Turning Old Driving Ranges Into a $10M/Year Business

Most people drive past old, beat-up driving ranges without a second thought. Nick saw something completely different. He saw an industry frozen in time, a market screaming for someone to care, and a gap wide enough to build a real business in.

That business is Golf Ranch. Four locations. 8,000 members. A goal to expand to 50 ranges — one in every state. And one location that went from 3.5 million balls hit per year to 12 million. This isn't a feel-good story about golf. It's a playbook for finding forgotten industries and modernizing them before anyone else does.

The Gap Nobody Was Filling

The insight that started everything is simple but sharp: more people are playing golf than ever before, yet the options were terrible on both ends of the spectrum.

On one end, you have Topgolf — expensive, entertainment-focused, more about the drinks and the vibe than actual golf. Great for a corporate outing. Terrible for someone who just wants to work on their swing three times a week without spending $50 a session. On the other end, you have the old mom-and-pop range with cracked mats, dead grass, and a beat-up ball dispenser from 1987.

Nothing in the middle. That's where Golf Ranch lives.

The golf industry has historically been one of the most resistant to change. Old ownership, old thinking, low standards. That creates an incredibly low bar for improvement — which is exactly the kind of environment where a focused operator can come in and win fast.

Step 1: Create an Atmosphere People Actually Want to Be In

The problem: Traditional ranges feel stuffy, uninviting, and weirdly intimidating. Topgolf fixed the vibe but jacked up the price.

Golf Ranch's fix: Make it genuinely friendly. Not fake-friendly. Actually welcoming.

Their signs say things like "No collar, no shoes, no problem" and "Seriously, don't take this too seriously." That's not just clever copy — it's a positioning statement. It tells a first-timer they belong here. It tells the serious golfer they won't be surrounded by gatekeeping energy. It tells the person who just wants to hit balls with their friends and drink a beer that this is absolutely the right place.

Widening the aperture of who your customer is might be the single most underrated growth lever in a local business. Golf Ranch didn't just serve golfers — they served people who want to *do something* on a Tuesday evening. That's a much bigger market.

Step 2: Fix the Product Before Everything Else

The insight: Customer feedback pointed directly at two things — ball quality and turf quality. So that's where the money went.

This sounds obvious but almost nobody does it. Most business owners guess what customers want. Golf Ranch surveyed them. And the answers weren't glamorous. People weren't asking for a bar or a DJ. They wanted to hit a good golf ball off a mat that didn't feel like concrete.

Ball quality: They invested in high-quality balls and built a sorting process to remove worn-out ones from rotation. A scuffed, waterlogged range ball flies completely differently than a real ball. Serious golfers notice immediately. When you fix it, they notice that too — and they come back.

Turf quality: They tested mat after mat, including options sourced from Amazon, to find surfaces that actually replicated a real hitting surface. That's unglamorous, iterative work. But it's the kind of thing that turns a one-time visitor into a regular.

The growth from 3.5 million to 12 million balls hit at a single location didn't come from a viral marketing campaign. It came from making the core experience better in ways that mattered to the people actually paying for it.

Step 3: Extend Hours and Weather-Proof the Range

The constraint: Traditional ranges are victims of weather and daylight. Rain, heat, darkness — all of them kill revenue hours.

The fix: Structural upgrades that most old owners never bothered with.

Golf Ranch added a covered tee line so customers don't roast in the Texas sun or get rained out mid-bucket. They installed fans for heat and heaters for cold snaps. They put in lights for evening operation.

This last one especially opened up an entirely new customer segment. People on dates. Friends unwinding after work. The after-dinner crowd looking for something more interesting than another bar. Nighttime hours attract people who weren't even thinking about the range during daylight — and that's additive revenue, not cannibalized revenue.

Every hour you extend operations without meaningfully increasing fixed costs is nearly pure margin. The lights aren't cheap, but they're a one-time investment that pays out every single evening.

Step 4: Build Recurring Revenue With a Membership Model

The model: $20/month for a "Ranch Pass" membership that unlocks a 40% discount on buckets of balls, exclusive pricing on the par-3 course and lessons, and access to member-only events like the "Ranch Pass Classic."

This is the move. Pay-per-bucket is fine. Membership is a business.

About 40% of customers at Golf Ranch's featured location are members. That's not just a loyalty stat — that's a revenue predictability stat. You know roughly what's coming in every month before you open the doors. That changes how you operate, how you invest, and how you think about the future.

The gym membership analogy is apt but the golf version is arguably better. Gym members famously don't show up. Golf Ranch members *want* to show up — that's the whole point. The discount is the hook. The community is what keeps them.

Member-only events create a sense of belonging that's genuinely hard to replicate. When someone has played in the Ranch Pass Classic, they're not just a customer anymore. They're part of something. Churn becomes emotionally harder. That's brand equity you can't buy with ads.

Step 5: Leverage Technology as a Differentiator

The technology: Toptracer Range, licensed from Topgolf, tracks ball flight and gives players real data on their shots.

Here's the interesting business history behind this: Topgolf's original thesis was actually to sell Toptracer technology to mom-and-pop ranges. Smart idea. Terrible execution. The upfront cost — around $200,000 — was a wall that most older range owners simply wouldn't climb. They were thinking about retirement, not capital investment.

That barrier became Golf Ranch's opportunity. By acquiring ranges that couldn't or wouldn't make the investment, then deploying the technology themselves, they could offer something competitors literally couldn't match without selling first.

Toptracer also includes a "Toptracer Coach" product for instructors — letting them track student data, assign drills, and manage their teaching practice from within the facility's system. That pulls golf instructors into the Golf Ranch ecosystem, which means their students follow, and their students' friends follow. It's a referral engine that looks like a software feature.

Step 6: Use Loss Leaders to Attract Serious Golfers

The example: A full putting green — expensive to build, expensive to maintain, generates zero direct revenue.

Why it works: It's the $1.50 Costco hot dog. It's not there to make money. It's there to make the decision obvious.

A serious golfer who cares about their short game will drive past three mediocre ranges to get to one with a proper short-game area. That's the customer you want — someone motivated, frequent, and willing to spend. The putting green is the signal that Golf Ranch is a real facility, not a glorified parking lot with some turf.

The same logic applies to the music, the comfortable patio areas, the overall vibe. None of these things have a direct line to revenue. All of them have a direct line to the decision of where someone spends their next two hours.

Investing in experience before you can prove the ROI is uncomfortable. But it's the difference between a facility people visit once and one they make part of their routine.

The Bigger Picture

What Nick built at Golf Ranch is a template that works far beyond golf. The pattern is everywhere: aging industries with outdated ownership, low customer expectations, and no one willing to make even modest improvements. The barrier to entry is often just the willingness to actually care.

Find the market gap between the premium option and the neglected one. Talk to customers and fix the obvious things first. Build a membership model that creates predictable revenue. Invest in experience even when it's hard to justify on a spreadsheet. Use technology that incumbents were too slow or too scared to adopt.

Takeaways

• The gap is the opportunity: Between Topgolf and dead driving ranges sits a wide-open market. Look for similar gaps in other industries.
• Survey, don't guess: Golf Ranch grew 3x+ by fixing ball and turf quality — because they asked what mattered.
• Memberships beat buckets: $20/month with 40% of customers opted in creates a real, predictable business.
• Loss leaders work: The putting green costs money and makes none — and it wins the best customers.
• Technology barriers become acquisition opportunities: Toptracer's $200K cost scared off old owners. Golf Ranch made it a moat.