Auto motive: our Small Business of the Year winner is a real wheeler dealer.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: FEATURE

In 1897, W.T. Jones built his wife a Victorian mansion, still standing on Carthage's main street a few blocks from where it circles Moore County's courthouse. He was the president of Tyson & Jones Buggy Manufacturing Co., which in 1890, its best year, built more than 3,000 horse-drawn carriages and shipped them all over creation. The company put the tiny town of Carthage on the map. Then came the automobile.

In 1987, with four used cars and $800 in his pocket, 21-year-old Richard Yow opened Rick's Auto Sales across from the old limestone courthouse. He fixed and spiffed up the vehicles he sold himself, swabbing Joy dishwashing detergent on the tires to make them shine--"they looked great until it rained"--because he could not afford the Armor All dressing big dealers used.

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The business shared a building with a fish market, and once upon returning from vacation, he discovered the owners hadn't paid their electric bill. "The power was out and the cooler was off, so the fish went bad. They'd dumped them down the storm drain." Rick's Auto Sales expanded, taking the whole building. "It took me two years to get the smell out."

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This year, what is now Rick's Auto Marketing Center, three miles away on the outskirts of town, will sell more than $4 million of cars and trucks whose leases, held by some of the state's largest companies, have expired. That's up from $2.8 million in 2004, when sales increased $430,000 from the previous year. Most buyers are Tar Heels who visit the lot on U.S. 15-501, rolling through the Sandhills between Sanford and Southern Pines.

Others shop by Internet, then fly to North Carolina, pick up their cars, take a vacation and drive home. Some have them shipped overseas. For them, Rick's Auto Marketing Center has put Carthage--estimated 2004 population: 2,169--on the map. That's one reason it's BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA's Small Business of the Year.

"I like the notion that you can still build a fair-sized enterprise somewhere other than in one of our big cities by finding a niche and working it," says Scott Daugherty, executive director of the Raleigh-based Small Business and Technology Development Center. "Also, his success is attributable to his service attitude. I don't care what kind of business you're in, that's got to be pervasive.

Daugherty was one of the judges in this year's competition, sponsored by BB & T Corp. The others were Ann Garner Riddle, vice president of T.W. Garner Food Co. in Winston-Salem, which was last year's winner, and David Kinney, the magazine's editor in chief.

Yow is a big small-business owner--he's 6-5--whose small-town surroundings conceal as much as they reveal about his business. As he walks through the shop in the 6,000-square-foot metal building he built in 1998, one of his nine full-time employees details a panel truck. "He doesn't speak much English, but he has a talent for fixing anything." Next door, pickups pull up in front of Luis General Store--Bait and Tackle.

In front of the glassed-in showroom are lines of nearly new Ford Tauruses and Explorers, Nissans and scattered Buicks, BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. To one side of the lot rests a row of identical Chevrolet commercial vans. At first glance, little distinguishes this place from hundreds of other used-car lots that dot the state, though in truth there are hardly any similarities. But here Richard Yow, 39, sells cars, which is all he ever wanted to do.

"My father worked for a Chevrolet dealership, and I thought that was the greatest job on earth. I love the concept of buying and selling something for more than you paid for it. If I bought a skateboard for $10, I'd want to turn around and sell it for $12. Once out of high school, all my friends went off to four-year colleges. I wanted to do cars, but my parents said, 'No, you're going to school.'" His associate's degree from Central Carolina Community College in Sanford is in industrial maintenance. "My parents said, 'Pick something--you're going.'"

But he came back to Carthage and opened his car lot across from the courthouse. "I remember sitting at my desk, thinking, 'Gosh, what am I going to do next?' Some days I had nothing to do." You had a 1972 Dodge wrecker, but he had to wait until his mother got home from work to retrieve the trade-ins he bought from dealerships that considered them too old or too worn out to bother trying to sell. "I had to take the tag off her car and put it on the wrecker."

Gross sales his first year in...