Fast N' Loud

by Richard Rawlings

  Still, I didn’t let it deter me. I knew I’d never quit. I knew it was just a bump in the road, another lesson, a slap in the face to tell me I needed to work harder, and smarter, and to truly live up to my potential. Selling bathroom ads was clearly not my life’s ambition.

  As I watched some other dude ride off on my Harley, I vowed that I’d save up my money and buy myself another one—in cash—within three years.

  I’d wind up doing it in six months.

  OVERDRIVE

  Funny thing about setting goals: sometimes once you set ’em, you exceed ’em.

  I started reading all sorts of motivational books to help me with my sales career, and I’ve gotta tell you, that’s a trip in and of itself. Everybody should read those kinds of books at some point in their life. Reading about the road to success and the path to greatness can get you all sorts of pumped up about your life and possibilities. The key to applying the philosophy in any of those books, though, is to realize there’s no shortcut. There’s no gimmick. Big success takes huge amounts of work. You just need to hold on to the enthusiasm and passion for whatever it is you’re doing, and then go do it. Anything short of getting it done is just laziness in my book. It’s all up to you. There’s nobody holding you back but yourself. Ever.

  I gave myself three years to save up enough to buy myself a brand-new Harley, sure, but I also knew that the Harley was just one small goal of mine. In the back of my mind I knew that I wanted to be able to get back into cars, and not just the way I was into cars in high school, buying and selling ’em for a few thousand bucks, but big-time into cars—buying and selling classics, going to the big auto shows, going to car auctions, building hot rods, eventually buying Porsches or Ferraris or Lamborghinis the way rich folks did and driving like a bat out of hell just for kicks. I wanted to be able to buy nice things in general. I wanted to live the life of the rich and famous. Basically, I wanted to live large, all while having as much fun as I possibly could.

  I know they say money doesn’t buy happiness, but damned if you don’t need a whole lotta money in order to buy things that can bring you the kind of life I wanted to live. And living the life you want to live is what brings you happiness, isn’t it? That meant I needed to make a lot of money, and to do it before I got too old to enjoy it.

  In my search for a new sales job that could make me a lot of money, I ended up meeting a chick who worked in the printing business. This girl was a saleswoman, and she was successful at it. She was pulling in like $50,000 a year, which was a pretty darned good living in 1996. I was intrigued by that. I knew a little bit about the printing and paper business already because of my earlier success with the Promo Wipes business. I also knew a thing or two about sales, and definitely had a natural knack for it. So I asked this girl if she could introduce me to her boss, and she did, and next thing I knew I was working as a salesman for a print broker.

  Basically, this guy was the go-between who would broker deals between companies that needed something printed—be it business cards or menus for restaurants, or giant billboards for some big company—and the design firms and print houses that could get the work done. Printing was a much more complicated business back then than it is now. Nobody had access to computerized design programs and that sort of thing, so a broker could step in and provide a business with access to everything they needed, which would save them a lot of time. And in business, time is money. The premium a business would pay to have us take care of everything they needed is where the profits came in, and the profits could be pretty huge.

  I made my money taking a commission from those sales, and I frickin’ nailed it. I completely hit my stride in that salesman role, and in a matter of months, I surpassed that girl’s sales for the year. I convinced the boss to give me a larger commission percentage if I could meet certain goals—big goals that he thought were impossible for one salesperson to meet—and then I went out and I hit and exceeded those goals. I threw myself into making money the same way I’d thrown myself into goofing off and traveling around in my Jeep. The way I saw it, sales was fun. It was a challenge to get people to part with their money at the same time you were treating ’em right and making sure they’d come back for more. After all, making good money meant I could have the things I wanted.

  Six months into this, I cashed a single commission check that was more than enough money to cover the cost of a brand-new Harley. Not just any Harley, either. At the tail end of 1996, I picked up a ’97 Harley Davidson Softail chopper in my favorite color, green. I got that chopper custom painted with all sorts of crazy skeletons and detailed scenes that you can only see when you’re right up close to it, and I still own that bike to this day. I love it. I promised myself I’d never get rid of it. I keep it right outside of my office at Gas Monkey Garage alongside a bunch of my other personal cars and bikes that I’ve collected over the years.

  I cleared over $100,000 in my first year in that job. I also fell head over heels for the girl who got me into the business—a relationship that would affect my life in some very significant ways, and also one that wouldn’t end well. But that’s a different story for a different book.

  Once the boss saw how well I was doing, he very quickly made me VP of Sales and gave me the leverage to make some changes in the company. I encouraged him to buy some printing equipment himself, so we could sort of double-dip and make profits both from the sales and from the actual printing. I found ways to incentivize the other salespeople to go out and hustle up more business the way I did, too, all while increasing our profit margins and putting more money in their pockets. I threw everything I had into that business, and every idea I had worked.

  I never let my dedication get in the way of my fun, though. I’d take all that cash I was making and go hit the road on my Harley on the weekends. I occasionally took crazy cross-country vacation rides with some fellow Harley enthusiasts, blowing money on beer and women everywhere we went.

  By the time I was twenty-eight, I was pulling in somewhere around $400,000 a year as a salesman. I was driving around in the biggest, baddest Cadillacs I could find. I had a brick phone—you know, those big old cellular phones with the antenna on top—before anybody else in the Dallas area had a cell phone. I could afford just about anything I wanted, and what I realized was that everything I had still wasn’t enough for me. I wanted more. I wanted everything.

  It was right around that time when I met a girl named Sue.

  Sue was the prettiest tall, skinny, buxom blonde that I’d ever laid eyes on—and I’d laid eyes on a lot of tall, skinny, buxom blondes. (I most definitely have a type!) The thing about Sue that very quickly blew me away is she was easily as smart as she was beautiful. She was also extremely successful. She was running a multimillion-dollar home-health-care company. She drove a BMW 7 Series. She had a beautiful house with a pool in a gated community in the suburbs. She didn’t need a man to support her. She didn’t want a man to support her. And I gotta tell you, that right there is one very sexy quality for a woman to have.

  This girl rocked my world so hard that on our twenty-eighth day together, as we were driving past the airport on the way to the city of Grapevine for dinner, I looked at her and I said, “Right or left?”

  She seemed confused. “What?”

  I said, “Well, we could go right and go to dinner like we planned, or we could go to the airport and fly to Vegas and get married instead.”

  “Are you serious?” she asked me.

  I was sort of half joking when it came out of my mouth, but all of a sudden, it hit me: I really wanted to marry her!

  “F—k yeah,” I said. “I’ll go to Vegas. Let’s go. We’ll get married.”

  She said, “Left!” So we drove into the airport, went up to the ticket counter, bought two tickets to Las Vegas, and got hitched.

  We hardly spent a day apart after that, for many years.

  With Sue’s encouragement, I broke free of the job I was in, took my clients with me, and started my own prin
t-brokering business. The amazing thing about that business is that all I needed to run it was a desk and a phone. There was very little overhead.

  I saw changes coming in the print business, though. Computers were changing everything. The old typesetting services and glass plates and all the things that had dominated the field for so long were simply going by the wayside. Working around it all the time, I could see that what businesses really needed was one-stop shopping: companies and individuals needed to be able to walk into one place to have their designs done, and their printing done, and to have all of it managed under one roof without brokers or anybody else in the middle.

  I was lying there in bed one night with Sue when I told her what I’d been thinking. “Sue, I want to do something silly,” I said. “The broker business is going to die because things are getting more computerized. So in order for me to keep my clients, I need to buy the printing presses to do most of the work.” I also told her I was thinking one step further. “I think the ad-agency mentality is going to go away, too, especially for the small-business owner, the medium-business owner, because the computers are getting smarter.” I said, “I want to have an art department that can design and do brochures and menus and packaging and all of it, and then print everything in-house. That equipment, it’s expensive, but I want to bring it all under one roof. We bring in everything from the very beginning—design and art to proofs to prepress to our own press, press checks, whatever we want—and we do it all right there.”

  She thought I was crazy at first. But the more I talked about it, the more she saw my passion and vision. I was positive I could make a profit on every single aspect of the business. Finally Sue said okay, and with the help of her reputation and good name, I got a small-business loan. I bought an established printing business in town so I wouldn’t have to start from scratch, and then I started to build my own little company.

  I know what you’re probably asking at this point: what in the hell does any of this have to do with building hot rods, flipping cars, and the craziness that we see every week on Fast N’ Loud? Well, let me tell you: business is business. Looking at how to do things faster, smarter, and more profitably than the next guy is important no matter what business you’re in. The lessons I learned in the print business would feed absolutely everything I would eventually do at Gas Monkey Garage.

  I put in a prepress, put in an art department, put in design. I hired all those people. Then I built my salespeople up, too. Here’s where I got smart: I treated all my salespeople as brokers and double-dipped on the profits. I priced all of my print jobs at a profit to begin with, and then my brokers would go out and sell our services for a markup from there, and I would pay them well for doing that. They were basically allowed to set their own pricing, and they would make a commission of 40 percent of whatever profit they delivered. Of course, that meant I was keeping 60 percent of that additional profit for myself. Boom! It was rad. In no time at all we were kicking ass and taking names.

  I also put a premium on customer service. I knew from watching my dad work in the grocery store that if you treat a customer right, they’ll remember you, and they’ll come back. Most print shops in those days were grimy, dirty places where nobody would ever want to hang out for longer than they had to. I built a shop that was sparkling clean from top to bottom. If a customer came in to check his or her proofs, there was a glass of champagne waiting for them upon arrival. If a customer came in to sit on press checks, there was a pool table and a little lounge area and a bar and a beer cooler for their enjoyment while they waited.

  We quickly gained a reputation as the best medium-sized print shop in the Dallas metro area. Before I knew it, I had $2 million worth of equipment and a great big staff humming away under one big roof, just like I’d envisioned.

  What’s really amazing to me is that I hadn’t laid out all that much cash to get it started. I’d followed my shop teacher’s advice and managed to sock away some savings while I was working for somebody else, and I’d risked a huge portion of that meager savings to get this new company off the ground. You’ve got to take the risks if you want to get the gains. But small-business loans were what paid for the building and all of the equipment. The cash layout was tiny compared to what the company grew into. There’s a whole world of possibility out there if you look for it. As long as you’re smart about it and you put in the hard work, there’s no reason you can’t start a business with very little cash of your own. None of the businesses I started cost a fortune out of pocket at the front end. None of them! Including Gas Monkey! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I hired my sister, Daphne, to come in and do all the books for me. Prior to that, she was working for another company that was actually one of my biggest customers. She was a huge asset in that she could share information with me about all of the other print shops in town and what they were making in terms of competitive offers—so that allowed me to always be a step ahead of them in my pricing. I had eyes and ears everywhere, actually. I was always watching what the competition was up to and doing my best to get in front of them in terms of aggressive pricing or new equipment or whatever I needed to do in order to win new clients and keep my old clients coming back for more.

  I also refused to put all of my eggs in one basket. A lot of print companies relied on one big client for 40 or 50 percent of their business. If something happened and that one big client went away, the whole operation could go belly-up. I refused to let that happen. If any one client got to be more than 10 percent of my business, I would tell them to take a portion of their business elsewhere, or I’d just kick them out entirely and tell them we could no longer service their needs. I know that seems backward to some people. I’m not most people. Staying diversified kept my business healthy, and I knew it was the right way to run things because my business stayed profitable while I was paying my salespeople more than they would get paid at any other print shop around. I wasn’t the only one rising as the business rose. I loved seeing the people who worked for me get more successful, too.

  So scratch that earlier statement. My business wasn’t just “profitable.” My business kicked ass! And that left me room to have some fun.

  Honey, pack your bags. We’re going to Florida.”

  One of the best things about Sue was I could talk to her about anything, from business to cars, and she’d be into it. She not only supported me, she understood my passion for things. In fact, she was a car fan herself, and one day she told me that the ’68 Shelby was her favorite car ever. She’d never owned one. They were rare, and expensive, and she’d just never come across one that was up for sale.

  “What are you talking about?” she said that day when I called her.

  “I just found a guy down in Florida who’s selling a matching pair of ’68 Shelbys. One for you, one for me. Let’s go get ’em,” I said.

  The next day we were off to Florida, where we spent $65,000 on a matching pair of red Shelbys. Hers was an automatic GT 350, mine was a stick GT 500, and to see those two cars side by side was one of the coolest things ever. We drove ’em to the beach, sat in the sun, and had a few drinks, and came up with the bright idea to commemorate our new purchase with a set of matching tattoos. Together we drew up the back-to-back style “RR” that I got tattooed on my arm that day, and that she got tattooed on her back. That night, we went to one of those crazy beach-town bars where people write their names or some funny thing on a five-dollar bill and then staple it to the wall. The whole bar was covered with these bills, and so I decided to do it, too. I grabbed a pen and wrote a little poem: “Two Shelbys, two tattoos, one for me and one for you.” I stapled it on the wall.

  Back in Dallas, driving that Shelby around made me feel like I was on top of the world.

  I wanted more of that.

  A snapshot of one of our Shelbys. COURTESY OF RICHARD RAWLINGS.

  At the same time I was building the business and buying nice cars for my wife and myself, I developed a close friendship with a
guy named Dennis Collins. Dennis and I had sort of grown up together, even though we didn’t know each other. We’d run in some of the same circles. We’d often wind up in the same bars at the same time. We were both into cars. We both rode Harleys. We were like two peas in a pod, just not in the same pod. Then we wound up taking a cross-country Harley trip down to Daytona with a bunch of other local guys, and we started talking and partying and whatever. He was a very cool guy, and I was glad to know him. But it wouldn’t be until a couple of years later when we’d really connect.

  In 2003, I decided to enter a road rally called the Gumball 3000. This was a three-thousand-mile race full of wacky guys in their fancy cars who were hell-bent on driving as fast as they could from San Francisco to Miami. I’d been reading about this thing since the first Gumball started in Europe in 2000, and one night I just up and decided I was gonna do it. Sue thought I was nuts to throw myself into that sort of thing, and so did a lot of other people. Other than taking my Jeep to California and riding my Harley, I didn’t have any experience with driving cross-country, and I certainly didn’t have experience driving in a non-sanctioned competitive road rally at high speeds. Oh, and I didn’t have a fancy fast car, either. You know what I entered into that rally? My Chevy Avalanche pickup truck. I knew that truck could haul ass, and I also knew that I was more driven to complete and hopefully win this thing than just about anybody else in it. When I get my mind fixed on something, I hit it. Hard. And I certainly wasn’t scared about it. To me, it just sounded like one of my cross-country road trips kicked up a notch. It seemed like a way to live out a Cannonball Run–style dream. I mean, is there any American guy my age who didn’t grow up dreaming about driving some fast car across the country like they did in that movie? I’d built a business that allowed me the money and time to go live out that fantasy. Why the hell wouldn’t I give it a try?