Batesville will gain a factory for ATVS

Bad Boy to hire 150 over 5 years

Bad Boy Mowers, a manufacturer of zero-turn lawn mowers and all-terrain vehicles, plans to invest $7.4 million and hire 150 workers over the next five years, the Batesville firm said Thursday.

The expansion will be for the production of allterrain vehicles, said Scott Lancaster, general counsel at Bad Boy. The all-terrain vehicles are made on a limited basis now, Lancaster said.

“We’re in the process of setting up a dealer network and beginning to massproduce these,” Lancaster said. “We’ll be making 10 new models in four to six months.” With the expansion, Bad Boy will have more than 550 employees.

Bad Boy’s coowners, Phil Pulley and Robert Foster, started the business in 1998 in Foster’s garage in Diaz, about 30 miles east of Batesville, Lancaster said.

“Robert is our design person,” Lancaster said. “He kept buying lawn mowers for his private use and they kept breaking down. He said, ‘I can build one better than this.’ So he built one that was rock solid. The first person to try it said, ‘This is one bad boy,’

so they decided to call them Bad Boy mowers.”

In 2002, Pulley and Foster built a plant in Batesville to manufacture their growing business. In 2002, the company sold about 350 mowers, Lancaster said.

“We’re on track to sell 23,000 to 26,000 units this year,” Lancaster said. “It’s been huge and steady growth. There haven’t been any peaks or valleys.”

Bad Boy makes everything that’s orange on the riding mowers and all-terrain vehicles, Lancaster said, which excludes the engines and seats.

“We build them from scratch,” Lancaster said. “The raw metal comes in quarterinch or thicker sheets about the size of a piece of plywood. We run five assembly lines. They come in one end of our facility as a flat piece of metal and they come out the other end as ready-to-use lawn mowers.”

Bad Boy will break ground later this month, with construction to end in about six months, Lancaster said. Bad Boy will begin hiring workers after the plant is completed. New employees — roughly 30 hires a year — will be trained by the company, so no experience is required, Lancaster said.

The mowers are now made and stored in several facilities covering more than 650,000 square feet in Batesville and Melbourne.

Bad Boy will receive $1.5 million in incentives from the state for the expansion, plus about $750,000 in employment incentives, Lancaster said. The Independence County Development Commission also supplied a $500,000 incentive for the project, Lancaster said.

Nonsupervisory jobs will pay an average of $16 an hour, Lancaster said. That amounts to about $33,280 a year. Independence County’s per-capita income is $19,912, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The county’s unemployment rate was 7.9 percent in December, slightly higher than Arkansas’ unemployment rate of 7.7 percent that month.

“Anywhere you are seeing jobs created at [above-average] wages, which is what you have to have to thrive in the future, it is very important,” said Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

With manufacturing under duress for years, it’s good that there are announcements like Bad Boy’s to help compensate for announcements of layoffs, Deck said.

“Of course, you can’t replace a job lost in Fort Smith with one created in Batesville, but it is really important for the overall employment of the state,” Deck said.

It is good news when a local firm expands and hires more employees, said Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

“But it doesn’t necessarily mean only local residents will be hired,” Pakko said. “People may relocate to the area to take advantage of the jobs. But there will be spillover effects. The money will be spent in the community for services and other activities, and it will be a net benefit for the community.”

Hiring 150 people over five years will not make or break a county’s economy, Pakko said.

“But it’s one of those little bits of information about small firms expanding and hiring,” Pakko said. “Those small stories can add up to economic recovery.”

Bad Boy also has its own transportation system, delivering the mowers and all-terrain vehicles by 18-wheel trucks to dealers throughout the country, Lancaster said. The machines also are sold in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The company’s residential line of mowers, which sell for about $2,900 to $4,999, are the second-leading models of zero-radius turn mowers in the country, behind exmark/toro, Lancaster said.

Much of Bad Boy’s growth has been through word-ofmouth recommendations, but the company also has some high-profile marketing sponsors, such as country singers Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Rascal Flatts, he said. The company also advertises at professional bull-riding events, Lancaster said.

“A lot of those guys believe in our product so much that they don’t even charge us to be spokespeople,” Lancaster said. “Merle Haggard called a few weeks ago and had written a jingle for this next year that he wanted us to listen to.”