#2: Harry Arnett
Harry Arnett is CEO of Municipal, a sports utility apparel company. Prior to co-founding Municipal, he spent 14 years in the Golf Equipment industry, highlighted by a 9 year stint as a marketing executive at Callaway Golf. In this episode, Harry joins the Course Record Show to tell us about how equipment companies sponsor players, his stance on the distance debate and how he is building Municipal with celebrity co-founders.
Listen to the interview below or on Spotify, Apple, Google, Stitcher or Amazon. Enjoy!
Roberto: Harry. Thanks a lot for joining.
Harry: Hey, it's my pleasure. It's nice to talk to actual human beings. Now that we're in the coronavirus I feel like I spend a lot of my time emailing and texting, so it's good to have actual conversations.
Roberto: Yeah, this is great.
Dan: Harry, we'll see how normal we are by the end of this. We'll see if your opinion of us changes too much in the next few minutes. We want to start just taking a look back down memory lane on your time in the golf business, specifically getting a bit of a deeper dive on how we manage relationships with Tour players and the Tour in general.
Sponsoring Tour players
Dan: So to kick us off, I know in your time at Callaway you sponsored a lot of Tour players. I’d be curious to understand how involved you are personally in those decisions of who to sponsor. And what are some of the key attributes that you look for in a player before committing to sign them?
Harry: Yeah, very involved because the Tour is it.
This is really timely now with a lot of the discussion going on about equipment standards and so when you're trying to create an aspirational brand, which all golf brands are trying to, at some level, you really want the validation from the players that play it at the most elite level. And that's where the Tour comes in. So there are really two components to that. Number one, you want players that are going to represent the values of your brand, are going to represent what your company stands for above and beyond just how they play.
But the second part of that is you want them to play with you. You want him to play well and they're playing your equipment. So when I was really proud of our approach when I was at Callaway and TaylorMade too before that, because that was the number one thing that we thought about and debated: do we really think we can make this player better? And if we didn't think we could make a player better, then that was a red flag. So we always factored that in, there were, I can't, it may be early on when we were trying to turn the brand around and we didn't have a lot of Tour players for Callaway. We probably reached a little far for some guys where we wanted branding on Tour and we wanted more numbers of people playing our clubs, but that vanished pretty quickly, maybe in a year or two.
And we really started to want to engage more with players that we felt like not only could we help, but they were really interested in that relationship with us. It's a lot of science because there is science to it: attack angles, what kind of player are they? And now, you can really size a player up, unfortunately, based on a lot of data. We talk about that.
“Oh, he's a 178 mile per hour ball speed guy. He's a 180 plus ball speed guy. Now he's a 190 plus ball speed guy.” Did you ever think you'd see guys on Tour hit 190 ball speed, Roberto?
Roberto: It's crazy. That's crazy. It's changed so much.
Dan: Speaking of data, what metrics do you use in either qualifying who would be a good player to sponsor or when evaluating someone that you just signed whether they are improving? You mentioned some ball speed numbers, et cetera. What else do you use to validate? What are other intangibles that you spoke about?
Harry: The one piece, because you can break a player down all the way to spin rates, side span, angle of attack, ball speed.
Like I'm looking at Roberto, you guys, you're probably looking at Roberto, like “that's my buddy.” I'm looking at Roberto. I'm thinking “he's 168, 170 ball speed. He comes a little from the inside, hits a little draw.” No, but really the one factor in Roberto left this, cause he's “yeah, I could do that job.”
The one piece of data that is highly correlated to success on Tour is how much were they winning? That’s it! Cause you see plenty of players out there with talent and you just, Roberto knows this, you see it. You're like “the guy's never won anything.” So it's not like they're going to turn a light switch on.
And the guys that are dominating on Tour, didn't (just) start dominating on Tour. They dominated when they were 17. That's the ultimate factor. When you look at, especially now with college is, “how many wins? was he playing in fields that had legit competition?” And those guys, you can pretty much bank they're going to be good Tour players.
Roberto: Yeah. Winners win. I thought you were going to say money lists because when you were like, the only stat that matters is the money and the FedEx.
Harry: I kind of got into the golf industry a little bit later in my career. I was late thirties when I started at TaylorMade and I had this really idealistic view of the profession, the motivation of the professional athlete.
And then when I got around Tour players it's pretty simple. They want to win and they want to make a lot of money.
Roberto: That's exactly right.
Dan: They're just like us!
Harry: Yes, exactly. Exactly. It’s just their vocation is a little bit different than ours is.
Roberto: Circling back to signing players... You left Callaway golf in 2019, so when I matched up the timelines, I thought Xander Schauffele would have been a guy who started his pro career with TaylorMade and really ascended very quickly to the top level of the game. And then signed with Callaway. Were you involved in signing Xander specifically in his case? How does that process work and how did you nail that?
Harry: I was part of the team. I think that was one of the fun parts about being at Callaway. A lot of those types of decisions were team efforts, because not only do you want to sign a player, but in my roles as an executive responsible for how we would communicate that out to the world- is how are we going to match up Xander with our brand and then tell people about it at the most grassroots level.
So for someone like him, that was pretty much a no brainer as it gets. With the only risk, I suppose, is he hadn't won a lot, but he was at that time 23 years old. I think he was ascending. You could tell that. He was about to hit that period in his career where he was learning how to rack up top tens in big events.
I think at that time before he came to us, he had finished top 10 in three majors out of the four or something like that. A little bit out of nowhere, not for Tour players, because you guys knew him, but for the average person, probably didn't think he got a top five at Erin Hills and the US Open in 2017.
So people were really starting to pay attention to him. He's from San Diego and we were really looking for a rising star that was younger, a rising star that could carry the mantle of being our premier guy for a while. Cause it was Phil [Mickelson].
Phil and I are the same age. So he was in his late forties. He was still competing a lot, but he was on the tail end of his time when he was going to be in contention often in the big events. So we were looking at those factors, and then his character plays a lot into it, as I mentioned before. So in the meeting with him and his father, Stefan, they were really interested in a relationship with an equipment company that could help take Xander to the next level and then stay there.
I think there's a perception on the outside that players chase money with equipment contracts. And I think in some ways that can be true, but it's far riskier to a player to switch out than it is to stay with something they're comfortable with because with the money that's available in the PGA Tour, they far surpass what an equipment company pays with some exception, such as the top five or ten players.
They're making between $5-$10 million in endorsement money. But if you take a player like Dustin Johnson, who is number one in the world. I think Dustin, on the golf course in calendar year 2020 made something like $16 million bucks or something like that, which is crazy.
And so TaylorMade may pay him $8-$10 million. If he's making $8-$10 million with TaylorMade, and his play falls off, that's far riskier than just taking the guaranteed money from an equipment company. Do you agree with that, Roberto?
Roberto: I agree. I think Dustin won like $23 million on the course. It’s $15 million for [winning] the FedEx Cup now. That has shifted in my tenure on the Tour that has shifted as the purses have really increased. And actually the endorsement dollars from equipment companies has decreased, so your calculus is a hundred percent right. And that applies from the top to the middle to the bottom of the Tour.
If you're in the middle of the Tour and you're going to switch from one company to another for a hundred grand or another 200 grand... even in the middle of the tour, a good year is $1-$3 million. So you're being very short-sighted taking a $100,000 guaranteed and potentially hurting your performance.
Harry: You're a hundred percent right, it really started to change. I'm wondering what the established veterans on Tour felt about this, but
what really started to change since 2015 was kids coming out of college that were getting guaranteed $2 million kind of deals, $1-$2 million per year kind of deals, without ever teeing it up on the PGA Tour. And that kind of happened out of nowhere.
Spieth was the first guy I remember that jumped. Well there’s Tiger, but he's an outlier. Spieth was the first guy I remember that made that jump. And Under Armour wrote a fairly sizable check at that time. And we were all thinking they had lost their minds.
And I think that paid off pretty well for them early on, but now you've got guys like Matt Wolff and [Jon] Rahm who came out in 2015, 2016, of course, Bryson [DeChambeau], Collin [Morikawa], more guys that are turning pro with guaranteed, pretty sizeable equipment deals. And that is a fairly new phenomenon outside of once in a generation players like Tiger and, even when Phil turned pro, I don't think, even (inflation-adjusted) real dollars, I don't think that was the type of money that guys were signing for.
Dan: So those rookie contracts that are so new notwithstanding, the perception is that over the last maybe 15 or 20 years, the equipment money for on a sponsorship basis for Tour players has gone down. Do you largely see that to be true? And to what do you attribute that? What are some of the forces behind what's causing that?
Harry: I think TaylorMade was driving a lot of that in the middle 2000s when they were chasing count and they were really paying a premium to have headwear and drivers in play. And so that drove the number up, so it really forced the market there.
And I think once TaylorMade pulled back, frankly, I think that's what kind of popped that bubble somewhat. And companies weren't as willing to pay high six figures for players that were between 50 and 100 in the world like they were 10 years prior. And that shift- Roberto probably lived through this- that shift happened virtually overnight.
It was like within two seasons. All of that changed with some blips along the way. When Nike pulled out of the equipment world, they were still paying. And I think still are in some cases a pretty nice amount for apparel, headwear and footwear. But really overnight the whole thing shifted, and it became very top 20 dominated.
But yeah, that big shift happened overnight. Were you guys talking about that kind of stuff, Roberto, in the locker room? Just how quickly it shifted.
Roberto: Yeah. Especially when I was playing nicely I got up to maybe #60 in the world, but yeah, I was a 50 to 200 guy in the world. And those kinds of “pinch yourself” checks from equipment companies went away pretty quick. I think my second, third year on Tour, I had a TaylorMade deal. I had TaylorMade on the side of my hat, big corporate sponsor on the front. And it was a significant... it was a $150,000-$200,000 deal for basically 11 clubs, including the driver. And that went away overnight, like you said. The next renewal was like, “we can send you a driver.”
Harry: That's how we'll give you a deal.
Roberto: We'll give you a deal and a driver.
Harry: Yeah.
The equipment manufacturer’s view on the distance debate
Roberto: So that a hundred percent echoes your timeline.
Harry, back to the news that the R&A and the USGA are thinking about doing something about [restricting] distance. And we're not sure what that is yet, but it feels like they've confirmed that they're going to do something.
I feel like people speak for the equipment companies. They make assumptions in the debate. I'd like to hear directly from the source. How do equipment companies feel about the rules changes aimed at reigning in distance in the pro game? Or if we're finally gonna bifurcate rules, what is the boardroom at TaylorMade and Callaway and Titleist like, what are they talking about?
Because I don't feel like we actually hear from them. We just have other people put words in their mouth.
Harry: It's a delicate place to be because all the companies you just talked about and, too, I know better than the Titleist, but there's a real sincere respect for the USGA and a sincere respect for the job that they do.
From my perspective it's an impossible task, what they're trying to do, because they have so many constituents that have different motivations. And I know that their stated goal is to do what's right for the game in capital letters, the GAME. But at the end of the day our commitment when I was there [at Callaway and TaylorMade] was always helping golfers play better and enjoy the game more.
So those two things are at odds when you're talking about rolling the golf ball back and making it shorter, and you're talking about limiting the efficacy, literally, of golf equipment. It's going to make the game harder for the average golfer. That’s where my personal perspective on it is... like I was saying at the very beginning,
it's like changing fuel standards for my Chevy Blazer because the guys in Formula 1 are driving too fast.
Roberto: You are a proponent of bifurcation of two sets of rules?
Harry: I'm a staunch proponent of two sets of rules! I play golf every week, again with my regular foursome. I promise you nobody's dominating our little short golf course here in San Diego.
Let's make a Tour standard golf ball. Easy enough. Titleist is not gonna like that, by the way, but you're going to still create an innovation path for the golf companies. You're not gonna take away any of the enjoyment and the growth of the game for guys like me that play on weekends and it will still, I think, breed the competition on the PGA Tour.
But I'm interested in the player's perspective because you know that the game at the highest levels has absolutely shifted in the last five years to be much more of a power game. When I first started in the golf industry, which was 15 years ago- Roberto could talk about this too- probably the first time you got on a launch monitor was probably in college. Did you ever get on one when you were in high school?
Roberto: No, they came in college, but they were so dodgy and I don't feel like they were reliable. It's like you said, it's the TrackMan in the last, 5-6 years, that's been a massive jump.
Harry: What do you think your ball speed was when you were 23?
Roberto: I've hit it the same distance since I was 23. And when I got on Tour the qualitative way of saying it was, “Roberto hits it long enough to play the Tour.” And I was between 90-100 in driving distance on the PGA tour. And there are 200 guys on the PGA Tour...
Harry: Right smack dab in the middle!
Roberto: Smack dab in the middle! And my ball speed was probably whatever, 166, and I hit it 286. Nine years later, it's the same ball speed. I still averaged 286 and I am #199 out of 203 players in distance on the PGA tour.
Harry: There you go.
Roberto: There is nobody that hits it shorter than me on Tour. Not a single player. And that happened fast in nine years. Isn't that much.
Harry: I know. And you're probably in better shape and all that stuff. Just the guys coming out, a couple of things are happening, I think. Yes, equipment's getting better, it's more just the science and the understanding of how to get ball speed from the player and the equipment and how to get distance is a lot further along than it ever has been.
And you have guys now, and I don't necessarily love this way that some instructors teach, but they literally teach with the data on how to maximize distance and reduce spin, and all that stuff.
Roberto: Yeah. I think back to when I was in college, there were guys that hit it long and they were 10 or 20 yards longer than me.
Dustin's the same age as me and we played together in college. Taking him out of it. But the conversation was just like, yeah, I played with another All-American today and I hit it in the middle of the mall and he's 12 yards longer than me, or he's 15 yards longer than me. And yes, I could add eight yards if I put on 10 pounds and I should have obviously, but now guys hit it 50 yards longer than me!
And that is where you just say, you throw your arms up and you're like, “I'm going to do what to add four yards?!” And it used to be three guys. It used to be Dustin and JB Holmes and whoever... Tiger. Now there are 30 or 50 guys that can carry it 320 yards and that's 50 yards longer.
Harry: I think it's, they're learning there's a lot more fitness and they've learned how to use that speed to deliver it to a golf ball more than guys used to. Roberto can shoot down that theory quickly.
Roberto: Dan would have to explain this because he's much more of a real engineer than I am, but I think if you combine two things, anecdotally, they said that in the eighties, nineties, seventies, the harder you hit it, the more the ball would spin.
I think that what has happened is the equipment allows this one-to-one: the faster you swing, the ball doesn't spin, the farther you can hit it. So you have these tools that you can use to just get speed and speed. And the ball just goes farther and farther. I don't think it's the players as much. They're learning, like you said, they're using the data better, but you can't tell me when you watch Greg Norman… he would have hit it 320 in the air with that golf swing. Nicklaus in his younger years, when you watch that golf swing, if you would have put a Callaway Epic in his hand and a ProV1, it would have gone 330.
So I think it's the tools and the knowledge of what to use, how to use the tools. But I think the spin thing is a real thing that the harder you hit it, the more it spins...
Harry: It's a nuance thing, but it's a really important thing that the golf balls that players are playing now, the spin profile is nowhere near what it was 10 years ago.
Guys are playing on Tour with golf balls that spin significantly less than they did 10 years ago. And Roberto's right there. They're learning. That's how they're playing the game: with speed and low spin.
Roberto: It's wild. The Georgia Tech kids...I still live in Atlanta, I still practice with the guys on the team some. There's just not a guy that carries it in the 200s anymore. They all carry it over 300 yards and that's just standard issue.
Dan: So you mentioned your view on bifurcation. Do you think others in the equipment business feel the same way?
Harry: You won't get a consensus.
I think that if you remove the commercial interests of the golf companies, they're all run and populated with people that love the game that I think we all would probably stack hands on anything that would potentially cause people to walk away from the game as a bad idea.
And I see personally anything that talks about “we're going to make it harder for people to see improvement” as a potential disaster. And I think that viewpoint is probably shared by most. I don't think equipment sales or golf ball sales would decrease one bit if there was a different standard for the professional tours.
Marketing in the Golf Equipment Industry
Roberto: Do you think a marketing dollar for an equipment company is better spent on a handful of blue chip players or winning the count?
So at a Tour event, if there are a hundred players, Callaway has 55 drivers in play and that's winning the count.
Harry: All things being equal, I'll take the count if you're offering it to me. It's just expensive. That's a debate that we had at Callaway just about every year. I was there at it, particularly as we got momentum in it, and it became a possibility for us to potentially go after the count. But I also was of the mindset that it's not absolutely required based on how readily accessible information is to people to be able to learn about your products and learn about your brand where 15 years ago, the only way anybody ever knew about golf products was from a magazine, their club professional, or watching on TV.
That was it. Now the consumer is in much better position to educate himself or herself about equipment and the game and instruction. There's so many avenues now for people to curate their own learning. But all that being said, if you were going to offer me one or the other, I'll take the count.
Dan: You talked about how the consumer is so much more aware and has much more access to information. So marketer to marketer, I've got a question about that and how you capitalize on that. I, as a consumer, certainly experienced a big repositioning of the Callaway brand over the last several years... younger, a lot more digital, a lot more talking to me in a much more salient way.
Was there resistance in taking the brand that way? What made you confident that it could succeed in a totally different set of rules?
Harry: There really wasn't any pushback. When we started down that journey we were in a turnaround and so we needed a different way to market our products.
And so we saw that as a real opportunity for us to marry up to two things that we felt were important. It was the premium-ness and innovation expertise of the Callaway brand, which we really wanted to be aspirational in that area. So premium-ness and innovation, but we really also want it to be the most accessible brand that anybody had ever seen, not just in golf, but anywhere.
And those were two, that's really a compromise that people feel like they have to make a lot of times because if you're talking about aspirational and premium, most brands manage their brand that way to be somewhat exclusive. So there's an inherent exclusivity. If you think of, if I just said, “Hey, name five luxury brands or premium brands,” we'd probably all name Rolex or Porsche and there's even like a channel strategy that makes those products hard to get. Do you guys agree with that?
Roberto: A hundred percent.
Harry: We thought what if we could take the premium-ness and we could cut out the intermediary to how we tell the stories so that people would, when they wanted to learn about Callaway, they would come directly to us.
And we really were thinking about the way that people were communicating (and are communicating) was much more casual. Was much more mobile handheld. Then, how could we marry up the authentic vernacular of golf with the way that people communicate to ourselves and have among each other and have that be our brand voice while still talking about really cool shit that we were really proud of?
And if we could do that, that would be cool on a couple different levels. Number one, just from a brand expression, people would see us a lot more modern than we were before, which was pretty stodgy. If you wouldn't... as a matter of fact you guys should have Chip Brewer on your show sometime.
Chip and I walked around Augusta in 2013. So we were just getting the brand going. And we said, “let's count the people here that are wearing Callaway headwear, but they don't count if they're over 50 years old.” So how many people are at the Masters, walking around? They won't ever tell you! But let's just say it's 60,000 people, maybe more.
I think we walked around for four or five hours and we counted three people that were wearing Callaway hats. We saw TaylorMade hats everywhere, Nike hats everywhere. Titleist hats out, even Ttileist hats everywhere!
So we were like, we gotta get, we really have to get this brand not necessarily younger in terms of the demographic, but in terms of our tone, we really got to get this brand cooler so that at least maybe by 2014, when we come back, maybe we'll see 10 guys wearing the Callaway hat. So we really were embracing a new way of communicating.
So pushback? Not at all because we really, we had no choice.
Founding and Leading at Municipal
Roberto: Harry, you had a successful tenure in the golf business and chose to shift gears into the apparel world, specifically with a sport utility apparel company, Municipal. Love to hear a little bit more about that experience.
Harry: Everybody says, if you're going to start something on your own don't do it because you're running away from something. And that certainly wasn't the case.
I had a role... I loved Callaway. I've worked with people I loved. I worked for somebody, Chipper, who's still someone that is a mentor and I model a lot of my decision-making after. But I felt like I really wanted to challenge myself to push myself right to the edge and see if I had what it took to help create something from scratch that would be successful.
That voice in my head was really starting to get loud, like my last couple of years at Callaway coincidentally tracked with when I met Mark Wahlberg, who loves golf more than anybody I know. And he and I are roughly the same age. He was going through some of those same themes.
He was starting to diversify what he was involved in. He really wanted to get into various businesses outside of entertainment. He was diversifying within entertainment and he, and I bonded over that shared life experience.
I was really interested in his kind of motivation. He had made a sincere commitment to health and wellness and trying to really align his talent, his ambition, and his sense of purpose together.
And that's exactly what I was going through. And so we started to talk about, “let's do a brand together.” And we were fumbling around somewhat with what the concept was. And ultimately we started at a really (I think) cool place: we started with the vision instead of what the product is.
Roberto: You knew it would be apparel, or you literally didn't know if it would be a gym? [Harry shakes his head] So you didn't even know it would be apparel. You just know it could have been an app. It could have been gyms.
It could have been...
Dan: ...how do you go from the macro to the micro?
Harry: He [Wahlberg] only puts his time and stuff that he cares about. And I obviously was leaving something or was thinking about leaving something that I loved. And so what we really triangulated on was that we wanted to build a community of inspired people, who never stopped pursuing their full potential. And we wanted to create an environment, whether it was a brand, a service as you guys were saying, or a technology, but ultimately it has to be something we know what we're doing, so we're not going to go toe to toe with Zuckerberg and and Jack over at Twitter.
So we better figure out something that we know about. So then we went bottoms up at that point, Dan we're like, “okay where do we feel like,” and this is where Stephen Levinson came in... Mark's partner on a lot of other stuff... “where do we feel like we have the best chance to be not just disruptive, but we can do something of significant value to the consumer” and Mark and I were talking about, with Mark's passion for health and wellness, my experience in active sports and pack and performance sports is, there's an opportunity for us to do something really cool and unique in a market that's big enough to matter that will put all those pieces together. And so that's ultimately how we landed on what Municipal is.
When we started talking about it -- I think sometimes ideas work this way -- when we started talking about it, it became so obvious to us, which is, there's this convergence of street style and athleisure, this collision that's about that is happening. that nobody has created a brand that put those two things together. So the most comfortable, softest, versatile stuff that you wear all the time with a style that is accessible and resonant that will make everyone look and feel great. And if we could be a brand that sort of celebrated not just, “Oh, you're going to feel great,” but celebrated the journey that we all take to try to become better human beings -- and that's where our purpose started to come in -- then that would be a really cool thing for us to do. And who knows how big that is, but that would be worth our time to spend 80 hour weeks doing.
Roberto: As a follow-up to that you launched the apparel brand in the second half of 2020.
Do you still see, 10 miles down the road, gym equipment and do you see like a whole ecosystem around health and wellness for Municipal and the apparel is step one?
Harry: Absolutely. I think that this is just the first step. Now we want to build a foundation and a customer base that starts to look at us as “Oh, those guys make quality stuff that is designed for the lifestyle of reaching your full potential and achievement and not cutting any corners and celebrating the self-starter, the self-made aspect of it.”
And in a weird way... first of all, when we started this, nobody told us there's a pandemic coming in 2020, so that's been fun. But in a weird way, the things that we were hypothesizing and part of our thesis of why we felt like this brand was needed, really got accelerated during that time.
During this time, from a product perspective, everybody is embraced in comfort. They're working from home, they want the versatility that they get from going from one place to the next. They're dressed down, but they don't want to look sloppy. And from the brand perspective, which is the second stage of how we plug in our media and social strategy and digital strategy is:
I think everybody has really started to evaluate and put their arms around the stuff that absolutely matters to them. And if it's not in that circle, we're not spending time on it.
So we're really prioritizing as people, as fathers, as human beings, the stuff in our lives that have substance. So a lot of those themes have really accelerated our thinking, but our growth path will definitely follow what you're talking about, Roberto. Outside of this core, apparel. Our co-founder, Lev (Stephen Levinson), he says all the time, “I can't wait till we're not in the apparel business anymore,” but really what he's saying is reaching our own full potential as a brand where we're really are engaging with people in a way that feels like their lives are better because we exist.
Roberto: What's the most overlooked part about being CEO?
Harry: It's just a commitment. It's a full-time commitment. I think I inherently knew that was going to be the case and we're a tiny company, we're 14 employees. I've been a part of organizations where the number of people I was responsible for was hundreds of people and never felt that I was on the clock 24 hours a day. And this is part of maybe being specifically CEO of a startup: every hour I'm not spending thinking about long-term brand value, in the short term, operations, is an hour longer it's going to take us to get where we need to go. It's like Ben Hogan used to say: every day he's not practicing as one day longer it's gonna take him to get great. So that's the same. And I don't think I've done a good enough... I'm sure there's somebody that has done this kind of job for a long time that could tell me more about how to manage that. But that's an intensity that I've had to get used to, or tried to get used to, over the past year and a half.
Roberto: Do you find it easier or harder to turn work off and turn family on being at a big company or basically being CEO of a small company?
Harry: I think it's easier in a big place. But one of the nice things about the quarantine is I haven't done any business travel since... the last time I was in an airplane... in exactly one year, which I can't even remember the last time I've said that.
So it's been easier to manage the pull of family. And I think so- I haven't missed any of the stuff that I typically would miss.
You’ve had a job that puts you on the road. How many weeks were you on the road? 40, 35?
Roberto: 30
Harry: That's hard.
Dan: So Harry shifting gears a little bit to how you see yourself as a leader. Roberto plays a round of golf, he puts up a score, he knows if he did well or not. But a lot of the business world just isn't that direct. Oftentimes it's just hard to get feedback. How do you create your own feedback loops to get over that? And how do you promote getting feedback and acting on it?
Harry: It's essential. The more senior you get, the lonelier it gets and you're absolutely right. People stop telling you things. I always say people stop telling you the truth. It's just human nature and it's incumbent upon me to create the dynamic, trusting, kind, candid relationships with the people that are closest to me, whether they're direct reports or or one layer below, or certainly like mentors that I have, that will shoot straight and letting them know that they have the space to do so. And it's constant.
I'd say that's the other thing that's really different, particularly in a startup, is how much you have to communicate because there's no natural inertia to a startup. You don't have the natural inertia of being in business for a long time with long-term business partners, or just the way you operate everything you do, you have to create your own momentum.
And that is a constant commitment to that communication loop that you're talking about.
So it really is about having a commitment to the dialogue, learning how to ask the right kinds of questions and really encouraging people acknowledging and rewarding when people give you feedback, even if it comes across as criticism.
And believe me, that's not something that I inherently was good at! I always, especially as a young guy growing up and having jobs, I always heard feedback as criticism and I hated it. So you learn a couple of things: #1, when somebody gives you some feedback about your own performance or your own behavior, they're telling you a lot about you, and they're also telling you a lot about themselves.
So I've tried to get into kind of a Zen place where I'm looking at it through that prism and much the same when you mentioned Roberto much the same way. If he's working with a coach or somebody who isn't going to tell him he played well when he shot 75. Did you ever hate that?
Roberto: That's the biggest challenge I've seen with PGA Tour coaches is they have a very difficult job coaching the Tour player. That guy has been at the top 1% of his profession since he was a junior golfer and college golfer. And he's obviously good enough to have made it to the PGA Tour. And the really good coaches will go to that guy and be like, “you need to do this better. This is what's right. And this is what's wrong. Here's the information. Take it or leave it.” And that's a hard thing to say to a top 50 player in the world, but that's what they need.
And I don't know how to do it. And they have kind of Ninja ways of communicating and telling a guy that he's great and he's 10 feet tall, but that he could do a little bit better, but that is a really tough deal. So that feedback loop in instructors for PGA Tour players is really challenging.
And I've watched some of my instructors go through that learning process. I never worked with Butch Harmon who I'm sure is just... he's been doing it 40 years, but I worked with some great instructors who we learned together. And it was really cool to watch them work with me and work with other players.
Harry: Yeah. Chip, my old boss used to talk about “CEO disease.” He's trying to avoid CEO disease, which is where you think that you're unassailable and every idea you have is great. And just the arrogance that comes with the profession, you have to have a high degree of confidence in a role like that.
But you also have to have an incredible amount out of humility and have a passion for learning and getting better. I mentioned that phrase, which is what I subscribed to, which is kind candor, which, for my team here, we practice that you owe it to your colleagues and especially me to provide them with information that's going to help them get better. Or if you see a behavior that's undermining their own ability to be effective, to call it out in real time, kindly, candidly. And we have to have the type of environment and culture where I'm giving you permission, so that takes some time. It takes muscle memory. It takes reps.
And over time you build a really profound trust among your teammates. And if you do it really well, culturally, then that scales throughout the entire organization, whether you're 14 or 14,000. It's a really profound topic, Dan, because I think that, especially as you rise up through an organization or what have you, it gets lonely.
Roberto: I've thrown my papers away just because the conversation has been so interesting. Dan, I'll give you the last last question and then we'll do some rapid fire kind of one word answer, type fun stuff.
Dan: From a business standpoint, where do we go from here with Municipal? What's the roadmap look like? Big milestones you’ve got ahead? What’s the box you're most excited to check off before we catch up next time?
Harry: Yeah. So it's an interesting place. And I should say it's been exactly where I was hoping for in terms of -- or maybe be careful what you ask for -- because I really have felt like I've been right on the edge of the learning curve constantly.
And one of the things that's really different is holding on to two concepts that are really opposing forces, which is the short term execution and operations of the business, the cold hard realities of what's our daily sales number look like with what are the things we need to be doing to build long-term brand value long-term enterprise value and trying to marry up those two things.
So we've been at the same time, we've been building this foundation where we would have the potential to explode with growth while still building out in a methodical patient way, the things that we need to do to build a long-term, sustainable business model. I'll give you an example about that. With Mark's involvement, it would have been really easy for us to have put this brand in a national retailer. At some point in the first two or three months of our existence, that would have been short-term success.
That would have been somewhat of disaster for our long-term viability. We're not a brand. Anyone knows it probably wouldn't have done very well at retail. We then would have had our product discounted, etc. etc. So we've had to be really patient at the same time, have a lot of conviction and confidence that we're doing the right things. So I'm happy to say we launched officially on municipal.com.
So we're building the foundation. We invested pretty heavily into a kick ass digital experience on municipal.com. So we didn't cut any corners. The next step for us is to start doing a lot more things that are more explosive and aggressive and how people find out about us. So we've done very little advertising. We've done very little promotion. We really didn't want this to be seen as a Mark Wahlberg vanity project. We wanted this to have some real substance to it.
Tap-ins: Short questions about golf and business
Dan: We're going to transition from questions that would involve a lot of depth, a lot of nuance… We're going to put that aside. The premium now is on speed. So we've got two segments here. I'll lead one called Tap-ins and then Roberto will lead the next one. So I'm going to fire away if you're ready.
Favorite golf course?
Harry: This will surprise you, Roberto. My favorite golf course legit is Bobby Jones Golf Course in Atlanta. I love it. I can't get enough of it and they redid it. I haven't played it since the redo, but I've had the opportunity to play a lot of great places and I honestly think I'm always a guest, no matter where I go. I don't have any delusion that someday I'll be a member at one of those places, but I always love playing at Jones.
Dan: You may have just answered the next one too, which is: favorite municipal golf course?
Harry: It's still Bobby Jones.
Dan: Favorite 19th hole?
Harry: Okay. Now I’ll get super snooty. I had the opportunity with, and this is probably more like the person I was with and the experience, but a mentor of mine is Alan Mulally who used to be the CEO of Ford. And I had transfusions with Alan underneath the umbrella at Augusta National. That's pretty good.
Dan: That's hard to top.
Harry: That is hard to top
Dan: Best golf trip you've been on?
Harry: I love and this is not profound at all because everyone loves going to this place. I love going to Bandon Dunes. Love it. Just can't get enough of it. I'm on the West coast. So it doesn't take a full day to get there, like it does for the East coasters. But I love the whole vibe of that place. So anytime anybody wants to go I'm all in!
Dan: Still on my bucket list.
Harry: Yeah. You've got to get there.
Dan: Who's the player you most wanted to sign, but couldn't land?
Harry: It probably was Jon Rahm and they had to wait for me to leave. And then now he's at Callaway. So we kicked ourselves for a while on that one because he quickly became like a top 10 player instantly.
Dan: Better golfer: you or Wahlberg?
Harry: I think I'd probably take him if we played my way, which is “let's just walk at a normal pace.” And if we played his way, I think I would probably tap out after 12 holes. Cause I'd be too tired, but he's sneaky, he's dangerous. Cause he's probably like a nine handicap that can shoot 73. So he's dangerous, but he could shoot 90. I think the time to play him is, you gotta play him on that nine handicap when he's been shooting a movie for a couple months. Never play him at the end of a one or two month time in between movies. Cause he's been playing a lot, never playing them.
Dan: Say Wahlberg comes up and shoots one of those 73s that you talked about and takes a bunch from you on a bet and just wipes you out. Would you rather pay cash to settle this or would you rather do one of his 3:30 AM workouts?
Harry: Oh god. I'm old school that way, which is when you lose a bet, I pay instantly either standing on the green or when we're sitting at the table. I also have a personal philosophy that I never liked to bet people that make a lot more money than I am. Cause it's hard. It's a gut punch to hand money to somebody that has a lot more money than you do.
Dan: When will hoodies be accepted at private clubs?
Harry: We're almost there. There are guys wearing them on Tour right now. So I don't know. Do people look at you weird, Roberto, where you play, if you wear a hoodie?
Roberto: I played a pretty fancy club today and there was a guy in my group wearing a hoodie. So I think we're there.
Harry: We're already there.
I think there'll be, what will be fascinating to me is when April rolls around on one of those cold mornings is if somebody is going to wear a hoodie and will somebody say something about it? You won't ever know they said it, but will it happen? But I think we're probably already there.
Dan: Entourage or Ballers?
Harry: Oh, good question. So different. I'm going to have to say, I'm going to have to say Ballers. If you look at that show, a lot of the topics and themes they were talking about were ahead of their time. But it's meatier to me. Entourage is just a fun ride.
Dan: All right, last one from me. Better to have in business: Good people, good culture or good product?
Harry: It's an old saying, but it's so true, that “your culture eats your strategy for lunch.”
So you can go to battle with the right people and figure it out. So I always start with that. Your culture is the most important thing and it doesn't change. So your culture shouldn't evolve, your strategy always will or can. And your tactics certainly do, but your culture can't.
Roberto: The next section is called Buy or Sell. These are pretty self-explanatory. Buy or sell: Tesla?
Harry: I'm selling Tesla.
Roberto: Buy or Sell: the Tokyo Olympics?
Harry: I'm selling. My heart says buy, my head says sell.
Roberto: Buy or sell: simulator golf?
Harry: Okay, I am big-time selling simulator golf. I don't like it. Do you like it?
Roberto: I haven't played it in too long to have a, there you go.
Harry: I don't enjoy it at all. I think part of it is I feel claustrophobic trying to hit balls in a simulator.
Dan: You guys live where there's good weather, though. That's probably it.
Harry: Yeah. Maybe so.
Roberto: Dan's in Boston. He could do some simulator golf.
Dan: I'm dying for a simulator.
Roberto: Buy or sell: Bitcoin?
Harry: I have to understand it before I'm buying or selling it. So I'm going with the Warren Buffett thing: if you don't understand a business, don't invest in it.
Are you guys all over Bitcoin?
Roberto: I'm not, you're not.
Dan: Same reason.
Harry: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good strategy. Good strategy too. I don't invest enough anymore because all my money's in Municipal now, unfortunately. But I did really well with investing in companies whose products you like. It's as simple as that. When I was at Callaway, we did this talk show in front of a studio audience called Callaway Live where we piled a bunch of people in a studio audience. And it was an interview kind of show where we talked to people that were just connected to the game. So players, media, business people that love the game, Talmud, Alan [Mullaly], or I met him before that, but I had him on David Novak who has become a mentor and friend CEO of Yum Brands. I decided just on a whim, “Oh, I'm going to put together the Callaway Live Fund,” which is business leaders that I have on the show. I'm going to invest in their company because these are really good business leaders. And that fund in the six years that I had, it grew like almost 60% year-on-year for six straight years. Isn't that crazy?
Dan: Wow.
Harry: Yeah. So I think like people that you believe in as leaders and it just, if you like products, I never had anybody from Peloton, but
Roberto: Georgia Tech guys, that's it?
Harry: Yeah. Yeah. There you go
Roberto: love it. Unfortunately, for Dan and I, not these two Georgia Tech guys.
Harry: Isn't it a simple idea that's very well executed? And I know there's a lot of complexity on how you do it, but isn't that just the best ideas are the ones that are the simplest? Yeah, I hope sport utility gear is one of them. It could be, but who knows?
Roberto: Buy or sell: self-driving cars?
Harry: There's no chance I'm getting into one. Well you guys are the engineers, so you tell me. There's no chance I'm jumping into a self-driving car without putting my hands on the steering wheel. Would you guys do it? Are you guys buying that?
Dan: For sure
Harry: You are?
Dan: For sure.
Harry: All right, Dan's much smarter than I am in engineering. So maybe I'll take your word for it.
Roberto: My daughter is five. And when she was born, I made a bet with my wife that she would never get her driver's license and drive a car. And I don't look good in that bet right now, because to a layman they've, there's been no progress in five years on self-driving cars,
Harry: How much did you bet her?
Roberto: Oh, whatever it means, whatever she will give me.
Harry: Chores for a week or something.
Roberto: Buy or sell: getting an MBA in 2021?
Harry: I have an MBA, I'm buying it. I would never trade that experience for anything. I think that, I should say specifically, doing it full-time versus part-time -- I don't have any experience on the part-time -- but I think the accelerated learning along some topics in a condensed way is really important.
And I think the other thing I'd add as a caveat is: do it after you have a few years under your belt of being out in the real world, cause this stuff will make more sense.
Dan: If you were admitted today, would you do it and start remote or wait until you could do it in person?
Harry: I would wait, just that's me. I just think so much of the academic experience is the comradery and the exchange of information. I went to a school that placed the premium on learning via team team learning. So I would probably wait.
Roberto: Lastly, buy or sell: working remotely?
Harry: I'm selling it so hard.
I can't stand it. I cannot stand it. It's a zero out of 10. I think there's some cool parts about it. I think that for a company it really opens up your pool of potential employees. You're not limited obviously by space and time.
But as somebody that gets a great deal of enjoyment out of seeing people I work with and my own management style is very much a “lead by walking around,” I felt like I've had one arm tied behind my back since we've been working remotely. So, sell! Hard sell.
Roberto: I like it. The only thing that could have made this conversation more enjoyable is if we were in person, maybe a couple of beers in hand.
So I'll sell working remotely too. Harry, thanks a million.
Harry: Great. Guys, good luck with everything.
Takeaways
Roberto: Alright, Dan, great conversation with Harry. High energy guy. Long tenure in the golf business at a really high level. What jumped off the page at you?
Dan: What jumped off the page the most is how different a leader he is from folks like me. And by that, I mean, I'm so analytically driven and process oriented and Harry is not by his own admission. So, contrasting styles there are fascinating.
Roberto: So you’re saying that when you try to measure market penetration, you don't just go to the Masters and start counting how many hats you see, because I thought that was an amazing story. I love that he was, like, we saw two hats all day. We're f****ed.
Dan: Yeah. That's “Harry analytical.” And I love it, it works. And it makes the point very effectively. Just how he thinks from more of a place of intuition, more a place of people first, I should say- it was fascinating. And we'll talk about this some more because I think some examples jump out. He's the kind of guy who makes me realize I have blind spots in my own approach to business.
Roberto: Yeah. And so the question, talking to the Wizard of Oz for me as a player, was how do you sign players? How do you evaluate them? How do you make decisions? That was the first one that I came up with, what I wanted to talk to Harry about, that was the top of my list. And it was a great answer. I thought he was more detailed than I thought he would be in looking at ball speed and spin rate and launch angle. I thought, wow, I didn't know they got that into it. But then I loved how he was, you know what matters?- winning! So, that was a real inside look at how he makes decisions too. Right?
Dan: Hey, winning solves a lot of problems and that's what cuts through a lot of the noise. When you just look at it from that main factor.
Roberto: Winning solves every problem. Winning solves every problem.
Dan: Sure does.
Roberto: And I think he's right. The players you see on TV, the vast majority, either won the US Junior or made a run at the US Junior and/or were big-time All Americans in college. And then take the guy who, like a guy like me, was a good college player- not great- but had to go through the mini tours. But I won a bunch of mini tour events.
So you don't get guys who are just kind of kicking it around the mini tours and then get their card and have success on the Tour. It's kind of a pattern that emerges. Everyone's different. If you win the US Amateur and, you know, go Jon Rahm, where he was a two-time college player of the year. Obviously he's different from me winning some mini tours in Huntersborough, North Carolina. But it's still something. And that pattern is still something.
Dan: So what are you saying? You want to have the job picking who Callaway or Titleist or TaylorMade should sponsor next?
Roberto: Dude, like, I got the chills when he started saying that these companies are paying young guys seven figures coming out of college. That is the last job in the world I would want to have, because you will get your ass fired.
It's impossible. It is impossible to pick who's going to really pan out. Take Justin Leonard, Phil Mickelson, Ryan Moore, or Bryson. If you win the NCAA and you win the US Amateur, that's as close as you're going to get to a sure thing. But take some guys who are really great players and some pan out and some don't and “pan out” is subjective also.
But you know, Callaway made a big bet on this kid out of Oregon, Norman Xiong. He hasn't really played the Tour. Patrick Rogers, who won more times at Stanford than Tiger Woods, has played the Tour and played some nice golf. But he had massive expectations coming out of college and a big Nike deal.
And then you got Xander Schauffele, who was a good player at San Diego State and got better every year. But he's one of the top five players in the world now. Scottie Scheffler. Again, good player- US Junior champion. Top 30 in the world. It's just really hard to pick which of those guys is...you're going to have some absolute strikeouts and that is a tough, tough business to be in. I wouldn't want to be that guy.
Dan: Yeah. I guess it depends on how the economics work, because I wonder if this is more venture capital or debt investing, right? Does one bust bring down the house and make the whole ROI of the sponsorship program tank, or is it more like venture capital where one out of 10 needs to be a massive hit and it more than covers all the duds? I'd be fascinated to know on a portfolio basis, how you think about this, and what tolerance for risks you can have in that perspective.
Roberto: Yeah, that's a really interesting way to think about it. And we need to try to get a college development guy on [the show] who are basically the scouts for these companies. Top of my head, I think it's different for the different companies. So take Titleist. They've got 80% of the ball share- maybe it's higher in college. So they're going to get a bunch of guys coming out of college playing the ball that they can make small bets on. But Callaway, they're looking for front of the hat. They're looking for drivers. That's a splashier investment to me. It could be more of a VC model. Those are just different dynamics of what equipment players use. It's driven by a different business model between Callaway and Titleist. So that might be part of the answer at least.
Dan: Yeah, that's interesting. Hey, sticking with the OEMs, but switching gears a little bit. What was your take on Harry's approval of bifurcation? Or how did you... I love that you went into that and tried to get the equipment company rep’s perspective on it. What did you think of his answer there?
Roberto: Well, I loved hearing him talk about it because I think that's the voice that doesn't get heard. I think every golfer knows how Brandel Chamblee feels about it and how Rory McIlroy feels about bifurcation and how far the ball goes. And everyone puts words in the mouth of the equipment companies. But it was cool to actually hear from them. And my big takeaway there was that he said, “look, the executives running all these companies- they show up at work everyday trying to make money, but they love golf.” And I thought that was what I needed to hear that because I think that gets lost. And when I think about it, he's right. They all got into the business because they're junkies. They have a passion for golf. So of course they're trying to make money, but just hearing that Harry loves golf through and through, and it's not just about selling 1% more golf balls. He's also a true fan. And the game is a huge part of his life too. So I thought that was great.
Dan: Yeah, I agree. I initially thought the response of being in favor of bifurcation was almost counterintuitive to what I've expected someone in that position to say. But the more I think about it, no matter what the R&A or the USGA do, it's gonna get all these companies on a level playing field- they have to compete against each other on some terms.
And so it's not just changing it for one company. If you think about a relative advantage, they all have to find a different way to make it work. So that really helped me make more sense of Harry’s response and why what I felt was counterintuitive maybe isn't so much when you think about it. And I think Harry explained that well.
Roberto: People get so emotional about this issue that it's a hot button. It's not going away either. Guys are just hitting it farther and farther.
Dan: It's gotten very emotional; you're right about that.
Roberto: Yeah. Alright, let's jump to Municipal. Question for you: so Harry and Marky Mark conceived this whole ecosystem of Municipal. Why do you think they started with apparel? Why was that step one of the whole world that they're going to create?
Dan: I've been thinking about this a lot and I think the explanation that makes sense to me- this is a theory, not an answer- but my theory is apparel has a low barrier to entry. Great. That's good. It also makes it a not very profitable business. Not good. But if there's an ecosystem play behind it that we've yet to see then apparel gives you essentially a really good branding platform to get the name out there, to get Marky Mark's name out there, to get the brand out there and what they're all about, and the vision that Harry described. And it's marketing that pays for itself with some profitability hopefully, to help launch and to help sort of catalyze whatever the next pivot is coming off of that. So that's an explanation that at least jibes to me and could be essentially a good way to sort of fund the next play coming into the ecosystem. So I don't know if this...does that make sense to you?
Roberto: Yeah, it does. I think it gives you a wide reach, right? Apparel: if you're going direct to consumer, like they are, you can sell a shirt to a guy in Seattle, a guy in Miami, and then all of a sudden Municipal is spreading around the country where let's say, you start with gyms. The barrier to entry is a little bit higher- real estate. And let's say they go big and they open six gyms in Southern California. You don't really have any reach outside Southern California as far as building your brand. So I think that's definitely part of it. And the other thing is their trump card is Marky Mark, right? I don't know how many followers on social media Mark Walberg has, but it's gotta be tens of millions. So the analysis could have simply been, like, with Mark Wahlberg in our back pocket, apparel is the way to leverage him. And that could have been one way to think about it.
Dan: It goes viral. It's very easy to sort of transmit that information out there. So I think that makes sense to them.
Roberto: Yeah, and again- reach. If you see Mark Wahlberg working out of this kick ass gym and you're like, “I want to go there” and it's in LA and you're living in Des Moines, Iowa. You can't really touch part of that brand. If you see Mark Walberg part of this really cool thing called Municipal, and you can order a t-shirt from Municipal in Des Moines, you're, Oh, now I'm part of the Municipal thing. So it's just very accessible for people. I think it could have been a really, really smart place to start.
Dan: Yeah. It makes sense. And you know, the whole athleisure thing is in, and they're a part of that. So they're in a bit of a trend within the apparel space that is more nuanced than apparel in general.
Roberto: And you know what? I really liked their take. I thought it was very authentic that they want to motivate people to be active. They want to be a part of a cultural shift to where it's cool to work out. And it's cool to take care of yourself. And that was not just marketing BS. Harry had conviction in that concept and I'm sure Wahlberg does too- guys walking the walk, working out at 2:30 in the damn morning or whatever he does. So I think authenticity goes a long way and I think they have that.
Alright. Next part where I just got my bowl of popcorn out, was your great question about feedback. I shoot 72- you can just have immediate feedback on a result. Listening to you guys talk about feedback in your environments was super fascinating. And I love that part. So, well played there. I loved hearing that.
Dan: Well, I was very selfishly motivated to ask that question because it's something that I think about a lot in my career and I'm sure other professionals do too. And so back to the whole “how he thinks differently than someone like I do.” You know, when we talk about the lack of feedback loops in the business world, my intuition is to build my own feedback loop, to be self-reflective, build in time for self-examination and being self-aware. But Harry went the complete opposite way. He's, like, just because you're a leader doesn't mean you can't get feedback from others. You just have to make sure that the conditions...the environment is set up more deliberately to get there. And I thought that was very interesting. I did not think that's where he was going to go. And it's got me questioning my own system too.
Roberto: So you think he just tries to build a culture where people are willing to give him feedback? You're saying, that's what he does more than what you do?
Dan: That's right. Yeah, he does, which is harder in practice than in theory, because the reality is the moment you criticize one employee too hard, they're going to shut down and never gonna give you that feedback. So you gotta be super mindful of the long game in terms of getting feedback. Way ahead of the game. Even though you're just trying to have an exchange, you have to create an emotionally, psychologically very safe environment. When you want to give criticism to others, it’s very hard. So it's a really fine balance. So his answer makes sense, but in practice actually kind of hard to do. So it takes a very special leader to do it.
Roberto: Yeah. And I also got a little bit of the Ray Dalio vibe from Harry with the radical open-mindedness, as far as how he builds that culture. That's just kinda how the impression I got from how he deals with people.
Dan: Yeah, it probably is. It probably is. I do think power dynamics make a difference here, like in terms of when you put a hierarchy in place, that can break down. So the Dalio thing and what we're seeing that feels like the Harry thing is hard and I admire people who are trying to do it because logically my brain goes, “yes, that's the answer; seek truth. Be honest, et cetera.” I think people's emotional cortex goes through a different place sometimes and that breaks down.
Roberto: Yeah. That's probably a good point. See, that's why I have... my caddy and I, God bless him. I can throw clubs at him when I get mad on the course and he's nice enough to be, like, “well, that was just a business thing.” And then we can go have a beer later. But I have a business of two compared to a business of 14 or 1,400 or 140,000 in some people's case.
Dan: Well, we gotta get him on the show to see what he thinks about that too.
Roberto: Oh, we cannot have my caddy on the show! That would go so poorly for me. God bless him. He's the best. That would not be good for me. I would not look good. We're not coming out looking good in that deal.
It was great to have Harry on. Really appreciate his time. Super guy. And I'm looking forward to following what they do with Municipal. It's going to be a fun ride, I have a feeling.
Dan: No question. Well, thanks for listening, everyone. Catch you next time on The Course Record Show.
