About Yardstick Golf

Why I Started This Website

I began looking into indoor golf as a potential investment opportunity. In doing so, it quickly became apparent that the assumptions about the number of rounds played drove the business case on such an enterprise. This refers to both the number of simulators my area could support and the percentage of time they would be rented.

Most of the simulator manufacturers had ROI models that they provided me showing an expected utilization of ~70-80% for the year, but were unable to share actual results. They also didn't have any empirical information on impacts of weather, population, etc. I decided to create a survey to collect that sort of information and provided a copy back to participants of the survey.

What I found was that these ROI models overstated actual use. I was also able to evaluate a number of other data sources covering weather, golfers in a 10 mile radius, home price, percentage of renters, etc around a facility to identify a few drivers to help build a forecast of expected utilization in my area.

Given the total lack of information like this, I thought it might be interesting to see if I could build a community and continue to gather data that owners would find useful.

Lem Clevenger

Our Indoor Golf Mission

Our mission is simple. Yardstick Golf's aim is to help you build a successful indoor golf business through research and data driven strategies. A recent study on using data to improve business by McKinsey (a leading global consulting firm) found that most retail businesses could improve their top line by over 10% and their bottom line by roughly half through improved use of data .

Our benchmarking study takes that one step further. By examining the performance of peer indoor golf businesses, you can quickly target the areas needing improvement. The benchmarking data also provides you with achievable minimum goals and targets based on the experience of others.

We've done extensive research on the indoor golf business. By combining surveys, data about businesses, traffic, weather and golfer demographics we've determined the keys to running a successful indoor golf center.