What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
The full story starts with my brother Jimmy.
Jimmy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and watching someone you love deal with a disease that progressively takes away control of your own body is something that changes how you see everything. He was still determined to play golf through it. Not because golf was the point, but because staying active, staying competitive and doing something he loved was how he refused to let the disease define him.
I’m a mechanical engineer by training. When I watch a problem I care about, my instinct is to build something that solves it. So that’s what I did. I started developing a training tool that could help Jimmy work on his swing without putting his body through positions or movements that would overwhelm what he was dealing with physically. The early versions were rough and we tested them together, and that process of building something for a real person with a real constraint became the foundation of everything ONE Club Trainer is today.
The concept we developed together was dynamic inertia, using the natural resistance and momentum of a weighted training tool to automate proper swing mechanics without complicated instruction or setup. It worked for Jimmy because it didn’t require him to force his body into anything. It trained the pattern through repetition and feel.
Jimmy passed away. And after he was gone I had a choice about what to do with what we had built together. Walking away from it felt like walking away from him. So I kept going and turned a deeply personal project into a patented product that PGA coaches and golfers across multiple countries now use and trust.
That’s the real answer to why I do this. It was never about golf. It was about building something that honored what Jimmy and I created together and making sure it outlasted both of us.
Tell us 3 surprisingly easy and 3 surprisingly difficult things about your business.
Three surprisingly easy things:
Getting PGA coaches to try the ONE Club was easier than I expected. I assumed there would be resistance from professionals with established systems and strong opinions. In reality, the tool spoke for itself the moment someone picked it up. Coaches are practical and when something produces a visible result in a student’s swing within a few reps, they don’t need much convincing.
Going international was easier than early domestic scaling felt. I thought crossing borders meant a wall of complexity around shipping and market fit. The demand was already there though. Golfers in Australia, Japan and Sweden found us before we formally targeted those markets and that organic pull made expansion feel like following a trail rather than blazing one.
Building a community around the product happened more naturally than I anticipated. When the tool delivers real results, people want to talk about it. That word of mouth created something I didn’t have to manufacture.
Three surprisingly difficult things:
Inventory planning across multiple markets with seasonal demand is genuinely hard. Getting the timing right between production runs, shipping lead times and demand peaks across different hemispheres where summer and winter fall at opposite times of the year is a puzzle that never fully resolves.
Telling the product story in a way that honors the engineering without losing the everyday golfer is harder than building the product was. The mechanics are real and specific but golfers don’t want a physics lecture. Finding language that is honest and accessible at the same time is something I still work on.
Letting go of control in the right places took longer than it should have. I built this with my own hands alongside my brother and that personal investment makes delegation feel like a risk even when the people around you are more than capable.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
The first is watching the product work on someone who didn’t expect it to. There’s a moment when a golfer picks up the ONE Club for the first time, takes a few swings and feels something click in their timing or their release that they’ve been chasing for years. That moment doesn’t get old. It’s the clearest possible confirmation that what Jimmy and I built from scratch in a backyard actually does what we believed it would do, and I feel that every single time.
The second is the engineering problem itself. Golf swing mechanics are genuinely fascinating from a biomechanical standpoint and I don’t think I’ll ever stop finding new angles to look at them from. The relationship between force, timing, path and release is complex enough that there’s always something worth refining or rethinking. For me, that sustained intellectual engagement is what keeps the work from ever feeling routine. I’m not managing a static product. I’m still developing one.
The third is carrying Jimmy’s name forward through something real. I think the hardest thing about losing someone you built something with is figuring out what that thing becomes without them. For me the answer was to make it better and more widely trusted than either of us imagined it could be when we were testing rough prototypes together. Every coach who recommends the ONE Club, every golfer who improves because of it, every market we reach that we never planned for feels like proof that what we started together was worth finishing. That’s not something I take lightly and it’s not something I expect to stop feeling grateful for. It’s honestly the part of the work that sits deepest and it shapes how seriously I take every decision we make about where this brand goes next.
What are the three things you need in work to achieve purpose? Why are they important to you?
The first is a problem worth solving. Not a convenient problem or a profitable one on paper, but one that has real stakes attached to it. For me that standard was set early when the problem I was building for was my brother’s quality of life. That kind of weight changes how seriously you take every decision in the process. I think without a problem that genuinely matters to me I would produce competent work but not meaningful work, and I’ve never been interested in just competent.
The second is the ability to see the direct connection between the work and the outcome. I need to be able to draw a straight line from what I’m doing on any given day to something that actually changes for someone because of it. That’s partly why I stay close to the product development side and close to the coaches and golfers who use the tool. When that connection gets too abstract or too removed I lose the thing that makes the effort feel worth it. Proximity to the real result matters more to me than most people in my position would probably admit.
The third is continuity of purpose across time. I need the work to be building toward something that outlasts the current moment. Short term wins are fine but they don’t sustain me the way a long arc does. Knowing that ONE Club Trainer carries Jimmy’s legacy forward and that every golfer we reach adds another layer to something we started together gives the day to day work a gravity that I don’t think I could manufacture artificially. Purpose for me has to be rooted in something that existed before the business did and will matter long after any single milestone passes.
Tell us about a time where you saw a surprising outcome that you did not expect.
The one that stays with me happened early in the international expansion, and it came from a direction I genuinely didn’t see coming.
We had started getting orders from Japan without any deliberate effort to reach that market. No targeted ads, no Japanese-language content, no outreach to coaches or instructors there. Golfers were finding the product, buying it and apparently talking about it within their own networks because the orders kept coming in clusters rather than as isolated one-offs. I noticed the pattern but I chalked it up to coincidence for longer than I should have.
Then I got a message from a golf instructor in Japan who had been using the ONE Club with his students for several months. He had tracked their progress, documented specific improvements in swing speed and timing across a group of players and reached out to tell me about it. He wasn’t asking for anything. He just wanted me to know what he was seeing.
That was surprising on two levels. The first was that the product had travelled that far on word of mouth alone and was being used seriously enough that someone was tracking outcomes with it. The second was that the biomechanical principles behind the tool translated completely across a different golfing culture with different coaching traditions and different physical baselines among the students. I had believed the engineering was sound but I hadn’t tested that belief across that kind of cultural and geographic distance.
It changed how I thought about the product’s potential. I had been thinking about international markets as a distribution challenge. After that I started thinking about them as proof that the underlying science worked independent of context, and that realization quietly shifted how ambitious I was willing to be about where ONE Club Trainer could go.
How do you get yourself out of a funk? Please share the details.
The first thing I do is stop trying to think my way out of it. That’s usually the instinct, to analyze what’s wrong and engineer a solution, and in my experience that approach makes a funk worse because you end up in your head about being in your head. So the first move is always physical. I get outside, I move, I do something that requires my body to be present and my mind to follow rather than lead.
Golf is the obvious one for me and yeah, I use it. Not to work on anything specific or to perform well, just to swing and walk and be somewhere that has nothing to do with a screen or a decision. There’s something about the rhythm of the game that resets my internal pace in a way that nothing else quite replicates. I’ve tried to figure out why and I think it’s because golf demands just enough focus to crowd out whatever was looping in the background.
If the funk is deeper than a bad day, I go back to the origin. I literally go back to the early documentation of what Jimmy and I were building together, the notes, the prototypes, the reasoning behind the original design decisions. Not for nostalgia but because reconnecting with why this started cuts through whatever noise has built up around the current version of the work. It reminds me that the foundation was solid and that whatever is making things feel heavy right now is sitting on top of something real.
The last thing is giving myself a deadline to feel it and then move. I believe a funk deserves some honest acknowledgment rather than immediate suppression. But I also know from experience that open-ended wallowing doesn’t serve anyone, least of all me. So I give it a day or two, I let it be what it is and then I pick something specific and small to do and I do it. Movement creates momentum and momentum is usually enough to break the pattern.
What is a habit you try to stick to and how has it helped you?
The one I protect most is the weekly cash flow review, and I do it every Monday morning before anything else touches my attention.
It started as a necessity. When we were scaling across multiple markets with inventory moving in different directions at different times, I kept getting surprised by gaps I should have seen coming. Not because the information wasn’t there but because I was only looking at the numbers when something felt off, which meant I was always a step behind. So I made it a fixed ritual instead of a reactive one and that single change shifted how I operate financially more than any tool or system I’ve ever put in place.
What it actually looks like is about 45 minutes with our cash flow model, the receivables aging report and a quick scan of the next eight weeks of committed outflows against projected inflows. I’m not doing deep analysis every time. I’m just keeping the picture current so nothing builds up quietly in a blind spot.
The way it has helped me goes beyond the obvious financial benefit. I think the deeper thing it does is lower my ambient anxiety about the business. When I know I looked at the numbers three days ago I carry the week differently than when I’ve been avoiding them. There’s a confidence that comes from staying close to reality even when reality is uncomfortable, and that confidence bleeds into how I make decisions in every other part of the work.
For me, the habit works because it has a fixed time, a fixed scope and a clear output. I’m not sitting down to figure out what to look at. I already know. That predictability is what makes it stick and what makes it genuinely useful rather than just another thing on a list.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
The one I come back to most isn’t a revenue milestone or a market expansion, even though both of those matter to me. It’s the patent.
Not because of what a patent means legally or competitively, but because of what it represents in the context of how it came to exist. Jimmy and I developed the concept of dynamic inertia together over years of iteration, testing and honest conversation about what was working and what wasn’t. We were engineering something real out of a deeply personal need and we were doing it without a team, without a lab and without any guarantee that it would amount to anything beyond the two of us working it out in a backyard.
Getting the patent meant that what we built was genuinely novel. It wasn’t a variation on something that already existed. It was a new idea that held up to the scrutiny of a formal examination process, and that validation came from the work itself, not from marketing or positioning or how we told the story.
What makes it the achievement I’m proudest of is that Jimmy was still alive when it happened. He knew. He understood what it meant that something we had created together from scratch was now protected and recognized as an original contribution. That moment between us is something I carry with me in a way that no subsequent milestone has come close to matching.
Everything that came after, the international sales, the coach partnerships, the brand recognition, was built on the foundation that the patent confirmed was real. So when I think about what I’m proudest of it’s not really the patent itself. It’s that Jimmy and I proved the idea was worth protecting before the world had a chance to weigh in on it. That mattered then and it still matters now.
What is your favorite book and why?
The book I keep coming back to is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
I read it during a period where I was carrying a lot and trying to figure out how to keep moving forward without losing the thread of why any of it mattered. Frankl’s core argument is that meaning is something you choose to find rather than something that gets handed to you by circumstance, and that idea landed differently for me than anything else I had read up to that point.
What I keep taking from it is the distinction between what happens to you and how you orient yourself toward it. That’s not a passive idea dressed up as wisdom. For me it’s an active daily practice and Frankl lays out the case for it in a way that feels earned rather than theoretical because he lived inside the most extreme version of that test imaginable.
If you could go back 2 years and give yourself advice, what would it be?
Delegate earlier and more completely than feels comfortable.
Two years ago I was still holding onto too many decisions that didn’t need me. Not because I didn’t trust the people around me but because the company felt young enough that my involvement in everything still felt justified. I told myself I was maintaining quality. In reality I was slowing things down and quietly signaling to the people around me that I didn’t fully trust their judgment, even when I did.
The advice I would give myself is to pick the five decisions that genuinely require my specific perspective and let everything else go to the people I hired to handle it. Not with constant check-ins or approval loops but with a clear outcome standard and real autonomy to get there.
The second thing I would tell myself is to get the financial forecasting rhythm in place six months earlier than I did. I was looking at the numbers reactively for longer than I should have been and that cost me clarity at a couple of moments where clarity would have changed the decisions I made. The weekly review habit I have now would have paid for itself many times over if I had started it sooner.
And the last thing is to stop waiting for the right moment to tell the brand story more publicly. I was so focused on the product and the operations that the storytelling side kept getting pushed back. I believed the work would speak for itself if I just kept making it better. That’s partially true but it’s also an excuse that kept us smaller than we needed to be for longer than was necessary. The story was ready before I was willing to tell it.
Are you willing to be a mentor? If yes, what is the best way to reach you?
Yes, genuinely.
I believe mentorship works best when it’s specific rather than general, so I’m most useful to founders who are working through something concrete, whether that’s scaling a physical product, managing cash flow across multiple markets, building a referral-based distribution model or figuring out how to tell a brand story that actually connects with the right people. I’m less useful as a general sounding board and more useful when there’s a real problem on the table.
The best way to reach me is through the ONE Club Trainer website at oneclubtrainer.com. Send a message through the contact page with a short description of where you are, what you’re building and what specific challenge you’re trying to work through. I read those personally and I respond to the ones where I think I can genuinely add something rather than just offer encouragement.
I don’t do open-ended coffee chats but I do take focused conversations seriously. If you come with a real question I’ll give you a real answer.
Just for fun, what is your favorite dessert?
Honestly, it’s a really good crème brûlée and I don’t think anything else comes close for me.
There’s something about the contrast between that hard caramelized top and the cold, creamy custard underneath that I find genuinely satisfying in a way that more elaborate desserts never quite deliver. I’ve had versions that were too sweet, too thin, too warm and they all missed the point. When it’s done right though, it’s done right and you know it immediately.
I think what I actually like about it is that it’s a simple thing executed with real precision. The ingredients are basic. The technique is everything. And that gap between a mediocre version and a perfect one is enormous despite how minimal the recipe looks on paper.
I’d take a perfect crème brûlée over any towering chocolate thing on any menu, every single time.