A year on from winning New Brunswick’s Breakthru competition, Castaway Golf Technologies has exceeded its annual sales targets and is selling its second-hand golf balls in 1,400 stores in Canada and the U.S.
The Fredericton company last year won the $287,250 first prize in Breakthru, which seeks to find the top new startup in New Brunswick. The company won with a mechanized device that can retrieve the millions of golf balls that end up in water hazards. It now retrieves ball from more than 75 golf courses in the Maritimes and the U.S. and then resells the balls under the Castaway brand.
The number of golf courses is growing as Castaway forms more partnerships.
“This summer we really got into the industry as a whole and figured out our position in it,” said CEO Matt Vance during a recent interview in Toronto, where he was meeting with potential investors. “We created some very strong partnerships over the past summer and that’s what really helped us to grow the business.”
Castaway grew out of Vance’s love of golf and his realization as a boy that there’s money to be made from retrieving and reselling golf balls lost in water hazards. Now he’s on a mission. “We want to help make the game of golf more affordable as we want to help grow the game of golf,” he said.
Vance, a product of the University of New Brunswick Technology, Management and Entrepreneurship program, became CEO last year after his former partner Josh Ogden left the company.
Vance said Ogden’s passion is starting companies, so he is working on new startups while Vance is in growth mode with Castaway.
Vance’s company is now making improvements to its hardware so the next iteration will be more sophisticated and user-friendly than the previous version.
The five-member team (which includes at least one Maritimer lured home from Western Canada) at Castaway is developing new revenue streams, he added. However, Vance was coy about the specifics of what partnerships he has formed given the fact that there are a number of competitors with similar products.
“We really nailed down and asked our customers what they wanted and we’ll launch some new products this summer that our customers have told us they’d like to see,” he said.
The growth has been strong enough that the team is now looking at finding a new, larger warehouse in the Fredericton area, as it’s outgrowing its current location.
Castaway has been able to accomplish its growth by bringing in revenue and from the money and in-kind services it won from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition. To continue the growth, Vance is now in the process of raising capital from investors.
Without getting into specifics, he said he is talking to “smart money” investors, that is individuals or institutions that bring expertise and networks as well as capital. It’s similar to the benefit the company got from winning Breakthru.
“Winning that competition proved our business model, helped us to be poised for growth and established relationships,” said Vance. “And it gave us the opportunity to bring some Maritimers from out West back to the East Coast.”
