Could this labor solution work in the United States?

For decades, Duncan Cheslett worked as a successful self-employed cabinetmaker. He turned to greenkeeping in the immediate aftermath of COVID — and is now building a business that provides freelance greenkeeping support for clubs across the United Kingdom.

After retiring from his furniture business, Cheslett, a keen golfer, turned to greenkeeping as a way of combining his love of golf — particularly golf architecture — with earning a living.

“I worked at several courses around the Manchester area and I loved it, but when you have worked for yourself all your life, your mind is always turning over business ideas,” he said. Cheslett conceived the Relief Greenkeeper concept initially as a way of being able to work part-time while expanding his horizons and working on a variety of courses that interested him.

He set up The Relief Greenkeeper as an umbrella under which he could market his services, on a freelance basis, to courses that might need an extra pair of hands for a few days from time to time, perhaps to cover sick leave, or to provide more labor at peak times. And he found that hard-pressed course managers loved the idea.

“Because I was self-employed, I could go and work for a club for a few days and they would not have to incur any of the many costs that arise when you have people on staff,” Cheslett said. “No National Insurance, pension contributions, or the like. I could charge an hourly rate that was good for me but was much cheaper for the club than paying a member of staff. And from my own point of view, working on a variety of courses was a great way to keep work interesting, and helped me make friends and contacts across the golf industry in the North-West.”

Cheslett has worked more than 20 courses and events, including Wallasey for the English Amateur, St Anne’s Old Links and Hesketh in Southport. He also worked at Royal Portrush for the Open.

Cheslett realized that the Relief Greenkeeper concept had the potential to do much more than manage his own working life.

“At every course, people would ask me about what I was doing, and express interest in doing the same — and nervousness about leaving a staff job and having to find work,” he said. “And everywhere I went, course managers told me that they would use a service like this. It was clear to me that some sort of agency that could connect greenkeepers and clubs would be a good thing for both parties.”

So he took his first additional freelance greenkeepers onto his books and began placing them with golf clubs requiring extra short-term staff.

“I’ve been able to supply my greenkeepers with steady work, saving them the time and stress of continually having to find and negotiate their own contracts and generally earning them a higher rate of pay than they would have received working at their former course,” he said.

Operations have focused on Cheslett’s home region, but now he has decided to roll the service out nationwide. “I know that the idea is sound, and there’s no reason that greenkeepers and clubs in all parts of the UK won’t find it as useful as those in the North-West do,” he said.

The expansion has already started, with Relief Greenkeepers at work in Lincolnshire, the West Coast of Ireland, Aberdeenshire and the Central Belt of Scotland. And Cheslett said that he is ready to take on more.

“I constantly have clubs calling me, saying they’ve heard about my service, and can I provide them with someone,” he said. “If I had more greenkeepers on my books, obviously I could and would.”

Interested professionals across the UK can contact Cheslett at the Relief Greenkeeper website, his email, or by phone at 07720 285376. “Any clubs who would like to have reliable, experienced freelance greenkeeping resource for between £23 and £30 an hour,” he said, “should do the same.”