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Mike Huml shows off his Inc. 500 award.

“Racing in itself is risky. Speed is risky. Whether you're drag racing, rally racing, taking a bike down a quarter-mile track at 160 miles an hour...there's a lot of risk involved. And you wouldn't do it if you didn't enjoy being on the edge.”

As an entrepreneur, Mike “Slowboy” Huml, founder of Slowboy Racing, knows something about risk. He also knows quite a bit about speed: since founding the Indiana business out of his basement in 2002, Huml has seen sales revenue fly up 863.5%.

That kind of growth recently earned his business a place on the 2007 Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies. Slowboy, which came in at 297, was one of ten entrepreneurs invited to speak at Inc.'s Chicago kick off ceremony in October. The rural business manufactures and sells aftermarket motors and parts, mostly for rally racing.

Rally racing features road-legal cars with modified parts that make them competition-fast. The sport has garnered international popularity and is best known in the US through ESPN’s X-Games. Huml gestures to one of the turbo-charged vehicles in his shop. “If you took that car out there on the road and floored it, it would probably scare the begeezus out of you,” he laughs.

Slowboy began accelerating in 2002, when the successful sales executive found himself out of a job after a company buyout, “I remember thinking ‘How am I going to do this?’” he recalls. “I just had a baby boy, just got a new house and just got laid off. I had no income because my wife wasn’t working. So I had to at least get something to be able to pay my bills.”

Huml already had an idea to create a custom turbocharger housing to fit a stock Mitsubishi Eclipse. Early in the process, he contacted Tony Palamone, Director of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Small Business Development Center (SBDC), who connected him to the Self Employment Assistance Program at IUP. The SEA Program, sponsored by the State, offers business development instruction and counseling to the unemployed while simultaneously allowing them to collect unemployment as they are launching their business.

Huml followed up with Palamone for further assistance in developing his plan. “SEAP was a great program, but it was very general,” Huml reflects, “I met with Tony a lot more than just those few sessions. He could give me a lot more one-on-one assistance.”

By the time Huml came to the SBDC, he had already begun working on the pricing. “They helped me do the business plan and focus my idea in one direction rather than 500 directions, which is kind of how my mind works,” he said.

Palamone modifies, “One of the things I really give Mike a lot of credit for is when he wrote up his business plan, his vision was clear. It’s true his mind works at a million miles an hour, but ultimately when we went back and looked at his plan several years later, our reaction was, ‘WOW this was right on the money.’”

Slowboy’s first sales did not come easily: Huml made over 100 calls to potential manufacturers to produce the product he had developed. Without money to finance the production, however, no one was willing to take on his project.

“They said no. Actually, ‘no, no, no, no,’” he corrects. “I was at my wit’s end; I almost totally gave up. And one of the very first companies I had called a month before called me back. And they said, ‘That little project you told us about? We have a guy here who believes you’re on the right path. When can you come up?’” Slowboy now does a million dollars in business annually with the British Columbia shop.

By 2002, Slowboy already had over 150 customers just through word-of-mouth. Many already knew Slowboy from Huml’s racing days, which began back in 1995 (it was a nickname that stuck). “I had been out there for years just having fun. But I never sold a product before I met this guy!” Huml says, pointing to the SBDC director.

Huml continued to work hard, however, optimizing his period of unemployment by investing in his fledgling venture. With the tiny check from the Department of Labor & Industry, he was just able to support his family. “We lived off of a lot of spaghetti, ramen noodles, and PB&J,” he recalls. Huml credits his wife of nine years for her support. “She had faith in me. She said, ‘I know you’re going to make it work.’”

Any revenue from Slowboy’s sales went right back into the business. “I just keep reinvesting, putting more into new products, putting more inventory on my shelves. I literally started the company with [the SBDC] and five grand from my dad,” he describes.

Huml later brought in his father, as well as his wife Candy and little brother Nick into Slowboy’s operations. By 2006, the business had 20 employees. The Philadelphia-born entrepreneur says his wife was the reason his business began in Indiana, but the area’s workforce is why it will stay. “I absolutely love Indiana County. It took this entire year to make sure I wanted to keep it here, but the workforce is here,” he affirms. “I can hire people the next day when I put an ad in the paper.”

Slowboy, which Huml says he originally planned as a “nice little million-dollar-a-year, two-to-three person business” is now up to $6 million, with sales in every state and 15 countries. After the Inc. win, the entrepreneur geared up again. He drafted an outline for a strategic plan on the plane home from Chicago, and by year end, has completed nearly all of the objectives to expand. Key accomplishments included purchasing a 20,000 square foot facility needed to grow the business, implementing an inventory system with real-time processing into Slowboy’s eCommerce site and obtaining financing to purchase additional inventory once the new building is complete.

Huml is currently working with the SBDC to refine his strategic plan and recalibrate his business to meet its new target of $25 million in sales. “I need to sit down with you,” he says to Palamone. “When can we get together?”

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