You may have been a client of ours for years, or you may be new to our company and services. Whatever the case, we think that everyone can benefit from listening to our new podcast with Angela Giovine from Happenings Media. We strive to be as transparent as possible with our business and practices, so why not learn the bare truth about our rise and future progression of our business. Our co-owner of Foresite Sports, Greg Esterhai exposes how he and business partner James Nam built their business from a dorm room at the age of 22 into an prize indemnity insurance empire! We highlight some of the most profound questions, answers and quotes from the interview below.

Our Business In A Nutshell

Angela: “Tell me about your company…”

Greg: “The name of the company is Foresite Sports. And that’s our corporated name. Our first real DBA was US Hole In One and that’s sort of our bread-and-butter and still accounts for I’d say 75% of business that we do. Then we have Interactive Promotions Group which is a division off of US Hole In One. And the two of those really combined into the prize indemnity insurance space so what that is is essentially we are an insurance broker who works with groups that run events such as a golf tournament or they’ll be doing some sort of a charity basketball tournament. We’ll deal with different companies car dealerships, casinos especially anybody who’s running an event where they want to give away the potential to win a big prize.”

Angela: “If nobody wins they’re covered and they’re safe but if somebody wins your company helps them pay.”

How It All Started

Angela: “Tell us about how you started this company. How did you think to get into this area?”

Greg: “My business partner and I we’ve been best friends since we were in second grade. Went through high school together. Went off to separate colleges. I was a bio minor and psych minor with a health major the idea of maybe going into medicine or something you know in psychology. But my friend had come to me our senior year and asked me if I ever thought about starting a business and if I was interested in starting a business with him.

Greg: “And our plan was at the beginning we were going to run golf outings. Another thought was that we were going to go out there and help these different organizations run these events.”

Greg: “So I remember one of the first things we said we needed to do was we obviously need the phone number for this company so we went into what was the only cell phone store in the Philadelphia area which was on Market Street (Sprint store). And I remember we walked in there and put this on a business card and then as soon as we drove out the city the phone didn’t work anymore.”

Greg: “Within the first couple years we started to see the one thing a lot of these groups were asking for was this hole-in-one insurance that was sort of a staple a lot of these tournaments that we started to realize that this is more of a product that we can actually sell as opposed to a service.”

Growing The Business

Angela: “And you had pretty strong growth, you grew your business pretty quickly from the gecko. How are you able to grow and become so successful so quickly?”

Greg: “We were just fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and I say that just if you think back to the early 2000’s this was right at the beginning of the internet boom. So again when we were young we lived at home, didn’t have very much money. When we started the business it was from a $4,000 loan from my dad.”

Angela: “It was more handshake than it was the internet.” (referring to the industry)

Greg: “And that was our big entry point. Again being young and realizing that this whole world wide internet thing is probably we going to stick around gonna stick around. Like maybe we should jump on it. And did so we we were fortunate to grab the url holeinoneinsurance.com. And that’s what we did. We just focused all of our efforts to marketing online.”

Angela: “So how many contests are you insuring a year now?”

Greg: “We do about 10,000 events.”

Risky Business

Angela: “The definition of the word ‘entrepreneur’ is a risk taker …Can you think of any times where you’ve had taken big risks that have either not gone the way you saw it or we’re big payoff.”

Greg: “Although I consider both my partner and I an entrepreneur I would actually say that’s one thing that we could probably both look back on and say I wonder if we took enough risks.”

To hear the full interview, grab your earbuds or wireless headphones and check out our full podcast through the various platforms below.

Apple : https://apple.co/2MKj4QT

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2SfRS1C

Google Play: https://bit.ly/2GmVbhh

Stitcher: https://bit.ly/2Sj0t3D