that was quite successful and eventually was sold in the mid 90’s and led Edmondson to his semi-retirement. The fundraising ventures, golf playing and hunting weren’t quite doing it for him or others he had known from his days at Dataplex. So the wheels were put in motion to develop something, anything that would be success-
plus years in development the launch of the first SkyCaddie came in 2001 just a few weeks before the disaster of 9/11 which made disposable income almost non-existent in most families. “One of the perils of any new start up is that you need things to start out well or you can burn through your capitol relatively quickly. Luckily the investors believed in our
We have travelled over one million miles and collected over 100 million data points on golf courses to create the only primary mapped data base of golf courses in the world. We are the only ones that have mapped data base that we created ourselves,” said Edmondson, who had first-hand experience in creating this process.”I was the original mapper. I mapped
ful. “My other technology partners said, ‘why didn’t we try to start up something ourselves instead of try to find something that already existed?” Edmonson said that during the late ‘90’s his partners were already dialed into what the future would hold. They knew mobile phones would eventually connect to the internet and they would have embedded GPS. “It was really very interesting and exciting”, said Edmondson. He also adds, “It was quite by accident to really get into the golfing thing. It had nothing to do with my interest as an amateur golfer at all. We were just looking for places we thought there was growth opportunity for a start up business. What we kept coming back too was mobile devices, the internet and GPS”. The technology team looked at the cart based GPS systems golf courses were using and knew that was not the way they wanted to go. But taking that idea and selling it to the consumers that were soon to be carrying handheld computers had strong possibilities. “What we started to think was we could take a cart based GPS and imbed that in a handheld device. We thought this would be better consumer product than a golf course product”, said Edmondson. That idea started to blossom and after three
concept. We were ultimately able to afford the marketing that was required to expose a brand new product to golfers that had never thought about needing a product like ours before. We actually created a brand new product in an existing market. The golf industry has been around for centuries and has been limited to 14 clubs and a ball. We were trying to introduce a 15th item to their golf equipment”. Nearly 11 years since the launch in 2001, SkyCaddie is the number one rangefinder in the game. Over one million units have been sold and the company has generated over 300 million dollars in revenue. The Ridgeland based company employs 150 Mississippians and 250 employees total worldwide. So what has made the SkyCaddie the gold standard of rangefinders? The answer might be in the way the company approached the idea of mapping the courses. By foot, one hole, one course at a time. “There were no maps to golf courses, so we had to go out and create maps to load into our device. That mapping process was part of building the company. We had put together teams of people and train them on how to map a golf course. To date we have mapped over 28 thousand golf course around the world. We have been to those golf courses about 45 thousand times.
Annandale ten or 12 times trying to get a process down of trying to map a golf course”. It is a process that separated the Mississippi built company from the rest in the industry. “Everyone else does their maps by tracing satellite imagery. They do that because it is quick and easy and saves money. We actually travel to the golf course, we walk the golf course and we record all the data points with equipment that is accurate to within a foot of being totally precise.” Edmondson and company have no plans of standing still in this lightening fast age of technology. They are already laying the foundation for the future of the company. The first step was the development of Club SG, an online community that is Skygolf driven. “When people buy our product they register the device and become part of our community. We know who buys are product. They use our product and they download golf courses. They upload golf scores to our website where they can track their progress and see how their game is going. They can also post it to Facebook, share it with their friends and make comments on Twitter”, says Edmondson who sees this as a marketing person’s dream because it creates and instant data base. “We have over a million visitors a month MISSISSIPPI SPORTS MAGAZINE - 35