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Ben Cowan-Dewar has the look of a man who’s enjoying his life. Sipping on a beer in the library of a swanky hotel on Saint Lucia, he is telling me about his new golfing venture on the island – Point Hardy Golf Club – a Coore & Crenshaw design. It’s the latest in a series of projects that have established his company, Cabot, as one of the pre-eminent golf development firms on the planet. He’s only 43-years-old but he now has properties in Canada, Scotland, the Caribbean and the USA. He has every right to be quietly confident. But above all that success, Cowan-Dewar is quite simply a very nice man who is exactly where he wants to be.
“I think the greatest joy in life and in business is to do what you love with people you love doing it with. There is no substitute for that,” he says. “I think success follows that. It’s easier to follow your passion, to work all the hours, if you’re loving it and you want to do it for those around you.”
(Image credit: Jacob Sjöman)
Cowan-Dewar has enjoyed tremendous success in the golf industry in a short space of time. But his career path started early.
From a young age, there were clear hints that Cowan-Dewar’s future lay in the world of golf course development. As a young kid, living on the family farm in Ontario, he started to see the potential for golf holes across the property and was soon building greens and tees. He travelled and golfed extensively as a young man, playing many of the world’s great courses. By the time he got to the University of Toronto he had strong ambitions to work in golf.
“I was an entrepreneur probably before I knew what an entrepreneur was,” he says. “At university, I started a golf travel business, initially running tours to Scotland and Ireland.”
That was a successful little enterprise, but Cowan-Dewar quickly began to see further prospects.
“It was the start of the internet,” he says. “We saw an opportunity to help these international courses, and facilities with their digital marketing. If you were a golf resort in, say, the Caribbean, it was hard to connect to a client in Canada. The only option was print and mail, so we had a great opening there.”
For many of these famous international venues, great imagery was another missing element.
“I had the World Atlas of Golf, a book I loved from the age of about nine, and that had a few photos but that was basically it. So those were the only photos you’d see of Seminole or of Royal Melbourne. And so, all…
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