More than 30 years ago, GOLFTEC founder and CEO Joe Assell saw an opportunity to bring more precision to a game that often relied on feel alone. By using technology to help golfers better understand their swings, he set out to make improvement more personalized and effective. That vision has “carried all the way to today,” said Joe Calabria, senior vice president of accounting and finance at GOLFTEC. “For a 30-year-old company with the founder still as CEO, it’s impressive. It doesn’t happen very often.”
GOLFTEC pairs expert coaching with proprietary technology that breaks down every swing into measurable data. The result is a highly personalized lesson and club-fitting experience that has made them the world’s largest provider of golf lessons and premium club fittings, with more than 260 locations worldwide. “We are the most data driven, technologically driven, golf instruction experience you’ll ever get,” explained Chris Koske, GOLTEC’s chief marketing officer.
“We’ve got over a thousand coaches across the world that are the best trained coaches,” Koske said. “Every single one of them flies out to our HQ and learns how to be a GOLFTEC coach utilizing our technology to make people better.” The company has now taught more than 20 million lessons and helped more than 1.8 million golfers improve their game.
As GOLFTEC expanded, company leaders saw an opportunity to bring that same standard to the rest of the business. Their back-end systems needed to be just as sophisticated as their coaching technology.
“If we want to be a data-driven company, we need to be a data-driven company everywhere,” said Calabria. That meant modernizing the systems behind payments, reporting, and daily operations so the business could run as efficiently as its coaches teach.
The challenge: Bringing business operations up to the standard of the GOLFTEC customer experience
GOLFTEC had already built a highly data-driven experience for its customers. Inside each training bay, coaches rely on detailed swing data to guide every lesson and club fitting. Behind the scenes, the systems supporting payments and reporting told a different story.
“We had a smaller merchant processor at the time that was helping us, but it was very antiquated,” recalled Calabria. “We didn’t have great information on the customer. We didn’t have great information on chargebacks. We didn’t have great information on how sales were linking up with our payment platform. It was just hard to do the basic blocking and tackling of recording a sale before Square.”
The lack of visibility created ripple effects across the business. Coaches, whose expertise is in helping golfers improve, often found themselves troubleshooting payment issues, handling refunds, and managing manual transactions at the front desk. “We found out we were wasting tens of thousands of hours of coaches’ time on just being the front man at the manual processing system,” Calabria explained.
The friction didn’t stop there. Manual reconciliation slowed the finance team’s ability to close the books, delaying insights for leadership. “When you’re getting information to the executive team about how the business is doing at business day 20 when the month is almost over, that’s not as insightful as giving everyone information on the business day 8, 9, or 10,” said Calabria.
For a company built on data, the gap became impossible to ignore.
The solution: A connected payments platform built for speed and scale
For GOLFTEC, the right payments platform had to support a complex, omnichannel and multi-location business without adding more friction for coaches or finance teams. Following its acquisition of SkyTrak, a popular simulator brand, GOLFTEC was managing both in-person transactions at its training centers and a growing mix of retail, wholesale, and direct-to-consumer sales.
That meant choosing a POS system that could fit into GOLFTEC’s existing tech stack, simplify transactions, and make it easier to see what was happening across the business in real time. “A point of sale is there to ring up the customer and move on,” said Calabria. “If it’s creating more issues than it’s solving, then it’s not doing its job.”
Square stood out for how easily it fit into GOLFTEC’s existing systems — and how quickly the team could get up and running. “It was very easy to integrate Square into our business,” Calabria recalled. “The API data was very seamless. It was pretty quick in terms of the start-to-finish process.”
An easy setup was important because GOLFTEC needed a payments platform that could work alongside its frontend eCommerce platform and internal business tools. By integrating with GOLFTEC’s broader systems, Square created a cleaner connection between sales, payments, and reporting, giving teams a unified view of the business.
For the coaches who use the system every day, the platform needed to work without becoming a distraction.
Our coaches want to devote their energy to their students, not wrestling with payment processing. Square gives them the freedom to keep their attention where it should be — on fixing swings and helping players enjoy the game more. That frictionless ease of use is why we chose Square.”
Chris Koske → Chief Marketing Officer, GOLFTEC
Koske, who has been golfing since he was 14 and has even designed a few clubs himself, understands firsthand how much the lesson experience depends on keeping coaches focused on instruction. With a more intuitive system in place, coaches could spend less time managing the front desk and more time helping golfers improve.
The impact: More time for coaching, faster financial decisions, and stronger control at scale
For GOLFTEC, the biggest impact of switching to Square has been the ability to operate with more clarity across the business.
The first win was time. GOLFTEC estimates it saved roughly 10,000 hours since switching to Square. “We think we saved around 10,000 man hours in terms of moving to Square just from the admin process, the lack of refund process, things like that,” said Calabria.
That time went back to the people who matter most in the customer experience — the coaches. Instead of acting as the front line for payment issues, they could stay focused on instruction and club fitting. For a business with over a thousand coaches at any given time, that’s a significant gain in efficiency.
The second win was speed. With cleaner transaction data and less manual reconciliation, GOLFTEC shortened its monthly close by two days. That gave the finance team a shorter path to reporting and gave leadership access to fresher performance data earlier in the month. “We’re able to move much faster if we can close the books faster,” Calabria explained.
The third win was stronger financial control. After Square flagged a rise in disputes, the team worked with GOLFTEC to improve both how contracts were structured and how quickly disputes were addressed through the platform. Those changes had a meaningful financial impact. By tightening the process and using Square tools to respond faster, GOLFTEC improved its dispute outcomes and protected more revenue. “That saved us about $100,000 in the bottom line,” he said.
Taken together, those gains tell a bigger story than faster payments. Square helped GOLFTEC bring its operational infrastructure in line with the rest of the business, providing real-time insights and greater control as it scales to hundreds of locations. The company had already built a category-defining golfing experience. Now, it has a connected POS system behind the scenes supporting that same level of precision.
