When Are You Going to Get a 'Real' Job?
Scott Stallings's business is golf. He's blogging for BNET from the Nationwide Tour as he travels about 300 days a year in pursuit of a PGA Tour card. Click here to find all of Scott's posts.
Anyone who has ever started his own business has probably been at one time or another on the receiving end of this question: "When are you going to get a real job?"
If you're anything like me, there is quite possibly nothing that annoys me more. Throughout the course of this season several people have had the nerve to walk up and ask me that question.
I realize that for the person who wakes up Monday through Friday to go to the same 9-5 job every day, trying to get on the PGA Tour sounds crazy.
But when am I going to get a real job?
If this isn't real work, I'm not sure what is. The life of a pro golfer looks a lot more like that of a business owner. Here's a look at just a few of the things that go into building and sustaining my golf career:
- Manage the finances of my LLC
- Raise capital, which includes finding and meeting with potential investors and pursuing sponsorship opportunities
- Play in Pro-Am events every week -- it's good for branding and it's supplemental revenue and is required by the Tour.
- Hire a caddy, an agent, and a swing coach
- Keep track of my stats and hit my performance metrics
- Oh, and everything that goes into playing the Nationwide tournaments in a different city each week and playing well, so that I can both earn a decent living and qualify for the PGA Tour.
When I wanted to marry my wife back in 2006, my father-in-law was skeptical. Jen and I were just out of college. "How exactly are you going to make this work?" he asked me. He wanted to know how I planned to travel 300 days a year and support his daughter on the road.
I pulled out my business plan and went over all of the numbers with him. I went into great detail about ways to minimize our risks (my investors assume most of it) and how I planned to set aside emergency funds, just in case. I knew I had to leave some room for error because if you put yourself in a situation where everything must go right to be successful, you're setting yourself up for failure.
Now my father-in-law is one of my biggest fans -- and he doesn't even play golf.
Have you ever gotten the 'real' job question? How do you respond to it?
- Find out where Scott ranks on the Nationwide Tour here.
- Follow him on Twitter @stallingsgolf