Brandon Malone has seen the bottom.
And now he’s convinced he’s got the formula to return to the top.
The president and CEO of one of Wetumpka’s newest businesses, Pro-Line Motorsports, went, he says, from a millionaire to being almost penniless.
“In 2016, I completely went belly-up on a $14 million company,” Malone said. “Not even a dollar left. The way that they did it was they came in and they said, ‘Hey, you owe a lot of money to a bank or whatever and we’re taking every paid-for asset you’ve got’ and I had a couple of million dollars in paid-for assets. It was because I was an incorporated company, but also a publicly traded company and from that company’s board, you know, they pretty much served me papers that said, ‘Sorry, you’ve really done nothing wrong’ – I’d only missed two payments, but my payments were like $50,000 a month. So when you’ve got that kind of money that’s going out as a payment to a bank, they don’t waste time to still the process.”
Malone eventually was recipient of a judge’s order to freeze all his assets. He went to court and was able to salvage $100,000 from the sale of those assets. He says at that time he didn’t think he wanted to live.
“God does things to you to humble you in your own area,” Malone said. “When I first got into business in 2006, I knew God very well. I was a devout Christian who went to church all the time and never missed anything. And when I started making money and selling companies and selling stock I didn’t ever go to church, started having affairs on my wife and got divorced. And God gave me signs. He’d take a little bit here and a little bit there, but I’m so hungry and determined that you could take a little bit away from me and I’m still gonna recover. It would have to be taking it all. And he did.”
It’s a captivating and sad story about how the young man who spent time as a child in foster care made good only to have a fortune disappear. But it’s one from which Malone has benefitted.
Chief among those benefits is that his business demise led him to meet his current wife, Kelly. Divorced previously, Malone can barely find the words to explain what she has meant to him since their meeting.
“God knows when to put certain people in your life and when he put my beautiful wife Kelly in mine, he did just that,” Malone said. “After I got saved again in the middle of November 2016, I met my wife on Black Friday of that year at Perry’s Steakhouse. I was getting gift certificates for my sales guys at Tameron Honda in Birmingham where I was sales manager. We talked for a minute, but never exchanged numbers or anything. The next day on the Quad in Tuscaloosa – and, if you’ve ever been there, you know it’s very big – it just so happened that, right next door to our big tent, the Superior Hyundai and Nissan tent was set up. There was Kelly, the lady I met the night before at Perry’s. We’ve probably not spent a week apart since.”
But even Kelly can only take so much. A few days prior to Pro-Line’s grand opening, she said she let Brandon know that she was very much ready to “get the show on the road.”
So Saturday, Malone, the reborn businessman exhausted from long nights in preparation, opened Pro-Line with a car show, live music, a burnout contest and more.
“I didn’t even try to sell anything,” he said. “I just wanted everyone to see our store and see what we had.”
What they have is cars, off-road accessories, everything you need for your everyday ride and much, much more.
And if they don’t have it, there’s a chance they can make it for you.
“The thing is we’re not just a parts company or only doing cars or trucks,” Malone said. “We actually have our only manufacturing label.”
What’s more, Malone has put together a fabulous and talented team of professionals that Malone says was “the hardest thing about putting this business together.”
“I had to have the right people with the right attitudes, but also the right knowledge in their particular specialty,” Malone said. “But where attitude is concerned, everybody works hard, so we’ve got to work harder. I don’t want our phone ringing more than twice. If you’re supposed to work and you’re going to be late, don’t bother coming. I’m tough, but we’ve got to be the best in our business.”
In addition to what PLM displayed on Saturday, there’s more to come. Malone promises an outdoor venue for everything from mud races to live music is on the way adjacent to his new store.
“We want to bring something to Wetumpka that it’s never seen,” Malone said.
