Welcome to Issue #16
"If you can’t outplay them, outwork them”
Ben Hogan
What’s on mind this week
Am I the only one not speed training, Hideki’s playoff woes due to a chair, Augusta says no to Player and grandson request, great to see Roger Maltbie back on the course, The Players Championship is not a major, Rory/Reed rivalry is exactly what we need, LIV purses are bulging at the seams, Tommy still going solo with no clothing deal, only 55 days to the Masters.
In the news
Why it matters: Early 2026 PGA Tour broadcasts delivered triple-digit year-on-year gains, forcing broadcasters and sponsors to reassess golf's true media value ahead of the next rights cycle.
Our Take: Koepka's return provided a short-term lift, but the bigger story is structural. Broadcasters increasingly believe golf's older, affluent audience was historically undercounted and is now being captured more accurately through improved measurement. That changes the baseline for future negotiations. This does not guarantee permanent growth, but it materially reframes golf as premium, sponsor-safe inventory. For rights holders and brands, the signal is repricing risk heading into 2030 negotiations.
Why it matters: US health insurance premiums rose 6.4% in 2026, with coverage at 94% of private versus 58% of public courses, revealing growing cost pressure on golf operations.
Our Take: Labour accounts for over half of operating costs and rising premiums compress margins even in high-demand environments. The private/public coverage gap explains retention disparities: private clubs maintain staff, public courses struggle. For operators and investors, benefits strategy is now as crucial as agronomics or member experience. Courses failing to offer competitive packages face chronic turnover, degraded service, and reduced profitability, the steady-state market will expose these structural pressures.
Why it matters: Leading operators warn that recent participation gains will reverse if facilities fail to adapt to how newer golfers actually want to play, socialise, and spend time.
Our Take: US green grass rounds reached 29.1 million in 2024 according to NGF's February 2026 report. Demand remains elevated, but the challenge is product-market fit risk. Capital is already shifting from capacity expansion towards short courses, wellness amenities, and social spaces. Retention has replaced acquisition as the industry's core challenge. For owners and investors, the choice is clear. Redesign the golf experience around modern usage patterns or watch pandemic era gains erode. Momentum alone will not protect legacy models. Capital is voting early, and culture will decide the winners.
Pic from Getty
Worth your time
Read: The story behind Chris Gotterup refusing a Masters invitation as a spectator and waiting to earn his debut through qualification.
Watch: Arnold Palmer on the Bob Hope Show A funny clip from Arnold Palmer’s appearance on the Bob Hope show in 1963. Innocent times.
Listen: A deep dive into golf course architecture history (specifically the work of Langford and Moreau), this ‘The Fried Egg’ with Blake Conant is widely cited as a must-listen for purists.
Tech: Claude Opus 4.6 Went down a rabbit hole this week learning about the latest thing in AI….‘vibe working’….using Claude’s newest model. Lots to learn but really impressive stuff if you have time on your hands to play around with this stuff.
Feature story
The Creator’s Portfolio: How golf influencers build businesses beyond the algorithm
Alissa Kacar has built exactly the career she wants. The golf content creator, known online as @newladygolfer, works with premier brands like PXG, hosts events for the PGA Tour and USGA, and plays some of the world’s best courses while getting paid for it. She controls her schedule, chooses her partners, and wakes up genuinely excited about her work.
“I’m so happy with everything that I’m doing right now,” Alissa says. “I wake up every day and I’m like, absolutely, yes I am. So it’s just wanting to keep accumulating those yeses each day.”
Yet even while thriving in her current role, Alissa is thinking about what might come next. Not because she wants to stop, far from it, but because the most successful creators understand that personal brands, however lucrative, have structural limits. Her longer-term aspiration, if the right opportunity emerges, is to make an investment within golf that allows her to stay involved while moving behind the scenes.
That instinct reveals how the most durable creator businesses are built. While platforms like YouTube create outsized winners and brands compete aggressively for influencer attention, the strongest operators are not optimising for any single platform or revenue stream. They are building portfolios.
The economics of being everywhere
Alissa’s income looks less like a traditional media model and more like a diversified portfolio. Year-long brand partnerships provide baseline income. Three to six-month contracts add predictability. One-off sponsored posts create flexibility. But the highest-value work happens offline.
“The stuff that I do in person, which will be anywhere from one day on site to a week on site, those are probably my biggest paying jobs,” she explains. “They’re very involved, require a very high qualitative level, lots of deliverables, and long days.”
This creates a clear economic tension. The work with highest renumeration, in-person hosting and presenting, does not scale. A week hosting pays well, but it also represents a hard ceiling. Alissa can only be in one place at a time.
The structure prioritises margin over scale. Alissa’s most valuable offering is not content that can be licensed endlessly or distributed globally at zero marginal cost. It is her physical presence.
That structure also acts as protection. “I use my Instagram as a working resume,” she says. “It’s the highlight reel that helps me get those in-person hosting jobs.” The content itself generates direct revenue too while also creating demand for the higher-margin work.
The creator revenue matrix
Alissa’s model reveals a framework applicable beyond golf content creation. Revenue streams can be mapped across two dimensions: structure and intensity.
The strategic insight is portfolio construction. Rather than optimising for any single quadrant, successful creators balance across all four. Annual partnerships provide baseline income and relationship stability. Shorter contracts add flexibility. In-person work can serve to drive margins. One-off collaborations fill capacity during quieter periods.
This creates natural revenue smoothing. When event season quietens, content partnerships continue. When brand budgets tighten, event work provides a buffer. The portfolio structure turns the non-scalability of personal brands from a weakness into a design principle.
The platform paradox
Ask Alissa where the biggest unrealised revenue opportunity lies and the answer is immediate: YouTube.
“People that are doing it are crushing it,” she says, pointing to creators like Bryson DeChambeau and Good Good. “YouTube is a whole other animal. You need teams to film, edit, all the things. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people doing it well.”
Her decision not to pursue it is deliberate. She already employs a photographer, videographer, and part-time assistant who travels with her. Expanding into YouTube would require building a second operation. More staff. More production. A fundamentally different workflow.
The trade-off is clear. Pursue maximum revenue growth and sacrifice the lifestyle flexibility that makes the work appealing or maintain the current structure and accept a natural ceiling. For now, Alissa has chosen the latter. This choice illustrates a broader reality: many creator businesses encounter growth limits long before they exhaust market demand. The constraint is not audience interest, but operational complexity and personal bandwidth.
The measurement gap
When it comes to return on investment, Alissa’s experience highlights a familiar problem. Some partnerships include trackable elements such as affiliate links and discount codes. Others do not.
“Somebody can see me promoting a product, and it’s very easy to just go and look it up on Amazon or go directly on the website,” she says. “Still doing my job, but unfortunately that’s not always trackable.”
The economics illustrate the challenge. A creator with over 100,000 followers posting about a golf product might generate 3,000–5,000 impressions and 50–100 link clicks. If the brand pays $2,000–3,000 for the post, the trackable cost per click runs $20–$60. By performance marketing standards, that looks expensive.
But the calculation misses indirect value. Instagram research suggests only 2–3% of influenced purchases happen via direct links. The majority occur through later brand searches, in-store visits, or retailer websites. A creator post that generates 100 trackable clicks likely influences 3,000–5,000 total purchase considerations.
As budgets tighten, partnerships built on trust rather than data are often the first to be questioned. This creates interesting market dynamics: Brands with sophisticated attribution models may undervalue creator partnerships, while brands willing to invest based on affinity maintain access to talent competitors cannot justify.
Community as constraint and advantage
Unlike many creators who outsource engagement, Alissa handles her own community interactions.
“When people message me, you’re most likely going to get a response,” she says. “If somebody takes the time to ask a question or wants to know courses to play in San Diego or apparel brands to check out, I want to respond.”
The time cost is real. As her following grew, the workload increased accordingly. But the approach creates differentiation. When followers see her recommend a product, it carries the weight of an established relationship rather than a transactional endorsement. That personal engagement strengthens trust, but it also reinforces the same structural constraint: time spent replying to messages is time not spent expanding the business.
Partnership equilibrium
Alissa’s four-year relationship with PXG offers a template for effective creator partnerships. The arrangement works because of three factors: genuine belief in the product, clear communication around expectations, and mutual respect.
“They’ve always made me feel very valued,” she says. “On the flip side, I want them to feel that whatever they ask, they’ll get a high-quality result.”
Annual contracts and consistent delivery provide stability. At the same time, long-term partnerships deepen reliance on the creator remaining front and centre. The more successful the relationship becomes, the harder it is to imagine stepping away from it.
The transition challenge: From talent to IP
The golf industry offers a masterclass in creators evolving beyond their personal brands, a pivot from Talent to Intellectual Property (IP).
Rick Shiels has already navigated this, moving from a solo teaching pro to Rick Shiels Media, with institutional backing from 54 and Sanabil Private Equity. Similarly, Good Good Golf successfully raised $45 million in 2025 (led by Creator Sports Capital and Omaha Productions) and is now title-sponsoring a PGA Tour event in late 2026. In both cases, the value has been institutionalised into a brand that survives independent of any single personality.
Alissa is aware of the challenge. Alissa’s business combines her personal brand, content creation skills, event hosting expertise, and cultivated brand relationships. Moving to a behind-the-scenes investment role, should the right opportunity emerge, would simply represent a different application of the capital and industry knowledge she's built, not a limitation of what she's created, but a natural evolution into a new phase.
This lack of transferable IP is not a strategic failure; it reflects the authenticity-driven nature of personal brands. But it defines her next horizon. Any transition to the "behind-the-scenes" investment role she aspires to would require her to build or acquire IP that functions as a saleable asset, rather than a calendar-dependent job.
Control versus scale
At its core, Alissa’s story reflects a familiar trade-off. But it also raises an uncomfortable question for the creator economy: is this a business or a job?
Traditional definitions suggest businesses are saleable assets that generate value independent of the founder. By that measure, most creator operations, including Alissa’s, are high-income jobs with business infrastructure. They pay well, offer flexibility, and create genuine value. They also require the founder’s continuous involvement.
Alissa could pursue scale. Hire more staff. Expand into new platforms. Build systems that function without her. She chooses not to, at least for now. “I love getting to have control over my schedule,” she says. “That’s a really nice perk of the job that I do.”
For now, Alissa is building a business that delivers income, flexibility, and satisfaction on her own terms. She has also, perhaps accidentally, illuminated the creator economy’s central tension: the qualities that make creator businesses successful, authenticity, personal connection, individual craft, are precisely the qualities that makes them harder to achieve real scale.
That clarity may be the real competitive advantage.
One thing from history
The LPGA: When the star became the sales team
Pic from Golf Digest
In 1950, Babe Didrikson Zaharias faced a commercial problem. She was the most prominent figure in women's golf. Two Olympic gold medals. Multiple major championships. The ability to draw crowds. But there was no stable professional tour for her to play on. The previous women's circuit had collapsed. The golf establishment showed little appetite to rebuild it.
So, she helped build it herself.
On September 13, 1950, in Wichita, Kansas, thirteen women signed the charter creating the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Patty Berg was elected the first president. That inaugural season featured 14 tournaments and $50,000 in prize money. Survival required more than talent. It required hustle.
Zaharias understood leverage. She was known to call a promoter, negotiate an exhibition appearance for herself, and then say, "And I'll bring along a few of the girls." If promoters wanted the star, they got the tour. The founders booked events, made radio appearances, threw first pitches at minor league games, and drove from town to town promoting their own product. They were athletes, operators, and sales executives at the same time.
Zaharias was dominant on the course, winning multiple events in that first season. Her presence provided the proof of concept that kept the enterprise alive.
Today the LPGA awards well over $100 million annually across more than 30 tournaments. In 1950, thirteen women bet on a simple thesis: if the market would not build distribution for them, they would become both the product and the distribution channel.
That strategy built an industry. And it started with women who understood that if no one else would sell their story, they'd have to become salespeople themselves.
Next week
With the February deadline now well and truly passed, we look at what Brooks Koepla’s solo exit reveals about LIV, the PGA Tour, and player power.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David