Rick Rutter has known success everywhere his business career has taken him, including with mega-companies like Kellogg's and Pillsbury.

With that type of background, Rutter, the President, COO and Co-Founder of Leawood, Kansas.-based OnTrack Sports, LLC., is going to great lengths to make Accu-Length, the first and only golf clubs designed to grow with your child, one of the new breakthrough products in the golf industry.

But it was the taste for success that Rutter achieved in the foodservice industry that laid the groundwork for his endeavor into golf.

After graduating from the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1980, Rutter began his career by managing Houlihan's Restaurants in the Southeast.  The Kansas City native then took a sales position in Kellogg's Foodservice Division, where he snap, crackled and popped to many sales records during his 4-year tenure.  Next up was The Pillsbury Company, where he took a mid-level sales management position.

Rutter stayed with Pillsbury for 16 years.  By the summer of 1998, he had risen to Vice President of Sales USA and was responsible for the sales growth and management of the Foodservice Division, which had annual sales of $600 million.

But Rutter, now 42 and the father of two sets of twins, yearned for a bigger, more exciting business challenge that included ownership in a company.  When Rutter was approached by a friend with a fantastic idea but no money to fund it, he jumped at the chance to become a partner.  Thus Accu-Length, a product simple in design, noble in concept and complex in creation, was born.

The question: Why not patent a golf club shaft with an extendable technology that would allow it to lengthen to accommodate the needs of growing children?  By not having to constantly replace a junior player's clubs every time they had a growth spurt, it would save parents money and provide the youngsters with easily custom fit golf clubs that would last them several years.  Rutter felt that if the technology would perform, the market potential would be huge.  Two years later, a US patent was granted for the technology and primitive prototypes were assembled and tested.

Progress was slow - at time excruciatingly so.  For the next three years there was product testing and retesting, prototype development, beta testing, trademark design, more patenting and more fund raising.

Finally, after more than 50 prototypes and nearly $1 million in capital expenditures, Accu-Length is ready for the market.  And with more than 6.5 million junior golfers, the market is ready for Accu-Length.  By providing easily custom fit clubs for juniors, Accu-Length will help young golfers play better golf while saving their parents hundreds of dollars versus repurchasing new clubs year after year.  According to Rutter, it is "A common sense product."

As Rutter may have learned at Pillsbury, Accu-Length is indeed a Poppin' Fresh idea which should have him "rolling in dough" very soon.