Lawn king: from headquarters near tiny Coatesville, Art Evans builds the world's fastest lawnmowers.

AuthorKaelble, Steve
PositionCover Story - Chief executive officer of Magic Circle Corp.

He may run a $40 million-and-growing company, but you're more likely to find Art Evans sporting a cap than a tie. And while he'll politely discuss sales strategies and growth forecasts, he's more interested in showing off a new, more powerful engine and explaining the mechanical assembly an employee is working on. He operates in a 21st century business world, but Evans' trademark is the shop rag hanging from his pocket.

In short, Evans may be chief executive of Magic Circle Corp., the Coatesville company that makes Dixie Chopper commercial lawn mowers, but in his heart he's really chief tinker. He says his staff set up an office for him--"They got embarrassed about me not having an office," he explains--but he's much more likely to be found in the company's R&D area, experimenting with some new way to make the Dixie Chopper more powerful or more durable.

Evans prides himself on building mowers that are as dependable as an old Volkswagen, and his machines have earned the motto "the world's fastest lawnmower." Says Evans, "I spend every minute of every day trying to figure out how to wring more productivity out of this mower."

A THING ABOUT SPEED

Evans, it turns out, has a thing about speed. Years ago when he had a day job as a fork-truck driver for IBM in Greencastle, Evans moonlighted as a semiprofessional drag racer. He decided after 13 years that he wasn't going to make it as a dragracing pro, so he called upon his mechanical background and opened auto-parts and machine shops in Greencastle and near his childhood home of Coatesville, near the Hendricks-Putnam county line.

Then he spotted what he decided was the future of mowing at an Indiana State Fair exhibit. It was a "zeroturning-radius" machine, able to turn on a dime because the two drive wheels operated independently from one another. So taken was he with the concept that he opened a lawnmower distributorship, selling the Dixon and Grasshopper machines.

Evans began to tinker. "I took the transmission from a heavy-duty machine put it on a smaller, more corn-pact machine," he says. "I crossbred the two." The result was a hit with customers, and convinced him to go into the mower-making business. He created his own zero-turning-radius machine, built for speed and designed to last.

He settled on the name Dixie Chopper for a number of reasons. For one thing, as a drag racer he felt kinship with Southern rebels. The name also bore some resemblance to the two brands he initially crossbred...

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