The 7th Annual BPG Buying Group Show is underway at the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata, Ontario.
Tuesday, October 15th was set-up day for 55 vendors representing all areas of the golf industry as well as a day of education with the overall theme being “Achieving Success Together”.
Leading off the day was James Cronk, Principal of the Cronk Group, which boasts over three decades of coaching teams. James also facilitated a mentoring round table discussion with a distinguished panel of senior golf professionals featuring Doug Rankin (Toronto GC, Ontario), Paul Sherratt (Rideau View GC, Ottawa, Ontario), Cory Kartusch (St. Charles GC, Winnipeg, Manitoba), Trevor Fackrell (Burlington GC, Hamilton, Ontario) and Steven Brosseau (Laval-sur-le-Lac GC, Laval, Quebec) and then closed off the day with a wrap-up to the day’s educational activities.
Danielle Nadon, General Manager and Head Professional of Loch March Golf Club in Ottawa, along with Padraig Kelly, Head Professional of the Ladies Golf Club of Toronto, engaged the audience with their talk on Ladies in Golf.
Ottawa’s Trevor Hains from Crestcom, a company that features interactive leadership development, gave an entertaining talk to a very interested and engaged audience.
Adidas also presented a merchandising round table featuring their panel of Lesley Hawkins – General Manager of Adidas Golf Canada, Kevin Lund – Managing Director, Global Retail Programs, Maxime Dion – Creative Head, Environments and Padraig Kelly – Head Professional of the Ladies Club of Toronto.
The latest golf products are being shown to BPG Members and Guests from Wednesday, October 16th through Friday, October 18th, providing one-stop shopping for golf professionals and golf clubs.
The BPG Buying Group represents over 150 golf shops who are members of the PGA of Canada and their objective is to offer their Members a partnership with a select group of professionals from across Canada and provide management of their day to day activities through an electronic centralized billing service. Rebates are provided to BPG Members on all purchases made with BPG authorized vendors, including all major Canadian Golf Vendors. They also provide services such as the golf show, seminars and golf tournaments and a networking outlet with top professionals from across Canada.
Flagstick caught up with Martin Boucher, General Manager of the BPG Buying Group, and asked about the success of this year’s show and the growth of his Group.
“We’re excited about our 7th Annual Buying Show at the Brookstreet Hotel where five of the seven shows have been held. It’s a great venue for us and they take care of us. The thing that I love the most about this is product and you can buy the product anywhere and a lot of it is done here but the networking that is done here is phenomenal. That is what the Brookstreet Hotel gives us other than everyone is staying here at the hotel, everyone has dinner in the restaurants and that’s just a big bonus to what we do.
The education component is new to us. We tested it out last year with Greg Patterson for one capsule which was great and this year we had the full day with five different subjects, special speakers and it was a great success. We had a lot of demand for it probably because there’s not a lot done through the PGA. There is some coaching and teaching but never on the best of the business for golf professionals. I think that’s something we’re going to keep on developing and trying to make better on a year to year basis.
The one thing we would love to see that we don’t always get; a lot of people don’t realize that the BPG Buying show is open to everyone within the industry. Most of the Clubs all buy product and they’re all part of the industry and we’d love to see them come out to this show. We’re not getting that support from the local clubs and I think they would gain by coming here and seeing people from the industry, and building relationships whether they’re members or not, we’d love to see them here.
Our company is still growing and we’re at 155 Members right now. We have fifteen applications for membership so we should be at 170 Members next year and growing. A lot of our growth is coming out of Western Canada so we’ve hired a consultant – Mike Loftus to help us out. Mike has been in the golf business for 50 years and is well established in Western Canada. He’s helped us open more doors in Alberta and B.C. and that will keep growing and we still have 4 or 5 new Ontario accounts for 2020.
Our team is myself, my son Dominik and Jody Levoy, our Member Services Manager who started with us this past January. We are looking to hire one more person to join our team in addition to Mike in Calgary and Elena Furlan, our consultant for Eastern Canada.”
The BPG Buying Group has their office at the Camelot Golf & Country Club in Cumberland, Ontario and, after a brief rest, the planning begins for their 2020 Show at the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata.
Dominik Boucher, Jody Levoy and Martin Boucher 
James Cronk, Doug Rankin, Paul Sherratt, Cory Kartusch, Trevor Fackrell and Steven Brosseau 
Kevin Lund, Maxime Dion, Lesley Hawkins and Padraig Kelly 
Padraig Kelly and Danielle Nadon 
Trevor Hains
