We remained strict about keeping our commitments to God and to each other. I imagine it would be difficult for many people to change everything after the amount of time that Rachael and I had been living together. But for us, I’ll put it this way: God honors and can do a lot of work with the type of decision we made. He is so gracious.
In November 2009, we visited Rachael’s parents in New Jersey, and I asked her father’s permission to marry her. He was relieved because he and her mom still assumed that something was wrong between us and were still unsure of my intentions. I did not know her parents well. Before Rachael moved in, she had been doing all the driving to come see me. Her parents felt like they had been losing their daughter to me, and when I said I wanted to propose, they were happy to know I was prepared to make a commitment.
I had a ring designed, wrote a poem, and wrapped the poem in a pretty package. On Christmas morning, my first gift to her was a video camera. I suggested we set up the camera to record us opening the remainder of our presents. Next, I handed her the wrapped poem, and as she read it out loud, I dropped to one knee. The last line of the poem was, “Will you be my wife?” She answered, “Yes,” and then I slid the engagement ring onto her finger.
Rachael wanted to wait a year to get married, but I favored six months. Like in any strong relationship, we compromised! It helped us agree on a wedding date in the middle of our preferences when we found an opening in August at a place to get married near her home, on Long Beach Island in New Jersey. I had seen that particular place the week I asked her father for permission to marry her, and I had a pretty strong feeling that our wedding would be there. That place typically booked up two years in advance, so when we found out that August 20 was available, we grabbed it.
Rachael had the vision for our wedding, and together we planned everything. She thought of every last detail, and it showed when the day came. Two weeks before our big day, we were in South Dakota for business, with no cell phone service and trying to make all the pressing arrangements for a wedding halfway across the country. It was stressful but exciting.
The wedding turned out perfect. Michael Guido performed the ceremony. The weather was warm but great. As we walked out of the boathouse chapel as the new Mr. and Mrs., butterflies were released while “Here Comes the Sun” played on wind instruments.
Our wedding was on a Friday, and many of the guests stayed for the weekend. Rachael and I spent a week there before returning home to get back to running PJD. Almost a year later, we took what we considered our honeymoon in Napa, California.
We both are convinced that Rachael’s moving out strengthened our relationship. Making that commitment reset the clock for us; it was like telling each other that we were worth it. I consider ours a story of redemption because we were able to get back to what our relationship should have been in the first place.
I know some will not believe that is possible, because I have heard that remark when Rachael and I have shared our story. But believe us when we say that it is never too late for a couple to honor God and each other.
The dynamic of American Chopper changed drastically after my father fired me, and that set us up for a needed refresh of the show. Viewers had related to the routine of the arguments between my father and me: yell at each other, throw a fist through the door, storm out of the shop or office, and a little later be like, “Sorry, let’s get back to work.”
Even when I was no longer working at OCC, my father’s attacks on me continued. But for most of season 6, I was no longer there to bring resolution. The arguments were entirely one sided. Instead of the two of us yelling at each other, he ranted and said junk about me and Mikey, who also had left the company, and that was the end of it. It was like he couldn’t help but say nasty things about us.
The show’s contract was running out after that season. As I was getting Paul Jr. Designs up and running, the future of the show was hanging in the balance.
Eileen O’Neill from TLC called and asked what was next for me.
“I think I’m going to start building bikes again,” I told her.
“Would you do that even without the show?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s time for me to start building bikes again.”
I believe that if I had not said I wanted to return to bike building, the show would have been over. Instead, a new contract was written up for the show that called for me to build bikes and was sent to OCC. My father and his management team said they would not sign a contract if my building bikes was a part of it. With me out, they wanted their own show.
Eileen told my father that if he did not sign the contract, the show would be canceled. OCC told her to go ahead and cancel the show.
That exchange took place on Friday, February 5, 2010.
Eileen called and told me, “Well, Paul, you must be a really good bike builder, because they’re willing to lose the show to have you not build bikes.”
“It’s been an absolutely amazing ride,” I told her. “We appreciate so much what the network has done for us.”
“Okay,” she replied. “I’m releasing to the media that I’m canceling American Chopper.”
Discovery fed TMZ the news and TMZ posted a short article titled “ ‘American Chopper’—It’s Over!” that reported the next week’s episode would be the series finale. After a weekend of that news flying around, the OCC folks—without calling Discovery—signed the contract on Monday and rushed it to the network.
Eileen called me and told me that my father had undergone a change of heart.
Discovery called OCC’s bluff, and OCC buckled.
The funny thing is that my father’s firing me might have been the best decision he made for OCC since saying yes to doing the first pilot episode. I think that during the sixth season, the show had begun to run its course. The ratings were still good, not great, but with me not working at OCC, American Chopper had stopped being the show that made it successful. My father and his management circle had been pushing hard to have their own show, but Discovery had not been willing to give them a show without me. The bottom line on American Chopper was that it was about a father and son building motorcycles. Remove the son, and what made the show unique?
When Eileen heard me say that I wanted to build bikes again, she had to be thinking, We are not going to miss this!
Once all sides had signed on to continuing the show, Discovery came up with the idea of playing up the competition between my father and me by changing the show’s name to American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior. I had no say regarding the new name, but I would not have been in favor of the change. At no point did I want to perpetuate any negative relationship between my father and me. But I was already in a contract, and networks know what they are doing.
The concept gave the show new life, and we stayed on the air four more seasons over a span of three-plus years. Ironically, the father-son dynamic that kept the show on television was what OCC had been ready to lose the show over.
RAMPING UP PJD
Once I signed the new contract for the show, Rachael and I immediately went to work finding a shop location and building up my equipment—only to learn my father was determined to make my entry into the business as difficult as possible by trash-talking our new venture to potential vendors.
We found a good location that had not been listed yet. It was near the original OCC shop in Rock Tavern, the next town east of Montgomery and about four miles from OCC’s headquarters. We had no problems securing equipment.
EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY
People skilled in handcraftsmanship tend to resist technology. I understand that because I appreciate the tradition of doing things the old way and I don’t always like change myself. But I have always embraced technology when it comes to custom-building bikes. The combination of creative thought, handcraftsmanship, and technology makes for impressive results. Technology makes us a better company, able to put out a better product. Without technology, we could not operate at a high level whil
e also working at the pace we need. Technology also improves our skill set.
For example, in the old days, if we needed to measure a part that was complicated, we would have to sit there and keep trying to figure it out until we got it correct. There was a lot of trial and error. Now, we have a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine that measures three-dimensionally. But at the same time, we are still doing sheet metal work and welding by hand to give our bikes the exact look we want.
Probably the most valuable tool in my shop is the Flow Waterjet machine, which generates a crazy-high pressurized stream of water about the thickness of a hair off my head. The water flow creates a clean and precise cut of steel. The Flow Waterjet enables me to think creatively because we can make precise brackets and panels and other things in a ridiculously short amount of time.
If someone told me I could keep only one tool from my shop, it would be the Flow Waterjet.
I also began assembling a team that looked familiar to viewers, hiring Mikey and Vinnie, who had been gone from OCC for several years. I hired Brendon Thompson to handle sheet metal. Cody Connelly joined us, and then I brought in Joe Puliafico after OCC fired him. By the time Joe joined us, my shop was the land of misfit toys. But we were off to the races because we had hired the right team.
Owning an upsizing business brought with it a learning curve because there was a lot to manage with the employees and all the expenses. I knew about running a company from being part owner of OCC, but there were responsibilities I had never been personally involved in.
I knew how much motors, transmissions, and frames cost, but at PJD, I realized just how unbelievable all the expenses and New York state taxes were. I had to purchase all the necessary insurance and become a licensed manufacturer, because in order to sell bikes, I had to title them under the manufacturer’s name.
We needed work. My name had become a brand, and potential clients knew I could design. But only two companies on television could build a bike for corporations, and I was starting almost from scratch against the established one.
Rachael and I considered changing the company’s name, but in the end we stayed with Paul Jr. Designs because we didn’t want to put Choppers in the name and be restricted to only bikes. We wanted to stay well rounded in our work, while taking advantage of the equity in my name.
We also committed to conducting PJD’s business based on relationships and godly principles, such as honesty, integrity, character, and loyalty. Even when it would hurt, we would do the right thing. When no one appeared to be looking, we would still do the right thing. While working at OCC, I had observed bridges being burned—and I did not want to run my business that way. The problem with burning bridges is one day you look forward and there’s nowhere else to go, and then you look behind you and there is no way to get back to where you were. All the bridges are out.
PJD would not have just clients and vendors; we were going to have relationships with them.
We didn’t have a client when we decided to take it full circle with another web-themed bike, the black-and-yellow Anti-Venom Bike that, despite the web theme, I designed with its own unique look compared to the Black Widow. I questioned whether to build a bike for myself when I needed to make money and pay employees. I decided that, in order to show that I could do bikes on my own, PJD needed a signature bike.
After we started working on that bike, PJD landed its first client: GEICO. Going from nothing to two custom bikes at once, we were officially a motorcycle company.
For GEICO, we built the rear fender in the shape of the GEICO lizard and gave the bike a gecko-skin paint scheme. We unveiled the Anti-Venom and GEICO Bikes during the same week at the seventieth anniversary Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, South Dakota.
Two weeks later, Rachael and I married, and after we returned home, the pace in the shop picked up in a hurry. We worked long hours, just as we had at OCC, but in a better, positive environment. The atmosphere around the shop was so happy and the production process so smooth that the network accused me of taking fights with my employees behind closed doors.
“You had a disagreement with Brendon the other day—what did you do with it?” I was asked one day.
“We didn’t have a fight, just a creative difference,” I responded.
Creative differences are great. They’re healthy. Brendon and I disagreed, but then we got over it and went back to work together.
SPIRITED COMPETITION
We suspected OCC of spying on us, so we blacked out the windows in the shop and tried to be as secretive as possible about our work. The American Chopper setup made us a little paranoid, too, because the main production for the show took place at OCC headquarters. Our crew would film at our shop, and then the tapes would be taken to OCC for the post-filming work. Our work and our creative process were on those tapes. As part of their work for the show, the crew also took pictures of our work. We found out later that my father and his crew looked at those pictures and knew exactly what we were working on.
My father was blinded by the fact that we were now in a competitive situation. Looking at the photos and film from our shop actually put his crew one step behind us. If they were seeing what we were doing and reacting to our work, they were always chasing us.
The spying on our work, the lawsuit, the disparaging way he spoke about me, my family, and my business—those hurt my father’s celebrity. I witnessed my father falling over himself. He spent the better part of five years on television trying to destroy me publicly—not just my business, but me, personally. And it hurt his business and his brand. It hurt him.
I took the stance that I would never retaliate against my father. First, I wanted to keep my heart right before God; a time is coming when I will have to answer to God for all my actions. Second, I knew that someday I’d have my own son, and my legacy would depend on how I handled myself.
My father focused on our business. So did I. At one point, we were shown videos from OCC for the express purpose of antagonizing us into retaliation. Discovery wanted a real mudslinging match, and I felt pressured to get into a back-and-forth with my father’s company. But whatever OCC threw at us, we wouldn’t throw back. I maintained that when something bothered me—and there were plenty of things that did—I would go to God first and not retaliate.
THE BRAND, AT WHAT COST?
At Paul Jr. Designs, I didn’t always make money building a bike for a client because most of the time I worked without a budget. In fact, on some bikes, I lost money, if you want to look at it that way.
Perhaps that’s not sound business all the time, but to me it was part of establishing and maintaining the brand. A client and I would agree on a price, but during the building process, I might decide that the bike needed a $10,000 set of wheels. So I’d add them because we were building a work of art to represent what the client was all about, whether it be a product or a corporate message.
In these cases I was willing to lose money to not sacrifice the brand quality because of a statement that represents who we are as a company: whatever it takes to do the best job possible.
Not cutting corners is what allowed us to exceed client expectations on every project. Sometimes that hurt a little financially, but looking back, I think it has been worth well more than the initial cost to build our brand around the value of never coming up short of the best build possible.
The network’s competition theme worked to a degree, but it never became as sensational as they desired. The anger was one sided, so it looked bad for my father, and I was just the son who was starting a business and trying to make a living.
The fan base really came to our side. (I hate to say “our side,” but that’s the way it was.) Clients came to us, too, because they appreciated our no-retaliation position. The shift in our direction appeared to increase the jealousy on the other side. To me, the more the folks at OCC couldn’t control that jealousy, the more obsessed with us they became. They focused on us, kept trying to catch up with us, and we kept mo
ving forward. We were determined to keep doing the right thing no matter how difficult it was.
And I’ll be completely honest: It was no cake walk. It was difficult every day. Every single day. For five years, at least.
I would talk with my guys at the shop, and there were times when we wanted to retaliate against OCC. There were times when I really wanted to get back at them. My pride was hurt. I would write angry e-mails but then erase them. Most of the time, I would have been right in my responses, since I had every right to feel the way I did. But that gut check would come and tell me that responding was not the right thing to do.
As hard as it was not to respond—to feel like I was just sitting there and taking it on the chin—the Senior vs. Junior years helped me understand how to honor God first and foremost while operating under difficult circumstances.
For season 8—the second of Senior vs. Junior—Cadillac reached out to Discovery wanting to be involved with the show. Discovery asked PJD and OCC to both build a bike for Cadillac. Discovery was careful not to propose the builds as a competition, but after a year of building bikes separately, this would be the first apples-to-apples build with father and son.
The Cadillac build was unique in that Discovery proposed it to us. One of the distinctive aspects of our show was that we brought original ad sales in for the network. Discovery sold advertising for the show, but because of our business model, a corporation paying us to build a bike gave that company, in effect, a one-hour commercial. This wasn’t like a soda company paying to have someone hold a can of their product during a show, or a particular brand of clothing being visibly worn. When companies like Microsoft, GEICO, and Skilsaw signed bike deals with us, they received the added benefit of having an entire episode (or two) built around their brand.
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