18 entrepreneurs Teeing off to triumph
Andrew Stanley turned his passion for golf into big business when in 1998 he set up Golfbreaks from his bedroom. Today, Windsor-based Golfbreaks is Europe’s largest golf travel company and in 2011 achieved a turnover of £31 million. In fact in the past two years, in the midst of tough economic times, the company has had two of its biggest growth years. Stanley talked to Eleanor Harris about the ‘Tiger Woods effect’, his ambition to get every one of the UK’s 4m golfers on an annual golf break, diversifying into the spa industry, and why being an entrepreneur is in his bones
Andrew Stanley is founder and chief executive of the Golfbreaks Group. He was born in 1969 in Johannesburg and grew up in Somerset after his British parents moved back to the UK in 1972. He has a degree in hotel and catering management from Portsmouth University. After graduating in 1992 he worked for Airpic selling aerial photographs door to door, and by 1995 had risen to sales director. In 1996 he joined Consumer Exhibitions and launched the first consumer golf show in the UK.
In May 1998 he founded Golfbreaks and in August 1999 launched Golfbreaks. com. In 2007 he launched
Teeofftimes.co.uk and in 2010 launched
BookaSpa.com. Stanley was a finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2006 and the company won the RBS Company of the Year Award in 2007. Stanley is married with three children, and his current handicap is 8.
Why and how did you set up your own business?
Have you got the best job in the world?
I absolutely have got the best job in the world. I’ve got a note on my computer screen which says: “As Confucius once said: Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I feel very fortunate that I’m involved in this.
Have you always been passionate about golf?
I had my first golf lessons aged nine, but really got into the sport when I was in my early 20s, at university: there was a wonderful scheme in Portsmouth where for £1 a round students could play on the local municipal courses on certain days of the week. I spent my third year of university on a placement at a hotel in Thurlestone, Devon, which had a beautiful nine hole golf course right on the coast, and there I could combine my two passions of windsurfing and golf. Now, I’ve got three young children so I’m not finding it quite as easy to get my golf fix as I used to, but it’s in the bones, I love it and still see it as a huge growth industry.
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The crunch time came when I saw a gap in the market for organising Ryder Cup-style matches for groups of golfers. I’d already organised a number of those with groups of friends and always seemed to be the one who got lumbered with the organising but I enjoyed doing it and realised that there was a potential market to go into. When I set up the company in May 1998 it was literally from my bedroom in Chiswick, and I didn’t earn any money or draw any salary for the first year, which was pretty tough. I lived off £8,000 of savings and £4,000 on my credit card. But that first year was a fantastic grounding year, working out what made money and what was popular, and I realised that there was a lot of demand for no frills golf breaks in the UK – groups of four or six golfers wanted me to provide a one-stop booking service. I realised that there were a lot of golf travel companies who took people out to Spain, Portugal and France, but there wasn’t anyone doing it in the UK. So I talked to a number of golf resorts in the UK, and many of those were looking for a sales and marketing arm to help drive some golf break business to them, so it was perfect timing. I moved into an office just off the Hanger Lane roundabout, and my cousin, Guy Proddow, came on board and helped launched the website,
Golfbreaks.com, in August 1999.
Can you tell me about the growth and success of the company?
It all took off very quickly. I very fondly remember sitting in that room just off the Hanger Lane roundabout thinking “What have we created here?” Suddenly enquiries were coming in left, right and centre, and I was working all hours of the day. In the first year we booked 8,000 golfers. Last year we organised golf breaks and holidays along with standalone tee times for over 360,000 golfers. We’re the official golf travel partner for The Daily Telegraph and the PGA and overall we have
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – JUNE 2012
a reach of over 1m golfers. Part of the growth was that fundamentally I managed to recruit some very good people. From the early days there were three other shareholder directors who are still very much here now, and between us we’ve built a team of just under 120 people who are very friendly, polite, positive and knowledgeable with an evident ‘we’re here to help’ attitude, which definitely drives through the business. What has been key is that we’ve been really committed to delivering three things from the outset: choice, value and service.
How else would you account for the growth?
Timing has been very important – golf is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, it’s the highest participant sport here in the UK, up there with angling. And the ‘Tiger Woods effect’ in the last
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