No Laying Up: How four friends with local ties built an online golf empire

A round of golf usually presents an unavoidable incident. 

One in which a golfer must make a decision: go for it, or play it safe. 

In that way, golf is like life. 

Life presents circumstances and sometimes those circumstances intersect at the right place and right time, with the right people. 

That’s how four friends, who happened to be golf fans, created No Laying Up – a rapidly-growing online golf brand that's cultivated a massive audience and major brand partnerships with Callaway Golf, BMW and Charles Schwab. 

And it all started here in Southwest Ohio. 

Phil Landes, Todd Schuster and Chris Solomon met as students at Miami University from 2004-2008. 

Landes is from Cincinnati. He graduated from Mariemont High School in 2002 before he went on to play college basketball at Washington & Lee University. 

A coaching change after his freshman year was the first domino to fall into place. 

Despite his lengthy frame, Landes wasn’t a post player. 

“I was a little bit rail-thin and much more of a guard trapped in a taller body,” said Landes, who's often referred to by his nickname, "Big Randy." 

His new coach wanted Landes down low in the paint, where most players taller than 6-foot-6 reside. 

“Randy was like, ’No dude, I’m a point guard. I don’t bang down low,’” laughed Todd. “He ended up quitting after his sophomore year and transferred back to Miami and that was how I met him.” 

Schuster and Solomon lived across the hall in the same dorm during their freshman year. Landes and Schuster were both in the Kappa Alpha fraternity, and soon the three of them formed a friendship. 

“I think I had asked Randy if he wanted to go up to the Memorial (a PGA Tour event at Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio) one year,” said Todd.  

Dublin is Solomon’s hometown, so they stayed at his parent's house during the tournament, “and we did that a couple years in a row and that was kind of the start of our friendship between the three of us with golf as the main conduit,” Todd said. 

‘We never set out to start a business which I think is one of our secrets to success’ — Landes

After Miami, work took them in different directions. Landes went to business school at Indiana University before landing a job in public accounting. Solomon worked in accounting for KPMG in Chicago, and Todd worked for the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. 

They stayed in contact with a text message thread that ultimately served as the genesis for No Laying Up. 

“They had a text thread and they added me in because I knew those guys from going to visit (Miami) and it was really your classic thread with your buddies but about golf,” said Neil Schuster, Todd’s younger brother and the company’s fourth co-founder. 

The endless barrage of text messages produced an idea. 

“We had the text chain for a couple years and … I just remember a few years into the real world we were starting to think that we gotta do something with this,” said Solomon. “I don’t even know how we landed on golf, but the conversation always came back to golf.” 

So, Solomon created a Twitter account in early 2013. He called it No Laying Up and shared the password with his associates, unaware they were about to systematically create dream jobs. 

“Thinking back, it’s like oh my God, we were just blasting these stupid golf thoughts into the ether," said Landes.  “…I remember when we hit 100 followers, and it was like this is incredible. Why are 100 people following us? Who are these people? There was very slow growth – some people are starting to follow this, but we didn’t have a longer outlet.” 

They had another idea, one that would allow them to expound upon their thoughts in more detail. At the time, Twitter only allowed 140 characters in a single tweet, so the next move was a website. 

‘I wrote the first article which was about a guy wanted for murder that got spotted in a PGA superstore banging balls in a simulator’ — Neil

Neil was working for a tech startup in San Francisco.

The Schuster brothers are from Atlanta, but their parents are both from Ohio and their dad, Steve, is a 1972 St. Xavier High School grad. 

Neil, who played football at Columbia University, was the clear choice to help handle the new technical endeavor. 

Walking through downtown San Francisco to get 49ers tickets in November 2013, Neil got a call from his brother, Landes and Solomon. 

“At the time, the startup I worked for was a tech company,” said Neil. “They’re like, ‘You’re in tech’ – I was in sales, so I wasn’t a coder – but they asked if I could build a blog and I said absolutely.” 

Neil watched YouTube videos to learn how to build a website. He was also lucky that his roommate at the time was able to help him polish it and build the WordPress site, which took nearly all of December. The first article was published on Jan. 1, 2014.  

Among other things, they’d write weekly previews for tournaments, still to very little fanfare or readership. 

“At any given time over the first year to 18 months somebody would get busy or burnt out,” said Neil. “And nobody’s reading any of this. It’s like 500 Twitter followers but we’re all reading it and we’re laughing and helping each other out. 

“I know I’m gonna spend two hours writing this weekly preview for the Valspar (Championship) and my brother, Randy and Soly are gonna read it and laugh so that’s kind of enough of a reason to do it.” 

The next watershed moment was in April 2014 when they recorded their first podcast episode at the Heritage, a PGA Tour event in Hilton Head, South Carolina. 

At the time, podcasts were becoming more and more popular and No Laying Up recognized an opening and seized upon the timing. 

“We were extremely lucky with the timing,” said Landes. “We joked that golf was consistently about five years behind the times.” 

Where other major sports were already being flooded with blogs and podcasts, golf wasn’t. 

“What we soon realized was there’s not really a golf podcast and more than a podcast, there’s not really a golf outlet,” Landes said. 

‘Maybe we’ll get a couple free rounds out of this’ — Neil 

Early on the goals were pretty simple. They thought if they can get a few free rounds of golf or make enough money to pay for one golf trip a year then it would all be worth it. 

They had no idea it would evolve into quitting their day jobs to focus full-time on No Laying Up. 

Shortly after the website went up, Solomon accepted an offer from his company to move to Amsterdam, where he spent the next 33 months. When it was time for him to move back to Chicago and re-join his firm, he decided to quit and go all-in on No Laying Up. 

“We’re all living lives and this thing could have died easily,” Landes said. “I give Soly the most credit. I feel like he really kept it going at certain stages before we had any sponsorships and we were kind of plateaued at this relatively small audience. He was stubborn enough and then got some breaks with networking and meeting certain players.” 

A few months later, Todd followed Solomon’s lead, then Landes, and eventually, Neil left his job at Google. In addition to its merchandise line, No Laying Up's audience growth associated with its digital content produced advertising revenue which made their business model profitable and their work ethics relentless because they had bet on themselves to succeed. 

Now, Solomon hosts the podcast and runs the main Twitter account which has more than 200,000 followers. Landes handles all the finances. Todd’s like a utility club that does a bit of everything from planning trips and events, to writing and editing, as well as helping Neil handle the merchandise. And they’re all involved someway in content creation. 

Recently, No Laying Up added video production to its list of undertakings. With that, they hired a fifth full-time member to the team: DJ Piehowski, a former PGA Tour employee, who’s become an essential part of No Laying Up’s content creation. 

“I think my job title’s almost more of a consigliere if you want to think about ’The Godfather,’” said Piehowski. “I’m not necessarily part of the family but I’m integrated into just about everything you can be.” 

Since Piehowski arrived, No Laying Up’s venture into video has produced two popular golf travel series which have taken them all over the world and a competition series that recently featured 17-time PGA Tour winner Jim Furyk. 

There have been too many key moments along the way to name them all, but the initial sponsorship with Callaway got the ball rolling. Then during the 2016 Ryder Cup, PGA star Rory McIlroy, who’s sponsored by Nike, saw a No Laying Up t-shirt design and asked if he could get some for his friends. 

“I’m basically sending 40 shirts to some random address in Belfast (Ireland) like this is crazy,” said Neil, who got a cease and desist letter from Nike two weeks later. “I remember being like, ‘I’m going to frame this cease and desist as a turning point.’” 

McIlroy would eventually be a guest on the podcast. Same with Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson ahead of their 2018 pay-per-view match. Major winners Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth have also been on the show. 

"It's been this series of natural progressions," said Todd. "Our intent has never been to get views or clicks. We just want to put out quality content that we would watch and that we feel serves golf fans, and the other stuff will take care of itself." 

In the last six years, No Laying Up has advanced astronomically. They now have two podcasts that regularly reach a six-figure audience, more than 450,000 followers and subscribers across all social media platforms, as well as a popular merchandise brand.  

‘I think about that all the time … the butterfly effect of this thing’ — Solomon

Any number of things could have derailed this. Nothing did. 

“That’s the miracle of all of this,” said Solomon. “You can pluck one little thing out and none of it happens. 

“Here we are. It’s something I think about all the time and how incredibly fortunate we are.” 

They worked hard and they didn’t give up, and sometimes when those two things are present, the breaks might just fall the right way. 

If someone’s never played golf, they likely have to be explained what “No Laying Up” means. 

“It came from a mindset of guys that weren’t afraid to take chances or take things in their own control,” said Solomon. “It ended up becoming a great metaphor for us but I promise that was not the intention at the time. It was never about being reckless, it was like I love to celebrate the players that when presented with a huge challenge it was confidence in their ability that drove their decision as opposed to fear of what would happen if things went wrong.”