As golf clubs grapple with high labor costs and seek ways to operate more efficiently, Golf Genius is betting AI can automate tasks ranging from processing pro shop shipments to handling tournament-day operations, reducing the amount of staff time devoted to administrative work.
Labor is the single largest expense in the golf and country club business, with total payroll generally targeted at 45% to 55% of gross revenue, according to golf club management company Bobby Jones Links. With labor accounting for such an outsized share of the cost structure, productivity-enhancing technology presents a clear opportunity, but only if time saved translates into tangible business upside.
Golf Genius is a golf technology company best known for its tournament management software, which clubs, courses, resorts and governing bodies use to handle everything from registration and payments to pairings, live scoring and leaderboards. The company said its technology serves around 11,000 golf facilities and reaches over 15 million consumers worldwide. While tournament management remains its foundation, Golf Genius has expanded into golf shop and inventory management, coaching technology, handicap infrastructure and consumer applications including Golfshot.
Mike Zisman, founder and executive chairman of Golf Genius, is a longtime software entrepreneur who previously founded Soft-Switch, an early electronic-mail software company that was acquired by Lotus Development Corp.
For Zisman, customer ROI doesn’t necessarily come from slimming down employee headcount. He described Golf Genius’ value proposition as “a combination of cost reduction, cost avoidance and value added.”
You can see how that plays out in Golf Genius’ Golf Shop product, where an AI-powered feature scans vendor shipping documents and automatically converts them into inventory data. Zisman recalled one club bringing in an intern at the beginning of golf season. His supervisor told the young hire it would take about a week to process a backlog of shipments that had just come in.
“This young kid comes back at the end of the day and goes, ‘Well, I’m all done,’” Zisman said. “That is a huge example of a golf shop saving a lot of time.”
At The Ooltewah Club, northeast of Chattanooga, Tennessee, head golf professional Thomas Durbin said using Golf Genius has largely eliminated the need to set up and tear down physical leaderboards.
“For a while we continued to set up both physical and digital leaderboards and we noticed that players preferred the ease and convenience of the digital leaderboard. I have not had any player come to me and talk about missing the physical leaderboard, and the staff are better able to service the members and provide a better personal experience.”
The hassles of yore become apparent at one tourney where the club still displays scoring the old-fashioned way on a physical leaderboard. Durbin estimates he spends two hours preparing it and another hour updating scores during play, while a couple of additional employees are needed to staff the scoring table.
“The most important feature I use is the tie-breaking methods. When you complete the round, it instantly breaks all ties in a correct and consistent way. This takes away the high anxiety situations at the scoring table where the players are hanging around waiting on the results. The pressure is lifted and the results are accurate every time.”
The software has also shifted some administrative work away from employees. When registration opened for the club’s Member-Guest tournament, Durbin said it filled within three minutes while collecting the player information needed for the event and tee gifts. And for some outside events, the club has charged a Golf Genius fee to help offset its own software costs.
Horseshoe Bay Resort, a four-course golf resort in the Texas Hill Country, offers a window into how efficiencies can translate into greater capacity. From 2019 to 2024, group golf revenue increased 45.6%, group golf rounds rose 14.8% and member-event participation jumped 56.3%, according to Holly Jenkins, director of tournaments and group golf. Jenkins notes that Golf Genius wasn’t solely responsible for that growth, but credits the software with helping her department absorb increased volume without the administrative workload rising in lockstep.
Over that time period, the tournament operations department’s responsibilities expanded beyond resort golf outings to include member tournaments, golf associations, tournament technology, billing, communications, budgeting and multi-course tournament operations. Jenkins said Golf Genius helped centralize registration and event information processes, giving staff breathing room to manage the broader workload.
“Its value is less about eliminating labor and more about increasing the productivity and capacity of the staff we already have,” Jenkins said. “I view Golf Genius as an investment that allows our existing staff to accomplish more rather than simply as another software expense.”
Tyler Brennan, founder of Momentum Golf Partners, a multi-course operator, uses the free version of Golf Genius and says it saves staff considerable time calculating handicaps and producing scorecards and cart placards, particularly for complicated round-robin events. But he isn’t convinced that further time savings necessarily translate into financial returns.
“While our golf staff do have passing moments of chaos, they generally have ample time to handle tasks like this,” Brennan said, arguing that additional automation could simply result in more downtime rather than lower labor costs. “After all, golf is in fact a business, so every decision must improve the state of the business.”
For Zisman, the labor equation is less about cutting existing jobs than avoiding the next hire. “For most clubs, I would say cost avoidance. It’s not like we have five assistants, we can go to four assistants. It’s, we’re going to avoid hiring the sixth.”
Zisman argued that the other side of the return is harder to quantify: the member experience. At Merion Golf Club, where he is a member, teams pay about $1,400 to enter the club’s Member-Guest, which Zisman estimates generates roughly $100,000 in entry fee revenue. For an event of that significance, he said, clubs are willing to spend to make the experience memorable and deliver what golf professionals often call the “wow factor.”
“Golf pros will say to me sometimes, ‘Mike, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we would pay your annual fee just for our Member-Guest,’” Zisman said.