Holiday Golf is a success story, and that success is the story of Stefan Tjellander, an entrepreneur who five years ago decided to leave his cold native Sweden and start a new professional and personal life in warm Spain.
A lover of all kinds of sports, but locally in love with golf, Stefan had a great vision for the future when he changed his organized life with a stable job for a life as a tour guide in Gran Canaria, Mallorca and the Costa del Sol, and started working in a small golf wholesale distribution company that had been created by his compatriot Ingmar Werner, who also had a hotel next to the Real Club de Golf de Las Palmas. It was Holiday Golf.
Of course, it was nothing like it is today. It had been created in 1991 and Stefan joined in 1995, when the company had only one part-time office worker and a couple of salesmen. Today Holiday Golf has more than twenty employees, 1,500 meters of modern facilities in Marbella (offices, warehouse and showroom), distributes its products in several countries and has offices and facilities in Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon.
Stefan, a connoisseur of the world of golf due to his love of the sport and his work as a tour guide for groups of golfers, sensed the great potential for growth that the company could have, took the commercial reins and settled in Marbella, the epicenter of the Costa del Golf. From there he began to expand the business throughout Spain and Portugal, exercising his commercial work aboard an old Ford Fiesta without air conditioning.
He began to use his garage and even his own house as a warehouse (“my wife was not very happy when I filled her living room with boxes”) in the Los Arqueros urbanization, next to the course designed by Seve, whose clubhouse restaurant also served as a makeshift office to prepare papers before leaving to travel all over Spain with his utility vehicle loaded to the brim with merchandise.
“I saw the possibilities and wanted to do well,” Stefan recalls. “Then we set up the first office in San Pedro Alcántara (Marbella),” he continues, “and I saw more business possibilities because people wanted more things, clothes, shoes…, and I started to contact new suppliers. At the same time I was in charge of sales, contacts with suppliers, the office, the warehouse… We grew and moved to another place in San Pedro to have more space”.
The needs for facilities increased and in 2005 the company acquired a large building in a modern industrial estate in Nueva Andalucía, next to the Marbella Golf Valley. The company continued to grow, and a couple of years ago doubled its facilities by purchasing the adjoining warehouse.
In 2010 Stefan, who then owned 49 percent of the company, and a Swedish businessman bought the remaining 51 percent of Holiday Golf from Ingmar Werner, and a year ago Stefan acquired all the shares and became the sole owner of the company.
-What is Holiday Golf today, what are its lines of business?
-Fundamentally it is a company that distributes golf products for golf stores and golf merchandising for companies. We are now covering Spain and Portugal, and we are also working in Italy, Morocco, Bulgaria and Turkey. And of course in Andorra and Gibraltar.
We also have the leather product, which was born eighteen years ago, and we have made entire lines for Glennmuir, Osborne, Tío Pepe, Valle Romano…. With the leather product was born the possibility of making our own brand, Ofelia T, which is the name and initial of my daughter’s surname. We are working with this brand in fifteen countries with distributors who also sell to many companies in other countries. In Switzerland, for example, we have now placed several important orders with large companies.
-Another facet of Holiday Golf is the consultancy, design and installation of golf stores…
-Yes, thanks to our extensive experience in the sector, we have knowledge that we want to pass on to our customers so that they can optimize their businesses as much as possible. There are many things that can be improved in the stores, and we help them to do so. For example, putting the counter at the back, improving the display of products, covering shop windows to increase the interior display area, having the products well ordered… Unlike any store in the street of a city, which needs to capture the attention of passers-by to get them to enter, most golf course stores do not need store windows because customers are already in the place and know that the golf store is there. We also advise on sales techniques. And the result is very noticeable. Every client whose store has been renovated by us has seen sales increase by one hundred percent or more in a very short time. And now we are also working to be able to do self-replenishment through computer programs, so that many tasks are automated and the customer gains time for other things.
-What projects does your company have in the short term?
-We have incorporated quite a few brands lately and now we are focusing on their consolidation. We are not particularly looking for any specific brand, and perhaps the only thing we may be missing is a strong brand of hard material, of sticks. In addition to the expansion and renovation of our facilities that we are now completing -warehouse, offices and showroom-, we are also focusing on the organization system, to facilitate the work in all areas of the company, for which the computerization of processes is very important, which will facilitate the orders to our customers, to the golf stores, and will improve their performance.
-Which of the brands supplied by Holiday Golf are having the most success?
-Of the last ones we have incorporated, Oakley stands out: we are finding that it is a very desirable brand, in eyewear more than anything else -in clothing it enters in 2017-, Callaway is a very big hit in clothing, and Cutter & Buck also has a very, very good reception. And there is of course Ecco, which continues its unstoppable success because it is a product of exceptional quality, and once you try it, it is very difficult to change brands.
-Holiday Golf is, fortunately, an atypical company in the sense that even in times of crisis it has registered a great growth, with annual sales increases of around 25 percent. What is the key to this business success?
-I really believe that a lot of work, a lot of dedication. I left Sweden 25 years ago with a salary of 2,300 euros, I had eight weeks of vacation and I traveled a lot, and I came to Spain to work for 300 euros a month because what I liked was the contact with people (he confesses that there was also “a beautiful girl” in Mallorca who contributed to that) and the climate. Many of us who left Sweden started as tour guides, and you were paid very little because there were so many of us who wanted to work in that field. I have never worked for money, but because I like to do a job in which the client is satisfied with the service I provide. The key to success is to work for the client, that the client is satisfied. We have almost never missed a delivery, we do everything to help the customer, and I think in the end people realize this and trust us.
-What role does the company’s staff play in Holiday Golf’s success?
-Everyone who works here has one thing in common, and that is that they want to do a good job. And the energy of being able to work well, in good harmony, is what I have always brought from Sweden and I want everyone to feel that. And I want everyone to take responsibility. The truth is that I have been very lucky with the staff.
Leave a Reply