I could hear the bikes approaching, and then it was as if the crowd disappeared, their cheering drowned out by the display of raw horsepower as the fastest people on the planet battled for position down the front straight.
I’m not sure if I really believed what I was saying, but that was the goal, and that goal eventually became a reality. Like most stories, mine had a turning point. A few years into running VNM Sport I was having coffee with another business owner. He ran a company that fixed commercial trucks for some well known corporations. He told me that what I was doing was more of a hobby, and not an actual, successful, business like his. Obviously we did not agree on what success looked like. Sure, if you looked at things from purely a dollar figure I was making hobby-level money in comparison to what he was bringing in, but money has always been a close second to why I started the business.
WHAT AN AMAZING FEELING!
“Jacuzzi” of baselayers . I wanted world champions to choose to wear my product, not because I paid them to, but because they preferred it over the rest. In the beginning I had some business goals that seemed pretty unrealistic. I wanted to make the very best product in a very small niche market. I remember saying that AS YOU COULD IMAGINE, GETTING INTO THAT VIP SUITE DIDN’T HAPPEN OVERNIGHT. - Chapter five 13 years ago I could only dream of being at COTA, in a VIP suite, but there I sat cheering on my riders. I reflected on how far I had come as a business owner as I watched Moto2 World Champion Remy Gardner fly by me, wearing my baselayers. The ones that I designed. The ones that I produced. The ones that gained enough of a following at local race tracks to give me the confidence to approach riders on the world stage. I was trying to be the
Photo Credit: Oxymoron Photography
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