Why we started Dormie — and what we were trying to fix

In 2009, when I started booking golf trips professionally, the industry worked like this: a client called a number, spoke to someone who had read a brochure but not necessarily played the courses, received a package assembled from a list of preferred suppliers, and paid a markup that bore no obvious relationship to the value added.

I was that someone for the first four years. I read the brochures. I attended the press trips. I assembled the packages from the preferred supplier list. I was good at it. The clients seemed happy. The business made money. And somewhere around 2013 I played Leopard Creek for the first time and realised that nothing I had ever said to a client about a golf course, before having played it myself, was worth very much at all.

The problem with the industry as I had experienced it was a systematic disconnect between the person with the knowledge and the person with the client. Specialists who had played the courses were writing the brochures. Sales people who hadn't were answering the phones. The knowledge was in one place. The conversation was happening somewhere else.

Dormie was built to close that gap. The specialist who has played the course is the person you speak to when you enquire. There is no call centre. There is no hand-off. If I haven't been there, I tell you that. If I have, I tell you exactly what you need to know and nothing that I'm guessing at.

The name: in golf, dormie means a player is as many holes up as there are holes to play — they cannot lose. It is a position of earned security. Not a guarantee, but the result of having done the work. That is what we want every client to feel when they call us: that the trip is in hands that have genuinely done the work.

We sent our first clients to Portugal in October 2009. Fourteen people, a golf society from Edinburgh, seven nights in the Algarve. Sixteen rounds of golf across four courses. Every tee time confirmed before they paid a deposit. The organiser called me when they landed back at Edinburgh Airport. He said: 'Nobody asked me a single question I didn't have the answer to.' That is still the best feedback I've ever received.

We have been doing this ever since.