VO: Meet Bart Mahon is founder and owner of Buggies Unlimited the world’s largest supplier of golf cart gear with 48 employees in Richmond, Kentucky.

Bart: Golf cart gear is anything that you use to accessorize your golf cart or to repair your golf cart.

Actually I was wanting to combine my life’s passions of sports cars and golf and golf.

Back in 1999 we were rolling pretty well with the traditional golf cart dealership. Along came the dot com crash of Spring 2000 and a lot of discretionary income of the retirees evaporated. 401 Ks went to 101 Ks. And I made about every mistake you could make as a traditional golf card dealership.

We scaled back from 16 employees and two stores to one store in Kentucky and only 5 employees. **We were at the bottom of the abyss looking up.

I started liquidating assets to keep the company afloat I’m not ashamed to tell you I sold a coveted sports car to make payroll one month.

Another month I sold an exclusive country club membership to make payroll. I took the old credit cards and had 9 credit cards that I had cash advances maxed out to $143,000. So there was no quitting. There was no option. We new we had hit on something so that’s where our focus was.

VO: Bart went back to what he knew best and launched a catalog and Internet company targeting do it yourselfers. Today he’ll do $1.5 million in sales per month.

Bart: We have a staff of – we call them the cart guys – people who have been in the golf cart industry for 15 to 30 years. These people don’t grow on trees. We have recruiting efforts all around the country. You combine these people with an engineer that we hired on staff and they collaborate and come up with ways to improve existing products in the golf cart industry.

With the rapid growth we were trying to get personnel to fill the void so I decided to beef up our employee compensation package. I was trying to make it fun to come into work.

Then when we chose to a couple of years ago hire a hospitality manager, Jazzman, James Baker. That was the X factor. He’s our hospitality manager Jazzman is the company chef. We provide lunch for all of our associates Monday through Friday. He is the company chauffeur. The employee of the month gets a night on the town in the limo with $500 cash to spend any way they want. The employee of the year gets $5,000 and a night on the town plus he entertains our vendors when they come into town.

He’s the glue I guess you could say that holds the thing together. He’s Mr. Hospitality.

It’s obviously easy for me to come in everyday. For all of the associates I want them to enjoy and look forward to coming into work as much as I do.

If someone doesn’t take you under their wing, find somebody’s wing and crawl under it…

I feel like Rocky Balboa. Get knocked down on the mat so many times but I was too stupid to lay there I kept getting back up. I feel like one of the biggest things that an entrepreneur does is we’re the push factor. We are relentless. We do not stop. We just have to press on. Press on.