In my opinion, some of those involved in OCC management wanted a luxurious glass building with big offices, fancy stuff, and the attention that would come with a new headquarters.
Supporters of the project kept trying to get me to approve the plan. After almost a year and a half of disagreements, it was obvious that the building was going to happen with or without my blessing, so I signed off on the project.
In the first episode of the fourth season, we broke ground on the new shop. But, still, I never understood the need for a new headquarters or, for that matter, the design they chose.
Even the construction process turned out to be a mess. Our headquarters was a huge undertaking, and my father hired a general contractor who had only worked on big residential jobs.
“The guy can’t do the job,” I said to my father.
“Why can’t he do it?” he asked.
“He’s never done it before,” I told him.
The management circle left it to me to question the man in one particular meeting. We all sat down and everyone on our side was like, “Go ahead, tell him what you think.”
I looked across the table to him and said, “I don’t think you can do the job.”
“I can,” he replied.
“Well,” I followed up, “tell me one commercial job that you’ve done that’s as big as this job.”
“I haven’t done one,” he said.
“Then how can you tell me you can do the job?” I asked him.
Everyone in the room looked at me like I was the bad guy. I was used to that look, because from their perspective, I always was the one to rock the boat. I did sometimes, but I also didn’t hesitate to step up and disagree with a decision that didn’t make sense. To me, that’s smart business.
My father, with the others in agreement, wound up picking that guy to GC the task of building the headquarters. The man couldn’t handle the job—he got kicked off before he finished. I was like, Okay, I wonder who said that would happen? Then the contractor wound up suing us for something. I don’t even recall what it was. It was just an absurd situation.
It’s not like I’m super smart, but this was simple stuff we were talking about when it came to whether we needed a new headquarters and a proven contractor to do the job.
We moved into the 92,800-square-foot headquarters in April 2008, which was shown about halfway through season 5, amid much pomp and circumstance. The overall design was cool aesthetically, but it was not set up for production.
OCC is still operating out of that building, with retail space and a restaurant on the property. But my father no longer owns the building because in 2011, under the threat of foreclosure, he had to turn the property back over to the lender and lease most of the property. In early 2016, the property sold at auction for $2,275,000.
INSANITY EVERYWHERE
My father did make some good decisions for the company. Moving from the steel business to the shop in Montgomery was a great idea. He bought that building himself and rented it to the company, which was smart, and that location provided us an ideal work space for a long time.
Naming the company Orange County Choppers worked out well. I hated the name at first, so I was definitely wrong on that one.
My father’s get-it-done management style could be effective; it wasn’t always a negative. I think he managed people who weren’t part of his family pretty well. And even with our frequent fights, we did good work together.
But when I look back at the overall picture, I just see insanity everywhere. And, keeping it real, our company made so much money during the show years that big mistakes that would have buried other companies went almost unnoticed. I thought there were members of the management team who were patting themselves on the back at the same time they were making poor decisions. Their mistakes, however, got lost underneath the pile of money coming in. When the money flow did eventually begin to slow, those decision makers got exposed, and I think that speaks to how the company was managed all along.
Despite all the disagreements and arguments and broken office doors, there were many good days filming the show. We had a great group of coworkers. We laughed, we goofed off, and we built cool bikes. We did all those things as a team, and much of that showed through on American Chopper. But what made for a good show is what eventually cast a negative light on the whole business.
I wish that my father and I would have gotten along better. It was like we were taking over the world because of the show’s success and yet we couldn’t figure out our relationship. I realize this is a running theme in my story, but the problems predominantly came because of my father’s negative outlook on me. I would ask my dad, “Why is it that you are always yelling at me, and why can’t we get along?” We didn’t fight all the time because I wanted to. Yes, I instigated fights at times—that was part of our dynamic. But I would estimate that 90 percent of the time my father picked fights with me.
Money and success were not the reasons we couldn’t get along. We were the same way back when I worked for him in the steel shop. The company wasn’t making much money then and we had jobs to get done. There was stress, and we blew up at each other. Then, during the show’s heyday, money was no longer an issue, but the same level of unhappiness existed between us. I honestly believe that started with my father, because most of our fights resulted from my father pushing me until I exploded.
I like to think that I have a long fuse. I would bite my lip a lot and try to work things out, but my father was a real agitator. He knew what buttons to push, and he pushed them often. And then once I’d had enough, I would freak out.
The viewers loved it. They enjoyed watching the sensational arguments. I think part of that is because more of our viewers than would probably admit also had explosive moments with their family members.
It’s weird to look back and reflect on how regrettable the fights with my father were, yet also realize that they helped make the show successful.
Perhaps that is why so many viewers have asked if our fights were real. They were, and they had been happening years before the cameras arrived. The criticizing and telling me that I had never earned anything—that had been my father’s MO since I was twelve. Or maybe even younger. He always had to talk as though he worked harder than I did. But I had worked hard for him since before I became a teenager.
One of the oft-repeated phrases on the show was my father asking, “Where’s Paulie?” They played the life out of that, creating the impression I was always late to work. I admit, I was late sometimes. I was a young guy. I was still maturing. I also was working my tail off, putting in eighty hours a week for years. Life was unbalanced because of how much we worked, yet my father wouldn’t cut me a break. I would work twenty hours over a weekend and come in Monday morning at eight instead of seven, only to have my father go off on me for being “an hour late.”
I was fine with working hard. I’ve never been a lazy person: I’d worked every weekend during the school year and every summer beginning at age thirteen, with no time off like my friends. I once had to fight a bloody battle with my father to get a Saturday off so I could go to the lake with friends. I’ve never cried about the hours I put in. My father raised me to be a hard worker. But then, unbelievably, if someone asked him about my work ethic, he talked as though I never did anything.
That was at the root of our relationship problems and, thus, our on-screen arguments. It would have been easier if the conflicts were scripted and we had to argue for the cameras. Then we could go back to work or to lunch or whatever like nothing had happened. But that’s not the way it was.
It’s one thing to get fired from a job. It’s another thing to get fired in front of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Then throw in the fact that I was fired by my father and it all added up to what would prove to be…the best day of my life.
September 28, 2008. That’s the day my father gave me the boot.
We had been in our new headquarters for only a matter of months, a
nd I had recently become a part owner of Orange County Choppers—finally. There’s a story there, too, of course.
Back in 2005, my father told me that he was promoting our general manager to senior vice president, which was my title. I threatened to leave the company. What most people don’t realize is that I technically wasn’t paid to be on American Chopper. I did not have a contract with Discovery. I worked for OCC, and OCC had a contract with Discovery to provide me as talent for the show. The talent fees went to OCC, not me, and the company paid me a salary that was more than covered by the talent fees Discovery paid OCC. I also was making appearances for which the company received money. My salary was good money, but it was not close to being on par with what I was bringing in for the company. The days of OCC breaking even were far in the rearview mirror, with the show making boatloads of money for OCC, and I was not receiving any of the profits.
I was eyeing a rather expensive Mercedes, and my father bought it for me. I can see now that with the money OCC was making, he bought me the car to try to keep me happy and, more importantly, quiet.
We were still housed in the Montgomery shop when I went to my father and said I would leave the company if he didn’t make me a partner. I told him that I deserved a portion of the company for what I was bringing to the table with my creative efforts.
That sparked a big blowup.
My father eventually relented. His lawyer at the time, now deceased, drew up some papers that we both signed that called for me to receive ownership in Orange County Choppers that would eventually reach 30 percent.
I didn’t receive my first level of partnership—I think it was 20 percent—until after we moved into the new OCC headquarters in Newburgh. Somehow, the process got dragged out for three years, and by the time everything finally came together, my money wasn’t there. And I’m talking about in excess of $10 million. Plus, the new headquarters carried a $100,000 monthly mortgage, and payroll was more than twice that.
After moving into the new headquarters, annual operating costs were projected at a few million dollars. I think my father wanted to reduce my salary and do something that would make me leave and then, when I asked to come back, agree to my return—only for less money.
At the end of the day on September 27, my father and I got into a heated argument after he said he wanted me to go back to building production bikes. After all the years of designing custom bikes with a distinctive OCC flair, he wanted me to go back to the early days and perform work like bolting tanks on frames—tank after tank after tank.
I was not above that work, but we already had people capably building production bikes. I argued with my father that with my design abilities, my job should be to take care of the creative work. As part owner of what had become a large company, I needed to handle all the things associated with keeping us moving forward creatively, including ensuring we were always prepared for the next project. My father completely disagreed, and he seemed clearly intentional about drastically changing my role.
The next morning, I went into the shop before anyone else. Calmly, I told my father that I wanted to talk about his wanting to move me to production bikes. “This doesn’t make sense to me at all,” I said. “How and why would I be doing this at this stage in the game?”
He was dead set that I should be standing at the lift all day tacking tanks on bikes like I had done in our early years. Another argument ensued. It wasn’t just any old argument by our standards—it was an all-timer. I threw a chair and stormed out of my father’s office. He followed me out the door and shouted that I was fired. I walked out of the shop and never looked back.
I sincerely believed that my father’s firing me wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to our argument, that instead there was a game plan put in place by management to fire me so I would come crawling back and take less money. Years later, a sound guy confirmed that and told me that he had heard an entire conversation about getting rid of me. (Sound guys overheard a lot of things when people forgot to turn off their microphones.)
I had signed a new five-year contract with OCC in January, and, looking back at it, that was a bad decision because things were coming to a head with my father. I probably would have eventually wanted out of the contract as much as they wanted me out at the time. Their only way to end the contract early was to terminate my employment.
The morning of the twenty-ninth, my attorney called OCC’s attorney to confirm that I had been fired. That meant I was officially out of my contract with the company. It also put OCC in a tight spot with Discovery.
I missed at least three weeks of filming without going back to beg for my old job. The show’s producer, Christo Doyle, my point person with Discovery, was out of the country and I could not reach him, so no one there knew that I had been fired. That was our show’s first of two-and-a-half seasons airing on TLC, a member of the Discovery Communications family of channels. Eileen O’Neill was president and general manager of TLC at the time, and she came to OCC headquarters three weeks after my termination to talk with my father about a second show he wanted to do in which he would build furniture. Eileen met with OCC management and was informed that I had not been coming to work for three weeks. My dad asked her what he should do, and she said, “If I wasn’t coming to work, I would be fired.” That gave my father and the rest of management Discovery’s blessing for me to no longer be involved with American Chopper.
The same day of that meeting—which I knew nothing about—I finally made contact with Christo and told him, “I just wanted to let you know—I don’t know if anyone told you—but I got fired three weeks ago, and I haven’t been filming for three weeks.”
“That’s weird,” he said.
It just so happened that at the same time we were talking, Eileen was on her flight back to Discovery headquarters. Christo talked with her after she landed and asked if she knew I had been fired three weeks earlier. Obviously, that was not the understanding she took from her meeting with my father, who was trying to avoid being in breach of contract for not providing me as talent to the show.
The timing of how all that came down made it look like I had a spy inside OCC. I prefer to think that God was watching out for me.
Discovery wanted me to remain part of the show, but for me, there was no going back to working for OCC. We reached an agreement whereby I signed with OCC to work as an independent contractor on a couple of builds so I could be on the show and make a few public appearances. I worked at the shop for a month or two to film more episodes, and although I was supposed to, I never got paid a cent for doing so.
STARTING PAUL JR. DESIGNS
Being fired created a scary time because I did not know what would happen next. But it did provide me an escape from a really bad situation. Working for my father had long been oppressive, and it was time to leave.
I worked out a contract with Discovery separate from OCC for the show. I also started Paul Jr. Designs, which I ran out of a back room at my house.
My final contract with OCC had included a one-year noncompete clause that precluded me from building motorcycles. I was mentally done with bikes, though. The toxic environment at my father’s shop had made me sick of motorcycles. Building bikes was no longer fun.
PJD was set up to provide design services for and collaborate with other companies. Design work, to me, was not limited to motorcycles; it could be applied to practically anything. We hired a manager, Tim Cook, who sniffed around to find companies that might be interested in hiring me. We tried to come up with a gun design for a gun company, but that didn’t pan out.
Ultimately, we landed with Coleman, the outdoors company that specializes in camping and outdoor products. Coleman wanted me to redesign its on-the-go RoadTrip grill. This project was squarely in my wheelhouse because Coleman has a largely male demographic and the RoadTrip grill was metal, ran on gas, and rolled on two wheels.
I employed the same shaping concepts on the grill that I used on bikes, adding a lot of chrome accents and built-in diamond
-plate side tables. I gave the thermometer a speedometer effect, and for the finishing touch I included ten rivets on the top of the grill to mark the grill’s tenth anniversary.
To me, designing a grill was the same as designing a bike. Both projects were about problem solving and finding the best way to get from point A to point B.
Coleman, which also bought designs for coolers from me, made a great match for me. Building the grill was exciting and fun, plus it proved a good way to bridge the gap between manufacturing/design and understanding price point because I had to stay within parameters on cost and tooling. With appearances and royalties, Coleman kept me in business that first year of Paul Jr. Designs.
The American Chopper crew filmed me working at home on the grill, so I was still part of the show. Filming the show at OCC had been tiring, but when I started my own business, I wanted to do the show more than ever before. American Chopper was marketing for PJD that I could not place a price tag on. So I kept doing the show, but other than a couple of cameo appearances at my father’s shop as an independent consultant, I was no longer a part of OCC.
One of the more difficult things I had to deal with in establishing PJD was separating myself from what I loved and had created during all my years at OCC. I had designed the logo and worn it proudly. I had designed bikes, shown the bikes, and been in charge of all the proposed products. I had become one of the two main faces of the company. Those were all a part of me, and they were an expression of me creatively. Then in one day’s time, I had to essentially turn my back on everything I had promoted and stood for, on what I had thought I would spend the rest of my life continuing to invest in, and head off in a different direction—to start over. That was a difficult transition because I had to overcome how synonymous I was with what remained at OCC.
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