FMBGN-BIZ-The Cart Shack-How A Family Moment Sparked A Golf Cart Company

Golf carts used to mean a slow ride around a course. On Fort Myers Beach, they’ve become real transportation, and the rules, safety features, and technology have caught up fast. We’re joined by Dan Allers from Island Carts FMB and The Cart Shack to talk about what’s actually street legal, what buyers get wrong, and how a personal family moment sparked a business built for island life.

We dig into the difference between a traditional golf cart and an LSV (low speed vehicle) in Florida: the DOT windshield, lights, turn signals, seat belts, licensing, and the 25 mph limit that makes it legal on many 35 mph roads. Dan explains why converting a golf cart into an LSV can be more expensive and complicated than people expect, and why more gated communities are now requiring insured LSVs for liability reasons.

Dan also shares the real-world business side of Fort Myers Beach recovery. They grew a rental fleet quickly, Hurricane Ian changed everything, and the pivot back into rentals plus launching the sales shop became part of rebuilding. We close with practical shopping advice on modern cart brands, American-made manufacturing, and the biggest upgrade most owners feel immediately: lithium golf cart batteries that drop weight, charge faster, and deliver steady power with far less maintenance.

Subscribe for more Good Neighbor stories, share this with someone shopping for a street-legal golf cart, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

The Cart Shack
17649 San Carlos Blvd Ft Myers Beach, FL 33931
239-206-1220
dan@thecartshack.com
thecartshack.com

Island Carts FMB
(844) 362-2278
eservations@islandcartsfmb.com
islandcartsfmb.com

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Transcript

Welcome To The Good Neighbor

Intro/Close 0:00

Welcome to The Fort Myers Beach Good Neighbor Podcast — No Shade, Just Sunshine, Drama Free, Positive Vibes Only!!! With each episode We Bring You Closer to The Neighbors, Local Legends, and Beachside Businesses that make Fort Myers Beach The Slice of Paradise We All Love. We want to send out some Island Love to State Insurance U S A, Snug Harbor, Nervous Nellies..and The Alex King Group. They are the Good Neighbors and Businesses that allow us to share the soul of our community with every listener, Pull up a Beach Chair, Grab a Drink, and Let’s Meet The People Who Make This Island Feel Like Home. Here’s Your Host Cah-bo Jim Schaller

Cabo Jim 0:32

Welcome, good neighbors, to another episode of the Fort Myers Beach Good Neighbor podcast. Today we have good neighbor Dan Allers from the cart shack and island carts, right? That's correct.

Dan Allers 0:42

Island carts FMB. Yes.

Cabo Jim 0:44

There we go. Very good. Well, it's kind of a new business for you, right?

Dan Allers 0:48

Uh this part is, yeah, the the cart shack is fairly new. It's our sales side of our our golf cart business. We have obviously island carts FMB we've had for quite a while. That's our rental side. Okay. We've always had plans to you know venture into the sales side of it, but Hurricane Ian had other plans. So we're a little behind, but we're getting there.

Cabo Jim 1:05

Took a little while to get there, but now you're here, right? It did, yeah.

Dan Allers 1:07

We had to pivot a little bit, but that's all right.

Cabo Jim 1:09

So let's back up your story a little bit. Okay. How did you get involved in all this?

From Family Need To Rentals

Dan Allers 1:14

Actually, it started um quite a while ago. My wife, Megan, her mom lives up in the villages, which I know is a big golf cart area. And uh my daughter has special needs, and she probably will never drive on her own. So while we were up there one time, we let her drive her mom's Yamaha golf cart. And you know, she kind of lit up like a Christmas tree. Right. So I told my wife, I said, we gotta get a golf cart for down on the island so that when she comes to visit, we can never just drive on the street. So I started doing my research and found out obviously they have to be in LSV, which stands for low speed. They can't be a golf cart, they have to be licensed and everything on the island. Um, in the state of Florida, you could drive on roads up to 35 miles per hour. Okay. So obviously you can't drive them on San Carlos Boulevard here, but anywhere on San Carlos Island and Fort Myers Beach, you can drive it. Uh obviously anywhere else in the state that it's 35 miles an hour less. Yep. So we found a golf cart that that fit that. We drove it for a little bit, and after a while, I'm like, there's really nobody driving golf carts around here. I bet there'd be a need for rentals. So I talked to my business partner Tim and said we should we should look at getting into this into the rental business. And so we jumped in in 2021 with four carts, and by the time the storm hit, we were up to 15 carts with 10 more on order. Obviously, we know what happened with Hurricane Ian, so we lost all of that. Um, you know, 820 Buttonwood is where we started out of in after the storm, we turned that into F and B strong. Yeah, obviously, you know that was where a lot of people were able to get some help directly after storming up for three years, so that's kind of why I'm down, and now we're we're back in there again, running the rental business side of part of that. So um that kind of led us to we need to get going on the sales part of it. So that led to the cart shack. Actually, one of our friends, every time he would come in before the storm, he's like, Well, the golf cart's in there. He's like, God, this is this is like a cart shack. So that's how we kind of came up with the name. I wish I could take credit for it, but it was a friend of ours named Tom. It always happens that right after that, right? That actually planted the seed of the name. So we've been here for about eight months now, nine months. This used to be the old, I think it was called the sticky licky ice cream shop. It did. It used to be a car dealership, it was pink and it had a pink elephant on the roof, and but the county made him take that down. But we're right next door, obviously, the old bowling alley. So yeah, kind of gives an IP an idea of where we're at. A lot of traffic coming in and out. A lot of traffic coming in and out. Although this year the traffic hasn't been so bad, so yeah, not getting a lot of calls about the traffic, so we're happy about that.

Cabo Jim 3:40

That's a good thing. The light may have helped a little bit, right?

Dan Allers 3:42

Well, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.

LSV Rules Versus Golf Carts

Cabo Jim 3:44

There we go. So you mentioned it earlier, the difference between what you sell and a golf cart. Because I mean, growing up, people just had golf carts, right? In your old golf course, right?

Dan Allers 3:54

Yeah, yeah, like that one, right? They're just yeah, they're just your typical golf carts. So basically the difference is uh an LSV low speed vehicle has to have everything on it, like your car does, has to have a DOT windshield, blinkers, headlights, uh, seat belts, has to be able to go 25 miles per hour. Okay, we can't set them over 25 miles per hour. This is as fast as state law allows you to do that. Whereas a golf cart doesn't have to have all those, and the max speed on that is 19 miles an hour. So that's the real big difference is between a low-speed vehicle and uh an uh do people play with that a little bit? Oh, I'm sure some people do.

Cabo Jim 4:26

Yeah, I'm sure some it's kind of like the speed limit, right?

Dan Allers 4:28

Yeah, and there are ways that you could take a golf cart and put the stuff on it that you need to convert it to a low-speed vehicle. Um, it's fairly expensive and it's time consuming. You have to go up through Pinellas and go through the state to have it inspected and have it weighed so it's almost easier. More and now, believe it or not, more most of our customers are coming in from gated communities that are now starting to require people who had golf carts to have low-speed vehicles for insurance purposes. Because with a low-speed vehicle, you have to have insurance on it just like you would a car. Yeah. So people in gated communities, you know, the kids, grandkids drive it and they go to the clubhouse and they side swipe a car or something, there's really no ramifications. So I'm starting to hear a lot, a lot of gated communities are starting to switch to that. They're probably better for you know, like a seat. It is. Well, they're safer too because they've got you know, sneak belts. Exactly. Most of them, like this one, have three-point seat belts on them, just like your car. Or do you have to have a driver's license to drive one of these? You do, you do just like a just like a car. Okay. Just like a car.

Cabo Jim 5:22

I mean, growing up, we can jump in a golf cart and right.

Dan Allers 5:25

It's always a good idea to have a driver's license, but not you know, not everybody allows their again. It depends. If you're in a gated community, they may have different rules. But if you're definitely going to drive on a public road, you should have your driver's license.

Cabo Jim 5:35

Yeah, well. I grew up in Wisconsin and back in the day. Great grandpa had a farm, and we go out and drive a pickup truck, and we're on private property though. Big governments, right?

Dan Allers 5:44

Yeah, I learned to drive an old 73 Volkswagen bug stick, or set we also had a three on the three Ford pickup truck at my dad's birth. So same thing, you know, we'd drive drive back to the farm or whatever. So, yeah, it's a lot different now.

Cabo Jim 5:58

A friend of mine had uh had an old bug in high school, and we would uh he'd pick up all the basketball players and take us to practice. Yeah, so it was like it was literally like a clown car. We'd all get in this little VW butt in the middle of winter and we'd be scraping the window on the inside because of the frost never worked.

Old Cars And Learning To Fix

Dan Allers 6:13

Yeah, my first car was a 73 Plymouth Valari. I bought it for $400. Still one of the best cars I ever had. Wow. You know, I learned how to work on it. My mom could work on cars, and my dad could work on cars, and I hate working on cars. Yeah, right. So, but you know, when you're working for $275 an hour in the panic cooking hoose back in Minnesota, you either learn how to fix the cars yourself or you don't drive or you're riding your bike. So I learned how to do brakes and you know, it had old slant sticks in it, which is probably one of the easiest motors of motors to work on. So that's where I again I I we didn't have YouTube and yeah, I know we had a land. We didn't have YouTube and Google back then. It was you just take it apart and hope you can figure out how to put it back together. There were no smartphones, you know. If you needed pictures, it was a Polaroid or you were taking the pictures and taking them into the Walgreens. And I had to ask your dad or grandpa, like, what do I do now? And the answer was always the same, figure it out.

Cabo Jim 7:04

Yeah, right. So that's crazy. Yeah, I had uh I had a 78 Caprice Classic. Yeah, and that was a boat, it was a boat, it was a big solid car. Yeah, and uh, I think I had it back when I was in we had it when I was in college, and we got rear-ended by a brand new cutlass. Oh yeah, tore his whole front hood up and everything, and scraped the bumper on our thing, scraped our bumper sticker, didn't break a taillight, didn't break anything. That was a solid car back then.

Dan Allers 7:29

Yeah, they don't make them like that anymore. No, no, I'm I love I love old cars, but you know, they're just not practical. I'm more of a resto mod guy now, so I like the old look with the new drive trains, right? Modern, but still looks old. What's your favorite right now? Oh, there's actually a guy up the road here at the man caves, he's got a an old an old 50s Buick that's a resto mod, and it's a it's a charcoal brown color with a cream colored interior. Wow, one of the most beautiful cars I've ever seen. It's got a beefed up engine, it's a rest, it's a nice resto mod, but okay, that's really, really probably one of my one of the coolest cars. Every time he pulls it out, I have to go by and look at it. It's just really cool. I'm a big Camaro guy. My first real sports car was a 77 Camaro. I got from a friend of mine, Z28, and I love that car. And this long time ago, back in Blaine, Minnesota, I was fell asleep behind the wheel, drove right underneath the park van in front of me at the stoplight, and totaled that car out and had to get had to cut it up, so I lost that car. But that was probably one of the funnest cars I had. I bet, I bet.

Cabo Jim 8:30

There's a guy on the island that has what a teal T-bird, right? I see him drive a convertible, right?

Dan Allers 8:35

Yeah, you know, and over at Parrot Key here, they have a car show show, yeah. Every month, and so I get to see other cars driving by going in and coming out. So there's always really cool cars to go see over there. I think it's the first Wednesday of the month. Yep, yeah, I think that's what it is, but it's pretty fun.

Cabo Jim 8:49

Yeah, my dad was a T-bird guy, so I got kind of a little charm to that. And who doesn't want to take a convertible to the beach, right?

Moving From Minnesota To The Beach

Dan Allers 8:55

Well, exactly. You know, it's funny is that you see all the people who like you know, the Ford Mustang guys are not Camaro guys, Camaro guys, right? I've always wanted a 1969 DZ302 Camaro, but they're very hard to find just because of the motor that comes in it. So, you know, someday maybe some of golf carts. There you go. Come on in by us. Come buy a golf cart, help me get to my DZ303. Right, right. So you said you're from Minnesota originally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What brought you down here? Um, I was just tired of winners. Actually, it's a funny story. A friend of mine had been vacationing here. You know, I knew about Fort Myers because the twins played down here, but I had never been to Fort Myers Beach. And a friend of mine had been visiting here forever. And another friend that owned a paper called the Night Times. Anybody from Minnesota that remembers the Night Times, Johnny Klein owned that. And he and his wife, uh, she worked for some countries, so they wouldn't be able to fly down there. So they would always get a place down in Marco Island. So one time my ex and I came down to Markle Island and we drove up here to take the ferry down to Key West on the Key West Express. Other than that, I'd never been to Fort Myers Beach and know anything about it. But a friend of mine had been uh coming here for a long time, and she's like, I'm selling my house and I'm moving, I'm moving down to Fort Myers Beach. So she moved down to Fort Myers Beach, and at the time I knew that I was gonna leave Minnesota. I was either gonna go to Colorado or wasn't exactly sure. So I'd actually put in for a transfer to go to Colorado, and out of the blue, my friend called and said, Hey, I got a two-bedroom place down here. Do you want to come check it out? So I had taken a month off of work.

Cabo Jim 10:23

Sure.

Dan Allers 10:23

So I loaded everything up that fit my car and came over the bridge and never left. Just fall in love with that view when you're like, Yeah, so then I transferred from from Colorado out to here and and uh and started working in Fort Myers and just never left. And eventually ended up meeting my wife, Megan, at the old shamrock. Right. Yeah, so missed that place yesterday. Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah, we sure did. But it's all right. You know, hopefully somebody will build that back. So we had one of our uh former town, one of our previous former town managers, Keith Wilkins, actually found a really cool old picture. He found out that that's where we had met. Oh, really? And before he left uh to go back and retire, he actually gave us a really nice picture we got hanging on the wall at the house of the shamrock before it was destroyed.

Cabo Jim 11:06

So yeah, it's pretty cool. A lot of good memories with that place for sure.

Dan Allers 11:09

A lot of good memories, you know. That's just you know, I've been here since 2012. So the memories even before that are right here by moved down in 89.

Cabo Jim 11:16

I do so you know you know a lot more than I do, probably a little different, a little different, right? Things are you know it's changed a lot and it's gonna change moving forward a little bit. It will, but it's gonna be better, you know.

Dan Allers 11:27

Yeah, we're hopefully it doesn't stay cold like it is today.

Cabo Jim 11:30

I'm tired of the cold weather. I moved around to get away from that from Wisconsin here from Minnesota. We don't shovel snow anymore. No, we don't get that.

Dan Allers 11:36

We just had a friend of ours that was in town for the the St. Patrick's Day parade that was at the airport for the last two days because of all the snow that's going on up in Wisconsin, and they just got back seven hours ago. Wow, so they've been waiting there for two days today.

Cabo Jim 11:48

Yeah, my mom's up in Spooner, which is right across the border uh in Wisconsin, there, and talked to her the other day and she had 12 inches and she goes, it is still snowing. I'm like, Mom, you want to come down? No, I'm good. I'm good. I'm like, Well, you just stay inside, don't go anywhere.

Dan Allers 12:01

I know the people from Minnesota were probably laughing at the way I'm dressed right now, but it's cold out there. I'm with you.

Cabo Jim 12:08

I've been down here long enough. It gets below 80. I'm in pants and shorts and sweatshirt.

Dan Allers 12:12

You know, it was funny. My my roommate at the time before I moved down here, so I wanted to wait, you know, till my daughter was old enough to understand why I was moving. And and uh, you know, so I moved down here and I was gonna give my brothers all my stuff. They got snowmobiles, trailers, all that kind of stuff, and um all my construction equipment, all that was gone. And I was gonna give away all my warm sweatshirts. And uh a friend of mine, my roommate, he's like, You just you uh you don't want to get rid of it. It does get cold down there. Right. It's Florida, you know. You don't know what you don't know. And of course, that first year it got into the low 30s in December, and I saved one sweatshirt. My favorite construction sweatshirt was that a green car heart I had probably had for 20 years. Oh you know, car hearts that last forever, you know. And it takes about 10 years to really break them in where they're nice and soft. Yeah, and it was just it was perfect. So whenever it did below 70, I'd have that thing on, and then Hurricane Ian took it. So I lost it. So I just I finally broke down a couple weeks ago and and bought another car heart. Oh boy.

Cabo Jim 13:10

I think when I first moved down here, I could probably count within the first five years on one hand how many times I wore pants. You know, and the first year I was down here, 89, it got cold like it did this year, where it was like in the 30s, and I think there was actually flakes of snow in the air, nothing stuck, but it was you could see it in the air. But I'm like, what I moved away from this, what am I doing?

Dan Allers 13:30

I remember seeing the news stories the first time it got cold, and like you gotta cover your plants, protect your plants. What time am I in? Right, right. That's something I'd hear back in Minnesota. Yeah, yeah, you're covering your plants, like you've got to cover all your plants. You might get you might I did see one one news station where they said you might have ice form on your bird feeder. Oh, geez, that's crazy.

Cabo Jim 13:54

So getting back to golf carts. Yeah, what kind of carts do you got? What do you offer? What can people expect when they come in here and check out?

Dan Allers 14:01

So we have we have a few different brands that we carry. We've got Ed G V, we've got Grayson, um, which is what I'm sitting in.

unknown 14:08

Yeah.

Dan Allers 14:08

Um, we also have uh Voyager, which is an all-aluminum chassis with eco batteries in it, which now have lifetime warranties on them. And then our and we have rides, which is you've probably seen them around there, the ones that look like picnic tables wrapping around. We've got rides, it's an all-aluminum stainless steel made uh golf cart. Obviously, it's an eight-passenger. Yeah. If you've seen it, it looks like a picnic table on wheels. And a guy drives, and a guy drives, yeah, there's no pedaling. A lot of people say, Oh, you got a pedal. No, it's got a 76-volt motor in it or 76 volt battery. So you could do about 45 miles on a charge, it'll do 25 miles an hour street legal, just like a just like all of our other carts. And then we have Honor LSV, which is probably the most American-made uh golf cart really in the United States. 97% of the checks from that golf cart stay here in the United States. Their goal is to eventually be 100%, 100% made. But they have a custom uh frame. If you I've probably got 10 or 11 that have been sold on the island, you see them driving around. They've got a patent pending on their custom frame, the solid aluminum frame. They're now making all their own plastics and painting everything in-house. So the last thing that will need to be American-made on it will be the electronics. Obviously, that's going to be the hardest part of it. But everything is manufactured, and they can't say they're 100% American-made because of the electronics part of it, but they are 100% manufactured and assembled here in South Carolina. That is awesome. Yeah, it's pretty nice. 100%, you know, that's still they've they've been voted the safest card in the industry two years in a row. They've got the lowest center of gravity, they've got a patent pending on the stabilizer bar. In fact, before you can be a dealer, he has you come up to a shop up in South Carolina, and Tim and I went up there and took a tour and just amazed. It's got about $45 million worth of machinery up there. The aluminum comes from the United States. Everything comes from the United States, and it comes in as flat stock, and then it's bent there, welded there, assembled there. And they're, I mean, their qualities. They're probably the only golf cart that when it actually shows up here, I don't have to do anything. You know, right off the truck, right in the truck. Well, you have to you know make sure everything's tidied up, you know, because they spend time on trucks. Yeah, other than putting running boards on if someone ordered it with running boards, it's about the only thing I have to do because of the width of it. Yeah, I like that. So they're they're great cars, they're obviously not the cheapest carts on the market, but they're comparable to a to a uh you know easy go club car, Yamaha. They're in that same tech price range. But to me, they're far, far, far more quality conscious than those carts are.

Lithium Batteries And Real Range

Cabo Jim 16:30

Makes sense, makes sense. So technology-wise, from people from the old school golf carts to new school, what can they expect?

Customer Service And Local Trust

Dan Allers 16:37

So a lot of people, you know, the old golf carts used to have the lead-acid batteries in them. We've all seen them, they're just all sitting on the floor over there. So a lot of people are now converting to a lithium battery, so you can save about 300 pounds on a 48-volt cart. So instead of having six or eight batteries, you're having one look like one bigger one over there, just one battery replaces the six or eight batteries that you have. So you save about 300 pounds, and the difference between a lead-acid battery and a lithium battery is you don't lose the power. Anybody that's ever had a golf cart, and as you see your motor, you know, you see your charge going down now instead of doing 15, you're doing 12. You might have been on the golf course a couple of times. But anybody's been on the golf course knows what you're talking about. If they're not gas, you start to see them slow down. Well, lithium doesn't do that. It's similar to most people have drills in their house now. It'll stay full power all the way up until it's dead, and then it charges much faster. So, and they're not made, there's no maintenance. You don't have to put you distilled water in them, they're not sealed, you don't have to do anything to them except for get in and go. And most of them now have 10-year warranties on them, usually five to six years, full replacement, and then they start to prororate the last three or four years. Eco battery, like I said, they're probably the number one, they are the number one lithium battery dealer in the country out of Utah, and that's where a dealer for them, as well as Rhino, which is the hat that I'm wearing. So, so Rhino and and uh Eco or the and Eco just announced that they have a lifetime warranty on their batteries now. So obviously it's full replacement for so long then it starts to prorate, and eventually you get to the point where you get the new insights for it versus getting a whole new battery. So they've been great batteries. I know there's a lot of you know a lot of top out there about lithium batteries and cheap ones, not the yeah, good ones are good ones. Yeah, I mean if you're if you're buying something off of Amazon, yeah, you know, to save to save 500 bucks, there's a good chance you might have problems with it. But but uh you get what you pay for. You get what you pay for. Yeah, there's and there's no you know, there's nobody to pick up and call. That's why we like to work with companies that are in the United States, so you you actually can get the owners for both of them. I can text them both right now and they would get back to you or have someone from their support staff go back to you. So that's the kind of dealership we are. That's how we that's how we uh uh been successful in our rental business, is you're customer first. You know, we don't want to be the biggest, we just want to be the best. So we've we've really built our business on if you look at our reviews and on our island carts. I mean, we we built it on personal interaction. You know, there's not uh there's not a uh until we had someone now start working with us, we make sure we meet every customer. They usually get our personal cell phone number so that they have an issue, they want to know where to go to eat, what's open, what's not open. I still get messages from people two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, saying we're coming to town, can we get another cart? So that's the type of business we have for our rental business, and that's what we want to carry over to our day you probably won't see me in here doing something, you know, some at a meeting or or I have to be somewhere else. But usually I try to be here every day because we are new and I want people to know who they're dealing with. So I mean actual customer service, but people do that so well. If you you know, I'm we're all you know, we're a little bit older than some people now, so it's uh you know, it's the only way we know how to do things, yeah. You know, I was brought up that your word is your bond, right? So you know you can't please everybody. Obviously, we know that, but if you can please 99% of the people, that's obviously the goal. So far, we're we're we're we're hitting that mark, and we continue to hopefully do that.

Cabo Jim 19:53

There you go. You well, you're doing great. I mean, uh a lot of good things happening on the island, a lot of good things happening with the golf carts. But uh you are in a sense a good neighbor, and I love it. So, you know, we need more people like you on the island. We are I need to find out where you get all your fun clothes on. I always sell people to store, but they're actually they're they're loudmouth, they're loudmouths. They're all twins. I've got I've got a few loudmouth pairs of shorts. So John Daly. Oh, yeah, is same exact birthday, same date, same year as me. Really? I do have a twin, but it's not John Daly.

Dan Allers 20:23

We actually uh last year's button plug, we went as the daily buzz. He's got the good boy vodka. We were all thrust by it. We we had the mullets on, and it was pretty fun. We all have the loud mouth shorts on and loud mouth shirts on. It was it's fun. Yeah, I like that guy. How do you not like that?

Cabo Jim 20:41

I know exactly. Okay, yeah, and I love love your personality. You're just a great person around the community. So keep doing what you're doing.

Dan Allers 20:48

I will. You as well. All right, thank you, man.

Cabo Jim 20:50

Pleasure. Thank you. Take care.

Intro/Close 20:54

No shade, just sunshine, drama-free, positive vibes only. If you love what you heard, share it with a friend and need to get vibes going. Also, your favorite paper.