How I Really Started my Million dollar Business: The origin of SRKCycles.com

I found myself in the men's room wiping vomit from my face so traditionally when you say a million dollar business what they referring to is a business that has sent as sales over equal to were over a million dollars that would absolutely fit with with the sales of SRK cycles my wife my wife Rachel said to me one time you know I came home and I think she was thinking about something and she said to me how proud how proud she was of me for being a successful entrepreneur and I kind of stepped back and I thought I am the line between successful entrepreneur and that guy that jumped from job to job the job never satisfied as in-laws think he's a bomb is very fine I mean III had over 36 jobs before I went to college I always had learned always got another job always had to you know think about that guy always has some big ideas I would I would say there was one or two things that that person needs to change and he will be extremely successful person for me it was just discipline focus so where the story starts is prob about five years ago I was I had been a Internet manager for a large youth car dealership I'd been there for about three years prior to that I was buying motorcycles wholesale from private individuals you know Craigslist traveling up to eight to ten hours you know to buy the bike bring it back and then selling it to other dealerships such as like wow wow Motorsports in Marietta and you know a couple other dealerships and I was working with from from being it from being at the internet manager in the car dealership I was also a buyer for a little while which is a lot of fun you go to the auction buy stuff you know I learned so much from doing from from from being it from learning the automotive industry it's very interesting it's very exciting stuff and you get you get to meet a lot of cool people but the whole time I'm kind of planning my escape I know I want something more I know I want something different I know I want to do my own thing and I've always loved motorcycles so while I'm at while I'm at this dealership I'm helping them sell cars online getting stuff on eBay and you know really hopefully optimizing the internet to sell more cars and then and starting the ship cars it was very very exciting was very fun you know just really showing them that the Internet is not this redheaded stepchild when the internet started coming out or even up to a couple of couple years ago they would look at it as Oh someone just walked in the door this person's extremely important someone on the internet and we'll get to them later you know and we started changing that shift of a someone not everyone who walks in the door is is actually a real buyer you know or not everyone that who'd that buys is actually gonna walk through the door and that was a big paradigm shift so for about two years while I was there I was always kind of working through my mind and I enjoyed this working through my mind of how am I gonna what's what am I gonna do what's my own and I must have tried us and one do some advice well it's our own dealership I was coming over to 500 different domain names and none of them worked which one I figure that that awesome dot-com and I couldn't get and I finally so I had this I had this unclear idea of what I wanted to do and through all these different things I've worked in the dealership and Holies the pieces of the puzzle started coming in but it was still very clear it wasn't until one day where someone went in and they wanted to trade in a motorcycle to the dealership now normally we wouldn't do that on the time a person where hey I know bikes I jumped in there and I said we can trade this bike in years the amount we're gonna try it for and they've you know they gave it to the guy that customer was fine he traded the bike in now we own a motorcycle I was told from some of the other people you know I think the sales manager was like hey I called one my other guys I said these bikes are not good people don't like do you think we I think we we bought it wrong and I was like well you know let's just see within 12 hours we sold that bike with a four thousand dollar markup well wasn't for the under markup it was we sold the bike we made maybe a couple thousand on the front end and a couple thousand on the back end which would be a warranty and financing and stuff so we made pretty good money on with the bike we sold that too we traded in another bike we sold that bike within 24 hours and we made $2,000 on that bike that bike we tried in another bike at the same time and we sold that by within a week and they we made maybe you know another 15 to 18 hundred bucks on that bike all this happened within a week and that's when I realize like like the piece of the puzzle that was missing fell into place I want to help I can help dealerships trade in motorcycles and then I buy them and then I I sell them this is a killer it's a killer idea so that's that's where the real the idea of sr k cycles kind of originated so i came up with the idea i rush so i wrote a business plan so i came up with a business plan and i presented it to the owner of the dealership thinking that I could do this under his under his dealership umbrella because I don't want to start my own dealership that's a big deal and I'd have any money and you know he had some good valid questions for me and about this time I came up I came into the classic entrepreneurial dilemma that most entrepreneurs will come into and that is do you want a hundred percent of nothing because you don't the resources to start it up or do you want a portion of something that could be very successful and that was really hard for me and I knew that was I knew that was a dilemma and most of time I'm like I want a piece I want a piece of something instead of all of nothing but that's not the choice I made I chose you know what there's I want a third option I don't want to give up anything I want to own this whole thing so at the same time that I quit my job at the dealership my me and my wife were expecting our second child there was a guy that I do from church his name was guy and he owned a little little car dealership and I used to see him at church when I was a kid I see him at the auctions when I was a buyer my dad said hey I want you to talk to talk to guy I didn't really know him but he's like hey won't you talk to guy so something something someone told me a long time ago I mean that long ago two years ago they said you could almost judge how successful someone is by how many awkward conversations they've had and so anytime you anytime you think like oh man this I don't want to do this is an awkward conversation what kind of it with a different I do with that different mindset because I really how it really is how it is every time if you're gonna ask for more money for an ask for an opportunity or whatever it's an awkward conversation because you don't do it all the time so I went I asked him if I could sell motorcycles through his dealership under the umbrella of his dealership and yeah he thought about it he wrote some stuff up and he's like yeah we'll do it with will go with this split we use my money we're doing like this and I thought that was awesome and it was awesome and what this did was this allowed me to get in the door sell motorcycles get get my name out there see if the idea even works wait let me paying for any overhead or without me having any large upfront costs because I really had a I didn't really have any money the term self-made man has always made me kind of cringe though the amount of arrogance that you need to have to tell people that you've that your success is completely all your own it's just you know almost blows my mind away I mean when you look at if you've succeeded in anything even the people who were negative towards you you have to give them some credit of your success because that's that's what helped make you you know a lot of my credit comes from I would never succumb self-made man of course because of the London I said a lot of my my credit we would go to you know the mentors and I've had but mainly my dad who's always been there for me always listen to my ridiculous ideas and and help guiding me through that you know if you look at if you have someone who if you have a father or father figure someone out there you know who can do that for you you are incredibly blessed and you are very lucky and you really don't have anything to complain about now this was a very small dealership and when we first started the first month we only had we were a bike would come in I'd sell the buy two bikes would come in I'd sell to buy we never really had an inventory if you if you came in to look at one bike you didn't like that bike that was kind of in you know now we have a big inventory if you come and look at one bike and you don't like it we might have something else like that you might like maybe we don't and that was very comfortable for me you know the next month was very similar you know we sold a couple bikes but we never really had more than two or three bikes and at any given moment it wasn't until the third month that came in and you know I kind of step back and I realize holy cow we're sitting on an inventory of like fifty sixty thousand dollars we have maybe 10 or 12 bikes and this discus horrified me you know because I I feel like right now I'm getting out of my comfort zone and I was I was actually losing sleep over this you know I was thinking about I was I was worried I was concerned I mean I remember Kyle sleeping in the guest bedroom at the time because I don't like sleeping near little babies because they have like erratic breathing I'm always like I think are they still breathing you know me and then the baby oh I can't stand it so I sleep in the guest bedroom for a couple months I remember laying down in bed I couldn't sleep and you know I was praying a lot about this when I came up with was that if God wants this to succeed it's gonna succeed me worried about will not help you know I think the Bible verses you know what something along the lines of you know you you can't add a date of your life from word about it you know even though you know like the birds and the flowers look awesome and they don't they don't worry God just does it so if God wants to this business to succeed then we're good I'll succeed you know I mean if I work hard it'll work out if God does not want it to succeed I don't want it to succeed you know the man I'm not gonna go against God I'm if he if he doesn't want something to work out the last thing I want to be the last place I want to be is on the opposite side of God being like no no let's think let's make this work that's crazy so I kind of came to this reality I was like either way I'm fine you know either way it's gonna be good so I kind of made myself kind of made a little packed packed my kind of agreement with God and I said I will not worry about this for the next thirty days the next months starting from the first I'm not gonna worry about it and we're gonna see how we're gonna see how it goes it's kind of a one-way deal I guess and anytime that thought would come in you know a little bit of fear anxiety would come into my mind I was kind of let's knock it out you know I'm not thinking about it I'm not gonna do all that I'm not gonna think about it and what I end up doing was spending my spending my extra energy not worrying been they don't work we have we had less stuff to do we had work and and you know I spend that extra time on on work and strategy and plan it for the future and that first month that I did that we sold 14 motorcycles we sold more bikes and we've ever had I made more money than I ever did and it was amazing so then the next month I did the same thing and they just got to the point where I don't worry about I legitimately having to zero stress very little stress maybe occasionally very little stress about the owning and running this dealership so during that time at um when I was selling motorcycles under the umbrella fine cars by guy we we we grew we grew very fast we grew very fast and we grew pretty big we actually had I think within six months of start date to six months we had the largest you used motorcycle inventory in Lancaster County and we've pretty much maintained that we've maintained that status we were much bigger now but ever since then but we had the building backed out he was trying to run a business I'm trying to run a business we had the building packed out there was not very much friction between me and guy guys a very godly man I loved working with him but there was no he might say there was friction I would say there was no friction because I would just I got I didn't do the best job of this but I'll just try to submit Hey all right whatever you say he was the guy so I just kind of did but it just it just it just came at a time where I need to start my own dealership I needed I need to be on my own if I would have known at this point how much paperwork and dealing with the state of Pennsylvania the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania I would have to go through I honestly I probably wouldn't have done it now looking back what would I have to do it all over again yes I would absolutely do it all over again someone someone once told me that the the automotive industry in Pennsylvania is the most heavily regulated industry in the whole state well of course I had to ask him what was the least regulated industry he said law I guess I guess that makes sense so we had found this building so we defend this building it used to be like a port-a-potty company so they had just this thing filled port-a-potty it's more like that blue stuff and porta-potties the rent was about three thousand bucks a month little did I know compared you know I knew residential leases you know you signed a lease for 12 months you can get out of it it's not a big deal when you find a commercial lease if you sign a one-year which is too short but if you set a one-year commercial lease of $3,000 a month you owe them $36,000 they don't care if your building if your company goes out goes under tomorrow you find that dot you owe them $36,000 in the next year that's a little horrifying so if I found that out I was a little scared we got the shortest lease that we possibly could on this place but around the same time I had also just sold my rental property that I bought when I was like 19 or two though I sold that point around 30 grand in my pocket that gave me a little bit of cushion or seed money to get this get this whole thing started so we signed an 18-month lease on this 5000 square foot building which at the time seemed huge and just I was like there's no way we're gonna fill this building with bikes and then you know within a year later just packed and we're I'm feeling we're I feel like we need more space I I found a guy that I could pay him he did all the paperwork for the state in a couple months we were s RK motors doing business as SRK cycle we had a building we had a license to sell motor vehicles in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania now we need the money so this ends up being my Shark Tank moment I went to a bunch of different banks to see if I can get a loan now at this point I've been running you know successfully for you know about a year and a half in close to two years no one they were all interested to talk to me but when it came to actually doing anything no one wanted to give me a loan one bank even went so far to say that if you if you we could give you a hundred thousand dollar loan if you had a hundred thousand dollars and you can put that in one of our account and we can put a freeze on that so you're telling me that if I give you a hundred thousand dollars to hold in your account you will loan me back that hundred thousand dollars with interest yeah I'm not that that's a stupid idea it kind of rule of thumb banks are only willing to lend businesses money when they don't need them when they when they already have the money they don't actually need banks which is just kind of ridiculous so after that that was kind of frustrating after that I had my own little fan oohs moment I'll do it myself and when I mean I do I'll do it myself on me and I'm gonna go find a venture capitalist to give me money so through some contacts I had a meeting with a venture capitalist this is my Shark Tank moment I've gotta do a presentation I gotta do this pitch this this reminds me of a present of the first presentation I had to do in college it was law one it was law intro to law 101 I found myself in the men's room wiping vomit from my face and if you didn't do if you didn't do this presentation you failed the class and there was people in the class and just they're like I'm not doing it they're like I think at that point they just quit college so I'm feeling I'm feeling very similar to this I'm feel very nervous instead of if I do good on the presentation I get a good grade or I pass the class if I can do good on this presentation someone loves me a couple hundred thousand dollars and I'm able to support my family and potentially create my dream job so I had to convince this guy to let me borrow a couple hundred thousand dollars to sell motorcycles on the internet using YouTube videos but I had an ace up my sleeve during this presentation and the last thing I said in this presentation I think was what really made it an easy situation for an easy it needs a decision for him I was I none of this money that I'm borrowing is gonna be used for renovations or payroll or modifications to the building or computers or anything I got the money for that the money I'm borrowing we either be in one of two places motorcycle inventory I've proven that I know how to flip motorcycles or cash in the bank it's going to be one of those two spots and I said feel free to stop by any time to look at my books to look at my bank account and say okay he's got motorcycles there's inventory there's a value of the inventory and/or there's the money the bank account so after about a 20 minute meeting we shook hands and he said well how do you want the check so I took the largest check I've ever seen in my life deposit it I probably note to my wife first actually deposit it in my bank account and instead of partying or celebrating or anything we got to work we had a lot of work to do business 101 SWOT analysis strengths weakness opportunities threats if you're a business owner if you're an entrepreneur and you're not keeping your eye on you and you failed it's because you didn't keep an eye on one of those four things this o so where I'm at right now that kind of leads us into 2017 a lot has happened and changed since then we'll make that the next video we'll see you guys later don't forget subscribe you

Channel: Bikes and Beards

Views: 77,591

Rating: 4.8962193 out of 5

Keywords: motorcycles, test drives, moto vlogs, harley davidson, test ride, bikes and beards, funny, yamaha, motorcycles for sale in lancaster, Motorcycles, for, sale, in, harrisburg, motorcycles for sale in York, How i started a million dollar business, million dollar business, how srkcycles started

Id: Pfl6pzHJxFY

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2019