In this episode of the Tech Caddie podcast, Mike Hendrix interviews Chad Wright from Deer Ridge Golf Club about their recent technology transition from ForeUP to Sagacity and Toast.
They discuss the challenges faced with ForeUP, the benefits of the new systems, and how they integrate operations for a better customer experience. Chad shares insights on credit card surcharges, the addition of a golf simulator, and the importance of maintaining a strong online presence. The conversation highlights the evolving landscape of golf course management systems and software and the significance of technology in enhancing operations and customer satisfaction.
Welcome. am Mike Hendrix from smbGOLF. And today my guest is Chad Wright from Deer Ridge Golf Club. And this is a Tech Caddie podcast.
Chad, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Well, really glad whenever a golf course operator, can be on with us because, ultimately it always comes down to you guys, right? What technology decisions are you making? What are you thinking about in the future?
So you, you did recently go through a technology change and it’s something that I’ve actually been writing about for, I think over a year, I knew this was coming.
and been watching to see when it would go live and, and really you’re one of two beta courses that are live today. why don’t you, why don’t you fill the listeners in on the change you made? You guys were using foreUP, but you obviously made this change that frankly, hardly anybody has ever made, because you are in this beta. Why don’t you fill us in a little bit on what you guys are doing tech wise.
Yeah, so we made a switch from foreUP over to Sagacity and Toast for our point of sale system. Basically, we had just constant issues with foreUP having outages and deposit problems and various other things that we felt weren’t. Weren’t being addressed and felt we needed to make a change because.
There just weren’t really any options for if, if something was to go down, we were just stuck. I mean, it was just, your operations just ground to a halt for the hole day and you couldn’t, you couldn’t do anything. And it was just kind of twiddling your thumbs waiting for them to fix the, fix the problem. So we, ask, and I totally get that. can hear the stress in your voice. So I totally empathize with that. Do you know how long you had been using foreUP?
Yeah, so we started, I believe, it was around 2018 or 2019. OK, so five or six year run.
And I mean, I’ll say, you know, our biggest issue with foreUP was ultimately the support. I mean, the the day to day shutdowns were not great. But the day to day support was the biggest issue, I feel. We just wrote an article about why golf courses are leaving foreUP. And support is one of the detailed items in there where we literally got quotes from operators like you.
And that, you know, that with Toast, even the, when the salesperson came through and said, you know, what are your biggest issues? well, you’ve already got a leg up on, on who we have right now. Cause I’ve been doing this for five years and I’ve never, I don’t know if I had to say it’s like, you know, you just, we just went over this with Quick18. It’s like,
Jason, I know the guy’s name. You know what mean? I I know who I need to talk to. I’ve never met a person from foreUP nor did, and then there was through all these problems. Somebody finally said, would you want us to get us into you in touch with your account manager? was like, I have an account manager. You know, I’ve been doing this for five years and I didn’t even know. That’s right. So it’s funny you say that there’s a country club right off the road from you, Westbrook. Yeah. And Westbrook actually reached out to me today. I’m not going to name any names, but Westbrook reached out to me today.
