A Fortune magazine profile detailed how the former NFL quarterback and current ESPN commentator successfully directs the six courses that he owns to steady six-figure annual profitability, through sharp attention to detail and a focus on affordability, atmosphere and playability.
A recent profile in Fortune magazine detailed how former NFL quarterback and current ESPN commentator Ron Jaworski is now having success in the golf business through Ron Jaworski Golf, which now owns and operates six courses in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“I have never lost money on a golf course,” Jaworski told Fortune, knocking on a wooden table while being interviewed at his Blue Heron Pines Golf Club in Egg Harbor City, N.J. “I say that proudly because I know a lot of people can’t.”
And in fact, Jaworski told Fortune, each of his courses pulls in six-figure annual profits.
For all of the courses in his portfolio, including the recently acquired Downingtown (Pa.) Country Club in suburban Philadelphia (http://clubandresortbusiness.com/2015/05/27/new-ownership-cuts-ribbon-at-ron-jaworskis-downingtown-pa-cc/), Jaworski has employed the “doggedness and eye for detail that characterize his TV scouting [for ESPN] to turn a favorite hobby into three-plus decades of business success,” the Fortune profile said.
“It’s like he’s still a quarterback reading the field,” Ken Kochenour, Jaworski’s partner on five of his courses, told Fortune. “He sees stuff other people don’t see.”
Sometimes, the Fortune profile said, that means adding an alternate tee, or trimming trees to open up the fairway, in the interests of playability. That’s one of Jaworski’s central operating tenets, Fortune said, along with affordability (his courses charge less than $100 per round, even during weekend peak times), atmosphere (each club features a sports bar), and a quick pace of play (which his course rangers are not reluctant to enforce).
Other times, it means spotting savings opportunities. Ron Jaworski Golf relies on economy of scale, Fortune noted, purchasing everything from fertilizer to clubhouse food in bulk to be split among locations. This spring, after his purchase of Downingtown CC, Jaworski mobilized employees from his other courses to redo its shoddy sand traps. What would have cost upwards of $110,000 through a contractor was done for $18,000.
In golf, “your margins are tight and it can be thankless,” Charlie Clarke, Superintendent at Blue Heron Pines and a longtime Jaworski employee, told Fortune.
Jaworski’s love of the links dates to his childhood in Lackawanna, N.Y., Fortune reported. The son of a worker at a local Bethlehem Steel mill, Jaws was no country-club kid. But around age 9, he and his friends began sneaking onto the grounds of a public nine-hole course near their grade school to play scofflaw rounds, and Jaworski was smitten.
At 22, in 1973, Jaworski bought his first set of real clubs. By then he was a hotshot second-round pick of the Los Angeles Rams, after a successful collegiate career at Youngstown State University, and he put the clubs to frequent use.
But even then, Fortune reported, the strong-armed QB who came to be known as “The Polish Rifle” was painfully aware of how short an NFL career could be: “I was scared to death of the future,” he told Fortune. In 1977, after he was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles and found stability as Coach Dick Vermeil’s starting quarterback (he would lead the Eagles to the 1980 Super Bowl, where they lost to the Oakland Raiders), Jaworski and a teammate took over operations at a nearby golf course—an experience he enjoyed enough to begin envisioning his second career.
Five years later, Fortune reported, Jaworski learned that a bankrupt course in southern New Jersey was for sale. He scraped together $1.65 million, more than four times his $400,000 salary, to buy the course, which he rechristened Ron Jaworski’s Eagles’ Nest. As the new owner, he soon set about cutting greens, raking traps, and riding a mower to trim the rough. “Once you put your own money in the deal,” he told Fortune, “it’s amazing how quick you learn.”
As his NFL career wound down, Jaworski’s stable of courses grew, and by the mid-’90s he owned a half-dozen clubs. As the Tiger Woods-driven rise in golf’s popularity prompted a concurrent rise in golf-course valuation, Fortune reported, Jaworski was offered more than $17 million in 1998 by a group of Wall Street investors for his courses—roughly $7 million more than he’d originally paid for them.
“I remember opening the letter, sitting with my wife,” Jaworski recalled to Fortune. “And I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re out of the golf business.’ ”
But the absence would be brief, Fortune reported. After a noncompete clause expired in 2000, Jaworski bought Valleybrook Country Club in Blackwood, N.J., launching what became the Ron Jaworski Golf portfolio. Retirement hadn’t agreed with him. “I got a little squirrelly,” Jaworski says. “I was probably playing too much, too.”
The course portfolio, Fortune reported, will eventually fall under the direction of Ron Jaworski’s son, B.J., currently Executive Vice President of Ron Jaworski Golf. The company’s founder is upbeat about its long-term prospects, even in the face of National Golf Foundation statistics that show a continued net decline in the number of courses.
Ron Jaworski is undaunted, Fortune noted, because he sees women and children—often shunned or discouraged by snobbish country clubs—as an underserved market that will be golf’s future lifeblood. He’s in the process of completing his second course purchase of 2015, and he’s eyeing more. “The numbers are down,” he says of the industry. “That’s a reality. But they’re not down for me.”
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