Today we’d like to introduce you to Dante Strom.
Dante, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Yes! I would be happy to. Thank you for the chance to share my story!
People alway laugh that I start with this, but I think it’s good to show were you came from. I started working at 16 at Subway making sandwiches, working full time all through High School. In college, I studied Marketing with a minor in Psychology. Early into my college experience, I took a leap of faith and applied for my dream job…selling private brands to corporate buyers! That process always intrigued me and I had to learn more.
To my surprise, with my limited experience but extreme work ethic and personal drive, I got the job! I was not only helping with their 20+ brands product marketing and brand positioning, but also building an in person sales process.
After a fun time with the 25+ brands I helped build, I unfortunately voluntarily left due to some conflicting ethical beliefs. That decision left me with a 5 year non-compete that held me back from any “Marketing” type jobs… which sounds cool on paper (“I have a non-compete”) but was actually super cumbersome. This meant I was mid-college for MARKETING and had to pivot my career to anything that wasn’t… Marketing.
I pretty much had to start my entire career from scratch. With my strong background in Marketing and Sales I had built this far, I was able to get an Account Executive Role at a Medical Clearing House. It was what felt like the only job that didn’t conflict with my non-compete and its complex lengths it went.
I was selling a SaaS Product for providers to get Health Insurance Credentialing so they can submit Medical Claims for the patients they treated and get payment back from the Insurance Companies.
I crushed my first year there and sold 150% of my quota by the second month alone. I strategically transferred my skills to a more lucrative Outbound Door to Door Sales Rep, and then finally I moved into Sales Leadership.
I’ve been screamed at, hung up on, ignored, every reaction you can imagine. Sales trained my brain in a way nothing else could. When you talk to hundreds of people a week, you stop guessing. You start recognizing patterns. You realize most outcomes aren’t random; they’re the result of process, timing, and understanding human psychology.
Pretty early on, when I first moved into leadership, I was just 22, didn’t have a college degree yet although I was in school for it, and suddenly I’m managing a team of about 80 people and had personally trained over 500 reps on how to sell. At one point, I actually think… if I’m remembering correctly my team had 10 out of our 80 people in the company’s top 50 performers. Eventually that grew to be around 15 or 16. I had a few people ask me what I was doing differently, my answer?
We didn’t have better leads or magic scripts. It was honestly because I got really disciplined about having radical candor with each person on my team stressing the importance of following the existing script, remembering your “why”, and most importantly removing ego from the process.
That experience changed how I see everything: Marketing, Leadership, Operations.
Now, everything I do sits in that overlap between Sales, Marketing, and Systems. Whether I’m rebuilding a process, scaling a business, or helping teams perform better, I always come back to the same framework: people, process, product, and performance (all being equally important. You can’t skip one and expect the others to carry it).
I don’t think I have some secret sauce. I think I’ve just been willing to stay in it longer than most people to test, fail, adjust, and keep going. I’ve been on those calls. I’ve knocked those doors. I know what it feels like to be one objection away from a Sale and walk away knowing, “I was close something small was off.”
That’s really what brought me here: experience stacked on experience, pressure forcing clarity, and a lot of learning the hard way, but learning it for real and then teaching others.
Now that my non-compete is up, I have been able to shift back into Marketing again and I absolutely love it! I was counting down the days to be able to shift back into this and in that time honed my Sales skills, but also my LinkedIn! Haha, I say that because I was headhunted by a high profile company to run their Marketing! (Because of my LinkedIn!)
I was headhunted a week after my non-compete was up. While I was there I helped them do 2 rebrands, launch 3 products, redo all their flyers and press releases…you name it! It was so fun to finally be back in something that I loved doing and now, I suddenly am better at it than before due to my added Sales experience!
I had a great time working for them, I am now at is with Golf and Fitness Utah. We own the Ranches Golf Club, The Ranches Fitness Center, The Venue at the Ranches, The Ranches Golf Simulator Lounge. We also have Tru Path Golf Academy, and Tru Path Jr. Golf Academy on the same property. I currently run their Sales and Marketing for all brands.
It’s been a big project to handle for sure, but due to it being such a small business feel with the owners being onsite and it not being a publicly traded company, I get to have my hands on a little bit of everything.
Our Event Venue just celebrated its 24-month open this last December 2025. In that short time period, it received 11 features across British Vogue and Vogue Retail. Due to it being such a new venue, we didn’t haven’t enough images to submit for these features and ironically I volunteered for my first modeling gig to be the model! This means I happen to be in 5/11 of those shots! I was actually invited to go to New York Fashion Week as a result of this and was able to go to that this last fall for the first time ever.
This last month we launched Tru Path Golf Academy and Tru Path Jr. Golf Academy and I found out that I was nominated for Business Elites 30 under 30 program! That’s always been a dream of mine to make big waves in an industry and do it before I was 30.
I’ve taken a very unique path to get where I am today, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. I’m uniquely me, and I love that. It reminds me of the quote that says “be fearlessly authentic” I actually have that on my mirror in my closet and look at it every morning as a reminder.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
NO! Ha it definitely hasn’t been smooth. I don’t say that in a dramatic way, just in an honest one. A lot of the struggle for me wasn’t some big public failure, it was internal pressure. Being young and being put in charge early sounds great on paper, but in real life it’s uncomfortable. I didn’t have a degree yet, I didn’t have the “normal” resume background people expect, I’m a mom in her 20’s and suddenly I’m responsible for outcomes revenue, performance, other people’s livelihoods. That messes with your head if you’re being honest about it.
I also learned pretty quickly that effort doesn’t equal results. I was working insanely hard at times and still coming up short. I remember moments where everything felt right the people were good, the product was solid, the process made sense and yet we weren’t converting at the level we should’ve been.
That’s frustrating, because you want to believe that if you just try harder, it’ll fix itself. It doesn’t. One of the biggest struggles was ego, mine and other people’s.
Early on, I thought if I understood something, everyone else would just follow it naturally. That’s not how humans work. People resist structure. They fight process. They think they know better than psychology. I had to learn how to build systems that worked despite that, not because everyone agreed with me.
There were also plenty of moments where I was close… painfully close. One objection away. One follow-up away. One KPI not being tracked cleanly. Those moments mess with you because you replay them over and over thinking, “If I’d just caught that sooner…” But that’s also where the growth came from. Being on those calls, feeling that tension, is what trained me to see small problems before they turn into big ones.
Another real struggle was consistency. Not motivation, consistency. Doing the boring work when no one’s watching. Practicing objections on a Saturday night. Building follow-up systems instead of chasing shiny ideas. Holding people accountable even when it’s uncomfortable. That stuff doesn’t get applause, but it’s what actually moves the needle.
I’ll be honest, there were plenty of times where things didn’t work out. Where I had to admit I was wrong, scrap something I believed in, and rebuild it. That’s humbling. It also taught me not to romanticize struggle or success. Both are temporary if you’re not disciplined.
So no, it hasn’t been smooth. But I don’t see that as a negative. The friction is what sharpened my thinking. Every hard moment forced clarity about people, process, performance, and about myself. And honestly, I wouldn’t trust my own perspective today if it had been easy.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
What I do today is really the result of my entire career collapsing into one lane. I sit at the intersection of marketing, sales, and operations, and my job is to make sure those three things actually work together instead of fighting each other.
I specialize in building revenue systems, not just campaigns. I’ve spent years on the sales side, on phones, door to door, managing teams, training reps,
training managers.. so I don’t approach marketing from a creative-only perspective. I approach it from a conversion perspective. Every message, funnel, offer, and follow-up has to answer the same question: does this help a real person move closer to a decision? If it doesn’t, it’s noise.
Where operations comes in is where most businesses break. I’m known for tightening the gaps, the handoff between marketing and sales, the follow-up after, the tracking of KPIs that actually matter, and the accountability systems that prevent “we think it’s working” from becoming the default. I don’t just build top-of-funnel awareness; I build systems that hold teams accountable all the way through close and retention.
Across my career, I’ve worked in environments where scalability mattered. From training hundreds of reps, onboarding thousands of hires, running high-volume pipelines all lead me to think in a way about systems and their efficiency early on in my
career. That experience is what allows me to step into very different industries and see the same patterns show up over and over again. Different product, same human behavior. Different brand, same breakdowns between intention and execution.
What I’m most proud of is being able to take complex businesses and make them simple without dumbing them down. At Golf and Fitness Utah, that means aligning multiple brands, Golf, Fitness, and Events under one Revenue Strategy instead of treating them as separate silos. Marketing speaks the same language as Sales. Sales follows a process that Operations can support. And performance is measured clearly enough that decisions aren’t emotional … they’re informed.
What sets me apart is that I didn’t come up through one lane. I didn’t start in Marketing and learn Sales later, or start in Operations without ever selling. I’ve lived in all three. I know what it takes to build an Ad and post it and track it, I know what it feels like to be one objection away from a close, and I know what it feels like to be responsible for the system that either makes that close possible or impossible. That perspective changes how you build everything.
At the end of the day, I’m known for turning effort into outcomes. Not by working harder, but by designing systems that make it easier for people to do the right thing consistently. That’s the highlight of my career and it’s what I care about most.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Most of my collaborations happen when someone knows something isn’t working but can’t quite see where it’s breaking.
That might be the Marketing Leads are coming in but not converting, your Sales Team is working hard without consistent results, or you have Marketing that looks good but doesn’t move Revenue. I work best with Founders, Operators, and Teams who are willing to look honestly at their numbers, their process, and their follow-up, not defensively, just objectively.
At Golf and Fitness Utah, collaboration often starts internally. I work closely with Sales, Operations, Marketing and Leadership to align messaging, expectations, and accountability.
That same approach extends externally when I’m advising or partnering: clear goals, clear roles, clean data, and regular feedback loops. I’m not the person to bring in if you want hype or shortcuts … I’m the person you bring in when you want something to actually perform and you are willing to do what it takes to get your business there.
For people who want to support my work, You can follow me on LinkedIn, or Instagram to follow my personal journey.
I would also love to invite you to follow our brands on social media and LinkedIn.
The Ranches Golf Club, The Ranches Fitness, The Venue at the Ranches, The Ranches Simulator Lounge, Tru Path Golf Academy, and Tru Path Jr. Golf Academy.
Thanks again for the time, can’t wait to hear from all of you reading.
Pricing:
- Unlimited Golf Membership Starting at $99/mo
- Weddings and Corporate Events starting at $700/half day
- Unlimited Golf Simulator Memberships starting at $135/mo
- Fitness Memberships starting at $35/mo
- Golf Academy Memberships starting at $85/mo
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theranchesgolfclub.com, www.theranchesvenue.com, and www.theranchesfitness.com
- Instagram: @Dante_strom @theranchesgolfclub @theranchesfitness @theranchesvenue
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dantestrom
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/g4zvg31S_UU
