There is a version of this story that sounds like a warning.

Professional golfer by day, tech founder by night. Two demanding things pulling at the same person. Something eventually has to give.

I thought that too, going in. It turns out I was wrong.

What I Expected vs. What Actually Happened

When I turned professional in 2024 and kept building PARfect Performance alongside competing, the assumption — from people around me, and honestly from myself — was that the two would eventually clash. That tournament weeks would suffer. That I would be half a golfer and half a founder, doing neither thing properly.

What I did not expect was how much having a second world to step into would actually help me compete.

Professional golf is consuming in a specific way. When you are on tour, everything collapses into the next round. Course management, swing feel, scoring, the leaderboard — it fills every mental corner if you let it. That level of focus is necessary, but it also means that when things are not going well on the course, there is nowhere else for your head to go. The loop just runs again.

Having PARfect to come back to breaks that loop. It gives me something completely different to think about — a problem that has nothing to do with whether I hit a good shot on 14. Answering a coach’s question, working through a product decision, writing a blog post. It is not a distraction from golf. It is a release valve for everything that builds up around it.

The Two Roles Actually Feed Each Other

The other thing I did not fully anticipate is how directly one informs the other.

I am not building PARfect from the outside looking in. Every feature we ship, every decision about how Parfy — our AI practice planning assistant — should work, is filtered through what I know from competing. When I track my own strokes gained data during a season and see the gap between what I trained and what held up under pressure, that is not just useful for my game. It tells me exactly what the platform needs to do better for the college players using it.

That feedback loop is genuinely hard to replicate if you are not playing. I am the user, the tester, and the builder at the same time. It is an unusual position and I think it makes the product sharper.

The influence runs the other way too. Running a company teaches you to make decisions with incomplete information and keep moving. You cannot wait for the perfect data set or the perfect conditions. That mindset has made me more composed on the course — less paralysed by uncertainty, better at committing to a shot and moving on.

The Part That Is Actually Hard

I want to be honest: it is not all clean and complementary.

There are tournament weeks where I have had to be intentional about closing the laptop entirely and not looking at anything PARfect-related until Sunday evening. Not because it is stressful, but because the mental separation matters. If I am thinking about a feature while I am reading a green, that is a problem — not because building the company is a burden, but because golf requires presence.

The discipline of switching off one identity to inhabit the other fully — that is the real skill. And it is one I am still working on.

Why It Is Worth It

The reason both things are worth doing is the same reason they make sense together.

College golfers are practising thousands of hours without a clear picture of where their game is actually leaking shots. Coaches want better tools and do not have time to build them. That gap is real and I know it from the inside — from Delaware, from captaining a Division I program, from now competing on tour and watching how data-driven professional golf has become.

PARfect exists because of that gap. My playing career exists to close it from the other side.

One thing makes the other more credible. That is the point.

Want to see how PARfect Performance is changing how college programs approach practice? Try it free for one month at parfectperformance.com

Read the previous post: (https://parfectperformance.com/posts/post-12)