Best-One of Bowling Green Is 'All-In' on Family

At Best-One of Bowling Green, a two-location commercial tire dealership in Kentucky, business has always been a family affair.  

“I’ve tried to take nepotism to the umpteenth level,” Wes McAdams, the company’s owner, says with a laugh.  

“Our son, Noah, runs our Glasgow (Ky.) store. Our oldest daughter, Anastasia, does our social media and marketing. My two nephews ... one is my sales manager and one is my service manager.” 

Other employees have been “adopted” by Best-One of Bowling Green. While not related to McAdams, he says they’re every bit as integral to the dealership’s success. 

“I have a salesman who’s been with me for 15 years. His wife works the front counter. Their oldest daughter works for us and her husband is one of our service techs. Their youngest son is 16 and is out here, stacking tires. 

“I have another 15-year guy in the back who does all of my receiving. Both of his sons have worked for me. One is still an outside salesman. I have a service manager whose two sons work for us. We have seven sets of husbands and wives who work here. 

“People are the most important part of what we do,” says McAdams. That sometimes includes people whom other business owners have turned away. 

Second chances

McAdams founded Best-One of Bowling Green after working at another tire dealership for several years. He knew he wanted to run his own company and in 2000, bought a dealership that sold a mix of consumer and commercial tires. 

Across the street from a shopping mall, the outlet was “in a horrible place for any truck tire work. But I had a commercial background and wanted to grow the commercial side of the business.” 

McAdams gradually enlarged his commercial truck tire revenue, despite having no space inside the 3,800-square-foot store to perform tire changeovers and other services. 

“We did everything out in the parking lot,” he says — sometimes under a plastic tarp in bad weather. 

Business continued to grow. In 2018, his dealership moved into a bigger facility in Bowling Green. By then, the company was doing around $9 million in annual sales. In 2020, McAdams added a second location in Glasgow. This year, the dealership is on track to make nearly $20 million.  

McAdams always credits Best-One of Bowling Green’s remarkable success to its employees.  

Many tire dealerships “will say they have good people. They also have the same prices, the same brands and the same service trucks that we do. I try to take human beings who think about life differently out to our customers.” 

Some of those human beings have unconventional pasts, including criminal backgrounds, he says.  

“Four — maybe five — leaders within my company have (committed) felonies. Maybe it happened when they were young. I have two or three ... where it took a few years to get things expunged from their records.” (All of them, he adds, served their time and repaid society.) 

Other employees have worked for McAdams at various points, quit or were let go when they were derailed by personal problems and were hired by him again — some on multiple occasions and in some cases, years later. “One of my employees is on his sixth time with us,” he says.

McAdams, who has worked with various rehabilitation centers over the years, says he’s discovered that “some people who’ve lost everything need a second chance and even a third chance.  

“If we hire somebody and they can’t get past something in their lives and we have to part ways, they know that to get back in the door, they need to experience some sort of change — some sort of growth. Without people, how do we grow? If those people aren’t growing personally, it’s going to show up in our business.” 

McAdams says helping employees overcome personal hurdles is the most gratifying part of his role at Best-One of Bowling Green “In my office, I have a six-foot-tall window and a door stop, so I’m not an invisible owner. I encourage our employees to walk through the door of my office when they need help. 

“There’s no area of life where we can’t add some value, somewhere, but you have to walk through that door and ask for it.” 

When interviewing job candidates with checkered histories, “I assure them, ‘This is a no-judgement zone. Tell me everything.’ I ask a lot of questions about their lives, without trying to cross boundaries. I’m not concerned about yesterday. I want to know where they want to be tomorrow. When someone has (committed) a felony and they’ve paid the piper and have been turned down for jobs, they look at life through a different set of eyes. They want an opportunity.” 

Further development 

Best-One of Bowling Green offers a wide range of development opportunities for its employees, both new and those who have been with the company for years.  

“We partner with Dale Carnegie Training for leadership classes,” says McAdams. “Best-One has its own leadership classes. Everybody goes through Tire Industry Association training. We do quarterly OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) safety training. I keep a library (of books) in my office. We spend a lot of time diving into how we can help our employees become better human beings.” 

In some instances, “these are people who’re trying to model something that they’ve probably never had to model before and it’s challenging. We’re not all great at it. I’ve let people down.  

“Coming from a background, in school and growing up, where I felt that I was probably not going to amount to much ... I’ve thought, ‘I don’t deserve all of this.’ But I want others to find the success that I’ve found. Hopefully, they have a great start” at Best-One of Bowling Green. 

McAdams says that whatever his dealership evolves into, "I don’t want it to include me. Every day I try to diminish myself by lifting someone else up. To me, it’s about building people.”