When I first started my golf ball business a few months ago, it was easy to do everything myself.
Driving to one or two nearby golf courses.
Filling my orange Home Depot buckets with hundreds of balls.
Sitting in my garage and basement scrubbing and sorting them.
Listing them for sale on eBay.
I had a small operation running pretty efficiently.
But every time I listed golf balls on eBay, they sold within an hour or two. I was selling them faster than I could find them.
That left me with a question: How could I grow the business without working four times harder myself?
More People Created More Possibilities
I could spend more of my own time finding golf balls, but I could only be at one course at a time.
So I hired my sister and friends to help me.
At first, I thought they would just help me find more inventory. But once people got involved, I realized they weren't just giving me more hands. They were bringing different strengths.
Dewey was better at fishing golf balls out of the water.
Barclay was willing to go deeper into dense areas where I might not have gone.
Danny was a member at a different course, giving us access to new inventory.
Even something as simple as carrying the golf balls changed. Barclay decided that bringing two backpacks was more efficient than carrying buckets.
I Realized Everyone Brings Something Different
My sister was another example.
I approached cleaning golf balls as something that just needed to be done.
My sister experimented. She soaked them twice and cleaned them using a power drill brush. Her process worked much better, and suddenly a large portion of the golf balls were clean before I ever touched them.
It sounds like a small improvement, but when you're dealing with thousands of golf balls, small improvements add up quickly.
I had created the process by myself, so I naturally thought my way was the right way. But when other people started getting involved, I realized that I didn't necessarily have the best answer to every problem.
I just had the most experience doing it alone.
Trusting People to Find Their Own Way
This was probably the hardest part for me.
When someone did something differently from me, my first reaction was to think, "That's not right. I’m going to have to redo their work."
But seeing my friends and sister add value showed me it was OK to let go.
I learned that I could explain what worked for me—what to wear, where to look, what to carry—without telling everyone exactly how to do the job.
I knew finding 300 golf balls—about a five-gallon bucket's worth—in under 20 minutes was possible. So instead of paying my friends by the hour, I paid them a fixed amount for every 300 balls they found.
I was giving them a goal and letting them figure out the best way to reach it.
The Moment It Started Feeling Like a Team
The biggest change wasn't actually having people help me.
It was seeing them become invested in something that I had started.
I would get calls early in the morning from friends telling me they were heading out to a course on their own. They weren't waiting for me to tell them where to go or what to do. They had learned enough to make their own decisions.
One morning, Dewey FaceTimed me from a nearby course to show me all the golf balls he'd found. He had gotten up on his own, searched through the woods and creeks, and come back with a good haul.
Until then, part of me still thought nobody else would do this as independently as I did. Realizing they could was an awesome feeling.
It wasn't just that he'd found a lot of golf balls. Something I'd started had become something someone else was excited to be part of.
The Business Didn’t Have to Depend on Me
As everyone became more comfortable, they started bringing me their own ideas.
Someone suggested selling on Facebook Marketplace. Someone else figured out a new way to search for golf courses using the 18Birdies app.
For the first time, I wasn’t the only person coming up with new ideas.
That actually made me think more creatively too. Instead of focusing on every part of the existing process, I could think about what might come next. I started considering completely different ways to find golf balls, like diving in ponds.
The business could grow without every bit of growth requiring my energy and time.
Growth Isn't Doing More Yourself
When I started, I thought being good at business meant knowing how to do everything myself.
Now I think that's only part of it.
Knowing how to do the work helped me start. Learning how to teach other people, trust them, and let them bring their own strengths is helping the business grow.
I could have kept doing everything myself. In some ways, that probably would have been faster. But eventually, I would have become the limit of my own business.
I started this business thinking that growing meant I needed to do more.
Now, I'm realizing that growth means learning how to do less myself.
