[SaaS Series] The All-in-One Platform Modernizing Golf Operations With Jarrette Schule

Jarrette Schule is the Founder and CTO of TenFore Golf, a cloud-based, all-in-one management platform built for golf courses and recreational facilities. He founded the company in 2015 after recognizing the limitations of legacy golf management systems. As TenFore’s lead architect, Jarrette directs its technology vision and product development, creating mobile-first tools that help single- and multi-course facilities streamline operations, increase revenue, and improve the golfer experience.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:47] Jarrette Schule explains TenFore Golf’s all-in-one platform for course and facility management
• [6:49] The beverage delivery idea that inspired Jarrette to enter golf software
• [9:56] Why customer feedback pushed TenFore beyond its original mobile app
• [13:19] Jarrette’s early pricing model that removed costs for golf course operators
• [17:28] Lessons from changing SaaS pricing and navigating payment processors
• [25:42] How Jarrette won early customers and expanded beyond San Antonio
• [31:52] Landing TenFore’s first major multi-course operator and scaling the platform
• [37:50] Why Jarrette moved from CEO to CTO to focus on product and technology

In this episode…

Golf courses often juggle outdated systems for tee times, payments, food service, reporting, and customer engagement. What does it take to replace those fragmented systems with one platform designed around how modern facilities operate?

Jarrette Schule, a lifelong software developer with decades of experience building technology, explains that successful golf management software must address the entire operation rather than solve one isolated problem. He highlights the importance of listening to course operators, validating recurring needs, and designing tools around real-world workflows. This customer-led approach helped transform an on-course beverage-ordering concept into a connected platform spanning tee sheets, point-of-sale, booking, payments, food and beverage, reporting, and self-service kiosks. By bringing an outside technology perspective to golf, Jarrette identified opportunities that legacy providers had overlooked. He also uses a “rule of three” to prioritize features that deliver value across multiple customers instead of reacting to every individual request.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz speaks with Jarrette Schule, Founder and CTO of TenFore Golf, to discuss building an all-in-one platform for modern golf operations. They explore the product’s evolution, customer-led development, and growth through multi-course operators. Jarrette also shares lessons from SaaS pricing, payment integrations, and moving from CEO to CTO.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jarrette Schule on LinkedIn
• TenFore Golf
• GolfNow
• Stripe
• Stripe Connect
• Fiserv
• Ingenico
• CardPointe
• Clover
• 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More by Perry Marshall

Special mention:

• Jonathan Wride on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• [SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Online Forms and Productivity With Aytekin Tank of Jotform on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “What gets me out of bed in the morning is building something that didn’t exist before I built it.”
• “The more I learned about golf, the more of this onion that just kind of kept unpeeling.”
• “If you can just get to the demo, they’re going to love it. Right?”
• “I don’t want to just build AI fluff just to put AI in our tagline.”
• “We won’t build something until three different clients actually bring it up in conversation.”

Action steps:

1. Validate ideas with the people paying for the solution: Gathering feedback from operators before expanding a product helps confirm demand and prevents teams from building features customers will not use.
2. Prioritize recurring customer requests: Applying a “rule of three” to feature development helps teams focus limited resources on improvements that benefit multiple clients.
3. Demonstrate the product as early as possible: Moving prospects quickly into a live demo allows them to experience the product’s value and understand how it improves existing workflows.
4. Build around the customer’s entire operation: Connecting scheduling, payments, point of sale, reporting, and customer tools can reduce fragmentation and create a stronger, more valuable platform.
5. Align leadership roles with individual strengths: Bringing in a business-focused leader while the founder concentrates on technology can accelerate growth and improve execution across the company.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Jarrette Schule and you can check him out at TenFore.golf. All right. Jarrette, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. And this is part of the top software series. Yeah. We are talking about golf management software. Of course, one of the co-founders of Zapier on the podcast, that was an interesting episode and kind of the evolution. I had one of the founders of Jotform, and they talked about how they grew to 25 million users on the back of kind of like a product led marketing, like freemium model. So that was also a cool story and that many more on InspiredInsider.com.

And just, I was trying to think, Jarrette, if there are any interesting guests in the golf space, but I don’t think I’ve had any interesting guests in the golf space. More fitness. But this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that one, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution. Number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting staying top of mind for clients, partners, prospects, even staff from a culture perspective. Easy, simple. You just give us the addresses, we do everything else and it’s not like we send one off gifts. We’ll have to think of, you may have some cool golf stuff that maybe we incorporate in the future gifts. But it’s like we send usually gifts for one, you know, for four times a year for 3 or 4 years. So it’s not like, hey, here’s this. Thanks, but it’s ongoing for years to come.

So, you know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I always want to give to my relationships. And I found no better way to profile the people I admire and send them sweet treats in the mail. So check out Rise25.com. You can email [email protected] as well.

So I’m excited to introduce Jarrette Schule. He’s the Founder and CTO of TenFore Golf. He calls himself a lifelong coder who took the plunge a decade ago to modernize the golf industry. And when we find out his early on journey, it really was Jarrette taking a plunge. Right? If I ran up against the nose that you did, I probably would have quit. Honestly, like you’re hearing what you were running up against, but you didn’t, right? And so TenFore Golf is the next generation of golf management software. And it’s simplified. It’s really cloud based all in one platform built exclusively for golf courses and recreational facilities, you know. And so check it out. TenFore.golf. Jarrette thanks for joining me.

Jarrette Schule: 03:28

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:30

So we’ll just talk about the early on journey. I find it fascinating that you didn’t give up. Honestly, based on what you ran up against. But talk about TenFore Golf and what you do, because I know what it started at was different from what it is now. What is it now?

Jarrette Schule: 03:47

It’s always challenging to kind of explain it in a pithy manner, but it’s basically everything you need to run a golf course, both on the golfer side as well as the operation side. So there’s a point of sale system. There’s a tee sheet, there’s an fab point of sale. There’s a golfer app, there’s a golfer booking engine, web based. There’s a self-service kiosk now, which is one of our new offerings over the last couple of years. .

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:17

How do people use that? Like what do they use on the kiosk?

Jarrette Schule: 04:22

So the idea that I originally had was, you know, I went to a grocery store one day, maybe three years ago, and I was like, I just thought to myself, like, every store I seem to go to now has these kiosks, but I’ve never seen one in a golf course. So I’m always kind of like the anti Steve Jobs philosophy where, you know, normally when a golf course I usually don’t, I usually try never to build something a golf course hasn’t shown interest in. So it’s not. I build what they don’t know they need. I build what they know they need, normally. And the kiosk was kind of the exception to that rule for myself. And I just thought, you know, at least for certain golf courses and every golf course is, you know, a completely different animal, but there are certain golf courses that may have, you know, in the morning, there’s a tournament, they have a line out the door, people checking in.

So in that particular use case, a kiosk is great because you can kind of divert your line to the kiosk, especially if there are people that golf there often and they can just, you know, tap a couple buttons and they’re done. They don’t have to install an app, they don’t have to log into anything so they can check in for their tee time. They can buy a bucket of balls, they can order a hot dog, they get the ticket prints up in the kitchen, that kind of thing.

The other use case is kind of this new thing in golf where a lot of golf courses are actually trying to, you know, become more streamlined and increase their margins because what a lot of people don’t know is golf courses do operate on very thin margins, and sometimes their staffing can be a big part of that expense. So complete, complete automation of the pro shop. We’re starting to see that a little bit. And if not now, you know, in the long term scope of those courses.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:28

I want to talk about early on. Right. The original idea is, I mean, right now, we see there’s a lot of different. When, by the way, we’re looking at the video, if you’re listening to the audio version, there’s a tee sheet, there’s point of sale, there’s integrated payments, there’s a booking engine. But it started with kind of like a simple idea. You want to talk about that for a second?

Jarrette Schule: 06:49

Yeah. Originally, you know, I haven’t, I’ve always been a programmer software engineer since the late 90s, and after about 2007, I decided that, you know, the big corporate world wasn’t for me. And I started working exclusively for startups as a full stack developer, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere. I really enjoy. I love building stuff. My typical cliche that I always say is what gets me out of bed in the morning is building something that didn’t exist before I built it. I really enjoy that part of it. And so startups were great. I really enjoyed working for them because it’s just immediate satisfaction and products that were getting delivered quickly, sometimes daily. But they were never my companies. And so I had an idea. I was playing a lot of golf at the time. In the afternoons I would get all my work done and then go out and play the twilight times at golf courses. I just fell in love with golf. I didn’t actually start playing till I turned 30.

But one thing I had. My golf buddy at the time was a chronic drinker. He just couldn’t play a round of golf without drinking six beers, which is crazy to me. But he was always complaining because the cart girl or the beverage cart in the. The golf course business model is kind of a strange one. You have a person who gets in a golf cart full of beer and snacks and cigars, and they start out at hole one, and they kind of make a circle around the golf course. And, you know, maybe there’s no one at hole one. And then on hole two, they’re not interested and there’s no one at hole three, and then they go to four. And I just thought the model was very inefficient. And I thought, well, why can’t we just kind of make an app where you have the full menu of everything they have on the cart, and then you could kind of Uber beer to yourself, whatever hole you were playing. And that was kind of the original idea.

And the way I did it is kind of backwards from what you see with most technology companies where, you know, you get backing, you get investors, you hire programmers, you build, you build it out. Whereas with me, it was a side hustle. I already know how to write all the code. So I built the apps myself, just kind of on the weekends and after work. And I just kind of got really excited about it and made the full product. So there was an iOS app and an Android app where you could do the ordering and then a kind of a mini point of sale that would run on the personal phone of the cart employee and you’d order something and they say, Jarrette’s you know, the fourth green. He wants, you know, six beers you’d pay in advance.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:51

Like, sorry, you’re gonna play terribly. We’ll give you two. Yeah.

Jarrette Schule: 09:56

Yeah, well, it depends on the person. Some people play better. Right. But so that was the original idea. So I went to the PGA merchandise show in Orlando, after I had built all the software and scrounged up all the money I could and got a little tiny booth next to a small guy who would dance in front of his massage chairs. That’s how high class my section of the show was. So I had this little tiny booth, and as people would come by, every golfer I talked to, I pitched the idea and they were just like, that’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard of. Why have we never had this? But every golf course operator I talked to was like, well, it’s like 3.5% of my overall revenue. Am I going to have to run a report for your app every night on top of my point of sale app? And I had never kind of really thought through it that much. I didn’t know the golf business at all. I had come from, you know, I’d worked in medical and in oil and gas and banking and all different fields, but never in golf.

And so I kind of went back to the drawing board and I started kind of surveying the landscape of golf software. I didn’t know anything about it, what was out there. And I tried to get some meetings with some of the big players. Big point of sale players, one of the biggest ones still to this day. The biggest one is GolfNow, and they have a pretty crazy model, but I try to get a meeting with them. They wouldn’t even talk to me right, because all I wanted to do was integrate with the current point of sale system and send my sales into their system. And because without that, it’s just a non-starter. I couldn’t get a meeting. So I started looking into this software, all the point of sale and booking engines that were on the market. And it was just awful.

Like it just looks like it was built 30 years ago. And so I thought there might be a gap there I could exploit. And so I just went to work building everything. Right. And I thought, you know, and there was some discontent, especially with the GolfNow barter model at the time, which is basically golf courses, trading tee times to the software provider in lieu of payment. But I was running numbers and some of these golf courses, it’s you’re talking about six figures a year going to the software company for a single course. So I was like, wow, that’s pretty crazy.

So I started experimenting with different business models, one that I liked from another founder that I had met through an accelerator program. He had a model for lift tickets. And what he would do is he would charge an extra dollar when you buy your lift tickets through his app. And I was like, well, and that way you’re kind of passing the expense onto the end user, right? To the end customer. In this case, the golfer. So I tried that and just started making phone calls in San Antonio and got where I’m from and got a golf course to be my beta course. And so what I think the model at the time was 2.5% on every transaction would get added to the customer. The golf course wouldn’t be on the hook for any of it. And so it’s.

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