Today's WSJ featured a small article in the "Small Business" section covering the decision by an architect to go "small" instead of targeting the more glamorous kinds of assignments. Here it is. I took it from WSJ.com (instead of a link to the site) because they have a pain-in-the-butt registration.
Designing Small Golf Courses
To Swing With Tough Times
By PAULETTE THOMAS
THE PROBLEM: A played-out market. Raymond Hearn, 41, is a golf-course architect. In 1995, he launched his own firm in Plymouth, Mich., designing courses the typical way -- the showier, the better. "Any course going up had to top the last," he says. "Let's have seven waterfalls instead of two."
He attended the annual PGA show in Orlando, Fla., to rub shoulders with the big dogs of golf. He designed courses such as the aptly named Grande Golf Club in Jackson, Mich. "Everything was scaled up," he says. "They wanted people to say, 'Wow!' " The sand in the bunkers that lined the immense fairways was $42 a cubic yard (the $5 sand wouldn't do.) Everything had a "championship" label. It was, pardon the pun, par for the course, as elaborate private clubs erupted across Florida, northern Michigan and the Carolinas. Mr. Hearn began targeting the Top 100 golf courses to offer his remodeling services.
But as the '90s economy withered, so did golf-course construction. Bankers began to demand actual business plans and land appraisals, which sank many iffy clubs in the planning stage. His small firm -- he and a partner had five employees -- had to lay off one employee and rethink the future.
Everything about golf had exploded out of scale, he decided. The sprawling 7,000-yard courses were part of it. And the shrunken stock market reduced the pool of potential club members willing to pay $200,000 initiation fees.
THE SOLUTION: He conceded what was left of the glamorous, super-size course designs. Instead, Mr. Hearn thought small.
He visited public courses in the British Isles, and little known Scottish courses such as Elie and Cruden Bay. While there, he didn't see executives making deals, but groups of girlfriends or spouses playing together. He met with the Wee Course Society in Scotland. And he loved how the courses, established a century ago, before big earthmoving equipment, fit the rugged landscape. "They were so proud of their local courses," he said.
He nixed his plan to pitch his services to the Top 100 courses, and skipped the annual PGA show in Orlando. Instead, he is pursuing members of the Public Golf Course Owners Association, a smaller trade group. "We're going down to the grass-roots level and saying, 'How can we help you?' " he says.
He's become an advocate for "lay-of-the-land" design, which reduces course development and maintenance costs by tucking the fairways and greens into existing terrain. He won kudos from golf writers for his Hemlock Golf Club in Ludington, Mich., where his "low-profile" design challenges golfers with narrow alleys, exposed sand dunes, and deceptively pitched greens.
For the moment, he has two courses under construction, and five on the drawing board. "That's about the most we can hope for in this economy," he says.
THE LESSON: Inflated times create outsize opportunities. To survive in modest times, scale back with the zeitgeist.