Club Champion Chairman Joe Lee, joins John Traub to discuss custom club fitting, business growth, training, technology, and what goes into building a golf club for an individual player.
For golfers, there is always something to work on. Lessons, practice, fitness, course management, and the mental side of the game can all make a difference. But what happens when the equipment itself is working against the player?
That question is at the center of Club Champion's approach to custom golf fitting. For this episode of the Executive Air Space Podcast, we visited the company's flagship location in Willowbrook, Illinois, where I sat down with Chairman Joe Lee and Director of Sales Training Brad Sislo. We talked about how Club Champion grew from a small two-store operation to approximately 160 locations, why fitting is not reserved for low-handicap golfers, and how the company trains its team to deliver a consistent experience across the United States and internationally.
Then I got to experience the process myself, from the initial driver fitting to watching the club being built and finally taking it onto the course.
Joe Lee's introduction to custom club fitting began during a round at Olympia Fields Country Club nearly 17 years ago. A friend brought along Nick Sherburn, who described himself as a club fitter. Joe had been playing golf for decades, but he was not entirely sure what that meant.
After the round, Nick invited him to the original fitting location in Willowbrook and put him through a driver fitting. Within about 15 minutes, Joe was seeing meaningful gains in his distance. His immediate reaction was not only excitement about his own golf game, but surprise that he had played for so long without knowing a service like this existed.
That experience led Joe to invest in what was then EJL Custom Golf. Within months, he was helping run the company with Nick. They started with two locations and gradually expanded into new markets, first around Chicago and then across the country.
The basic idea behind the business has remained largely the same. There are golfers everywhere who care about their scores and want to play better. The challenge was taking an experience that worked in one fitting bay in Willowbrook and figuring out how to deliver it consistently in dozens, and eventually hundreds, of fitting bays.
One of the misconceptions Club Champion has spent years trying to change is the idea that custom fitting is meant only for scratch golfers, professionals, or very low handicaps.
Joe sees the customer much more simply: someone who enjoys golf and cares about improving.
At the time of the conversation, he said Club Champion's median customer handicap was around 14.5. That means the company regularly works with golfers carrying handicaps in the 20s as well as experienced competitive players. In some cases, Joe believes there may be even more room to help the higher-handicap player because poorly suited equipment can magnify inconsistencies that already exist in the swing.
A fitting also does not replace lessons or practice. Joe is a believer in both. The goal is to make sure the equipment supports the work a golfer is already putting into the game instead of creating another obstacle.
That matters whether someone plays 10 rounds a year or 80. A club that is easier for a player to swing and more consistent late in a round can still make a difference, especially as fatigue sets in.
Golfers have more equipment choices than ever. Drivers alone can come in several models from the same manufacturer, each designed around different launch, spin, weight, and shot-shape characteristics. Add dozens of shaft options, different weights, flex profiles, grips, and adjustments, and the decision becomes difficult for someone trying to make sense of it on their own.
Club Champion's model is built around testing those combinations rather than beginning with a predetermined brand. Its fitting bays allow golfers to combine heads and shafts from different manufacturers and compare the results.
That independence is important because the most popular club or the model a professional golfer uses is not necessarily the one that performs best for another player. A complete set also does not need to come from the same manufacturer. A golfer could perform best with a driver from one company, fairway wood from another, different irons and wedges, and a completely different putter.
The goal is not to create the cleanest-looking collection of logos in the bag. It is to determine which combination performs best for the person swinging the club.
As Club Champion began expanding beyond Chicago, leadership had to decide how to protect the experience that had made the original locations successful.
One of the company's most significant decisions was not to franchise.
Joe and his team believed the fitting methodology, employee training, marketing, club-building standards, and way customers moved through the process needed to remain consistent. Today, fitters from across the company's markets travel to the Chicago area for several weeks of training before working with customers.
That standardization helped Club Champion expand across the United States and later into Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Instead of building each international market from scratch, the company partnered with or acquired businesses that already shared a similar philosophy around custom fitting and access to a broad range of equipment.
The company has continued to look for golf communities where demand exists but its services are not yet available. Joe sees additional opportunity throughout North America as well as markets in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and other regions where golf continues to grow.
He is less concerned with reaching a particular store count than with eventually serving the major golf markets where avid players are looking for this type of fitting experience.
Brad Sislo is responsible for helping turn that business model into something that can actually be repeated from location to location.
Brad has spent much of his career around golf equipment, including roles with TaylorMade and Wilson Golf before joining Club Champion. He eventually took over the company's fitter training program and has spent years teaching new employees how to evaluate golfers, understand equipment, interpret data, and work through the fitting process.
New fitters do not simply receive a shirt and begin working with customers. They attend Club Champion University, where they spend several weeks learning the company's system.
That does not mean every fitter has the same personality. Brad expects them to bring their own style to the conversation. What remains consistent is the process.
A golfer visiting a location in Chicago should encounter the same core approach as someone visiting in Florida, Arizona, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia.
According to Brad, the fitting begins before a golfer starts hitting balls.
The fitter first needs to understand the player. What are they trying to improve? What frustrates them about the current club? What type of miss shows up most often? Are they looking for distance, consistency, a different trajectory, or something else?
That conversation matters because two golfers with similar swing speeds could need very different equipment.
Brad also does not believe a golfer needs to "fix" their swing before getting fit. Golf is always a work in progress. A properly fit club can provide better feedback during future practice and instruction, while equipment that does not match the player can make improvement more difficult.
As Brad put it during the episode, life is short. Play your best golf right now.
My own fitting started with a straightforward problem. I used to play to about a five handicap and had drifted closer to a 12. I was not practicing as much as I once had, and the driver had become less consistent.
Brad first had me hit my existing driver to establish a baseline. We were not trying to change my swing. He wanted to see what happened when I made the swing I would normally make on the course.
The data showed that I still had clubhead speed, but I was not converting enough of that speed into ball speed. My shots were also launching relatively low and tending to finish left. In other words, the feeling I had that I was leaving something on the table was showing up in the numbers.
From there, Brad began changing one variable at a time. We tested different shafts first while keeping the clubhead consistent, then used the shaft that performed best while comparing different heads.
The change happened quickly. With the first shaft test, my clubhead speed stayed almost identical, but my ball speed increased significantly because I was making better contact. Instead of asking me to swing harder, the equipment was helping me use the speed I already had.
That was an important distinction. The goal was not to manufacture a different golf swing inside the fitting bay. It was to find a club that worked better with mine.
Technology plays a major role in the process. TrackMan provides measurements including clubhead speed, ball speed, smash factor, launch, spin, peak height, and other factors that help a fitter understand what is happening.
Club Champion has also developed an AI-based fitting tool using data from the large number of swings collected across its locations. During my fitting, the system could recommend shafts and clubheads that had performed well for golfers with similar characteristics.
Brad does not view that technology as a replacement for the fitter. He described it more as a starting point. The software can narrow down hundreds of possibilities, but the player still needs to hit the clubs, and the fitter still has to interpret the results.
Feel matters too. TrackMan can measure what the golf ball does, but it cannot tell Brad that one shaft feels too heavy or another makes me feel like I have to guide the club through impact.
The final decision comes from combining the numbers with the golfer's feedback.
Finding the right combination in the fitting bay does not help much if the finished club is different from the one that produced those results.
That is why the second part of our visit took place in Club Champion's Willowbrook build shop, where the company assembles thousands of clubs each day. Builders work from the specifications created during the fitting and try to recreate the test club as precisely as possible.
We followed my driver through several parts of that process. The shaft was measured and prepared, the grip was installed to the prescribed specifications, and the club was balanced to match the swing weight we had established during the fitting.
The same attention applies to iron sets. Builders confirm loft, lie, length, swing weight, and gapping from club to club so that the set works together rather than behaving like a collection of unrelated pieces.
Something as simple as changing to a larger grip can affect the balance of a golf club. Adding length changes it again. Those differences may not be obvious when looking at the club, but the golfer can feel them during the swing.
That is why Joe describes club building as a combination of science and craftsmanship. The numbers create the prescription, but trained builders are responsible for turning those specifications into the finished product.
The final test was not another simulator session. We took the new driver onto the course.
The biggest difference for me was confidence. I did not feel as though I had to manipulate the club or create extra speed myself. The weight and balance allowed me to make a more natural swing and let the club do its job.
That showed up almost immediately. Drives that had previously been inconsistent became much more repeatable, and the extra distance meant shorter clubs into greens. Instead of hitting a six iron for an approach, another 15 or 20 yards off the tee could put an eight iron in my hands.
That is where driver distance becomes more than a number on a launch monitor. It changes the next shot and, potentially, the way an entire hole is played.
Looking back, Joe says the growth now appears more straightforward than it felt at the beginning.
It took time to move from two stores to three, then four, and eventually enough locations to build the infrastructure required for faster expansion. The company raised capital more than once, upgraded its systems, built training programs, and developed the operational support needed to enter new markets.
There were opportunities Joe believes they could have pursued sooner. He mentioned markets such as Japan and New York as places the company might have entered more aggressively. Still, one of Club Champion's larger business decisions was to continue investing in growth even when others believed the company was moving too quickly.
Joe's advice for other business owners is not to assume someone else's growth model is automatically the right one. Club Champion received plenty of advice to franchise, but leadership did not believe that model fit what they were building. They listened to outside perspectives, made their own decision, and remained focused on the customer experience they wanted to provide.
Equipment will continue changing. New shafts, heads, putter designs, fitting technology, and data will give golfers more choices, while the growth of indoor golf is creating new communities of players around the world.
What Club Champion does not want to change is the question at the center of the fitting: what helps this golfer play better?
That focus took the company from a small operation in the Chicago suburbs to an international business. It also took me from wondering whether something was missing in my driver to standing on the tee with a club that felt noticeably more natural in my hands.
The swing was still mine. The difference was finally having equipment built to work with it.
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