in Asheville North Carolina right by the airport, right by the brewery. Really cool operator there in a great course. It got it got flooded out with Helene, completely destroyed and we came in to rebuild the range and partner on that deal with them. Watching the families come in there, Stephen sent me a picture early on. And it was a grandmother in a wheelchair sitting in the bay with her family around her watching her grandkids hit balls. And I was like. "This is freaking cool, man this is freaking cool. This is what I want to do forever". How it makes you feel after it's fun. Like this stuff is fun. Building these things are cool. 49:51.38 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees And what I could tell some people that are interested in this, I'd say that's the coolest experience. The money is great. But to Nicole's point, what Stephen was saying earlier. What you get to feel from it afterwards and what you're doing for the community. And especially in some of these smaller towns that are doing it right. It's really cool to give a community something to do. that's That's positive. 50:13.23 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast I love this. In a way you're creating the vessel for shared memories and experiences. I love that. 50:21.55 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees It is. Yeah, it's really changed the perspective. We got into this because we thought it would be cool and fun and we like golf. But to experience what we're doing, I feel just on-ramping people, we're giving them ability to get into golf without being intimidated without being scared. Because we talked about earlier, what we did our first experience in golf. What was our first experience? That was my first experience. I was terrified at that point because i gotta go on that course like i gotta go out there or I got to go hit off this ground. So there's just so many positive things to this. We could go down that road forever, but I just wanted to make sure I got that in because I feel like it's just something bigger, right? It's something bigger than what we're doing here. And it's really opening up this game for more people to get involved. Who would not have before. 51:16.86 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Absolutely. I love it. Well, I think there's a bit of a mic drop moment right there. I have way too many questions still to ask, but the beauty of it is we still have time on the ModGolf YouTube channel, which we're going to jump over to now. So again, I encourage our listeners to become viewers over there. I will include in the show notes the link to that YouTube video and I will also include the links to everything Matt had mentioned there so you can easily connect and get in touch. 51:42.41 Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast So with that, why don't we finish up? So Stephen Arnold, the Chief Operating Officer, and Matt Towell, the founder and owner of Cover The Tees. Gentlemen, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today on ModGolf. 51:59.34 Matthew Towell - Founder/CEO at Cover The Tees Thank you. We appreciate it. 51:59.80 Stephen Arnold - COO at Cover The Tees Thank you for having us. It was great.