Not Par for the Course

Not Par for the Course

ENTREPRENEURS by Francis X. Gilpin | Associate Editor

Adrien Edwards has different priorities from the average American college student.

When a friend from Jacksonville called about visiting him in Tampa, Edwards checked his schedule and told his buddy to come on down. Then business intervened.

Edwards runs Tee2Greens LLC, a distributor of unusual accessories for avid golfers. He ended up spending all of 45 minutes over the course of two days with his pal.

That is becoming a routine occurrence for the 22-year-old budding entrepreneur. "A typical day is I wake up thinking, 'OK, I have six things to do,'" says Edwards. "By the end of the day, it turns out I had 15 to 20."

With help from his parents, Edwards acquired Tee2Greens earlier this year. He's now president of the company.

The primarily online golf retailer, formerly based in San Pedro, Calif., sells gadgets that include something called the HipKaddy. About the size of a fist, a HipKaddy fits comfortably on the belt of golfers. It holds two balls, two tees, a scoring pencil, and a divot repair tool, plus Velcro on the side to fasten a golf glove while putting.

With HipKaddy, duffers don't have to spend as much time fumbling around in their golf bags or pockets during a round. "I really liked the product," Edwards says. "I liked the uniqueness of it."

Until a few weeks ago, Edwards was operating the HipKaddy Web site while taking a full course load for a bachelor's degree in international business at the University of Tampa.

Edwards admits the strain caused both his personal health and academic standing to decline. With just one more course to go at UT, however, he relishes the chance to devote his full attention to turning Tee2Greens into a bricks-and-mortar retailer.

Swinging for cable sales

Born overseas to a U.S. Army officer and a French mother, Edwards moved with his family around Europe and the states while growing up. The family eventually settled in North Carolina.

Edwards displayed business instincts early by selling homemade wooden candleholders at the age of 12. He blames a poor shopping environment - the front lawn of his family's house - for the candleholder venture's scarcity of profits.

But that didn't discourage him. By the time he was 16, Edwards was using the Internet to advertise and sell decorative pieces, office furnishings and thousands of other knickknacks supplied by drop shippers.

In 2002, the California inventor of the HipKaddy, Fred Libertino, found Edwards through the Web in Fayetteville, N.C. Edwards says Libertino asked him if he would help him to sell HipKaddys.

Two years later, Edwards accompanied his father on a business trip to Tampa, and he decided to transfer to UT. "It's one of those cities where the ball is already rolling," Edwards says of Tampa. "I like development. I like to see things go up."

After moving to Florida, Edwards figured he was in a golf mecca. So he negotiated a lower wholesale price with Libertino and attempted to get the Home Shopping Network and local retailers to sell HipKaddys.

St. Petersburg-based HSN, a unit of IAC/InterActive Corp., has so far turned down the HipKaddy. Edwards says HSN has told him that it doesn't handle golf equipment, but he hasn't given up.

Edwards did succeed in placing the HipKaddy on the shelves of a Clearwater pro golf shop, where the manager reports decent sales.

Four months ago, Libertino offered to sell Tee2Greens to Edwards. Libertino, who is in his late 30s, was taking over a family paper business and didn't have time to continue marketing the HipKaddy. Edwards regarded Tee2Greens as a full-time entrepreneurial opportunity, rather than just a hobby, as Libertino had treated it. "I saw a little bit more," he says. "I wanted to have a business around it."

Using family financing and his own credit, which he had built up from his early businesses, Edwards got Tee2Greens for a price he declines to disclose.

The transaction was consummated without face-to-face contact with Libertino. "I've never met him," Edwards says.

After taking over Tee2Greens, Edwards acknowledges that he struggled balancing his studies and company responsibilities. He says he got by on about four hours of sleep a night.

"It was an insane amount of work to move it into the direction that I wanted to get to," he says.

Lost scholarship

Even before the Tee2Greens purchase, his schedule took a toll on his health. Last summer, the collapse of his lung put the lanky Edwards in the hospital. After surgery and other ailments, his body weight fell from 215 pounds to 154. He has since recovered and tips the scales at 186.

"Yeah, that was a pretty interesting ordeal," says Edwards, picking at a salad during a luncheon interview on Tampa's Harbour Island. "That's been a distraction."

His physician determined his condition to be stress-related and recommended Edwards take off a semester at UT. But Edwards pressed on. Following the purchase of Tee2Greens, his grade point average dipped and he lost a scholarship for his final full semester at UT.

There was one positive outcome from his medical condition. Edwards had to give up basketball long enough that he ended up learning how to play golf. "I got hooked," he says.

Hitting the links every now and then is about his only pastime at this stage of development for Tee2Greens. His friends have drifted away as his business has made leisure time a foreign concept to him.

"It may be possible to do both," he says, "but I don't really see how, when you're doing something from the ground up."

Still, Edwards thinks he will have plenty of time to socialize someday. "I'm working hard so I can be a kid," he says. "That's what I'm doing."

For now, Edwards is trying to get HipKaddy into more stores, preparing to hire his first employee and lining up sponsorships of golf tournaments and fashion shows to expose the public to his company.

Edwards says he is also quietly working on a handful of new initiatives beyond the HipKaddy, with the ultimate goal of opening his own retail outlets. "I always like to have more things in the background than what I talk about," he says.

Advise for Young Business Owners

Adrien Edwards says older business associates are only uncomfortable with his age when he is. So he isn't.

"Once I started losing that fear of being patronized or being looked down to because of my age, it started not mattering anymore," says the 22-year-old president of Tee2Greens LLC. "People start taking you seriously when you take yourself seriously."

Not that young entrepreneurs making sales calls or performing other tasks don't have to work hard, maybe harder than older executives. "One thing," says Edwards, "always be over-prepared if you're young."

The University of Tampa international business major has gained confidence from winning a regional prize in the annual Entrepreneurs' Organization's Global Student Entrepreneur Awards competition. He will compete for a national award this fall in Chicago.

Running a business is a process of self-discovery. "I found something I was so gung-ho about," says Edwards. "The next thing I know, I'm over my head. And then I turn around and I'm like, 'Wow, I did it. All right, keep going.'"