How Topgolf​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Reached The Top

Today, it’s suburbia’s favorite new game. But for years, it was a company hemorrhaging money. This is the inside story of how two twins, a skeptical management expert, and a big-thinking investor changed their fortunes— and the sport of golf.

- Jason Notte

Richard Grogan made a career of spotting bad ideas. He didn’t suffer them lightly—at Bain & Company, the strategic management firm where he was a senior partner, the many companies’ boards he sits on, or while director of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. So in 2003, when he was on a ski vacation with his family, he wasn’t especially impressed when two bankers representing a pair of British twin entrepreneurs approached him with a new opportunity. The conversation was brief.

“What industry is it?” he asked.

“Golf,” they said.

“Golf—forget it.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” he said, dismissing them. “Now, there’s another two-word answer, and it starts with the letter F.”

But the twins, Steve and Dave Jolliffe, had been doubted before. They’d built a quirky little British company called Topgolf, a spin on golf driving ranges that they saw as a recreational sport all its own: more of a boardwalk game than the stuffy pastime they saw as obsessed with, as Steve says, “the difficulty, the dress code, the silly rules.”

The PGA wanted nothing to do with them. Golf equipment companies said no to partnerships. Investors said no. Now Grogan, too. “I told them that golf isn’t a business; it’s a sport, and it’s the second- biggest source of losses of investment capital in the United States in its sector besides restaurants,” Grogan says now. “Why in God’s name would I want to do anything in golf, which, by the way, is in decline?”