Photo by Sarah Finnegan
Shella Sylla, left, works with Malinda Henderson, right, of Hoover on using a chipping wedge during a meeting of Sister Golf on June 5 at McDivot’s Golf Driving Range in Helena.
There’s more to the game of golf than just swinging a club. For Shella Sylla, it was the difference between struggling to meet sales goals at her job to surpassing them.
Sylla, a Hoover resident, started SisterGolf in 2013. The company teaches women to use golf as a business tool through private lessons, corporate workshops and boot camps. Sylla said many women she meets aren’t interested in golf or feel intimidated by the sport, so they never learn to play.
She was the same way.
“The connection wasn’t there for me,” Sylla said.
Sylla’s background is in banking and finance. When she started a job as a business banker, she was given a sales goal of $500,000 in loans closed each month. It sounded easy and her coworkers were achieving that goal, but Sylla struggled.
“I quickly found out that it was easier said than done,” Sylla said. “While I was struggling to meet those numbers, my coworkers, who were mostly male, were meeting those numbers and making it look easy.”
In the midst of some of those “disastrous” months, a coworker invited her to golf with them. Despite having little interest in the sport, she decided to try it out and take lessons.
Sylla found she actually liked golf and “it made for better relationships with my colleagues at work because now we had something else to talk about or bond over.”
When she was invited to join her co-workers in a golf tournament, she realized the networking potential of the game.
“I showed up to the tournament. It was me and a hundred guys. When you’re the only girl, it’s easy for you to stand out,” she said.
Other players came and introduced themselves to her, and it became the root of a network of professionals who could now refer businesses her way.
“Instead of me chasing down deals, networking, canvassing, cold calling … now I had a CPA that I had met saying, ‘Hey Shella, I have a client who needs $500,000 to close on a building, can I send you the deal?’” Sylla said. “I quickly went from struggling to meet my numbers to being a member of the Million Dollar Club [closing $1 million in sales in a month].”
That was a light bulb moment for Sylla. She said she first had the idea in 2002 to make golf lessons catered to professional women, but it was more than a decade before she decided to pursue that as a full-time business.
With SisterGolf, Sylla’s goal is teaching women more than just the mechanics of the game. Lessons and group events also cover terminology, score keeping, types of clubs and their uses, clothing, game pacing and more.
“We don’t just teach you how to swing a club, we teach you everything you need to know so you feel comfortable and confident when you step out on that golf course,” Sylla said. “That’s where we kind of fill in the gap.”
Sylla said golfing, both for enjoyment and for networking, is less about skill and more about understanding the fundamentals and keeping up with the game. Her own early days of golfing, she said, were much more like bowling because she couldn’t seem to get the ball off the ground.
“It doesn’t matter what your shot looks like,” Sylla said. “As long as you hit the ball and it moves forward, you’re in the game.”
Sylla said “seeing the lightbulb go off with women and seeing how it can really benefit them, and seeing the excitement when they realize they can really do it” is her favorite part of the job.
“Those moments are always great,” she said.
Through the game of golf, Sylla said she wants SisterGolf to encourage women to take chances and pursue opportunities in the workplace.
“Our goal is really professional development, to teach you how to not just survive but thrive in male-dominated industries,” she said.
SisterGolf offers special events for individuals, groups and companies at golf courses around Birmingham, including the TopGolf range downtown. Learn more about their services at sistergolf.com.
