The golf course has long been fabled as a recreational area that some view as an open air office, where big business deals are formulated and finessed then settled on a handshake.

Morten Bisgaard and Jacob Buksted embellished the reputation when they walked the fairways together and created not merely a contract, but a company that has since spread to 20 different countries from their native Denmark.

Players 1st was launched in 2012 to provide golf club managers with access to an online platform that helps steer them towards making informed decisions, including about how to boost both retention and recruitment numbers among their membership.

Bisgaard and his fellow CEO and co-founder of Players 1st, Buksted, had quit their jobs with a major consultancy company having built the framework of an idea for taking advantage of the then burgeoning landscape of cloud software.

“If you go back to 2012, 2013 that’s when cloud software was just in the beginning and everything was done on paper,” says Bisgaard.

“When we were out working at a client we were basically selling reports, PDFs, and if you want to change a comma in that we have to go back and we charge you by the hour and that’s how it was done.

“What we wanted to do was make it more in the moment and digital, use the cloud technology to make it easier to manage, but also make it more efficient so you would be able to do surveys more often.”

A six-month non-compete exit clause saw them with a lot of time on their hands. “What did we do? We went out and played golf,” laughs the now 46-year-old, who says he came into the sport very late, “but I love it – and I hate it.”

He continues: “Then we came up with the idea at the golf course. Hmm, so what we’ve been looking at here is for small to medium size businesses. What if we did that in the golf industry?

“What if we combine our professional skills with our personal passion?”

Players 1st was born and the pair’s zeal for their business model quickly helped persuade the Danish Golf Union to commit to an initial four-year partnership, during the first year of which the union financially assisted development of a management solution platform that now has over 10,000 users.

“We gave Morten Backhausen, their CEO, a complete cold call to say ‘we have an idea, we have tested it in our local golf course with a spreadsheet and a monthly subscription and we can actually see it works, can we come pitch you an idea?’ Three months later we had a four-year contract with the union about implementing Players 1st in all Danish golf courses.”

Through word of mouth, their success in Denmark spread “to Finland, from Finland to Norway and to England, Scotland and also the US,” recalls Bisgaard, who reveals that their current 3,000-strong client base is projected to grow by a further one thousand this year.

The engine that has driven this rapid growth is a system that uses the data from forensically sculpted surveys to allow golf club managers to make educated decisions in all areas. An on-line dashboard provides visual emphasis and clarification with the bonus that its output is updated immediately when a set of survey results is input.

While some aspects emerge that are specific to individual clubs, two common factors have been extrapolated from over 10 million surveys involving more than 3.5 million golfers: retention of members proves more beneficial than recruitment, and the social vibrancy of a club is more important to most members than a course’s condition.

“If you have a fantastic club there’s no better ambassadors than your members. They will go out and advocate for you,” says Bisgaard, alluding to retention over recruitment.

On the often neglected social benefits of golf club membership, he reasons: “If you gave the average golf course manager £100,000 and said, ‘hey, go and spend that wisely’, they will probably go and build a new green or fix a green or something around the course or maybe a new bunker.

“But it is really not the way you get most value for that money. It is in creating the environment around the club, getting members to belong.

“If it’s a nice place to be and if you get them hooked socially to the club it doesn’t matter about the green or the bunker, the quality of that, as long as it’s okay. But it doesn’t have to be world-class.

“Everyone wants to belong to a tribe and for me that’s where clubs should invest much more going forward as the amount of money you need to invest in order to create a great club environment is nothing compared to fixing the green.

“We’ve launched a partnership with England Golf in order to build the biggest financial benchmarking platform in England, so you can have an idea about how you’re performing against your peers, both revenue wise but also cost wise.”

Although price scaled for its original target market of low-and mid-level clubs, Players 1st number the majority of the world’s Top 100 clubs among their client portfolio.

Bisgaard has always been bewitched by numbers. “I was a bit of a math nerd growing up,” he concedes. “My first job was in the Danish Ministry of Finance.

“There is kind of a thread in my first job and in my current job because when I started out you would get maybe a 200-page report and you had to narrow it down to one page for the minister.
“From day one I’ve been working on simplifying or taking out the essentials in complex data sets and presenting them in an intuitive way.

“As an entrepreneur and engineer, you always want to tell about the formula that’s behind it and how you made this complex solution very simple. But when you get past that, it’s super satisfying that it works. Then you can always talk to your engineer friends about what technique you are using and why this is so fantastic.”

His understanding wife and eight-and ten-year-old daughters indulge his passion for golf by accepting his extension of every business trip by a day, during which he endeavours to play a new course before returning home.

In recent years he has become one of many converts to padel tennis, saying: “Padel gives newcomers immediate access to the sport. You don’t have to learn to play, you don’t have to be a member of a club.

“You can just go into a website, book an hour, there will be equipment, balls out on the court that you can just borrow for free, and you can just go and try it out. We see a lot of golf courses here that are building padel courts.”

His admiration for golf club managers is huge – “I don’t think I ever met anyone more busy than golf course managers. There is always some urgency somewhere” – and he is gratified that Players 1st can ease their burden.

Of his own job, he comments: “When I’m asked about what I do, I always end up feeling very blessed, but also humble about the situation I’m in. I truly believe I have the world’s best job. I’m able to travel the world, work with some fantastic people and play golf at the best golf courses in the world. What’s not to like?”