From banker's dream to golf start-up
Patrick Rahme originally wanted to work in finance. The Luxembourger holds a master's in finance from the London School of Economics and afterwards interned at Credit Suisse in Zurich and Geneva. For a long time his dream was to become a banker. But of all times during the financial crisis, reading the Financial Times daily in London, his enthusiasm flipped. Day after day there were new scandals about bankers who had done deals they should not have. Rahme realised this world did not suit him.
The conversations with his grandfather, an electrician who repaired aircraft turbines for the Luxembourg airline, were formative too. He never understood how you make money with money, Rahme says. For his grandfather there always had to be a real result at the end, a tangible output. That thought stuck with him.
The push towards entrepreneurship came from a university experience. In Lausanne, Rahme led a team of twenty as president of a student Junior Enterprise, and he enjoyed it so much that it became clear: entrepreneurship was his path. Three passions came together, golf, technology and the appeal of building something. Opening his own golf course was never an option for him; it would not have been scalable. He wanted a product with international reach and a team behind it. In January 2013 he founded All Square, roughly two years before digitalisation in golf really picked up speed. In his early thirties he had already run his own company for years, spoke five languages and played off a plus-2.5 handicap, a level most amateurs only dream of.
What All Square is
The first idea was a community, a kind of social network for golf, a Facebook for golfers, as Rahme calls it. Bit by bit it became what he himself describes as the Tripadvisor of golf: a platform through which more than 33,000 courses can be discovered and booked. Golfers connect, share where they have played, and rate the courses.
In early 2021 two larger building blocks were added: an integrated travel section and everything around live scoring and statistics for users. The vision behind it is a marketplace where golfers find everything they need in one place instead of clicking through many different websites, green fees, travel and equipment, plus simple operation and several languages. Internationality matters to Rahme here. Many guests, for example from Asia, would like to play in Germany but are stopped by German-only club websites. That is exactly the gap All Square wants to close.
The numbers behind the platform
Rahme cites concrete figures. At that point over 100,000 golfers are on the platform, with growth coming mainly from strong search engine optimisation. All Square has more than 100,000 pages indexed by Google and ranks highly for many queries. Website visits have risen by almost 80 percent year over year.
Striking: of the 100,000 users, only around 6,000 are German. The reason is clear to Rahme. Many Germans have a problem with the English language and want a German interface. That directly affects the Google ranking, because English content rarely lands on the first page for German search terms. Translating the platform into more languages is therefore firmly on the product roadmap, even if it is a mammoth task.
Users split roughly into 45 percent continental Europe, 20 percent each for the UK and the US, and the rest of the world. The most important travel destinations are Spain and Portugal. How strongly digital visibility works is shown by one example: for Cartagena in Colombia, All Square received many bookings without ever having focused on that market, simply because Google ranked the pages there highly. Golfers normally book their trips six to nine months in advance. During the Covid period this lead time shrank to a few days or weeks, which made the business considerably harder.
What golf facilities get out of it
Every golf facility is listed on All Square for free by default. Those who want more book one of the premium packages. With it the club gains visibility and access to business tools: direct communication with the community and its own members, including via push notification, plus statistics on visitors and bookings. A separate marketing package goes further and promotes the course via newsletter, blog and banners. The golf manager can decide which markets to target, steering the effort to where the return is highest.
What golf facilities take away from the conversation
- Your own domain with the club name ranks at the top almost by itself; the competition plays out on the positions behind it
- Unique text beats copied content, Google quickly recognises the source
- A fast, mobile-optimised site is a must, not a nice-to-have
- Regular updates prompt Google to re-crawl the page and rank it higher
- Multilingual content opens the door to international guest groups
Five points that decide the ranking
Rahme knows the websites of many golf facilities, it is part of his business. Asked what most do wrong, he names five principles for good search engine optimisation.
First, unique content. Copied texts are never welcome; Google quickly notices where content comes from. Second, speed. A slow site delivers a poor user experience, and that is exactly what Google wants to spare its users. Third, the mobile presentation. An older site that is unpleasant on a smartphone is a knockout criterion for Google. Fourth, optimising for the right search terms. And fifth, freshness: a site that does not change for years falls behind. All Square benefits here from the daily new reviews that provide fresh content, after which Google re-crawls the pages and moves them up.
A detail many underestimate: anyone who maintains their own domain with the club name lands at the very top almost automatically when people search for the club. The real competition is decided on the positions behind it, and there language plays a role too. Number one in Germany does not mean number one in the UK.
The worst thing is habit. You should never think you already know everything, always challenge yourself again.
Where the golf market stands on digitalisation
Rahme watches the market internationally and sees a clear acceleration. Contactless processes have become more important, green fees are booked online far more often. That also relieves a golf club's administration, where much used to run via phone and email. Add to that online equipment retail, golf streamed on the phone and digital marketing that has become more important overall. His conclusion: the market has arrived where it would otherwise only have been in three to five years.
Another observation concerns the people behind the facilities. When Rahme started in 2013, golf managers were on average considerably older. Today many more 35-year-olds are in such positions, and that noticeably changes conversations about technology. Those who grew up with tech grasp the value of a platform faster than when you have to explain the benefits to someone close to retirement. At the same time, Rahme warns against getting lost in digitalisation. Technology has to provide real value, not be an end in itself.
What drives him
Asked about the biggest learnings of his career, Rahme is candid: he still makes many mistakes and learns from them every day. Building the right tech team was especially hard at the start. His advice to founders without an IT background: get someone who really knows their stuff, and do proper due diligence beforehand. He barely knew the golf industry itself at first, even though he was a golfer, a lot he had to work out as he went.
Above all, it is about curiosity. You must never believe you already know everything; you have to keep questioning yourself and looking for the best solution. The enforced calm of the crisis helped him look at his own company more objectively and change cherished habits. That very word, habit, is the biggest risk for him. Anyone who does things only because they have always been done that way does not develop further.
Conclusion
The conversation shows two things. First, how a passion for golf and technology can become an international company if you consistently bet on scalability. Second, that many golf facilities give away visibility that could be captured with manageable effort. Anyone who takes the five ranking principles seriously, writes their own content, keeps the site fast and mobile-friendly and maintains it regularly, has already won a lot. And anyone who, like Rahme, sees habit as the biggest opponent stays agile even in a fast-changing industry.
