Golf pros are adept at providing valuable lessons on the practice range but often need a helping hand when it comes to turning a profitable pro shop.
That’s where the California-based Association of Golf Merchandisers (AGM) can become a valuable asset, enhancing relationships and elevating the retail experience for pros and general managers of golf clubs, resorts and the paying public across the country.
The AGM is a nonprofit organization that was at the annual PGA Show in Orlando, Florida, in January, drumming up support for its various programs and signing up new merchandisers and vendors.
“There are so many buyers and golf pros coming into the space without having anyone there to teach them the ropes,” AGM CEO Jennifer Morton says. “So, our education really does focus on three main areas — merchandising, marketing and management.”
Morton knows the golf ropes better than most, considering her father is Ken Morton Sr., the longtime head golf professional at Haggin Oaks Golf Complex and CEO of Morton Golf Management, a golf course management company that oversees all management aspects of four Sacramento Municipal Golf Facilities. Morton Sr. was inducted into the National PGA Hall of Fame in 2005.
“I think the PGA does a phenomenal job with its education,” Jennifer Morton says. “But I feel like they are more focused on player development, on growth of the game and golf course operations — all phenomenal things that we need to do to help ensure the continuation and growth of golf. Our focus is on the pro shop and on retail education.”
The AGM is also there to bridge the gap between merchandisers and vendors, a relationship that can at times be challenging on various fronts.
“We’re really trying to define that it's not an ‘us-versus-them’ relationship, it’s a conversation between parties because at the end of the day we want to build relationships that elevate both sides because really both sides want the same thing,” Jennifer Morton says. “The vendors want to be more profitable and have more terms, and on the other side no pro shop wants to have merchandise that they're closing out at the end of the season.”
The AGM has approximately 850 merchandiser members and over 200 vendor partners, and attending the PGA Show was an efficient way to reach out to that membership by holding workshops and sharing positive pro shop experiences.
“Being at the PGA Show was about trying to excite our membership, get them going, get them to know one another so they have more resources to ask, for example, about an emerging brand,” Morton says.
The AGM did a recent data survey that Morton says produced some interesting metrics.
“We found out that the average gross merchandise sales of an AGM member was 6.7 times the national average, which is an unbelievable number,” she says. “But you have to back that number down a little bit because there are clubs like Pebble Beach, Pinehurst, Congressional, Haggin Oaks and Desert Mountain that do millions of dollars. So we also looked at the median gross merchandise sales number and that was 3.7 times the national average. So, I really do feel like the AGM is the best resource if you're serious about your shop operations.”
Morton says one of the main pitfalls of golf shops is overbuying.
“Most golf shop operators have a tremendous desire to do the best that they can do, and yet you only know what you know,” Morton says. “You have to allow yourself to open up and be like, ‘there's an idea I've never heard of before, maybe I shouldn't bring in $10,000 of merchandise on day one.’ I will be more successful if I break that up into smaller groups that are coming in throughout the season so that when my customers come in the door they're not seeing the same thing every single day.
“A 10 percent markdown and then a 20 percent markdown and then 30 percent markdown is not the best business practice because you're training your members or customers to just continue to wait until an item is on sale.”
For example, one of AGM’s PGA Show workshops focused on display ideas.
“If customers come into the pro shop every day and see the same round table that's sitting at the front of your shop you need to ask yourself ‘How can I make that look unique, different, interesting 52 times a year?’’’ Morton says.
Titleist and Wilson, for example, just celebrated their respective 35th anniversaries with the AGM, said Morton, who noted the organization signed up more than 160 new members in 2024.
“We're not a buying group, so if you become a vendor partner we're not in here asking for you to give our membership discounts or give our members more than you're giving everyone else?” Morton says. “We really look at it as an opportunity to promote not only very well established brands in the golf industry but the AGM also focuses on new and emerging brands, and give them a space to get in front of the top 1 percent of buyers in the country, maybe the world.”
Maybe more than anything else, AGM helps its membership focus on emerging trends in the industry from the consumer side — a space that is rapidly changing — to turn the best profit available.
“A golfer wants to be wowed,” Morton says. “The current buzz is experiential retail; and where this is going is a transformative economy. You are seeing things from weight loss drugs to non-alcoholic drinks becoming popular. You have this generation that's not a single generation, and there is an economy that is imbibe in healthy ways that's going to be transformative to self. And that absolutely transforms into the golf shop.
“I think the golf industry is so well set up for club fitting. Pros and general managers also need to transform a golf shop into a fun space to be. I think about ‘Cheers’ and Norm coming in, and to me your pro shop should be just another evolution in another space where all of that fun takes place and happens.”
