Jesse James on the big break that made him famous | Trending Now

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0:45Hey, guys. Graham here. It's Friday, which means we get to share with you another one of our most popular clips from a past interview. What you're about to listen to is trending this week on our Facebook page. Hope you enjoy. This week, Jesse James.

1:05So before the Discovery Channel show even started, your business, West Coast Choppers, was already a big success. I want to take you back to an early meeting you had that really seems to be, from what I understand, one of the key meetings of your career. the company is just kind of in its infancy and you get a meeting with a company called custom chrome when my dad had his drug business antiques him and barry they had a warehouse in uh paramount like north long beach california and they shared a warehouse with perry sands who owns performance machine it's like and he was just starting his business so i went right to him and got a job working for performance machine for a year to learn cnc machining knowledge and all that stuff and then i left and went to boyd's well while i was at boy what at parry's he made these wide tire kits and they were taking super like taiwan stamped fenders from custom chrome and like cutting them offset and welding them together so bikes could have a fat tire on it in the early 90s and like i was welding those up and it was terrible the metal was like Taiwanese steel which like isn't the best quality because it's ground up cars with like plastic and rubber in it so when I went to Boyd's I kind of kept thinking about a better way and they're like 93 I really started to like learn metal work and I went in and apprenticed with a guy up in for a couple weeks up in San Jose named Ron Covell and then like came back and I'm like man I want to make a fender on my own and so I started making fenders in my garage after work and I met this a guy named Skeeter Todd at the Laughlin River run he's all and he worked for uh he he worked for a company that was like the competitor of Custom Chrome he's like you should call Steve Fizz I go I'll buy as many as you can make but anything else Fizz go buy too and so I you know it got crazy I was like selling them for like seven or eight hundred bucks a piece and i was like making 700 bucks a week salary working for hot rods by boyd and then i was making 15 grand a week welding in my garage at night and so then i started to sell the distributors so they could go global well uh i have some hell's angel friends like custom chrome requested it some bought some fenders directly from me to look at them well i have some hell's angel friends that I met when I was a bodyguard that are in like Singapore and China.

3:47He took the fenders and sent them right over there and tried to have them copied. Oh, wow. And like, what was your reaction when you found out? My friends knew I was pissed. My friends sent them back or said they, the Taiwanese turned it down because they're too hard. We can't make those. We can't do this here. And so they sent them back and I knew about that and he didn't know about it. and so we had a meeting and he says you know i told him i said hey this is the price and i want every one of these fenders to have my name on the inside of it jesse james west coast choppers like a brass tag he said he's all why would we do that he's like he said i could understand if your name was like arlen ness or one of the big names in the industry i'm like hey you know what maybe someday i'll be big in the motorcycle industry but that's just the way it's going to be and he said no so I was like all right two weeks later that he called and agreed and sent me and I can remember this is like a pinnacle part of my business I got a fact I rented I had my I left Boyd's I'm making fenders and building bikes on my own and I got a fax machine in the shop and that sound like you know the fax coming through and I remember like a hundred and $25 ,000 purchase order came over and it was like just me I didn't have any employees or nothing I'm like oh how am I gonna do this and like so buckled down and I farmed out a little bit and hired a welder and fired him and then I was by myself again and then you know just figured it out you know but that was like to me that's when like one of the most successful points in my life where I knew like, oh, like, whoa, like the fax coming in, custom chrome, this big order.

5:37I should have been looking at the profit margin though. That's where I messed up. Really? No, well, it was good for what it was, but like hindsight, distributors only make the lion's share. As always, thanks for listening. To see more trending clips from my team, go to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger.

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