Golf cart dealer keys in on Milton’s slow, simple lifestyle

By ALEXANDER POPP alex@appenmedia.com

MILTON, Ga. — If you’ve ever been out on the road in any of the dozens of golf cart friendly cities, you might have asked, “Why would anyone chose to drive around in one on the street?”

They’re slower than a car and are almost always open to the breeze. Worse, your range while using one is about 50 miles before they’ll need another charge or fill up.

But according to Robert Copenhaver, a partner with Low Speed Vehicles of Alpharetta, those are all the reasons you should consider a leisurely open-air ride in the Milton community.

Copenhaver opened LSV of Alpharetta as a licensed golf cart dealership with three partners in May 2022, out of a building off Mayfield Road in downtown Milton. The 24-year-old entrepreneur recalls that the idea goes back to his parents’ garage and a side hustle during college.

Growing up in Roswell, Copenhaver started and ran a successful landscaping company for several years until his business was acquired by a larger company in 2019.

“But while I was doing that, I was kind of hustling on the side and selling golf carts out of my parents’ garage,” he said. “It was like super random, I would buy one and then fix it up, make it look nice and then sell it.”

Copenhaver graduated from Kennesaw State University at about the same time his landscaping company sold, and he was left with a big question, ‘What would he do next?’

For about a year and a half he worked for a developer in Florida, and while there he made a connection with his initial partner, John Gaston, who owned a building in downtown Milton. Before long, he was introduced to two other partners with existing connections to the golf cart manufacturer EZ-GO, who saw a viable business in him that could thrive in Milton

“It was three local partners in the Milton area,” he said. “They said, ‘We’ve got a connection to EZ-GO, you know how to sell the carts … and here we are today.”

With those opportunities and connections, they quickly set up shop in Gaston’s Milton building. Copenhaver said Milton is one of the most golf cart friendly cities they could have picked for the business.

When they opened, Copenhaver said it was like the floodgates had opened and demand went off the charts. He thinks that’s due mostly to the golf cart ordinance Milton city officials passed in 2020 and the fact that there really isn’t another golf cart dealer nearby.

“It just made sense to kind of make our home base here,” he said. “Milton’s golf cart friendly, they passed the ordinance about a year before we got here. So, we jumped into that.”

Word has spread about LSV mostly through word of mouth and social media, he said. But it also doesn’t hurt that they’re located on Mayfield Road where traffic backs up near the roundabout at Heritage Walk in the afternoon, providing them a valuable place to advertise their vehicles.

“We put golf carts out front, and everybody sees them,” he said. “It’s funny because when they come out of the roundabout, they’re going like 5 miles an hour, so everybody slows down and they’ll look at our carts.”

To handle local demand for carts and the price of real estate space in the community, he said they opened with a “Tesla model” — putting their show room at a prominent location in Milton and opening a 5,000 square foot off-site service department on McFarland Parkway in Alpharetta.

Copenhaver said that if you asked him 10 years ago, he would have never expected to go into this line of business, but he has been continuously surprised at how fun and interesting the golf cart business has been.

“It sounds super cheesy, but you’re selling a lifestyle,” he said. “It’s a high-ticket item, but there’s so much you can do with it, and you can go anywhere.”

That lifestyle is one of LSV’s main selling points to those interested in buying a golf cart, but for Copenhaver, the draw of low-speed vehicles boils down to having a simple, convenient method of getting around town that doesn’t require maintenance or attention.

“Our whole society, I feel like, is moving towards the live-work-play model,” he said. “Everybody wants to live where they work and play … a lot of people don’t want to take their cars out, they don’t want to struggle with parking, they don’t want to drive around a parking deck at Avalon, they don’t want to fight traffic.”

To see LSV of Alpharetta’s inventory and learn more about streetlegal golf carts, visit them at their headquarters in Milton at 850 Mayfield Road or online at lsvofalpharetta.com.