Meet Elyssa of Dogwood Country Club

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elyssa

Hi Elyssa, we’d love for you to start by telling us how you got where you are today.
My husband, Dave, and I had spent six years bringing multiple products to market and building a golf e-commerce brand when we began to crave more connection in our day-to-day. Dave is a PGA professional and had years of experience as a golf instructor, so we used that as our jumping off point. We started looking for a local facility in need of a coach, but weren’t able to find a fit. That’s when we started thinking outside the box.
I knew Dave was incredibly talented. And I have an arguably reckless confidence in our abilities to make things happen, so I pushed him to launch his own instruction program independently. Golf technology has made training indoors not just possible, but elite. So the start of the plan was to find a space that could fit two bays and a reception desk. I would manage the marketing and admin work, while Dave would teach clients in one bay, allowing practice in the other.
We’ve learned over the decades that we aren’t terribly good at thinking small. The next thing we knew, we were planning out a country club in the middle of the city. And Dogwood Country Club was born.

Would you say it’s been an easy road? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced?
That first question alone made me laugh. The struggles have been countless, but if you don’t know struggles, you aren’t living. Even before we opened, we had folks all but telling us that this was a bad plan. The notion of playing golf indoors wasn’t widely accepted. We couldn’t find business funding, so we maxed out credit cards and took any form of loan we could get. There was no crew to build out the space, just Dave and I with tool rentals from Home Depot. We battled the city to allow us to serve alcohol based on the registered use of the space we’d leased. There was a pandemic that arrived while I was pregnant with our firstborn. Then came big downtown developers pushing us out of our original location to build condos. It’s wild to look back on how much we’ve fought to keep the dream alive, but the challenge is the fun of it.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Dogwood Country Club is Raleigh’s original indoor golf facility. We specialize in both indoor and mobile golf simulation, instruction, and private events. Members and guests can play full rounds of golf on famous courses around the world, gather data for each swing, or challenge each other to golf games.
Our facility is PGA owned and operated. And we run on the best technology in the business, Trackman radar. It’s trusted by over 1,000 tour professionals and 10,000 coaches and club fitters worldwide. Some of our accessory technologies worth mentioning include Swing Catalyst 3D motion plates and a PuttView augmented reality putting green. This tech isn’t just helpful for big golfers, it’s fun for everyone. We’ve won the Voters’ Choice Awards Best Event Venue twice. And we’ve been finalists for Best of the Triangle several years now.
We’re certainly proud to have been the first to tackle this concept of playing golf indoors locally, but what’s most important to us is making it a special experience. I feel confident that anyone who drops by will see the care that has been put into everything we do.

What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Anything you do, do it with heart.

Pricing:

• Weekdays before 5 pm: $40 per hour bay rentals
• Evenings and weekends: $55 per hour bay rentals
• Monthly membership ranges from $300 to $350 per month.
• Event pricing is customized to your needs.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dogwoodcountryclub.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/dogwoodcountryclub
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/dogwoodcountryclub
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/dogwoodccRAL