SPEAKER_00 0:02

Good morning. This is the Blaine's World Podcast, where conversations are worth hearing and seeing. You can watch each week on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. You can also listen in on Spotify Apple Podcasts. And for more information in past episodes, you can visit our website, which is behind me, Blaine's World.net. I'm your host, Blaine Greenfield, coming to you from my Zoom studio in lovely downtown Fairview, North Carolina. Each week, what we do is we focus on positive news and uplifting stories of people and organizations in both Western North Carolina and throughout the country. And toward that, and it's my pleasure to introduce Todd I'll get it, Snodgrass. And um Todd, you can wave to all your fans and friends who are watching this. That's everybody's watching. That's Todd Stodgrass. And Todd Stodgrass, as you'll see, is kind of an interesting guy. He's an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and hands-on builder with a background in industrial products, automation, and software development. Trevor focuses on helping old school businesses use mind technology without losing what makes them unique. And Todd, the question I always asked the first time I interviewed somebody is as a kid, you grew up where?

SPEAKER_01 1:16

I grew up in Rockford, Illinois.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Okay. And growing up in Rockford, Illinois, did you always know you wanted to be this entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Uh yeah. I mean, I started several small businesses as a kid. I got into like fingerscape words and uh making all sorts of little toys and stuff for my friends at school and uh kind of began selling them and got my introduction kind of there.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

What was the first business you ever started?

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Uh I'd have to say I started collecting Pokemon cards and selling them quite a bit. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

And how old were you?

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Uh probably like six on.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Okay. And do you do you still have some of those cards? Yes, I do. Do you really? Do you do you still collect them or are they a collector's item?

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Uh yeah, I've sold most of them off just because I got kind of out of that space, but uh I still can hang on to a few.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Okay, that's very cool. So you started out as a little kid selling cards to other little kids, and where'd you go from there?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Uh I started making the finger skateboards, got pretty into that, uh making my old molds to press the fingerboards out like a real skateboard would be pressed out out of wood, and uh doing the graphics on stuff like that. I was really into art as a kid, so I like doing the graphics on the skateboards and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

And uh how old were you when you were doing that?

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Uh probably like 10, 11 on throughout most of like my high school years and even early adulthood, really. I still make them here and there. So let me ask you, how'd you learn all this stuff? Um 100% self-taught in everything I do.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Well, in terms of was it reading or did you watch YouTube clips or have you picked up?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Uh yeah, and mainly just Googling stuff I have questions too as uh I carry out the process of trying to figure out whatever I'm trying to figure out, whether it's product design or you know, selling things or how to do Google ads, how to build websites. Uh, you know, certain resources prove more valuable than others, and you kind of get at sifting through those after a while. But yeah, a lot of YouTube Googling forms, digging through forms late at night.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

So you can pretty much, which I'm impressed with, you can pretty much figure out most anything.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Well, you're probably ahead of the game though, but with respect to AI, how does that fit into your scheme of things?

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Uh it takes out a lot of uh repetitive work, a lot of uh scraping through data and trying to figure out what's important, what's not, uh scheduling things, you know, great for that. Uh generating some content, you know, can come in handy with that. It starts to sound a little too AI-ish at some point. So knowing how to write content in the first place definitely helps, you know, correct some of where it kind of veers off. But uh yeah, you know, just uh automating things too as well, you know, writing a lot of monotonous code for me. So I don't have to write all the base code and I can just go through and make adjustments as I see fit. Well, even in terms of learning learning code, how do you pick that up? Uh I started modifying computer games when I was a kid, probably around eight years old. Me and my buddy Blake, uh that I've been friends with for over 18 years now, we made like modifications to like popular online Disney games like Toontown and stuff. And uh, you know, we would just make our characters do repetitive dances or like you know, silly little things on the screen. And uh, you know, eventually we took it a little bit further, and then he's actually in cybersecurity now, and I've done what I've done with product development and stuff. And you know, as I've uh got into 3D printing and CNCing and laser engraving and all sorts of different fabrication, it kind of forces you to learn how to do that, as well as the software that comes with it. You know, some 3D printers, especially the early ones I was really messing with, were uh they required a lot of coding and the firmware to make them work because it wasn't just wildly available like it is now, you know, which is great. You know, I think 3D printing should be accessible to everybody and tools like it, but um, you had to do a lot of modifying to the early versions of that.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

And that's where I think I first met you. You were involved in 3D printing, and that same thing, too. What made you want to learn? How'd you pick it up? What was the the impetus?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Um, really, me and my dad got started with it. He wanted the 3D printer really bad, and uh, I was like, I think that's really cool. And then we started developing the printers that we developed together, and it just made more and more sense to be able to fabricate our own parts because waiting on the slow boat from China to take forever to give us our machine parts and stuff like that. And there really wasn't a lot of widespread fabrication services for if you just had a quick idea at three in the morning, you can just get it made, you know.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

So, are you still involved in that at all? Yeah, I still have two because I'm impressed. I'm I'm looking at you uh here now, and I'm impressed. That t-shirt, you made that through 3D printing? I'm kidding. No, no, not quite.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

I do make a lot of household stuff through 3D printing, though, but definitely not the shirt.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

I'll be artwork on that. Well, you mentioned that's kind of cool, and I'm not familiar with it. Household stuff. Give me an example.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Uh anywhere from like a paper towel holder to a toilet paper hold roller, roll holder, um, you know, hooks for like dog leashes and stuff, coat hooks, cue hooks, uh, really anything that like you don't feel like going out to the store to get, and you just feel like using your 3D printer anyway, so you just make it.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Very cool. I don't quite understand it, but it sounds very cool. Sounds like a lot of fun, though, is it?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

Yeah, yeah, you know, especially with the amount of uh files that you have available online now where you can just kind of look up whatever you're looking for and see, hey, is this even going to relatively work? And then just being able to press print on it. You know, it's came a long way from having to level it manually to now I have ones with automatic leveling where you just press print that does it. You know, you don't have to spend hours calibrating the machine. So it's really came a long way.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

So fast forward that, if you would, Trevor, into your relationship with the company called Castle Rock Golf. That's where I I think I I got interested in what you're doing. All of a sudden I saw that you were involved in this company. What is Castle Rock Golf all about?

SPEAKER_01 6:54

So Castle Golf Inc. is a mini golf manufacturer. Uh, they started out doing their own courses. You know, it's a family-owned business. And over time, much similar to my own personal businesses, uh, they saw what they were doing, and other people wanted it because they can see it's profitable and it's a fun business to be in, which it definitely is. You know, it's a mini golf who doesn't like mini golfing, not very many people I've met. So, you know, and I was thinking, you know, I was kind of in the middle of a career change from making t-shirt printers, and I was thinking to myself, like, what would actually make me happy to be involved in? And I was involved in laser tag for a little bit for a company called Laser Blast, and we made a lot of the laser tag guns and phasers and stuff. So I got some experience with fabrication in the industry there, going to the trade show Iappa that I found Castle Golf through. And um, you know, it just made sense to do something that was fun because you know what I had been doing was kind of on its last leg, and I'm like, well, I want to have fun and have people happy to see me, you know, when I'm doing my stuff. So um, but yeah, it's a mini golf company. We've built courses all over the world. We have over 300 right now, you know. We don't build necessarily the most, but we do build the best.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

So the thing you told me off there was so cool, I thought that how you got that job. In other words, here you were looking to change where you're between um doing things, and describe the process how you got that this particular job.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Yeah, so like I said, I did some work for a company called Laser Blast uh through a friend of mine when I was working on the t-shirt printers and making them myself. And uh he had a travel install job with them. So we went around to a couple of jobs and I got to see how the arenas were actually made. And then we went back up to the headquarters and took like this cross-country trip, and uh that was really fun. And we started making the laser tag equipment there at their uh headquarters. You know, they had been self-manufacturing it for quite some time, so they had all the injection molds and all the uh solder insert machines and everything fancy that you need, the PCBs, everything to program these things and get them out the door to these facilities that wanted laser tag uh arenas. So, and they handled the whole process pretty much end-to-end, minus the things you have to contract out, like plumbing and stuff. And I just thought it was really fun, and I had gone through a couple different travel jobs with uh making printers and so forth and servicing them, and I was like, I don't really want to do something that's traveling. I like working from home and having the flexibility that that brings. And uh I was jumping from making t-shirt printers and I was like, what was that exhibition that we went to for laser blast? Like, oh yeah, IAPA. So I looked up there and I saw they had a huge exhibitor list. I'm like, hmm, like this is a lot of different companies that do similar things that I want to get involved in. Because, like I said, I want to make people happy with what I'm doing, you know, whether it's inadvertently through the things I do now or actually making the equipment. So I saw the exhibitor list. I'm like, this is a lot of companies to go through manually. So I built a little script with my coding experience that crawled through the list and found all the emails for all the companies that were exhibiting there. And I'm like, hey, you know, this is what I do, uh, this is my experience, more so going after a job than necessarily like trying to start a marketing firm, which is I what I think was kind of my unique angle with it, is I wasn't trying to sell them a service. I was trying to say, hey, you know, I want to work with you because this is the industry I want to be involved in. I think that's very powerful when you have little niche experience like I have. So I went through all the emails and I waited like a month or so for everybody to get back to me. And uh, you know, here and there people would respond, hey, you know, we're looking for somebody here, we're looking for somebody there. And it was all jobs I didn't really want to do. And then my boss, shout out to Todd Thornton, awesome guy, amazing, super patient, kind, uh, the best boss I've ever had, really. And uh he emailed me and he's like, Hey, I really like your resume. This is really uh, I don't want to say weird, but out there as far as your experience with building t-shirt printers and doing 3D printing and fabrication and coding, and there's not a lot of times you run across that all under the same roof. So he's like, you know, we got to do something here. And he's like, I'm looking for traveling install guys. I'm like, I don't really want to do that. Like, I've done construction and land block out in the heat and stuff and concrete work and epoxy floors. I'm like, eh, I don't really want to do that. I was like, okay, well, you know, I think we can make a spot for you here. So we talked for like two weeks and we went kind of back and forth on what I can do for him. And then I was watching YouTube and I was pulling up one of my favorite songs, you know, definitely not a Katy Perry song, don't judge me. And uh, you know, so I'm looking it up and I see an ad for Castle Golf, and I'm like, huh. This ad's really just not great. And I'm looking at it and it's like five minutes long, and it's just a shot of a volcano, and it's it's amazing what they're building, right? The light effects, the smoke effects, everything. But it took like four minutes to get to the end of the ad to where the light effects and the smoke effects and the fire were shooting out of the volcano, and it's like, wow, I've never seen this in a mini golf course before. This is really cool. I really got to do something here. So I'm like thinking in my head with the TikTok generation and everything else, people only want to pay attention to like a 30-second clip or less. They want to see all the action right away to get their attention. So I'm like, I brought it up to him. I'm like, hey, I was watching YouTube, and this is way too long. Like, this needs to be consolidated down into something that somebody's actually gonna pay attention to. And he went, you know what? I was thinking the exact same thing. I'm like, by the way, I was on your website because I clicked the website, of course, and the banner for the Google ad. By the way, your website's like really outdated. They were using some server stuff from Microsoft Server. If anybody knows how old that is, it's a dinosaur at this point, 2001, basically. And uh, you know, in an age where security is paramount and speed is paramount, because you know, if somebody spends more than a couple seconds on your site and they don't see anything load on the page, they're gonna click right off, so you're not gonna get their attention. And when you're selling, you know, $500,000 plus mini golf courses, that's really important, obviously, to garner somebody's attention enough to where they're gonna spend that kind of money with you. So I explained all this to him, and he's just kind of sitting there like this, and it's like, yeah, like this all makes sense. Why, you know, why has nobody else explained it this way or wanted to do anything about it? Because he had some people managing it and they just weren't effective at it. And so, you know, that's where I came in and really, you know, readed the whole entire website, readed all the Google ads, uh, most of the sales material. Uh now I focus on the front end of the sales pipeline. Uh, so anybody that reaches out, I kind of reach out to them and go, hey, what are you looking for? What's the space you have to work with? All right, let me hand you off to my boss and he can give you the exact quote, you know, and everything that you need to make this project happen.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

By the way, you mentioned some really good advice there that uh I learned kind of the hard way, but I used to think exactly that you had to a clip two, three minutes. As you pointed out, I learned that anything more than 30 or 45 seconds is too long for the most part, you know.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Yeah, now it's down to even 15 seconds.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Is it really?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah, if you're scrolling and you see something that's more than 15 seconds, like most people, I think it's 73% of people or something. Don't quote me that statistic, but uh it's a high number that people just scroll past it, like they have to get your attention within the first few seconds of the video, and it can only be so long.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

To me, it seems too short, but in reality it's longer than you think it is. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Yeah, because think about how much information you're getting lamb blasted at you per day if you're scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you're constantly information, information, information. You got to catch somebody's attention, especially if they're already having a thought about building something like a mini golf course. You know, instead of just Googling it, you want them to see, like, hey, these are the premier builders of mini golf. I should go with these guys because they know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

So now, with respect to this company, Castle Golf, so you help them, Castle Rock Golf, you helped them devise the website, their their YouTube clips. What do you do with them? Yeah, there's no rock in the middle of it, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

But um, yeah, I redid the entire website. Like I said, it was based off of server server architecture from 2001. Uh, it was really old. So not only is it old and slow in relation to page load speed and stuff, because that's very important, especially for Google, uh, making sure your website stays at the top of search results. If your website takes too long to load, you're getting knocked way down, and people are never going to see your website. So, you know, I handled all of the migration to a more modern platform, uh, which is what it's running on right now. And yeah, just basically took all the video clips, condensed them down, like I was saying in the ad, put that on the website, uh, built them a whole bunch of custom plugins for like the gallery and uh a showcase for their mini golf application. That as far as I know, no other mini golf vendor has an application for when you're playing the mini golf, you can keep score and take selfies and stuff like that when you're at the mini golf course. Um, you know, and highlighting smart scoring and having really just a comprehensive gallery that's updatable because this older technology also wasn't very easily updatable if at all. Um, so there wasn't anything current on it, and it can't pull current reviews and stuff, and it's really convoluted. It's way more code than this is, right? So even the owner of the company could go in and make changes if he wants to, which is the important part to me.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Let me put you on the spot then, since we're talking about it. Can we take a look at the website? See what folks will see?

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Let me share my screen here.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Yeah, so this is the website, if you can see it now. Yes. Okay. So yeah, the old website, it was sort of similar to this, I guess you could say, but um, it was just way older architecture. It would have like a dot ASP at the end of the C URL here. Right, right. And uh, you know, it's all modern, loads super fast. As you can see, if you reload it. Even with the video there, it's a 4K video, it still loads fast. Um, the mini golf course clips are condensed down in a way that these are drone aerial shots, so this is nice to look at, you know, at least in my opinion. Oh, very cool. And uh it chops it up quick, so you're not just looking at the same angle like a lot of websites have you look at, or just a solid picture. This is the actual course, you know, from above, and you can see the full scope of the project without getting too focused on one specific aspect of it. So it's got the headline, the call to action, and everything. If you click this, it goes down to our contact form and to our contact page on that button. Um, but yeah, I mean, uh a lot of it's just condensed down. Uh it's very so it flows to the contact form and it highlights, you know, all of our different process steps like inception, planning, and prep construction and support. Um, you know, it's important to know what the process is without getting too convoluted in it. You don't want to lose people's interest uh before they even get started. You know, you have some reviews here from one of our favorite courses that we've done, Darkwoods Adventure Park. That course turned out really cool. Um you know, you have all of our Google reviews here, so you can see people leaving actual current Google reviews and the contact form, which is like our number one point of people contacting us and so forth to reach out to us.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

So one of the benefits one of the cool things you did, so then you'll come in for somebody and you'll design all the stuff for them so they don't have to do it themselves. Yes, yeah. So go back to we can get off this and you can come back to saying you. You can close that down. And so on the uh that particular site, do you also do the rest of the social media? Do you do help YouTube? Do you help with the LinkedIn? You name it, Instagram, you do it. Do you do yeah?

SPEAKER_01 17:59

A lot of those platforms they didn't even have. They had a Facebook, but it wasn't like very active posting-wise, and it was just basically a construction photo dump of jobs. So uh I went through and now I add like the logo to it. I make sure the photo's cropped right, it's in the proper resolution for social media, so you can see it on a phone, on a computer, uh making sure everything's prim and proper, basically.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Do you do the clips also for them? The video clips now. Again, I'm just shaking my head, listen to you. That all this stuff you just kind of picked up on your own.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yep, yeah. I mean, like for instance, they provide a lot of the construction photos and a lot of the finished project photos, and I just go through and make them you know proper, but through all the different ventures that I've been involved in throughout my uh career, if you want to call it that, I'm 27, so not that long of a career, but uh you know, everything I've done kind of leads into the other thing. So I've just picked up all these little bits and pieces.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

So, with respect to Castle Golf, then aside from helping with the social media, the website, all that stuff, what else do you do for them?

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Uh Google Ads. Okay, so advertising on Google, uh paid advertisements. So, like uh when you search like mini golf builder in uh Google, it'll come up with Castle Golf almost immediately in the top search results, uh, which is very important for a business like this where people are generally researching pretty intensively. You want to be at the top of their mind uh when you're researching.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

So let me ask you this question, Trevor. If a business either working with you on their own has limited resources, do they put it into the website, do they put it into social media, do they put it into TikTok? How do you decide where you should spend your money?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

I think experimenting with a little bit of everything, like say doing a TikTok video, especially with AI tools that are available now, makes it a lot more easy to experiment without a huge marketing team overhead. But uh, if you try out each individual channel, it pretty quickly you can tell which one's gonna take off and which ones are just a complete waste of time. Uh for instance, like for Castle Golf, YouTube is good to have full-length like project feature videos, but very rarely do people want to look at that when on our website we have a very like sleek module to look at each project and not have to watch a whole video. They can just skim through it real quick, go to the next one, skim through it. Or if they want to filter by a specific project, they can filter by the specific project and then find it that way. So I think you know, trying everything, uh seeing what works is very quick in my experience. Um, you'll get very good feedback on what works, what doesn't, especially if you look are in like a niche industry and you go on the Facebook group, for example, and you're like, hey, this is what I'm doing. People tell you, eh, this kind of sucks, or hey, you got something here. And uh then you can use that to further expand what you're doing. But you know, for a business like Castle Golf, they have more of a legacy reverse osmosis type of business reputation where they've been in business for 40 years, which is you know very valuable in itself. Uh so people are already have them at the top of their mind because they've been trade show exhibiting stuff like that. But if you're just starting from the ground up, definitely sprinting it all the way out, seeing what works, and then you can really pick what to invest into from there. And I think with the resources and the technologies available now, especially with AI, it makes it a lot easier to like make your own website or at least get some kind of idea of what you should be paying. Um, you know, basic research on that stuff always helps too. A lot of people forget that they can just look up what people would charge for a website and kind of go off of that. But um, yeah, I I think it becomes very apparent very quickly what you should focus on if you just try all of it. And because the worst thing that can happen is it doesn't work. And you're like, okay, I won't waste my time on this.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

What's interesting about what you say, Trevor, is the fact that kind of the old model that I grew up on, you know, people just spend money on on advertising and not even look at the results, you know. Does it pay off? And here now you have the information available, you just have to find it or get somebody to find it for you and then look at it, pay attention to it. Um, but do you find that a lot of businesses kind of ignore the data or ignore the research?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of leads for businesses like this go on email inboxes on the answer. Uh, I think a lot of organic. Reach instead of paid advertising is widely ignored. Like I said, if you try a bunch of different things and you can kind of get an idea of what works without spending a bunch of money, or really most of the things I tried to do that I really capitalize on are free to low cost. So, like we for our business where we already have a reputation, it's easy to operate off of that for our new business. Still, uh, if you get organic traffic to your business, when you put paid advertising money to it, it's going to succeed. But if you just keep throwing money at something without knowing if it's validated on its own two feet, you're going to be wasting money and time.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

So it's a shame that most people, I don't think, pay enough attention to that or what yeah, they don't test it organically enough. And you raise another good point too. It's not so much the um spending the money, but to get results on it. And the results, not just the count on how many people look at something, but do they eventually order from you, you know, so that I don't care if you're not going to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

That's why uh one not to cut you off, but when I took over Castle Golf's Google advertising, I noticed they had like you know three million clicks on their ads, right? And they're spending 12 grand you know a year or whatever they're spending on ads. And the clicks don't matter. Like if people are clicking on it and they scroll around the website for a second and leave, what do they really gain from that? So focusing on conversions, for example, in Google Ads really lets you know who's actually submitting the form. If you make a specific action for when you're done with the form and you take it to like a thank you page, you can track it on that thank you page and make sure that where you're spending money is actually working for you. Otherwise, you'll just get billed out the wazoo because that's what they were, you know, that's their business model, is they want you to spend as much as you can. But you want to make sure that it's converting. And that's where you know conversion tracking and stuff like that really becomes important, which is also something that I think almost every business overlooks.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

And I like what you said there too. It's not only so much going, I love the idea of the thank you page, but then after that, what happens? So I don't care that you get 500,000 clicks on on the thank you page, and those 500,000, do you get any orders out of it, or do they get any business out of it? And bottom line, that's all you really care about, or should in large part care about. Trevor, where do you see this um in terms of working with um Castle Golf? Uh, where do you see this going in terms of the future? Um, where do you where do you see you going with this?

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Uh, I think the company's reputation itself kind of precedes itself, and we're going to continue to be very successful and a very prominent name in the industry. You know, we are one of the top builders in mini golf courses in the entire world. We've done overseas builds, United States builds. We have an interactive map on our website, castlevolt.com, where you can check and see where builds are. Um, but we've built them all over the place. We've dealt with almost every scenario. Uh, the market trend that I see right now is a lot of modular builds. Uh, not so much DIY where people are wanting to do it themselves because they still want some kind of professional integrity to it, but they want something that's modular that they can move around because you know the world changes very quickly these days, as we all know. So does your business plan and where you have space to put something if you say move or want to put something in a different area. Uh modular mini golf courses are becoming, you know, a pretty hot trend. Uh, I think with that, something I've been largely considering is technology integration, where you have like holographic theming instead of having to fabricate each piece of theming for those modular mini golf courses or even in general. But I think a lot of technology integration is coming, and that's one of the top things that we focus on is like our smart scoring system where it integrates technology into how you score. So you don't have to keep the score. The the mini golf uh obstacle or interaction itself is keeping score uh as you play it. So I think a lot more technology is coming down the pipeline, not just in mini golf, but in general. And you know, we do do other things as well as like bumper boats and batting cages and stuff. So I see a widespread uh trend for the industry that technology is really starting to get integrated into some of these old school business models like mini golf.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

It's funny you should say that because I'm thinking miniature golf 50 years ago was kind of very popular, then all of a sudden it lost uh its imp impetus. And then they I don't know if they still have do they still have a professional tour for miniature golf? Yes. Okay, so some people are really still into it. Does Castle Golf again involve in part three courses at all?

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Uh no, you know, we do do a lot of work. Uh a big emphasis of mini golf now, especially, is for disabled uh individuals so they can have a wheelchair accessible and with other disabilities, they can you know navigate it, like having Braille on the course and stuff, because a lot of that stuff back in the day wasn't so inclusive to people that were in wheelchairs or deaf or whatever, blind, um, any disability on the spectrum of disabilities, it wasn't accessible to them. It was just for people who you know, so yeah, I think it's been a lot more inclusive as far as that regard. And that's something that Castle Golf focuses on a lot is that our courses are wheelchair accessible, uh disability accessible, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Do you play miniature golf? Yes, yeah, and best score you've ever gotten for 18 holes.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Honestly, I don't keep score as much just because I want to enjoy the course as much as I can because we build them. So I've been going to the ones that we built, and I just play with like my fiance and stuff. Shout out to her, she's amazing. And uh, we just recently went and played in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee at two of the golf courses there, the mini golf courses, and one of them's actually got voted number one in the world uh there that Castle Golf built. So that was really exciting to play. And of course, we didn't keep score, we just had fun, but uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

I love playing minigolf. So you're right now with uh castle golf for a while. I'll put you on the spot. Ten years from now, what do you see yourself doing?

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Uh I see myself continuing to work with legacy businesses like this that have maybe, you know, not so much fallen behind, but just failed to adapt to modern standards of what your online presence should be, uh, how you run your ads and stuff. So that, you know, legacy businesses can continue to be exactly that. Legacy businesses not just flush money down the drain off savvy marketing people who are like, hey, this is how you need to spend your money exactly, and then they don't really fill them in, and before you know it, they're thousands of dollars into the hole with no results. I want to make sure that these businesses get results so that they continue doing what they love to do and what they want to carry on with their legacy of their business.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

And so let me ask you this if somebody is interested in doing what you're doing, what do you recommend to them to learn? In other words, just back up thing that blows me away with you, uh, Trevor, is the fact that you like know so many different things, but so many different, you know, so many different areas. How did somebody else pick up that knowledge?

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Um, I'd say with like as far as what I specifically do right now, really learning uh social media, Google Ads, um WordPress development with websites is a great place to start. Um, and even still, I use that today, and I build custom plugins and stuff. So, like as you learn the base things, you can kind of layer up your professionalism with it and get it to where somebody's actually going to pay for you to do it. But I think the most important place to start is just that to start, because a lot of people get too overwhelmed with all this looks like a lot of information or a lot of technology to learn or a lot of very specific terms. And it's like, especially with AI now and the level the level of knowledge and just general resources that are out there today, you can pick up absolutely anything you want to do. You really can. So I think the most important thing is to just start and you know, decide what you want to do, get into a niche kind of industry, like you know, mini golf, or uh, I guess in my case, it'd be attractions. So start either with something fun or something you really enjoy and really narrow it down to what you think you can make an impact in, whether it's you have passion for it or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

And so another thing that kind of impressed me what you're doing too, is I guess initially it didn't require a large amount of uh capital. Is that correct? True? You know, that you just kind of pick up something that you need all sorts of investment in, and you um found a great place to find it. If people want to find you to get more information about two things, Trevor Solidgrass, what's the best way to track you down?

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Um I'm on all social media as myself, and uh also you can reach out to me at any time, Trevor at castlegolf.com.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Okay, it says Trevor Solidgrass to find you if they want to find your social media. And with respect to Castle Golf, how do they find that information about that?

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Castlegolf.com. Okay, and uh all social media is at Castle Golf, at Castlegolf Inc. So we keep it pretty consistent. That was another thing I went through, is made all everything consistent, social analyzed.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

So and just as a final question on that, well, you said it's so on target, I think, because one of the things that drives me about inst drives me crazy about Instagram is a lot of it's not based on their name. You know, if you look up insta, you know, you look up people's names and they're not listed under their name with a company name. And so if you want Instagram, you find you'll find Castle Golf on the Instagram. So I don't know about you, that just made no sense to me, you know, with the Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:55

We had a lot of different like uh Castle underscore golf, Castle Golf Inc., Castle Golf. And it's like, no, like when I look at Castle Golf, the logo it says Castle Golf. That's all I'm gonna type into Instagram, that's what I want to find, you know, and we pop right up. So, you know, that's I think that's very important too. Is don't try to get like too creative or too like snarky with your usernames, like just make it people want to find you, they find you, you know, that's important for sure.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

And also you're pointing out the idea of consistency, be the same thing wherever you're looking. Exactly. Term Sonicrass is always you kind of amaze me. I remember when I first met you, you're like this little kid, and said, Well, where do you come from? You know, but um just whatever you're doing, keep it up, man. And um I greatly appreciate it. Well, I enjoyed speaking with you, and um, I want to thank you for being my guest, this Digital Plains World Podcast. I'd also like to thank my producer, um um Kim Kim Jones, who just changed producers here. And hopefully one of these days, I almost caught up with you. You told me you were in town not too long ago. I almost caught up with you. So next time you're in the area, hopefully we'll catch up with you, man. Yeah, we're considering moving that way, actually. So maybe sooner than later. Well, you were in you told me you were in Tennessee there, not too far from me, and then you were in uh Asheville area, weren't you?

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Yeah, I came there to propose to my fiance.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

Oh, really? She's from Asheville.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Uh no, I you know, I lived there with my dad for a while and I went to high school there. So uh, you know, I had kind of an idea of the area that I wanted to do it in. And uh, you know, we wanted to go to Tennessee and wanted to go to North Carolina, and we stopped at Kentucky on the way because that's about halfway in between. So I mean just a nice big road trip out of it was really fun.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Okay, well, like I said, hopefully one of these days we'll bump into each other again. That'd be great, man. Thanks. Thank you.