This is an excerpt from Small Business School, the series on PBS.

Meet Bart Mahan, founder and owner of Buggies Unlimited; the world’s largest supplier of Golf cart gear with 48 employees in Richmond, Kentucky.

Bart Mahan: Well 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.

Back in 1999 we were really growing very well with the traditional golf cart dealership. Along came the Dotcom crash of spring of 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 so we scaled back from 16 employees and 2 stores down to 1 store in Kentucky and only five employees and then we decided, we were virtually, we’re 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 golf country club membership to make payroll. I took the old credit cards and had nine credit cards that I had cash advances on maxed out to $143,000.00 so there was no quitting. There was no option. We new we hit on something and so that’s where our focus was.

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

Bart Mahan: We have a staff; we call them the cart guys. They are people who have been in the golf cart industry for 15 to 30 years. These people obviously don’t grow on trees. We have recruiting efforts all around the country. Now 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 had the problem to try to get personnel to fill the void so I decided to beef up our employee compensation packages, trying to make it fun to come into work.

And then when we chose to a couple of years ago hire a hospitality manager; Jazzman, James Baker that was kin of the X factor. Jazzman is the company chef. We provide lunch for all of our associates Monday through Friday. He is the company chauffeur for the employee of the month, gets a night on the town in the limousine with $500 cash to spend any way they want. The employee of the year gets $5,000 and a night on the town in the limousine and plus he entertains our vendors when they come into town. He’s the glue. I guess you could say that holds the thing together. It’s obviously easy for me to come in everyday but 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 a lot of times, get knocked down on the mats so many times but I was too stupid to lay there so I kept getting back up. We are relentless, we do not stop and those are not going to stop, we just have to press on. Press on.