Brad’s Kickstart ATV (609 East Taft Avenue) is a new business in the area selling and repairing four-wheelers, as well as performing service on the occasional scooter or motorcycle. Owned by Brad Brown and his wife Karen, the store is already getting popular, but more on that, later.
Brown is about as self-taught as they come. His parents divorced and things got “really rough,” he says. They lived in motels and homeless shelters throughout his childhood, and Brad himself never graduated high school. He got his first job working at a restaurant and from there got a commercial license and became a truck driver. “That was a good deal for me, driving a truck for a while. It got me leaps and bounds ahead in life.”
Though he was making good money, his father told him he should pursue something that aligned with his goals in life. “He said, ‘You need to find something you really like,’ and I was racing dirt bikes at the time,” he said. His dad bought a scooter from a shop in Tulsa, and then Brad bought one too, and they were having so much fun riding the scooters together that Brad ended up getting a job there as a mechanic. Within eight months, he was managing the store. “It was a dying business when I became the manager,” he said. “We had to borrow $50,000 just to stay afloat, but from there we made it into a profitable business.”
When the owner of that shop wanted to retire, Brad moved to another shop called Metric Cycles in Tulsa that focused mostly on motorcycles, but also sold a few scooters. “I always wanted to do four-wheelers, so I started with a small shipment and became a dealer and kept turning four-wheelers and it worked out well. It became the business it was for the next ten years,” he said. The store was owned by Tracy Farr, who came from a family of bike racing legends. “I owe all my success to Metric Cycles.”
Much like the situation before, the owners wanted to retire, and so they sold the company to a new owner, and that change in ownership was the push that Brad and his wife Karen had been looking for to open their new shop. “We’ve been praying about it, and I said, ‘God, I need something, I know what I can do, and I’ve already done it before for somebody,’ plus, we wanted to work together and figure out how we could do that.”
And so Brad’s Kickstart ATV was born. Brad and Karen don’t live in Sapulpa, but they’ve fallen in love with it. “We love the supportive atmosphere. We didn’t even know much about it; when we came here we just thought the location was good. But now, the whole community and everybody we meet is just amazing. Really, it blows our mind on how nice it is—even the relationship with the bank—It’s more, I don’t know, more relationship-based, everything around here.”
Kickstart ATV focuses on selling what they call “off-brand” four-wheelers, but the biggest benefit is that nearly every part of the product is universal. “This is the same carburetor that I can use on this one here, or that one over there,” Brad says, pointing across the shop. “There’s nothing on these bikes that takes more than two hours to fix,” he says. Kickstart also provides service for any and all of the four-wheelers they sell, plus a few they don’t.
So how does a guy who cut his teeth on dirt bikes and scooters take to selling four-wheelers? “It’s been really good,” he says, adding that the four-wheeler market has grown aggressively in the last few years. “So many parents and grandparents believe that they’re safer. The reality is, they’re both as safe as you make them,” he said. “But, very often, we’ll see a grandparent buy a four-wheeler for their kid for Christmas and then they’ll come back and get one for themselves, because they see what a blast their son or grandson is having.”
New four-wheelers start at about $800 for a kid-sized vehicle, which Brown says “can get a kid into something really nice,” and adults can get a new one for around $2,000. When the kid outgrows his smaller four-wheeler, they can trade it in for half of what they paid. “We sell used, but really, we sell a lot more of the newer ones, and then those families will keep buying from us because we offer such a great trade-in value.”
For the Browns and their six children—four of which still live at home—it’s all about the memories they’re helping to make. “Four-wheelers and dirt bikes have made some of the best memories of my entire life,” Brown says. “That’s what it’s really about to me is making memories together, and it brings the families together. And we’ve found that actually sells.”
