CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN!
Reaching The Top Of The World From The Flatlands Of Nebraska Photos Courtesy Robert Kay
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stablishing a National Powersports Dealer Association from scratch is a pretty lofty goal. However, when it comes to setting the bar high, Robert Kay goes over the top... literally! In addition to starting his career at a dealership in Colorado’s high country, he has climbed all 58 of Colorado’s “14ers” (peaks higher than 14,000 feet) and is currently working on climbing the Centennials (the highest 100 peaks in Colorado). And then there is Mount Everest and the “Seven Summits” — so how does a world class mountaineer become a dealer in the flatlands of Nebraska? The climb to the top started a mile high when a college kid took a temporary position as an assistant cashier at Fay Myers in Colorado (a legendary dealership in its own right). “My job at Fay Myers was intended to be a temporary three-month gig back in 1981,” recounts Kay, fresh from a motorcycle expedition in Nepal (more about that later). “I discovered that I really enjoyed this industry and was reasonably good at it. I started the finance department for them in 1981 and went to school at night.” He eventually graduated in 1990 with two different business degrees (International Business and Finance) and hired a company that tells you what sort of job you would like. “After a lot of Q&A, they said I should be in the powersports business. I guess I knew it all along...”
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Still, that is quite a climb from Assistant Cashier for Fay Myers to a 13-time Dealernews Top 100 winning operation at Star City Motor Sports and along the way he picked up a Harley store for good measure! “I started my own used bike wholesale/export company in 1991 after working at Fay Myers for 10 years. It did really well but, I hated being on the road so much, so after six years of doing that I bought Star City on 1/1/1997.” Star City has been in business since 1963 and was pretty well entrenched in the community... not the case with Kay! “It was tough uprooting my family from Denver and moving to Nebraska,” he admits. “But we like it here and the business has been very good to us.” So good in fact that he decided to double up. “I then bought Platte River Harley-Davidson on June 10, 2016 after wanting to own a Harley dealership for many years. It was a store in severe distress and was a lot of work to get it from red to black, but it’s thriving now.”