Seventh College of Business Alumnus Honored by Forbes 30 Under 30

Forbes 30 Under 30 North America 2025 honored a seventh College of Business alumnus for their golf ball recovery e-commerce company.

Ballz 4 Change, founded by Maxamillian Sherman, '21 Business Administration major, and his partner, Michael Hulle, is a start-up e-commerce company that retrieves lost golf balls in lakes, canals, and rivers to resell the balls at a lower cost. 

"My business partner and I were both former golfers, and he told me one day how he would look for golf balls in the banks of lakes around golf courses, and the idea sparked from there," Sherman said. 

A team of contracted divers will retrieve lost golf balls, which are then brought back to their facility in South Florida, where they undergo a sanitization process to clean the balls. The balls are later repackaged and sold at 50% below retail costs. 

It was a personal mission for Sherman, who, as a former Division 1 golf athlete, saw a part of the market that was not being served. 

"In the new golf ball market, they are priced far too high for the average college student to be able to afford them," Sherman said. "Since we started during COVID, we took advantage of the online space since physical stores were being avoided, and the typical person is shopping online anyway." 

A big part of their success stems from their social media advertising and staking a claim online; they leveraged TikTok, Instagram, and Meta to reach out to a younger consumer group for their products. 

Sherman, who also majored in entrepreneurship while studying at the College of Business, credits much of the course work for giving him a solid background to plan his start-up from the ground up. The finance classes he took ensured that he had financial awareness when it came to balance sheets. The senior entrepreneur class taught him how to use a SWAT analysis to decide his venture's feasibility before launching it. 

Now, his company is valued at $4.8 million and is set to reach $5 million in revenue by the end of 2025. They have a partnership with the South Florida PGA. Sherman and Hulle plan to increase their client base from 135,000 clients before potentially diversifying their product line to include golf clubs and apparel. 

Sherman joins a growing list of entrepreneurs fostered in the entrepreneurial system in the College of Business who have also been honored by Forbes 30 Under 30: Jan Bednar, Shipmonk; Alex Schulze and Andrew Cooper, 4Ocean; Hannah Herbst, Beacon;  Arielle Baril, Rielli,Kyle Lansing, Strawfish. 

-FAU-