Today we’d like to introduce you to Mercedes Jackson
Hi Mercedes, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Mercedes McFarland Jackson, CEO and Co-Founder of PAR365, an indoor golf lounge, bar, restaurant, and event center located in Roseville, Minnesota. Golfers love our six state-of-the-art golf simulators where you can play over 85 courses around the world, and non-golfers and families love to come in and use those same simulators to play a variety of arcade games, including darts, skeeball, and minigolf.
I co-founded PAR365 with Thomas Jackson, my partner in life and business, and it has been our great honor to bring it to the community and garner so much support for our mission to make golf accessible, approachable, and affordable. While we absolutely serve golfers of all abilities, our goal is to serve as a conduit to introduce the sport to those who traditionally have not had the same access to the sport, whether due to historical discrimination, geographic or economic isolation, or just inability to see themselves in the sport. We seek to provide that access by setting the bar for participation wherever our community members need it to be so that their entry to the sport is easy and comfortable.
After developing our own interest in golf during the pandemic, we saw an opportunity to provide a space where we could nurture a love of golf in a setting that is more familiar and culturally relevant to our background. As fairly new golfers, we didn’t want our space to center golf in a way that made it feel exclusive. We instead center community, music, a feeling of belonging. We want everyone to walk into our space and feel welcome; we have ample lounge space for groups to sit and vibe with their friends and others in the community. We have a full bar and restaurant to encourage people to stay and play, so we see not only golfers, but people coming in for date nights, for family activities, for rainy day relaxation. It is very easy these days to be siloed away from others – we want our space to be a place where folks connect with other community members, with people who they may not otherwise see in their day to day lives, to form authentic relationships and friendships while learning or perfecting this lifelong sport.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
We’ve had a number of challenges, but one of the big ones around our start-up was securing the liquor license. The Roseville city code would not have allowed us to have a liquor license, which was essential for our revenue model. As previously in effect, the liquor licensing law required that a venue be a restaurant with at least 100 seats or a hotel, and that a minimum of 60% of food and beverage sales arise from non-alcoholic sales. This presented two issues for us: 1) as a small business start-up, due to the nature of our business, much of our real estate would be taken up with the golf simulators; in order to have 100 seats at tables, the size of the space that we would have to secure was far beyond what we could afford; and 2) as many of our customers will spend an hour at the simulator and buy one or two beers before leaving, we could easily be upside down on the revenue requirement from the first day of operations. Fortunately, after bringing this to the city council’s attention, they were happy to work with us to amend the code in a way that allowed for us and small businesses like ours to be able to obtain a full license
One of our latest challenges has been figuring out how to drive traffic during summer months, when our golfers return to the outdoor course, and everyone else wants to be outside in some way or another. That is a challenge that we are still working through in anticipation of summer 2025.
What makes you happy?
The simple things – being able to enjoy a good meal, sleeping in, taking a walk in nature. I am often so plugged in to work and goals that dialing things down is how I refuel.
Pricing:
- Hourly (Peak): $55
- Hourly (Off-Peak): $45
Contact Info:
- Website: https://par365golf.com
- Instagram: @par365golf
- Facebook: @par365golf
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/par365
- Twitter: @par365golf
