Golf Instruction Platform Dead Set On Flattening Sport’s Steep Learning Curve

Before founding Performance Golf, a fast-growing online golf learning platform, Brixton Albert logged hundreds of hours of instruction to tweak all aspects of his swing as he chased a childhood dream of playing professional golf.

His senior year at Warwick High School in Lititz, Pennsylvania Albert recorded a stroke average of 70.8 and was recruited to play division 1 golf at Radford University. While cracking the starting lineup proved to be a challenge, he did log some tournament action and after undergrad he played on the University of Tampa’s squad while pursuing an MBA.

“I didn’t really have a great college golf career. I realized in college how good everyone is and I got into a little bit of a slump. It’s such a fine line and if you are struggling, it’s really challenging to make the team. My whole life growing up, my goal was to make the PGA Tour. I remember thinking if I don’t make the PGA Tour what am I going to do with my life?” Albert says.

He thought the next best thing would be to start a business that would be as fulfilling as a career playing professional golf. This would provide a way to stay connected to a game that occupied all his attention for eight hours a day from age 10-22. But before Albert was ready to turn a notion into an action plan, he decided to first get some corporate experience under his belt.

Straight out of college, Brixton took a job at Listrak, a purveyor of digital marketing automation solutions. He was primarily engaged in consultative selling to executives at omni-channel retailers, collaborating with clients like Spanx, Grommet and Books-A-Million. Working as a sales rep at a firm keyed into driving customer engagement, retention and revenue proved to be an invaluable educational experience for a budding entrepreneur.

“I got an amazing front row seat to seeing a company grow and I have a lot of respect for CEO Ross Kramer. I remember waking up at 3 a.m. on so many nights and taking notes on how I think the company could grow faster and do things better,” Albert says.

But at the tail end of a ten-year-run in software sales, he started feeling like a backup quarterback itching to take the field and showoff what he can do. In 2016 he invested $120,000 of his savings to launch Performance Golf as a side hustle while still at Listrak. Last Fall with his golf learning platform on track to net just under $30 million in revenue on the year, more than double 2020’s tally, he quit his day job to pursue his passion project fulltime.

The platform sells content subscriptions as well as one-off courses for purchase from top tier coaches tackling specific aspects of the game: everything from fixing a slice, to flushing irons and eliminating 3 putts. The demographic sweet spot for Performance Golf’s products are 50+ golfers seeking game improvement instruction on demand. They also don’t mind a little light DIY work, such as uploading their swing videos to the platform in order to get a customized video back from an instructor with feedback and a plan to fix flaws.

“The reality is in-person lessons are great for some people but a lot of people I find don’t want to take in-person lessons. There are some people who take a lesson and forget what they’ve learned right away. I think in-person lessons are great for the higher caliber player but that is a really small subset of the market,” Albert explains.

Albert took hundreds of lessons over the years and found that there were some instructors who could instantly flag a major flaw and prescribe a fix that would yield dividends in just a few seconds. Many others utilized more roundabout methods. They’d give him something to work on and he’d see little to no improvement for months. While developing Performance Golf, Albert travelled the country, meeting with hundreds of instructors and handpicked the ones who fell into the former camp, possessing a knack for providing time efficient solutions to expedite game improvement.

The resulting roster of instructors serving up training programs on the platform includes six-time major winner Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods’ former coach Hank Haney alongside a bevy of less instantly recognizable names that run academies and often crack top instructor in America lists. Martin Chuck, the creator of the training aid company Tour Striker, was the latest to join the platform and in his first six weeks aboard, sales of Chuck’s contact improving course hit $3 million.

Albert likens the learning experience on Performance Golf to working through personal finance personality Dave Ramsey’s baby steps. Only, instead of building an emergency fund and paying off debt you are grooving a more consistent swing with the goal of shooting lower scores.

In a time where there are examples of successful pros who learned how to play the game by binging golf lessons on social media, free content is certainly competition. But Albert sees his product as offering a much more customized experience than what users derive from gratis online alternatives.

“I think the big thing with free lessons is that you are just bouncing around and you don’t really know where to start. You see so many golfers who take advice from a friend or read magazines and watch YouTube videos. We want to help golfers take ownership of what is wrong with their swing and how do they fix it with an organized plan, rather than piece together a million things that really may not even apply to you,” Albert explains.

The company is tracking to hit $55 million in revenue in 2022 and Albert sees runway to push that figure to nine figures next year. To meet that goal Performance Golf is converting the site into an app and broadening product offerings to include physical products as well—proprietary training aids as wells as a couple golf clubs. The company is also building an enhanced video capture feature set to debut in 2023 that will track 17 different components of a golfer’s swing, producing a 3D skeletal swing motion view. This should give instructors a heightened level of accuracy when diagnosing swing flaws while also making it easier for users to visualize their progression.