Michael:
It's a good question, and honestly, I'm not sure anyone has ever asked me publicly how I made the leap. Ran can never think of good questions like that for his interviews.
When I was in college and writing to everyone in the business asking for advice, pretty much everyone told me I should try to get a job with Pete Dye -- so I wrote him letters for three years until I got to work on the crew at Long Cove. After college and my year overseas, I went back to work for the Dyes, in Denver, at Plum Creek and then Riverdale Dunes.
Pete was then trying to help his sons get into the business, so when potential clients called [with rare exceptions such as his projects for Landmark who dealt with Pete directly], they were referred to Perry or P.B. and then Pete would get involved as much as he wanted. Pete never really carried a payroll; he just sent you from one job to the next on the developer's payroll, so in going out west I wound up on Perry's side of the ledger, and in fact, I was Perry's first employee. But, Perry was not his dad. His goal was to do a lot of jobs and make a lot of money, and as a result, the only kinds of jobs he attracted were (a) jobs in Japan blowing down the side of a mountain to sell memberships with the "Dye" name, and (b) ridiculously tight housing development courses.
After a year or two of seeing those, I thought, "I could probably find a better design job than these on my own." It was extremely naive, really ... I had no idea how to go about starting a business, and didn't even think about it in those terms. But, things came to a head, and I became Perry's first employee to quit. I did one last assignment for Pete -- running the construction of the renovation of Piping Rock -- and then I was through, with no idea what to do.
I moved back into my parents' home for a while, but for most of the next 6-8 months I traveled around in my car, checking out different courses and getting back to some of the places I'd liked the most. I went and spent a day in Tom Fazio's office, thinking I might work for them, not really believing I could find a job on my own -- but, I didn't pursue it past that, as he seemed to have plenty of talented people there already. I wrote some articles for GOLF Magazine, and I started writing a book [The Confidential Guide]. I was single and had a bit of money in the bank, luckily, so there was no pressure to sort it out immediately -- that's really an important factor. But I might have been the only architect in history to "go solo" without having any prospect lined up as my first client.
In mid-summer I went up to northern Michigan to see a few of the new courses there and get back to Crystal Downs; I stayed with the professional, Fred Muller, for a week, and we got to be good friends. Not a month later, the professional at Grand Traverse Resort called Fred to ask if he knew of a young architect he could recommend to someone wanting to build a course down the road -- High Pointe -- and all of a sudden, I was in business. It helped immensely in getting the job that I could say I was going to live there and BUILD the course myself, instead of just design it.
So, what made me do it? Restlessness, and naivete. I would have happily worked for Pete Dye as long as he wanted me to, but that was never really on the table with Pete, and especially not at that point in the economy and in his family. Perry had given me a great opportunity to really make a lot of design decisions on the projects I worked on, but
I knew I was not going to be happy under Perry, trying to make the best of bad sites and him getting the credit if we succeeded. [After all, he really had no reputation of his own. I figured if I was going to help build someone's reputation, it might as well be mine.] My goal wasn't just to be a golf course architect -- it was to be a part of creating great courses, and Perry wasn't interested in that.
I found my first design job in 1986, my second in '88, my third in '89, my fourth and fifth in '92; and my sixth didn't happen until 1995, after a couple of stalled projects put some fear of failure into the equation. [I got married and had a son in between courses #3 and 4, and had to start thinking about working steadily for real.] ALL of those first six projects came as the result of references from people I'd met while I was traveling around in college -- Fred Muller, Brian Morgan, Dave Richards, Jim Finegan, David Earl, and Joe Luigs. I thought I'd been traveling just to see all the great courses I could see, but in fact, I had been building an extensive network of people, without even understanding that's what I was doing; and that was the foundation of my business.
For that matter, networking is still the foundation of my business. People always ask what I get out of all my time on Golf Club Atlas, and in addition to the fact that I like to discuss golf course architecture, I have come to understand that talking about it is what helps build my network of friends, and potential future references. But there's no point in networking on Facebook or Linkedin when most of the people seeking information on golf course design are eventually going to find their way here. Years later, when I sat down and thought about it, every great architect has had a big network of people who helped them succeed. All those old Scots pros who came to the US were a network of their own. C.B. Macdonald had New York and Chicago money to refer himself and Seth Raynor; Robert Trent Jones had the Rockefellers; Tom Fazio has visitors to Pine Valley, plus GOLF DIGEST panelists.
The other thing I've done way above average is to identify good people to work with me, and that's another side of networking. Tom Mead, the superintendent at Crystal Downs, quit that job to help me build High Pointe. Gil Hanse was an intern our first summer of construction, and eventually became my first employee. Mike DeVries was recommended by Fred Muller, and worked on The Legends and Black Forest with us. I'd worked with Jim Urbina and Eric Iverson when I was with Perry Dye, and eventually, as Perry's business slowed down, they came over to work with me. Bruce Hepner sought me out when we were working at Stonewall, and Brian Slawnik was referred by the turf program at Michigan State, because he wanted to get involved in construction. Overall, we've had an amazing number of talented people volunteer to work on one of our projects, and only a couple of duds among them!