This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Little did I know that, when I started The Picklr, I would do my part to save the world.
The pickleball industry likes to say that this sport will save the world — and for good reasons. Over the last decade, pickleball has morphed from a casual game to a lifestyle for millions. It’s brought people together and even helped them overcome depression.
Pickleball gets people off the couch and gives them another way to be active. It gets teenagers off their cell phones. It puts a paddle in their hands and a smile on their faces, offering an underrated workout they don’t have to think much about.
Because I started playing pickleball in 2015, I consider myself an early adopter. At that time, if you told someone you played pickleball, chances are they wouldn’t know what that meant. If they did, they had probably played it with their grandparents at a Florida retirement community. As an easier-to-play sport, it was popular with retirees.
At the software company I worked for, many of us played pickleball during our lunch break, but we never quite got the amount of play time I wanted; 50 of us would regularly wait to play on two to four courts. I often thought, “I’d never wait 30 minutes in line to play a game of anything else.”
I recall being inspired by two young kids I saw playing the game around that time. Because they had a tennis background, their style of play was faster, with harder hits and more jumps than the typical pickleball match.
That sparked a thought: I could see the sport transitioning to a younger demographic. It was already trending in that direction, and the millennials I worked with were almost religiously committed to it. Before long, my hobby grew into something more. In 2019, I started a pickleball paddle company targeting that younger audience, offering a more affordable price point and a variety of fun designs.
After selling about 100 paddles monthly, I decided to go even deeper. In December 2019, I placed a second massive order for paddles but wasn’t hearing back from anyone. News about COVID-19 began spreading, and the world was about to shut down. One thing stayed the same, though — I kept playing. In 2020, pickleball flourished, as it was deemed a COVID-friendly sport.
The company I was with went through a successful acquisition. Unfortunately, I was the first employee they let go, but it opened up my days for more pickleball and allowed me to consider my next career steps. It felt like time to pivot and focus my career efforts differently, and I had my dad to thank for that.
Continuing on a theme
My dad has been an entrepreneur all his life, and we were along for the ride. He bought a small tortilla factory when I was a kid, and my siblings and I would wake up at 4 a.m. to help package tortillas all through our high school years. In the summer, I worked landscaping jobs alongside him. Now, he owns a tire shop and has for the past 15 years. Creating your way in life has permanently been embedded in me.
When I told my wife I was through with working at corporations, we had just welcomed our fifth child. I wanted to be an entrepreneur like my father. I knew pickleball would play a part in that, but it took time to figure out how.
In December 2020, the idea hit: I’d create a facility with indoor pickleball courts that would allow reservations for games. There would be tournaments, clinics and leagues. There would be no waiting in line and no need to depend on the weather. Creating The Picklr was a way to help the sport grow even faster, providing more places for the game to be played. It was a way for those most dedicated to it to commit to that lifestyle fully, myself included.
There was a real need for courts like this; there was nothing like it. When I called my best friend, Austin Wood, to pitch my idea, he agreed with me and said he was in before I even finished my spiel. In January 2021, we signed our first lease for The Picklr.
By April 2021, we opened our first location — a seven-court facility — near the mouth of Ogden Canyon. While the idea of an indoor building dedicated to pickleball was new, we generated a lot of excitement from the community about having a dedicated place to play. People who’d become addicted to the sport were free to play anytime they wanted to. Fast forward to the present, and it’s been four years of figuring out what works best and how to make this business valuable.
Driven by community
Pickleball is still a new industry. This isn’t your next hamburger, sandwich or cookie chain. In 2020, the sport experienced massive growth and gained popularity rapidly in 2021 and 2022, with a 50 percent increase each year.
Watching the sport flourish gave me the confidence to commit to it. Early on, I discovered how community-driven this industry can be. From the start, it was about building on that community in all the ways we could, providing incredible training and experiences and creating an environment where people would feel included while having fun.
We became community builders out of necessity. In our earliest days, I felt like a glorified party planner. At every tournament and event we did, we wanted you to play pickleball while feeling like you were at a party. Sometimes, that meant having taco trucks onsite and giving out sombreros as prizes, getting creative about how to bring like-minded people together.
If we weren’t the first to build indoor pickleball courts in the country, we were pretty close. Others followed and will continue to. The difference between The Picklr and others was our ability to streamline opening new locations — Austin and I opened six additional facilities in Utah and one in Colorado.
It happened quickly. In 2022, we opened four locations in four months. Going from club to club almost killed me. As we grew to understand the business better and how we could best grow it, franchising became our answer. When you find passionate business owners who love pickleball and want to back a great concept, they’ll treat it like their baby.
By not jumping into it immediately, we were able to understand what it’s like to open a facility outside of Utah. The nuances of operations and brand make better sense to us now. Just before we started, I had some inkling of how successful it would be — and it has been. Within a month, I had 100+ leads in my inbox from people who wanted a piece of The Picklr business.
2025 is another beginning
In only 18 months of franchising, over 400 locations were sold throughout the United States. It’s overwhelming and humbling to have others believe in this vision along with us, and we feel the weight of responsibility that comes with that. We’ve built a strong foundation over the last two years and hired 70+ employees to support new growth.
2025 is set to be another beginning for us. Every week of the year, we’ll open one to two new clubs throughout the country. By the end of the year, we expect to have 100 locations open in the U.S. and Canada and will expand our footprint to new international markets.
It’s hard to sleep at night until we’ve done everything possible for our franchisees. If it doesn’t work for them, it doesn’t work for us. Along the way, we’ve had awesome wins — raising funds, hiring and attracting top talent, and even being named one of the Best Companies to Work For in Utah by Utah Business. We’re creating an environment where people love coming to work.
In my prior life, I was never just a sales guy. I wanted to understand how marketing worked with sales and what the bottom line meant to the business. I took an interest in what made a customer click a button to purchase a product. These lessons have translated into all we do at our company. The overall benefit is that they’ve allowed us to scale successfully with our growth in a way we might not have been able to accomplish otherwise.
Much of our operation stems from closely studying the companies I worked for. When I was a college dropout turned salesman for 10+ years, my career was largely tied to fast-paced software companies. That industry understood how to drive people to their sites, compel them to sign up and focus on conversion. While The Picklr is a pickleball company, we operate like a software company in many ways, analyzing customer retention rates, trying to predict customer behaviors and so on.
Final thoughts and advice
I have a favorite quote by Steve Jobs on display in my office, and I reflect on it often. He said, “Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Belief in yourself is paramount, as is listening to your intuition and developing a habit of following it. We all have that voice within us. We all have passions and interests, dreams we wonder about, and projects we want to accomplish. It’s almost as common for us to doubt ourselves so much that we never chase after those desires.
Sometimes, we have to find the courage to follow our inner voice. As Steve Jobs says, “Everything else is secondary.”
I used to tell myself that, even if The Picklr hadn’t worked out, I would have tried again with something else. If I hadn’t attempted to build this company, I would have regretted it. When I took this leap of faith, I was unemployed and had just had my fifth child. There could not have been a worse time to start something on my own. Somehow, we’re continuing to keep this dream alive by growing faster than expected. We’ve had the chance to bless those who have helped us and developed lasting relationships.
People have multiple reasons to become entrepreneurs. I’m driven by the ability to create, solve problems and see the results of my labor flourish. Those are big reasons for getting up in the morning.
There is one other reason, too, and it has everything to do with my dad. His sole motivation for coming to the U.S. from Mexico at 17, before even graduating high school, was to improve his quality of life for himself and the family he wanted to build. That’s why he worked so hard and continues to do so — for him to be successful in life and see his son enjoy similar success. That’s the ultimate reward.
Remember that you don’t require the same advantages as everybody else to start building your own dream. That hardly disqualifies you from future success. We decide how our lives will look by putting in the necessary work and sacrifices to get there. If you’re lucky, you’ll find success along the way.
