Entrepreneur of the Week: Dwight Miles of Whirly Golf

Dwight Miles of Whirly Golf

Our ZINO Society featured ZINOpreneur Member this week is Dwight Miles, President/ & General Manager of Whirly Golf Limited.   Dwight presented his company at the ZINO Society Roundtable meetings on October 19th and 20th . We asked him to share the answers to a few questions about his company.


What is your one-sentence elevator pitch? . . .  The fun short-game chipping and putting device focused on bringing kids to the game of golf through game improvement

How did you come up with the idea for your company? . . .  While talking with golf instructors, representatives with The First Tee and golf retailers, we found that kids love hitting golf balls...they love hitting the ball hard, seeing the ball in flight, but they did not like working on their short game - which is, arguably, the most important facet of their game. So we thought, how do we make chipping and putting fun and allow them to practice in their own back yard with family and friends.

The word that best describes your company culture is . . . Family

In one sentence, how are you different from your competition? . . .  By focusing on kids and partnering with kid focused charities, we have an established relationship with our target consumer and thereby established a unique and differentiated position in the marketplace.

What is the biggest challenge you face? . . .  We have successfully produced a prototype that we are testing. Our biggest challenge is raising the final capital to get us to full launch for the PGA show in January 2011.

How much money have you raised to date? . . . We have raised approximately $800K

If someone gave your company $3 million tomorrow, how would you use the money? . . .

• Make the final payment for product molds
• Finalize product packaging
• PGA Show - January
• Product samples for the show
• Product seeding for charitable partners
• Website
• Advertising and PR
• Road show to see key customers
•  Full worldwide launch
• Displays/Merchandisers for retailers

What is the oddest or most unusual thing about your company? . . . Huge worldwide potential with unique focus on captive kids audience that is expandable beyond golfers.

What is one thing missing from your business? . . .The one thing missing from our company is final funding to have product launch for the January 2011 PGA Golf Show.

Why will your company be successful? . . .We will be successful because we have a unique position in the marketplace by partnering with key charitable groups that touch 5M kids. Our leadership team has extensive experience in start-up businesses and global sales and marketing experience in consumer packaged goods. We have a business model that provides tremendous profit margin while meeting retailer target margin from inception. And lastly, we also have experience in the golf industry and have received sincere interest from the top 10 retailers buying departments.