6,124% Growth Almost Killed This Pickleball Franchise. Here's What Saved It.

From Hobby to Franchise

Jorge Barragan opened the first Picklr club in Northern Utah in April 2021 with seven courts and what he'd later describe as a straightforward bet: dedicated indoor pickleball facilities didn't exist at scale, and they should.

That bet looked different at the time than it does now. Pickleball had a reputation problem. A lot of people still filed it under "retirement community sport" or treated the name itself as a punchline. The actual numbers told a different story. The sport was adding players at a rate no other sport in the country could match, and those players had nowhere purpose-built to go. Most were showing up at converted tennis courts, community center gyms, and church parking lots with portable nets.

The market gap wasn't subtle. Barragan saw that players were serious, facilities weren't, and the distance between those two facts was a business opportunity. Repurposed big-box retail spaces — the ones left behind by the last wave of retail closures — turned out to be close to perfect for indoor courts. High ceilings, large floor plates, existing parking. The real estate math worked.

By the time 24.3 million people were playing pickleball annually, The Picklr was already several years into proving the model. But in April 2021, it was one location, seven courts, and a sport that most franchise investors weren't yet taking seriously.

When Growth Becomes the Problem

Four clubs in four months sounds like momentum. At the time, it probably felt like it. But momentum and infrastructure are two different things, and in 2022, The Picklr was adding locations faster than it was building the organizational muscle to support them.

Then came franchising. Once the model opened to franchise operators, the pace went from aggressive to something closer to unmanageable. Roughly one new club per week. That number looks impressive in a press release. Inside the organization, it created a different kind of problem: every new location needed trained staff, consistent operations, a playbook for member experience, and a support structure that could answer questions at scale. None of that exists automatically. You build it, or you don't, and if you don't, the locations that opened last week are already running on improvisation.

The Picklr went from 27 clubs to 64 in a single year. That kind of growth rate — the kind that earns a No. 43 ranking among the fastest-growing companies in America — has a way of exposing every gap in your systems simultaneously. What works across three locations stops working across thirty. Processes that lived in people's heads because there were only a few people who needed to know them suddenly needed to be documented, trained, and repeatable across dozens of operators who had never met the founding team.

The sport kept growing. The demand was real. The question was whether the organization could catch up to its own ambition before the wheels came off.

The Systems That Held It Together

The answer Barragan landed on wasn't complicated, but it required discipline to actually execute: standardize everything that could be standardized, and document it before the next location opened, not after.

That meant building playbooks. Operational guides that covered how a facility runs, how staff gets trained, how member experience gets delivered consistently whether the club is in Utah or anywhere else a franchise operator signed on. The big-box retail conversion model already gave The Picklr a structural advantage here. Repurposed retail spaces are predictably sized, predictably laid out, and predictably equipped with the ceiling height and floor plate that indoor pickleball requires. When your physical footprint is replicable, your operational playbook has a fighting chance of being replicable too.

Training infrastructure followed the same logic. At three locations, institutional knowledge lives in the founding team. At 64, it has to live somewhere else — in documented processes, repeatable onboarding, and support systems that don't require a direct line to headquarters to answer a basic operational question.

The discipline was in treating the systems as the product. Not the courts, not the brand, not the demand — all of which were already working. The systems were what made the demand serviceable at scale, and without them, going from 27 clubs to 64 in a single year would have been a liability instead of a milestone.

What 27 to 64 Clubs Actually Teaches You

The companies that land on fastest-growing lists aren't always the ones that grew fastest. They're often the ones that grew fast enough, and built correctly enough, that they survived to be counted.

Going from 27 clubs to 64 in a single year is not a clean win. It is a stress test applied to every assumption your organization made when it was smaller. Staff training that worked at 10 locations either scales or it doesn't. Member experience standards that lived in the founding team's institutional memory either get documented or they get diluted. Every gap that seemed manageable at 20 clubs becomes an active problem at 50.

What The Picklr's trajectory actually demonstrates is that the ranking — No. 43 on the fastest-growing companies list — is a lagging indicator. It measures what survived. The organization that earned that number wasn't the one moving fastest; it was the one that treated playbooks and training infrastructure as primary deliverables before the next wave of locations opened.

That discipline is harder to maintain than it sounds. When demand is real and franchise operators are ready to sign, the pressure is always toward opening faster, not toward documenting more thoroughly. The Picklr's 6,124% growth rate is the number that gets the headline. The operational systems are what made that number survivable.