2020 Vision

When I was a kid, I remember calculating how old I’d be when 2000 arrived and it seemed like forever away.  Now here we are in 2020.  Happy New Decade.

What does your 2020 vision reveal?

Will the golf industry continue to shrink slowly as the attention span of the younger generation shrivels and as economic realities evolve to make it impossible to justify devoting 100+ acres of prime real estate to golf?

Or are we on the cusp of a ‘Roaring 20s’ for the industry where the providers of the greatest game ever invented find a way to restore positive growth?

I don’t know for sure… neither do you… all we can do is try to produce a positive outcome.

Our Apparation team has spent considerable time sharpening up our strategic focus and I hope you don’t mind us taking a few minutes here to explain the role Apparation LLC is trying to play in getting golf growing again.  Since creating GroupLooper® in 2012 to feed my personal golf addiction, we’ve evolved substantially and I’ll readily admit it hasn’t always been easy to understand what the heck Apparation is all about.

So… let us try to set the record straight.

Apparation LLC is a G³ company… obsessed with helping toGrow the Game of Golf.
We believe golf is the greatest game ever invented and we’d like to help the industry thrive.

We design and build easy-to-use software that connects golfers with opportunities to play.
Our contribution to the growth of golf is to build, enhance and operate great software.  Our principals have been practicing this craft for decades… we love doing it and we’re good at it.  GroupLooper® was our first golf industry effort but our product count is now in double digits and growing.

Of course, we’re not good at everything… no one is.  For example, Apparation does not market direct to consumers… we provide tools to help our customers and partners market more effectively and if our customers need marketing assistance, we have alliance partners that can provide it.  Because we are not consumer marketers ourselves, Apparation will not insert itself between you and your customers and we will not use your customer data for our own selfish purposes.  It took us awhile to get our scope of practice sorted out, but it’s now burned into our DNA.

We partner with industry innovators to provide great experiences for golfers that make the game more fun, more convenient and more affordable.
We’ve developed web apps to support the invention/evolution of services such as Quick.golf, Doubles Golf, My Golf Fix, iDeal Genie, SmartPin, the Traveling Country Club and the Minnesota Golf Card.  We have additional interesting projects on the horizon.  Our Apparation Cloud assets and our world-class software development team allow each of our customers to reduce the time, cost and risk associated with implementing their vision.

We’ve also worked in the background with some of the golf industry’s leading technology companies to help them expand the functionality of their products.  We’d like to tell you who they all are, but we always honor our confidentiality agreements.

We develop and provide analytical tools that help golf course operators and golf industry consultants gain new insights that help them to be more successful.
The iGDB (Internet Golf Course Database) is the most complete, accurate, accessible and useful source of basic information about golf courses available anywhere.  Apparation’s bi-annual Internet Booking Market Share Analysis is the only source of independent golf software market share data available in the industry.

We understand that win-win is the only way to do business.
As a b-to-b business, we don’t need to be in the consumer limelight.

Golf businesses are our customers…
golfers are our customers’ customers.

If you own or operate a golf course, virtual country club/golf society, golf card program, golf industry software business, golf industry consulting or systems integration business or golf association… or if you have a hankering to do anything entrepreneurial in the golf industry… let’s talk about how our products and services can add value to your business.

Apparation wants to supplement your brand… not supplant it.  Tools like our CloudClubhouse and Virtual Country Club Manager platforms help your brand shine more brightly.

Work with us once and you’ll want to do it again… we understand that in the long run we are only successful if our customers are successful.

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Ok, if you’re still with me, let’s get to work on 2020.  One of the specific trends in the industry that we’ve been watching carefully over the past several years is the growth of “virtual country clubs”… multi-course membership programs like GreatLife, ForeLinx, the Public Country Club, Traveling Country Club and others.

Of course, here in our backyard in Minnesota the Public Country Club has been a recent growth phenomenon.

We are just putting the wraps on a white paper titled “The PCC Phenomenon… where does it go from here?”

Tune in to next week’s email blast for more details … every course operator should pay attention to how virtual country clubs are evolving… don’t ignore this trend.

We’ve got our work cut out for us if we are going to be successful in getting golf growing at a healthy pace again… let’s travel this long and winding road together.