Former Teacher Taking Swing at New Career as a Golf Concierge

Springdale entrepreneur Brad Norwood is the golf concierge of Northwest Arkansas. Just don’t ask him to plan a golf trip.

“We pride ourselves on planning a golf vacation, not a golf trip, because of the level of customer service,” he said.

Norwood, 36, is the co-owner of Springdale-based Executive Golf Packages LLC, a company that books golf vacations for customers throughout the country.

“We partner with golf courses and hotels to provide stay-and-play packages for our customers,” he said. “You tell us how many people you’ve got and where you want to go; in one phone call, we get it all set up. We book the tee times, the lodging, transportation to and from the course. We even offer a private chef in some instances. We arrange every detail. You just show up and play golf.”

Package costs vary, depending on course fees, hotel rates and seasonal demand. EGP operates on a direct billing cycle with each person in a group.

Vacations can be booked for most any course in the country, but EGP has a signed contract with 52 golf courses that the company agrees to promote.

“The golf courses and the hotels pay us to bring people to them,” he said. “It’s based on a net rate.”

Among the participating courses are destinations on Arkansas’ Natural State Golf Trail — which includes Stonebridge Meadows in Fayetteville; the Missouri Golf Trail; Kelly Plantation, Regatta Bay, and Emerald Bay in Destin, Florida; Pebble Beach in California and TPC Scottsdale in Arizona.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Orlando, Florida, are also featured destinations.

Norwood incorporated EGP in December 2013. He and Rob Frits, his brother-in-law who lives in Dallas, are equal partners in the venture and the only two employees. The business is operated from Norwood’s residence in Springdale.

“Since I own my own business, I have a respect for people who start their own business from scratch,” said Springdale businessman Pat Shinall, owner of Innovative Business Furniture Inc., and a recurrent EGP customer. “I lean toward supporting people who do that.”

Mike McFarland, senior vice president of business development for Arvest Bank in Springdale, said using EGP to plan golf vacations is a time saver.

“It’s about that as much as anything, and Brad just has the contacts,” he said. “We had 24 guys (from Springdale Country Club) go to Branson for three days for a Ryder Cup-style event and he was able to arrange lodging for all of us in three, eight-bedroom houses. He organized every detail for us and everything was taken care of.”

Norwood declined to offer specific revenue figures for EGP — “our [profit] margins are very small,” he said — but by using the company’s metric of units, business is up 178 percent this year in comparison to 2014.

EGP counts a night’s stay in a hotel as one unit and a round of golf as one unit. The company did 1,800 units in 2014, and Norwood projects that number will be at least 5,000 this year.

He said the number of customers this year is around 700, up from about 250 in 2014. They’ve been from several states throughout the country.

“We are starting to have some success,” Norwood said, adding the company could be moving into office space in Fayetteville very soon.

 

A Vision in Vegas

Norwood, a married father of three, was a full-time teacher with the Fayetteville School District when he organized a Las Vegas golf trip in the summer of 2012 for himself and 11 buddies from Northwest Arkansas.

He drew on the help of VIP Golf Services of Las Vegas, a golf vacation booking agency, to arrange every detail of the trip, from tee times, lodging, food and transportation.

The response to the trip struck a chord.

“All 11 guys called me before lunch the day after we got back thanking me for what a great trip it was. It was one of the best I’d ever taken with a group of guys,” Norwood recalled. “I just thought I needed to call this company and let them know that, because I didn’t do a thing. They did all the work, and it was like a well-oiled machine. We didn’t have a single glitch. All we did was show up and play golf.”

Norwood tracked down the company’s owner, Justin Rubinstein, and had several conversations with him in the months that followed. A vision for starting his own company began to form.

“I have some roots in Destin in recreation and resort management, and I knew Destin had nothing like this, and that is a great golf destination,” he said. “I thought I could make it work with some connections I had, and I asked [Rubinstein] if I promised to never sell golf in Las Vegas, unless directly through him, would he give me the business plan. He told me everything. We still have a verbal non-compete [agreement] to this day.”

Norwood began the company initially as a side business — he was also helping organize a handful of charity golf tournaments — but an introduction in 2013 to Scott Hovis, the executive director of the Missouri Golf Association, started him on the path of being a full-time golf vacation operator.

Hovis, Norwood explained, was looking for an operator to help book vacation packages for the 22 courses that make up the newly formed Missouri Golf Trail.

Norwood jumped at the opportunity. He landed the contract, and later added another agreement to book vacations to the 12 courses that make up Arkansas’ Natural State Golf Trail.

“Those two trails were the deciding factor that we could do this full-time,” he said. “The trails started picking up, and I started to see the future. In June [2014] when my teaching contract was up, I thought I’d take a spin and see what happens.”

 

Tradition Unlike Any Other

A ticket to the Masters is one of the toughest in sports. Not so much for the tournament itself, but for the golf course: Augusta National. 

Only a limited number of tickets are available, and those have been sold out for years. There’s a waiting list, but good luck getting on it, and the number of tickets sold is a well-kept secret.

For golfers, it is hallowed ground. As the trademarked phrase goes, it’s a tradition unlike any other.

Most have never been to Augusta, a bucket-list item for any golfer. But, if you’re willing to pay the price, there’s good news — Norwood can not only get you there, but get you there in style.

“It’s like anything else: Through the right sources, you can get tickets,” he said.

Besides booking golf vacations to a variety of top destinations, EGP also sells day trips to the Masters. An all-inclusive price of $1,995 will buy a round trip, private charter flight from Tulsa International Airport to Augusta, Georgia, — with breakfast and drinks included — ground transportation to and from the course, a ticket to a Masters practice round (Tuesday, April 5, 2016) and access to a hospitality house.

“If you live in Northwest Arkansas, the hardest thing you have to do is get to Tulsa,” Norwood said.

A separate package includes the Masters day trip, plus two nights at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Tulsa, two rounds of golf at the adjoining Cherokee Hills Golf Club, $100 casino credit and a private reception at the Hard Rock Casino to watch the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball national championship game on April 4. That ticket goes for $2,495.

Customers can buy tickets for a $100 non-refundable deposit, then pay the remaining balance in three installments.

“Never before have you been able to go to the Masters and not pay for it all up front,” Norwood said.

Norwood arranged a trip for 50 people to attend a practice round at the Masters earlier this year. Word of the trip spread quickly afterward, and Norwood is planning to take 150 people to the tournament next April.

“I could have sold 10 more tickets the day after we got back,” Norwood said. “I just don’t think a lot of people knew about it beforehand, and even then didn’t really believe the kind of trip we were offering. One lady even told me she thought it was a scam, then her [golf] pro told her he went on the trip, and now she wants to go. And she’s signed up to go next year.”

Pat Shinall had never been to Augusta previously, but made the trip earlier this year for the April 7 practice round. He’ll use EGP to book his trip again in 2016, and consider it money well spent.

“We traveled in style,” he said.