The Dale Jr. Download - 458 - Dale Earnhardt and the Rise of the NASCAR Souvenir Business - The Business of Motorsports Part III

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

Kelley Earnhardt Miller is back for another installment of the Business of Motorsports as she and co-host Mike Davis sit down with JR Motorsports’ Senior Vice President of Business and Strategy Joe Mattes. After spending years in the banking and garment industries, Mattes was connected with Dale Earnhardt Sr. through Don Hawk. Before Joe knew it, he was moving into Dale Sr.’s lake house and taking over a racing empire.Joe fills listeners in on how he and the Earnhardt team created some of the most iconic racing souvenirs of all time, including the Winston 25th Anniversary and the 1996 Olympics diecasts. He also explained the importance of not only working with large distributors and outlets but also directly with smaller vendors and collectors. The episode explains Joe’s departure from Dale Sr.'s enterprise and his early involvement with e-commerce through NASCAR.com. In part two, Joe details his journey back into the Earnhardt inner circle, this time through Dale Jr. and JR Motorsports. Check out Dirty Mo Media on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DirtyMoMedia  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The following is a production of Dirtymoe Media. Welcome to the Dell Jr. Download. It is yours truly, Kelly Earnhardt Miller. This is actually a little bit different segment. The business of photosports. This is something that I've wanted to do with you for a long time. Do business-related podcasts. Do business-related episodes.

Open chats, right? Open chats about the business concerns of our industry, which there are many. I hope this series opens people up to the broader, bigger picture. All right, welcome to the Bojangles Studio. It's Kelly Miller here with Mike Davis, and we are on our part three of Business of Motorsports, Mike. How exciting.

Yeah. Yeah, I love the business of motorsports. I love the series that we've been doing. I love having you at this table. It's so insightful. And I think we got a good one today, don't you? We have a really good one. So this has been teed up on Dell's show.

show. I think he really wanted to do this specific podcast, but here we are, you and I. We're going to make it happen. So today's podcast and story is going to be so fascinating. And the cool thing here, too, is not just a business of motorsports story, and it's going to be on licensing, but it's an Earnhardt story. I mean, you can't mention the word NASCAR souvenirs without thinking about specifically Dale Earnhardt. Your dad. Right. Yeah. So today we've got Joe Mattis.

He's going to be our ally guest today. And Joe is just been entrenched for, gosh, more than 25 years in this rich motorsports souvenir history. And he has some great stories, some fun stories, probably even some sad stories, you know, yeah, through his career. It's a roller coaster for sure. but if you're listening to this podcast and you have bought a NASCAR T-shirt, I'm not even talking about an Earnhardt shirt. I'm talking about anything. A die cast, anything.

Joe Mattis probably had something to do with it. That's how big. And again, from the 90s all the way to the 2000s, he's basically been a titan in the souvenir merchandising industry. And Dale Jr., like you said, he goes, if y'all want to tell a story, a business story, you need to do it on the merchandise and the run. roller coaster that that has been because at its boom, at its height, oh my gosh. It was unreal.

I mean, I am fortunate enough to have been part of Joe's story. So I came to work for Joe in 1995 as he took over the reins of sports image and we'll get into that. I'm sure, you know, he'll get into that story and we'll talk about that. And so he's been a huge mentor for me. I was in the throes in the mid-90s until I left there in 2001 of the licensing. business. I know how passionate he is. He's the number one person I had on my radar whenever we left Delin Horn Incorporated and started building junior motorsports. And I know some of the stories. I can remember at the height of, we were in this building off of Harris Boulevard and Charlotte. And at the height of race weeks and the height of everything we have going on, we literally were in

the parking lot with boxes and pallets, just unpacking and shipping orders and pick, pack and ship. That was what we were doing. And it was insane. So I'm excited. There's, there's a lot of probably the back in history that I don't know of, you know, how he came here and some of the inside stories. But I'm super excited to have him in here today and uncover some of those things. And really think about it from my perspective as I was sitting on another side of it and what he was going through. I'm super excited. Depending on how much he wants to tell us, this could end up being a two-parter. We'll see. we'll see how long we go. But I can tell that just in knowing the outline and the history,

we could divide this into a Dale Senior and a Dale Jr. Episode, like a Dale Senior was part one, Dale Jr. is part two because like you said, when you brought him over here, I think it was like 2007, 2007, 2008, something like that. Yeah, Dale Jr. was making this kind of big announcement, right? He was leaving the family company. I remember the paranoia that we all had. Like, we didn't know what to expect.

Were the fans going to revolt? Wait, we haven't even announced that he's going. There's two parts to this story. And then what would happen with the merchandise? Because Dale Jr., as everybody would assume, did quite well in that space. He did quite, he sold a lot of merch. And a lot of people listening to this show probably still have some. Absolutely.

Joe, I cannot wait to get him in here. This is going to be a fun one. Yeah, me too. I'm super excited about it. That particular time that you were talking about was like a nine-month, time frame of trying to figure out what we were doing and all those announcements. And Joe was a big part of that. And in fact, funny story, when I unfortunately got sick that year in the beginning of 2007

and was in the hospital and we literally interviewed in Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte. Oh, wow. See, I didn't even know that. Wow. For him to, yeah, it was like, we're going to make this happen. So that's some dedication right there just for the entire company. But good stuff. Well, listen, you're so much part of this story.

So I'm going to be equally interested in some of the things that you remember and some of the things that, because you're right, you're, you're paralleling with Joe. A lot of times, you know, with him hiring you at the souvenir company and then also you hiring him at Junior Motorsports. So let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah. Let's bring in our ally guest, Joe Mattis. Welcome, Joe. Ready for this?

I was thinking of the 30-year history. And there's so many highs and there's so many deep. close. We were just talking about that. And I'll try to focus on the highs. Well, it wouldn't be the right story if you don't sprinkle in with a little of everything, right? So Joe Mattis here at the table.

We're excited about this business of motorsports podcast. We talked about how this was super fascinating to Dale and he thought that he really wants to be in this seat doing the talking. But I'm so glad this is one of our business and motorsports episode. So let's just start at the top. You, I mean, from my perspective, I know how you got here, but let's talk about your background and kind of where you came from and how you got involved in this NASCAR souvenir business. Okay, I came from a heavy accounting and business background.

My first job was with Certainty Corporation in Mountain Top Pennsylvania, and I was a budget and cost analyst, which is sort of what I still play with numbers. You're still a budget and cost analyst. And then I went on to their headquarters in King of Prussia and I was a financial analyst. And we reviewed all the marketing and sales promotions. They were fiberglass insulation. So they would sell in a major program, and our job was to do the analytics from it. So it was heavy, heavy concentrating on that.

But then I had a word change early in life. My neighbor calls me, who was really a really, really good. And he said, hey, we need a controller in a bank. You want to be a bank controller, which is really a very boring job. But it was back in my hometown. And I already had one baby, going to have another baby. And where's your hometown? Ringtown, Pennsylvania. Okay. So this was in Shenando. And so I said, yeah, I'll be a bank controller. And I end up being a bank controller with about 20 women upstairs doing numbers, and it was painful. The banking or being around 20 women?

Both. I'm like, no, this is going to rotary meetings and I said, I got to get out of here. So I went back and I called my dad. I said, hey, dad. And I worked with my dad a lot in the injection molding business ahead of time from 14 on. But I wanted to be my own. I didn't want to go to work for my dad. I didn't want to go out of college and, hey, dad, I need a job.

That bank controlling job made me call my dad and said, hey, I need a job. And you said, well, you're going to have to come back and start the bottom. I said, that's fine. I just need a job. And so I was a corporate controller and they had facilities all over. And eventually it grew a lot. And we made hangers for the garment industry. And we had plants in Forest City, North Carolina, Rinktown, Pennsylvania, Long Island City,

all the way Texas and San Antonio, California. you. And we were like hangar king of it all. And, you know, we had patents. We went with retailers, and these retailers, we had them spec our hanger, which forced the manufacturers to use our hanger. So, you know, they would go, it was a good, it was a garment industry. So learning the streets, my dad put me in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in a warehouse to run distribution into the city. So you would run trucks into the garment industry. And a little poach boy in the Jewish industry, it was an interesting training. And then all along and eventually we had a lot of equity ownership and we went public.

And they're aggressive. And my dad was pretty high up from a manufacturing standpoint. And from a business standpoint, I started getting heavily involved in all aspects. and I came to North Carolina as assistant plant manager, and then I went to California. The place was losing a ton of money, and they said, send your son out there, and if he could fix it, fine, if not, we'll shut them down.

So we fixed it, and I was 28, and we did, it start working, and so they said, we got to get out of California because of the environmental problems, the financial problems, and we went to Tijuana, Mexico, and from dirt, literally, from dirt. We built this factory, you know, 80,000 square foot factory. And we had this, and we were in Takadi assembling. And from literally dirt, my father and I built this $45 million company. Good heavens. And then got up and running and going. And they're like, what are you going to do? You know, who's going to run it? My dad said my son will. And my wife says,

she's getting out of California. By now I had four kids. I've moved six times in nine years and I have four daughters and I'm never home. And I'm in Tijuana. I'm making hangers. That wasn't going to go. And we were producing between all the factories, three and a half, four million hangers a day. Wow. And it was just, my dad said, what are you going to do?

We built this. I'm like, I'm out of here. And he said, you can. I said, I am. So I went, told him I'm leaving the company and my dad is extremely mad at me. and he said, okay, he told the owners, send my son back to Pennsylvania, let him run my factory, and I'll stay here.

So from age 61, 62, and 63, my dad lived in Tijuana. Wow. Ran a factory. And then that was, and we got into sales and all that, and we were doing pretty good. And then I'm randomly in Pensacola, Florida.

After I get all that done, I'm randomly in Pensacola, Florida, and we start selling because we were making all these hangars. I was complaining about the sales department. They're not selling them fast enough. You make $3.5 million a day. You have to put them somewhere.

And my boss said, you got a problem with the sales department? I said, yeah. He said, well, what do you want to do about it? I said, I want to run it. So then I became the sales guy selling those hangars that my dad was making, everyone else, all these factories. And so I'm in Pensacow, Florida. And to get a sale, like anything,

you have to take someone to dinner. I said, taking this guy and his wife and his daughter's out. And every six months I go there and I get 10 truckloads of hangers. But it costs me a dinner. And that's how you got the business. And there was really no iPhones and all of that. So I call my wife. And I said, it was like December 13th of 94.

I said, man, I'll be home tomorrow. It was two weeks I was always on the road. And she said, well, Don's been calling you. Apparently Dale earned her bought a company. And he needs someone to run it that doesn't know. a thing about NASCAR, but just knows business. No, wait, who's Don? Don Hawk was Dale, senior business manager.

And did y'all know Don Hawk? My wife and Don's wife are sisters. There we go. I knew Cindy, I knew Don, like, you know, Don, but I really knew Cindy from, they lived in our hometown. Yeah. And so at this point, how long had you been at the hangar business with your dad? 12 years.

12 years. Okay. Okay. 12 years. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, he was president and he was going to be 65 when he was going to retire. And I was, you know, executive vice president and I was going to be president.

And you were poised to take over? Yeah. Yeah. And then where it's $125 million, $140 million, depending on the seasonality of it all business. It was a real business. And they're going to make him president as he was 65 on his way out for his 30-some years in the business. And, you know, junior was going to take over. And so life was good and all of that.

And then Marcy's like, Cindy really thinks it's a good job. Cindy really wanted Marcy to come down here. Ah, the sister. Yeah, she wanted a sister down here. Yeah. And I'm like, I didn't know anything about NASCAR. I mean, I knew Dale Earnhardt because I'm a sports guy. And you're from Pennsylvania.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, I have zero interest in that. Well, you just got to hear him out and call Don when you're done and talk to him. So I got done to dinner. I got my purchase order. You still got the sale. You got to get the sale, though. You got to ask for the purchase order.

And I called Don. He's like, hey, man, there's a tremendous opportunity. Marcy says you're working 70, 80 hours a week. This is an easy job. Above above. You should just talk. I said, well, I'm flying into Charlotte tomorrow from Pensacola on Piedmont Airlines. back then and we'll pick you up and I was like who's going to pick me up and what I'm going to do and he

said we'll pick you up and I get to the airport and there's a guy with a beard holding a sign Joe Mattis and the first day I met Rick Boss. Oh my heavens. Okay real quick Kelly tell us who Rick Boss is is a veteran member of the Del Earnhardt team and so he worked for my dad was one of my dad's childhood friends growing up in Canapolis and worked for my dad then subsequently came over and worked for for junior motorsports until his retirement. So he was like a 35, 40-year employee. Yeah, one of your dad's closest friends. Rick Ross, was his closest friends.

Yeah. So I have my suit on and my shine shoes because I was a traveling salesman. And all of a sudden I'm taking this trip with Rick Boss. And it was like, it was an experience. I mean, like, what am I doing? And Rick's Rick. Yeah. Rick's just a good old boy from Canapolis.

Yeah. Is he saying anything to you? Probably not. Yeah, where are you from? Pennsylvania, you're Yankee and, you know, why are you here? I mean, they just told me to pick you up. I don't know what's going on. And that really made me, you know, that really made me.

You didn't look like a racing guy. Oh, no. No, not at all. And so I get to that little brick house where Dale ran his business and Trees is sitting on the couch and Dale. and he said, come on in. And it was just those two when I come in. This is the 14th of December, right?

And he said, you got your resume? I'm like, you called me. I didn't call you. Yeah, you didn't have a resume. I didn't have a resume in my briefcase. You had a purchase order for some hangars. And I said, no. And he said, how are we going to know about you?

I'm going to just ask me anything you want. He said, okay, who you work for? blah, blah, blah. And you said, would the president of the company be mad? If he knew you were here, I said, here's this number. Call him. Your dad. No, no, it's Cliff DePree.

Oh, it was. That's right. You're what in your dad before yet. And I called Cliff and ask him what kind of guy I am. That's how you're going to get to know me. And he's like, what else could you do? I said, well, the union just voted two times to go on strike. And we just got that settled.

Call the guy from the union. Here's his number and ask him how I handled people. He said, they voted the strike twice. I said, yeah, we got lucky. They finally voted yes. We glad we got that done before Christmas. And then he just went through everything and just drilling down. And I kept on saying, why?

Why me? What do you want? I mean, how does this work? I said, I don't know a thing about NASCAR. He said, I'm going to teach you everything you know about NASCAR. I don't want you to learn from anyone else. I want you to run my business, and I want you to make sure we're doing everything the correct way. And then Trisa had a medley of theoretical questions on cash and inventory and approvals and all those things that are important to her.

And massive, a lot of hypothetical. And with my background, that was like riding a bike. Yeah. There's nothing I had to be prepared. You know, how would you do business? based on these parameters. Okay, here's how you do it. And it was like a two minute answer.

Okay, what else? And what else you want to ask me? And on and on and on. Massive amount of questions. And it was good. And finally it was like two and a half hours. Wait a second. Is Dale?

Dale engaged. He's engaged. So when Teresa's firing away at you, he's, you know, not does and all for anything like that. He's engaged the whole time. Yeah, it's two and a half hours. It was real engagement. And real quick, what year is this? 1994.

1994. And what little house are you talking about? Yeah, so in front of DEI, the big DEI now, when my dad bought that as a farm off Highway 3, there was a little brick, one story. You know, I probably built in the 50s, 40s, something of that nature, house where they housed their office. So that was Don Hawk's office. Teresa had an office. Darryl Barker, who's our chapter. here now. It had an office. He was, he ran accounting and all these kind of things.

Amy Hallman. Amy Hallman. Yep. So, so this was their office. And, yeah, that's where he did business. And then my dad built the Deerhead Shop that so many people talk about, which is where the Bush team at the time, you know, lived and the workers would, the guys would come over in the evenings and work after their day jobs and whatnot. And then you had Delin Hart Incorporated that got built, what, 97-ish? Is the brick house still there? Yeah. Or is it, is the big shop built on top of it? The brick house is gone because that house is where junior motorsports was when we first went there. That section was where the brick house was. Oh, okay. So the brick house is gone. Yep. All right. Okay. So now we have the setting here. All right. So they go at you for about two, two and a half hours, you say?

Yeah. And then, Dail, Teresa, are you done? And he really gave her the opportunity to ask. everything, and she's like, yeah, I'm done. He said, okay, Matt, it's getting the truck. Which, I don't know what that means. I got in the truck. And he started driving around the farm, and he would drive a little bit and turn it off. What's important to you in life? And, you know, just asking me life questions.

I said, okay, what's important to you in life, Dale? So every time he asks me a question, I mean, we're interviewing each other at this point in time. I have a real good job. And if I take this job, my dad's going to be real. mad at me. So I mean, I mean, so I, so it was good. It was interesting. And, and that was like an hour and a half plus. And then we get to the chicken coops at the other end of the farm. Yep. You know anything about chickens? And he's maddest right away, you know, you know, not Joe, Mattis now. And I said, no, I know chicken farms by me. What do I need to know about

him? He said, well, put your head in there. And now I had these wingtips on. He said, put your head in there and just just count. Let's just see how good of a counter you are. How many, how many chickens you think is in this coop? I mean, I'm like, I put my head in there. As soon as I got there, he pushes me in. And get your wingtips started. Oh, full of chicken crap. Do you have to go back to the airport at this point to get home? And then he's laughing. He's, you mad at me? I'm saying, no, I'm mad at he. He said, we got to wash them off. And so, yeah, we got washing them off. And so that was it.

And then, you know, that was the end of the interview and boom, blah, boom, might go back home. I want to go back to the car rides, the truck rides, because the truck rides, I think that that was dad's favorite place to, like, have those conversations. There's not anybody that he did business with or brought to the race team. If you talk to Steve Park or any of these people that didn't go on a truck ride. Everybody went on a truck ride.

And Del and I went on truck rides at times whenever there were, you know, serious conversations to be had. And you rode around the farm. There were old logging roads around the farm. And, of course, he put roads in as well. And you rode around the farm and, you know, you might stop and look at the cows and have a question or whatever or stop at the old home site where we used to look for, um, uh, airheads and things like that or, you know, eventually there was a barn.

There was the chicken coop. He was a Purdue chicken farmer. So, um, yeah. He was a Purdue chicken farmer. Yeah. Four chicken houses. I guess that makes sense. Yeah.

I mean, there were our chicken houses. houses, big ones, as a matter of fact. Wow. So at this point, Joe, do you think there's no way you're taking this job? Do you think I have no choice? Do you think you're a hostage at this point and stuck in a chicken house? What are you thinking? I just went home and there's so many endless questions and I just said, okay, and I spent a day and I got to meet Dale and I didn't think anything of it. My wife said, how was it? I'm like, it was just a conversation, So what do you think? I said, I have no thoughts. I'm not thinking about it. You weren't looking to change jobs. You had a job.

No. It was an interesting day. There was no job offer on the table. Oh, he said he's interviewing. He's seventh time champion. He needs to go to Daytona. He was asking me about my job and this and that. And I told him, I said, if I ever consider leaving, I'm going to have to give a big, big lead time. I mean, I can't just walk away from this company. He's like, I'm going to Daytona and I'm hiring that person. And I'm going to have that position filled. And I just want to know if you're interested. I'm like, I don't know.

So that's why the December 14th date, I think, is important, right? It's really important. Daytona's in February, let's say February 14th, you know. Well, he went, I guess the whole thing is they went to the Waldorf. He's seven-time champion. Trees and Dale's been thinking about buying sports image. And then they pulled the trigger. So in between, before that, they bought a new company.

I mean, they bought a souvenir company, and they bought it from Hank Jones and Joey Tillman. They needed someone to run it. So I've been gone now for two weeks, so I get home, and Marcy said, you're staying, I'm going shopping because Santa Claus has to come. Because I haven't been home. And so she goes shopping, and I get a call downstairs. I'm with the four girls, and we're building Christmas winterland. and Susie Boggis is playing on the cassette, and the girls are having fun.

And, hey, Mattis, what are you doing? And music was loud, and I said, excuse me? He said, where are you? And I'm like, hello, hello, because I was down my basement. I go upstairs. And he said, what do you think? You got to come work for me? This is 24 hours later.

And I'm like, I don't know. I didn't really talk to my wife. I didn't talk to my dad or the boss. And I mean, well, I'm making the decision today. And I said, are you comfortable with me? I mean, I don't know anything about this. He said, yeah, I am. And I said, well, all the parameters.

I'm going through all the details. He said, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. I'm going to Daytona. Don't worry about that. And I said, I don't have a place to live. You live in my lake house. I'm like, how, you know me for 24 hours?

I said, where's your lake house? It's on the lake. How that works, huh? And they say, do you live in my lake house? And I'm like, that's weird. You know, just be moving in your lake house. And I said, my kids are in school. They're going to have to stay at the end of the year.

I'm not bringing my kids out on this and that. I need a decision. And today's your last day. I mean, here's the bumper. Here's the intimidator. Here's the bumper. Day one of being intimidated. I can't imagine this because you were not looking to change a job or move out.

So I can't imagine what's like going through your mind. Like, where is this all coming from out of left field? I'm 35, right? But I've been, I'm really, really, I'm not known this isn't as long as a job as I was in. I'm working 70 hours. Yeah. I'm not home. I got the girls.

they made it sound like milk and honey easy job. Don was selling it. Cindy was selling it. And I'm like, hey, maybe it's a better job. I'm 35. Eventually, the garment industry made in America was not being made in America. So if you look career-wise, 35-year-old guy, career-wise, four daughters, maybe it's time.

But I had to like the phone call to figure out the time. So you hang up with them. Well, I say yes to him. Oh, you say yes on the. the phone. Well, he made me say. Yeah. I know that feeling. Yeah. Yeah. He made me say yes. And Marcy comes on about 10 o'clock. Girls are in bed. She said, everything good. I'm like, yeah, real good. Girls are good. Everything's good. We got the winterland bill.

And I said, Dale called me back. And she said, what do you tell them? I said, I tell him I take the job. But she said, how could you do that? You didn't talk to me. What do you mean? I said, you're the one that wanted me to take the job. Well, you can't just, I said, yeah, I told him it. How did you do? What are you going to do about your dad?

I said, I don't know. And so I go into work the next day. Now, this is my dad that spent three years in Mexico. Yeah. Why I took his own job. On your behalf. On my behalf. Yes.

And, you know, we're both going to be, you know, major principles, not principals, but, you know, president of the company. I go in and my dad's tough Co-Region. He was one of 11 kids. His dad was literally murdered in a mining incident when he was three months old, so he didn't have a dad. He got raised tough, and he was raised real tough. And he was tough.

He was real tough. I go and tell him, hey, I'm thinking about changing. I took a job at Dale Earnhardt. Who? He didn't know who Dale Earnhardt was. and he slammed his hand on the desk, and he was saying, you know, there's F-bombs. You little blah-bba woke up age 35 with menopause.

And he said, go to F home, get rid of that menopause, and come back here in the morning and get to work. I don't want to see you. Get out of here. Because he was back in Pennsylvania then. And he said, get out of here. I don't want to see you. get rid of your menopause and come see me in the morning and let's get back to work

came home marcy said what are you doing home i said i had a conversation my dad i said how did that go well i'm home and the workday's not over and um so i took it and there are some rough times my dad wasn't happy for me like six months he was really really upset yeah i can imagine yeah on that And so that's how it happened. And so that's December 15th. Yeah. 16th. And so when did you come down to North Carolina?

So I told Dale, I got to wait. I got to give him at least four weeks notice. And he's like, that's not going to be good enough. And I'm like, it is. He said, what are you doing January 1st? I'm like, it's New Year's. He said, I'll have a plane up there. You could talk to me to January 1st.

I'll pick you up. Let's spend the day January 1st together. And let's talk with Tracy. and all that and get going here. Pick me up January 1st. So he rejects your four-week notice idea? Well, no, and then he flies you back. Oh, he flew you back.

Yeah. And then he said, you have to start for the Winston preview. Yeah, which is usually like third week of January. 16th. Yeah. So there's another plane there. So that was my, I closed the office. I shut the keys off about 8 o'clock a night.

And it was Saturday. I locked the door Friday. Next thing, 7 o'clock in the morning, I'm in Allentown. I go to Winston-Salem, and I literally land. Bill, who's the cop that he always had there? Yeah. You just have you think of it. Yeah, he was a former highway patrolman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He takes me, and I literally get off the plane, and I walk on a souvenir trailer, and I start selling souvenirs. Saturday, 9 o'clock in the morning. Malcolm. Malcolm, Bill Malcolm. And I'm at the Winston Preview, selling souvenirs off of Dale Earnhardt's trailer.

And now the Winston Preview is stacked with NASCAR drivers. It was the thing that you did, you know, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of fans coming and had the souvenir trailers there and everything. So, I mean, that's a massive, like, here you go, throw you into the woods type of environment. And that was mandatory to drivers come. Yeah. So like from December 13th to January 16th, you know, I accepted a job in 48 hours, and I'm working a souvenir rig changing my entire life in 32 days. And what exactly is the job?

What is your job title? I was president of sports image. President of Sports Image. Okay. So you did get a promotion. You went from executive vice president to a president. I mean, that's a step up. And I didn't have to wait a year.

And you didn't have to wait a year. That's right. You know, took a beating from your dad, basically. And how long did your family stay back? They, I wanted them to stay to June. And because it was horrible the first couple of months. I said, stay to June. And Marcy's like, these kids want their daddy.

I'm like, don't come down. Because there was times in there. And there was some, there's highs and lows. I'm like, I got to get back to the hangar business. I got to call my dad once again. And I wasn't having fun. fun and she's like I'm coming down after Easter I'm like no you're not and she said yes I am she said they're your children I'm your wife I'm coming down so she comes down in you know April and she

moves into the lakehouse with me with the four kids yeah and so she didn't stay that long and then she came down but you know from that time I was there I mean I was literally getting up and going to bed 10 o'clock in the office and just trying to understand the business model and in the amount of work and energy it was. Did your dad acquire sports image or did he build it from? No, he acquired it. So Hank Jones and Joey Tillman that he spoke of, I don't know how long prior to dad purchasing that they had been in business, but they had been doing all the Earnhardt business. Yes. I mean for at least, yeah, and sometime in the 80s, right? And so it was a little building over in Harrisburg and, you know, a couple offices and Hank and it was all family. So Hank's wife and daughters and, you know, sister-in-laws and brothers,

and laws and cousin-in-laws and all this was all family-oriented business and um you know at that time in 95 i'm just thinking about the process of what you went through in terms of they would have had to have you know things in place to get to Daytona to get to the Winston preview right so product and t-shirts and and hats and i don't even know if die cast was a thing i don't think it was at that point and um it may have been and um and so you know you've got this warehouse and and and and and and so you know you've got this warehouse and like literally we would have these cardboard boxes full of the merchandise and pickpack and ship and the office stuff and taking care of a few you know we had a few account partners at that point like a mom and pops or um you know food city and people like that so i just

can't imagine in between going in and trying to figure out the business and the structure because at that point when they bought it they the joneses and tillmans weren't involved anymore and so that was a lot of people that some of the people stayed on board but a lot of the office people and Harno people did not stay on board. Yeah. So they go into the weekends and, I can't imagine. And if you remember, they bought the business, they bought the inventory. I got a customer list, who are our customers.

I got an inventory list. I didn't get many files. I mean, they, they, I don't think. It wasn't a super amicable, yeah, situation. They weren't happy getting bought up. No, it was a good, it was a, it was a nice, Dale Earnhardt. seven-time champion, and you're buying the business, he paid $6 million. He gave him $6 million. He wanted the control of the business. But that was a lucrative business, and it wasn't amiable.

Yeah. Not at all. Not at all. So the handoff was horrible. Do either of y'all know when Dale realized there was business and money to be made in merch? I mean, like, I don't know when he would have even started, you know, taking a T-shirt to the track. Or, like, I have no idea what the history of that would have been. But, like, do either of y'all know that? Was it maybe after his seventh championship? Was it after, you know, it was way before that? I mean, when I think about the T's that, you know, the nostalgic teas that I have or Dale has, I mean, you know, there were T-shirts of the 79 season, the 80, there were old, the old Gary Hart.

Target T-shirts. I mean, I don't know, I imagine, I don't know, but I imagine the process is similar to like what I'm doing with Wyatt. You know, I've got a bucket of t-shirts and hats, and I go to the racetrack and I hang one up up the end of the trailer, and I hope somebody comes by and wants to buy one. Do you think Teresa probably oversaw that? Probably. Probably. Here's my take, Mike. Yeah. I think he was a lot smarter and and and Teresa as well than everyone else. Yeah. He was very careful to secure. At that. time, the sponsor was getting paid, the car owner was getting paid, and the driver was getting paid on souvenirs. Royalty earned, and you'd split, a third, a third, a third. He was, he received all the rights from Goodrich, I mean, major, major brand, and he didn't have to pay them royalty. Richard Childers just drive my car. He didn't pay Richard Childers. That's huge. So Dale had all these rights, and he also had all these trademarks, and he was trademarking things, early in life.

And it probably was the 80s and the early 90s because there was the bootlegging part of it as well. And on the bootlegging part, I would go to Richmond every year and he'd give me a check and say, go see the sheriff and give him this check. And I didn't open it, but I'd give him the check. And the sheriff gave me two guys that were huge.

And you said, you walk around and you point out what's illegal, my boys will take care of it. And so every year I took two guys and we just, I pointed at merchandise and they took care of business. You didn't ask questions? Well, I just said it's not, we didn't make that because they wanted to have, they looked at every piece, every single piece of item. Teresa and Dale reviewed it. I mean, and so, you know, so we knew what was and what wasn't and there was a lot out there. And that's why Dale bought the company.

There was a ton of merchandise, and he knew the scope of it, and there's just too much opportunity not to do that. And other drivers, you go back to original history, Mr. Hendrick in 1986 started Hendrick Sportswear, and where he had souvenir trailers, I guess, Waltrip, his drivers were on it. Carolyn Yates, Robert Yates, had theirs. Penske had their own souvenir trailer. Ricky Rudd ran his own souvenir trailer. So you had various companies and drivers having their own souvenir trailers in the 80s and 90s and doing that. And Dale had his rights carved out, and that's what Hank and Joey was taking care of with Sports Image. And he just sort of followed what everyone else is, you know, and took over the company.

And brought everything in-house. All the licenses, everything was just under one roof. And that's good control. That's good, solid business. Joe, why, you know, if Dale Earnhardt didn't know you when y'all met, I'm curious on how he trust you or why he trust you or did he trust you at the beginning to manage his company and his money. I always approached it.

And during all those questions I was being asked, I was answering from a business point of view. From a practical business point of view, the hypothetical question, you know, there's a lot of cash that happens on a souvenir rig. How are you going to manage the cash process, Joe? And I said, easy. That's just a matter. That rig's a retail outlet. And those people hand that cash at the end of the day, they need to count it and bag it, seal it. And this is how I answered her. They need to seal it. And then at that point, I take all the money and I'll sign. I took these seven bags and I took this amount of money,

boom, and I'll sign, and they have that receipt, and I have the receipt. And then we collected all the money from all the other trailers. Then in the morning, when we got home on Monday, that bag sealed would go to the bank. And as I told her, we would go to the bank, and whoever in the bank counts that sees if it matches what the person gave me. Well, how do we know you're not going to steal, Joe? I was like, well, here's how I'm not going to steal. If that bag's open, I stole.

If the bag's closed, I never touched the cash. This is what you'd say to Dale? That's why I told Teresa. You told Teresa that? I said, if every time I touch money is sealed, and the only time I ever touch money is sealed, and I bring it to the bank sealed, then I couldn't have touched it.

And they said, okay. I mean, that's how I answered it. But that's what I told her. I said, hey, I won't touch it. And she's just staring at me, staring at me, and she's probably thinking, well, why the hell weren't we doing this before? So I never touched cash. I never counted cash.

Now, when I put it in the, when I was working the rig, I obviously touched it. But when it came time to count that cash, the rig operators counted it and bundled it and put it in a zip lock. Sealed. So your message to Teresa and Dale, I am not going to touch your cash. Literally, I'm not going to ever put my hands. hands on it. It's going to be sealed when I take it to the bank. Yes, 100%. It's sealed. And there was discrepancies, you know, $1,000 here and there where we would count wrong or the bank would double count it. Human error, you know, maybe, you know, whatever was in there. It was in there.

But then that's between, I would go back to the rig operator and those discrepancies. And it's just like running a register at a retail store. You know, you have pluses and minuses. You just keep them in line and you let people know you're checking. So if you let people know you have the tools in place, and my whole thing I kept on saying to Dale and Teresa, it's just us day and day out having the discipline, we have the tools in place to properly run a business. I got in a lot of trouble and I got challenged a lot. I don't know why you're coming here. You don't trust us. I said, no, it's not I don't trust you. I'm running a business. And these are business principles we're going to use running this business.

That means you don't trust us. I said, no, that's your interpretation. My interpretation is I'm running a business and I got to run it with business principles. So 95's here and I know I came to work at some point in that year, maybe in the summer or February. I came in February. Okay, because I was in college and working for a sports marketing company.

And, you know, the big thing in 95 was the silver Winston car. You're on the job in January of 95. I mean, that had to be the biggest moment. I mean, my recollection of timing is we were in the building in Harrisburg. I think we moved in 96. I remember us literally like filling up our cars full of stuff to move with. I don't even know how the rest of the move happened, but it was like, whatever's in your office, put in your car. We're going over to this building.

We rented a building from Gibbs. It used to be their shop. and they had moved to Hunter'sville, to their new shop, and we were literally like driving over there. And we'll get through the years, but when did you leave sports image slash action slash what year was that? 97. 97.

Okay. I think that's important because there's this two-year span where Joe, you've got this new guy coming down from the hangar business, being thrown into NASCAR, we accomplished amazing things in two freaking years. I mean, when I think about it, I know it's short term, but it felt like a lifetime of stuff happening.

It felt like a lifetime of success happening. And I cannot imagine the quickness of everything. So talk about that. Because how did the silver car come to be? I mean, it was massive, massive. And the silver car, and the Olympic car. Yes.

And 96. Yeah. We're great examples of the potential of this licensing business. So, like, tactically, I'm going through and maximizing that opportunity. I was creating a business plan of how's this sustainable 20 years and how do we take Dale Earnhardt when he's at a rate early early in 1996? I'm like, hey, Dale, we got to prepare when you're out of a race car. Well, I'm not going to be out of race car. I'm like, no, we, how are we going to run this business?

business and have it sustainable. And that was a lot of my thinking involved because it was pretty amazing. So that whole silver car, Fred Wagonow, so you said about Dicast. It used to be racing champions way back when. That's right. In the early 80s and 90s. And then action performance came, I think, in 93 before me. Fred was brilliant idea-wise. I mean, really, really big picture idea-wise. So we're in the Rainbow Deli in University area on 49. Yeah, a little back room. It was Fred and a couple of his people and Don Hawk and I were just sitting there having dinner. And 25th anniversary, Winston coming up, Silver Anniversary.

And that's where the concept came from, the Silver Anniversary Car. And with T. Wayne being really a major steward of the beach. business. Yeah, so T. Wayne was the president of T.wayne Robinson. Yeah, over the Winston brand. And largely credited for the NASCAR sponsorship. Winston's sponsorship of NASCAR, not just NASCAR Cup series, but NASCAR weekly racing series. I mean, like, it was a Winston branded series. Yeah, and it should have been. And it was. So that 25th anniversary thing was a perfect tribute

to Winston's involvement in the sport. And it was just, I didn't anticipate. how big it was going to be. Because is that the first paint scheme that we did for the Winston? That was the very first special paint scheme. Yeah. That was really the genesis of these special Darlington throwback week. That was numeral uno. And that was very, very big.

And Fredwood is a relationship with Francis Choi and all that. You know, we made stuff happen. And we had product and we had T-shirts. We had one hot silver night. Yeah. And we had all this apparel. And literally, the sales were just phenomenal. And Sports Image, Kelly ran customer service.

And Fred's way of going was doing distributors. We went to dealers directly to the mom and pop shops and some distributors. And it was good for the industry. Everyone had a bite at the apple. And you need those successes to keep everyone healthy. And that was good for me to learn as well. It may have been, we moved to that building in 96. We did that, Winston, out of...

Out of Harris Boulevard. No. No, okay, that's what I thought. So that's what I was telling Mike, you know, I mean, the way we worked, we worked hard, and you still had the same attitude that you had back then that you have today of work hard, play hard. And, but I was talking about, so it must have been maybe the Olympic time frame in 96 when we had the parking lot full. I mean, we were literally out in our parking lot, packing orders, counting, getting pallets. Oh, no.

We had like 15 trailers. So that Winston was, okay, it was so cool. Immediately you got to say, what could you do better? How do you want up that, the following all-star race? So at the end of 95, how did dad think things were going? How did you see success? What was happening? Yeah, yeah.

And how much money did y'all make up? Yeah, where were you? We were making a lot of money. Yeah. So that one paid. I knew the financials that I received when they bought the company, the customer list, and the other thing was way, way higher. I mean, GM, all the GM dealers, that was a $10 million account. Yeah.

So, you know, we worked in GM. We sold into all the dealerships. We sold Fu City, T-shirts and hats that went into their weekly flyers, snap-on, major corporate business. So we had these corporate, we had catalog business as well. So we had, and we would do a snap on catalog. We would do a GM catalog, a food city catalog. And then we had a generic fan-based catalog. Kelly ran the call center and all of that. So there was multiple touch points. And so when you had this opportunity of the Winston, your entire distribution shared in that upside. Not everyone goes to Charlotte Motor Speedway on May to the All-Star Race. So, you know,

we were getting product through distribution everywhere, and the mousetrap was working. It was growing, and it was really big. And I would give Dale his quarterly royalty reports. And with that, and I write him a check, and then I'd give him $400,000 and paid a tax man. You Q1, prepaid. And he's like, don't take money out. You're not going to be borrowing money for. from me, I'm like, Dale, I know how to manage the cash. The cash is good. Here's your quarterly seven-digit check for your royalties. And here's 400 grand. Send it to the tax man. So at the end of the year, you don't have a tax problem. You cover in all the basis. Well, I'm running the business. You're running the business. That's what he wanted.

And I assumed, let's just go ahead and answer. Kelly asked, you know, is Dale impressed? Is Teresa impressed? Are they feeling good? Are they giving you add-a-boys? What are they doing? Treesa never gave an adaboie. Fair. Okay. Fair enough. Beer night with Dale. Yeah, that was your attaboy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice. And he was always jacked up about sales and all that.

So now we get to the, you know, what are we going to do next? In 96. In 96. Well, there's this thing called the Olympics that are Atlanta. Oh, that's right. Yeah, and so I was going to do them a favor, and I get a meeting, and I go down to Atlanta, I go into CNN Center, and that's the Olympic headquarters.

And I went up there and I had this meeting. And I said, we have an opportunity here. And here's what we did in the Winston. And I'm going to bring awareness to you all. And Dale Earnhardt's going to, with GM and Richard Childer, is going to allow you guys to be on the car. And we're going to do a good job promoting it. And we're going to pay your royalty for it.

And we'll share in that. And that's where you share the royalty. You don't, you know, we're willing to share with them. But even onto Winston, they didn't get anything. but, you know, all that was Dale, 100%. Wait, RJ Reynolds? No, Dale and RC got that, the car owner and Dale. Yeah, but not the third party.

But for the Olympics, that guy looked at me. And looked at you like he was crazy. And he said, here's the deal. I don't know where you're from. Or how big you think Dale Earnhardt is. He said, we've been around a little bit longer than Dale Earnhardt, and this is the Olympics, and this is pay to play. Nobody sits in this office.

office to do us a favor. And so I'm getting a good spanket. I deserve. You don't really have a defense for that. You don't have an argument to make. My ignorance is being shown. I said, okay, what's the cost to play? He said, you come back here with a million dollars and that's a prepaid advance. You know, we have to earn that out and I'll give you a deal. I said, Seriously, he's like, this meeting's over. Straight back from Allentown, I mean, Atlanta to, like, that didn't go well. How am I going to get Earnhardt? It feels like the same nervousness or anxiety you would have had about telling your dad you were leaving.

This probably feels the same way of having to tell Dale Earnhardt that he's got to pay a million dollars to have a pain scheme. He was pumped on the concept. How'd that go? And I'm like, it's going to be great. I think we're going to crush the numbers. And I think, you know, because we have so much lead time, we're going to be in front of it. There's a couple of things if we had more time, we would have did better. You're going to make millions.

So what's next? I said, we've got to give a million bucks up front. You dumb, Yankee. What the heck? I mean, I have to give a million bucks up front. I said, it's a prepaid against royalties. And he said, no. No.

I said, Dale, this is big. And this is real big. And he said, no, that's not going to happen. And so I went to work, and there was a Ravelle monogram, another diecast company. They made the plastic model, and they also made a lot of mass market. And they're out of Chicago. So now you had racing champions in the business making diecast that had had some rights. And you had Fred Wagonow's in the business making diecast that had a lot of earn her rights.

And I go to Ravelle, and they've been trying to knock on her door, knock on her door and knock on her door. and I go to Revelle and I said here's an opportunity for this 1996 Olympic because the Olympic 96 is the call here and I'm going back and forth negotiating with them and we're going over through sales projections I'm like okay if I went to Dale how much could this be where would you sell it what's your distribution strategy and and they've been trying to get in and trying to get in and you know Dale Earnhard's worth getting into because they're fine action and Fred's trying to be exclusive and just monetize everything. And Fred didn't own sports image then. Right. And doing the sales projections and we're penciling this out and they're going to make a million bucks. Royalties. I said, okay, you got to guarantee me 70% of it up front. I need a check for 700 grand. And that's a big checkup. Normally you're guaranteed like 25% of projective sales and all that. I said,

no, I just need that. I have to pay them a million. I don't want you to pay the whole million. I'll go back and talk Dale and give me $300,000. I need a check for $700 before I go to see Dale to do the deal. And they had to work on it and go through their corporation and they came back

and they just wanted to break into the sport in a big, big way, and what better than the Olympics number three cars. So it worked for them and it worked for us. And so I got the $700 grand. I go back and I'm thinking he's happy.

He's still mad. He got it. Pay 300. We don't have paid anything. I said, if it doesn't work, you could fire me. You said, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so we end up with.

He had that idea before you did it, sounds like. So we end up talking into it. And how, I was talking to him, not Teresa, because it was his turn to carry that water upstairs. No, that was just, he has to take care of business. Paid a million up front. Time out. Wait, wait. You're refusing to go up there to tell Teresa. You didn't want to. You're like, look, I'll go have many conversations with many people. That's not what I'm having. You know, on Bear and I, you know, when we're having a good time, but hey, Dale, you've got to go to work here, too. You ain't crossing that line. Okay. You've got to do some work here. Okay. And so it worked. And to your point now, we're at W.T. Harris Boulevard, and we have zero space. So what we did is,

we went to action, Dale and Don, and had to really talk Fred into it. They manufactured all the product for the collectors, but they weren't allowed to sell it. We bought all the product ourselves. We 100% went out to all the dealers. We took all the purchase orders, and everything came into us,

and that's where that little 18,000 square foot couldn't fit it. and rent a tractor trailer, park it outside, ran a tractor trailer, park it outside. And literally, the whole backyard, massive, I don't know, 1820, filled to the top of the die cast and everything else. We had a warehouse. So our office, like we had an office space, and I'm just going to say there were 10-ish, 12-ish offices,

like space for offices. And then we had the remainder of it was warehouse space. And in the offices, however they were laid out, we had as many people as we could put in there. And like in our customer service area, which was, let's just say the size of like three size of offices, we would have like 13 to 15 people in there, just desk, kind of like your predator room now,

just desk after desk after desk. She means producer. That's a short term for producer editor for anybody listening. I don't hire predators. Predators. And like the office I was in, I shared an office with a. another person. And then I remember, Joe, your office up in the corner and then around the way,

there are multiple people in that office. And I mean, my point is just like, where there should have been 13 people sitting, we probably had 30 people sitting in 40 and the same thing with the warehouse. I mean, we had, we would go out the back door of the warehouse to get to these tractor trailers. We parked everywhere and anywhere we could. I mean, it was just, it was massive. Where were people primarily buying this, like, and ordering these things? Is it all that track? No. Track side, retail, and mom and. The retail, everything, it's all working. Yeah, remember now, you know, the GM business is flourishing.

Oh, the dealerships. The sponsor, Snap-on, Food City, the mom and pops across the country. The calling, when Kelly said there were 13 people in that litter room, they're all talking to customers, too. Oh, okay, so there's people phoning in. Oh, yeah. Wow. So you got everything. Oh, yeah.

And that's what you really want to talk about what's wrong in today. world, these drivers have this mentality. The only place to get this is on my website. The only place to do this is, you know, exclusivity. I want everyone to have all the products, start to race, go sell, and next year I'm going to have something else for you to buy. I mean, we totally want to add it, totally let the sponsors benefit, let the fans, let the mama pops, let everyone benefit. And I'm telling you today, the souvenir business isn't what it used to be by no means, but it wasn't for Dale Senior and Dale Jr. mentality and how we went, and with Kelly there, how we went to market, it'd be a lot worse. Yeah. We've always had this holistic, what's good for everybody. And between there, we got paid money, too. It wasn't like we left money on the table. It was just, everything's changed, and it's wrong.

It is really wrong. This is Joe's unedited opinion. And I've stressed that, but it's not the direction the industry is going. Yeah. So we're in 96. We go to the Olympics. Well, yeah. You get your deal done. From April 1 to June 30th,

we shipped $27 million out of an 18,000 square foot building. Yeah, that's shipping at 18,000 square foot building. 60 days. Yeah, 27 million dollars went out of here. That's big money. And in an antiquated way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No robotics, no automation, no, yeah.

Pure sweat. Do the truck drivers work for you? Yeah, no, no, we have a souvenir trailers. Trailers, yeah, we had. And they're just, and it's like, man, that's. We had four trailers at the time. Four trailers and a back of Poller. Yeah, I mean, we had five tractor trailers going to each race.

And we even had the Nut Brothers across the street. Yeah. The what? The Nut Brothers. Wayne Hanling. Yeah, they're YouTube sensations now. Yeah, okay. The Nut Brothers.

Yeah, so, you know, you have all the things. merchandise when you're making this you know inventory is a dirty dirty nine-letter word and um so i need a place to sell what didn't sell or broken sizes and it was wayne handling and another guy in there literally called the nut brothers i forget the brother's name yeah and um we sold them all our merch or excess merch but then if they need a little bit of help i gave him a paintbrush hat i gave him a shark tooth hat i gave a bunch of silver cars i didn't want to put um a quix they'd merchandise across the street, but I also had a primed a pump. And like I said, I wanted to take care of everyone. If you're going to take something bad, I got to give you something good.

So, you know, there's six trailers we literally had on the road. But there was a massive amount of business in a short amount of time. And the culture of the company and the people in it was just do it. I mean, Nike-ish paraphrased there. But there wasn't complaining. It was fun. Work is work. Work is fun. Yeah. And when we're done, we drank a lot of beer afterwards. But, I mean, it was a lot of work. I was just curious about that, actually.

I wonder moving, I have two questions here. One is how much more inventory did you guys create and then move from 90, 96 from 95, right? Like, like, I would assume a lot more inventory based off of your learning from 95, right? Oh, yeah. We're big on the radar screen of action performance. Okay. Now we're really, now you got this $100 million company of sports image, which is Dale Earnhardt's rights. Right.

Yeah, we're just doing Del Earnhardt at this point. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So now I'm planning this model and this business model. And Rick Kendrick had this company. He sold the motorsports tradition, Ken Barbie. And Ken Barbie had motorsports tradition.

And he had all the T. Wayne guys, Jimmy Spencer, Wild Trip, Jared, Bobby Labani. And he had all of these guys. And him and I were thinking, you know, how do we build a better mouse trap? And we're working on that. And then we started the concept of Chase because we needed to have that. He was a big mentor of mine. Ken Martin. You started the concept of Chase.

But we merged sports image and motorsport traditions. We were trying to. Okay. And that's where Fred. That's where the action piece came in. So Chase Authentics was. the brainstorm of these guys, which was sort of a private label brand for the sport,

for our product. When I'm thinking big picture, when I'm thinking big picture, I said, okay, we have this distribution company, and we're getting to the sponsors, we're getting to the mom and pops. We're not getting to retail. Nutmeg Racing was doing a good job with Bobby Laboney and Joe Gibbs.

And they had licenses with that. And so Ken, Barbe and I thought we were pretty smart. This is another lesson I learned. So we fly to Dallas, Texas. We go to Plano, Texas to J.C. Penny. And he's representing Jeff and I'm representing Dale. And we go see the buyer and say, man, we're going to bring you NASCAR.

Now, nothing makes in there. Already. And we're going to bring you NASCAR. And the guy said, you wasted your trip. You don't have a brand. You don't have a payroll company behind you. You don't have a strategy. You don't hit our timelines.

You wasted a trip down here and go home. So then we're like, okay, how do we get a brand? How do we get better? And Tommy Ryden was a lawyer from Nutmeg, and we're going to need them. Without them, without their brains and how they go about it, we'll never be successful. So it was a 15-month conversation where, first of all, we had to set up the concept of Chase. Now, we still haven't introduced it early, early to Dale yet, or Gordon. so we're just working through the what-es because we're conceptually we're just all over the place

but we knew without nutmeg or someone like nutmeg you wouldn't be able to execute we don't have the bandwidth and why is that because they were doing they were successful with the Gibbs well because of the way retail works they do all the stick of ball sports yeah okay yeah okay and they know the retailer's timelines they know you got to be nine months out nutmeg at the time would be like sort of like fanatics or somebody today or Nike or anybody that's in champion. Champion is a good one. Champion is a good one. Yeah.

Yeah. So they're a major apparel company. Got it. Majestics they own from baseball. They have different brands. Okay. They're professionals. They played into space at the high level.

So on and on and on, we're talking to them about, you know, Chase Authentics and the concept of starting a new brand. And Tom's like, we have a lot of vested in Nutmeg Racing already. I said, yeah, but we're going to be the official. trackside apparel of NASCAR. And he's like, how are you going to do that? I said, well, that's part of our thing. You know, we're going to have that, and that's going to be a brand,

and we're going to have top drivers, and we're going to take this from apparel, and one day we're going to bring it into trinkets, and one day maybe our die cast is called, everything's going to be called Chase. And he said, okay, that's your mid-tier distribution. What's your mass market? Well, that's Competitor's View. So we had two things. And Chase upstairs and Competitor's View downstairs,

because you have to have brands with different brand attributes and quality in retail. You've got to talk their language. And he said, you come back to me when you're an official trackside apparel of NASCAR. And so Ken and I, George Pine, who's been at IMG all the way up the ladder, and Billy Seaborne, we meet Lake Norman at a Longhorn or whatever. All of those meetings, Zimbabwe. Food and beer. Food and beer. Food and drink.

And NASCAR always wanted to get their marks on your product and get their 2%. And some people did, some people didn't, but they needed a way to be the league. And NFL gets their marks, MLB, you know, college teams, the collegiate marks, and they needed to get it. Because NASCAR really wasn't part of the souvenir business. They had their own deal in the 80s and the 90s, but they weren't like, they weren't the league. Other people, how NFL went to the marketplace, NASCAR was behind, behind, behind. And we're negotiating, and they've been trying to get it, and they've been putting pressure on us all along because they are the league. And it's Bill France, and everyone has a lot of respect for Mr. France.

So with George and Paul, not Paul. Bill. Bill, Ken and I said, hey, we're going to start this concept, and we're going to give you 2% on all our products, wherever we sell, which is a big win for them. They could go back and win. 2% for NASCAR. 2% for NASCAR and wholesale.

The only thing we need is we need to be called Chase Authentics to official track site apparel of NASCAR. No money. Nothing up front. we pay 2% which they want it and move on down the road. So that's when it really starts. So now we have that. So if we do this, we're going to do that.

And if I could bring that back to Tommy Wright and say, okay, we have this. And then more and more we kept on doing it. Eventually, they agreed to do that. So, and that's when we're trying with Ken. We're trying to combine motorsports. So when Don Hawks trying to sell Dale's company to action performance, I'm working with Barbie on motorsports tradition and with this Chase concept

and also with this combining our two apparel companies and to be an industry solution. And Fred mad at me forever because of bringing Ravel in and doing the Olympic deal. Because that was competitor to him. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Fred wasn't happy.

Fred ended up firing me twice over in my career. So Fred wasn't too happy with me. So Don ended up selling our company before we could get to deal with Dale and Teresa. And Dale just wanted, he wants to build garage mahal. He wants $30 million. So this is the time he's planning to build Dellenhorn Incorporated, the shop. And Fred pays him $30 million, which is okay. Okay, you know, the money Dale paid for the company.

He got back three or four times, plus he got $30 million. And then he got the royalties. Then he got $20 million guaranteeing royalties. Let's do a quick recap here because there's a lot of names and a lot of companies and a lot of brands here. And I'm now just starting to understand all this. So basically, you as the president of sports image, which is Dillon Hart's company, has decided to work with the other companies in the industry. Ken Barbie is sort of running the Hendrick Motorsports company.

Who has Jeff Gordon, correct. Jeff Gordon. And Jeff Gordon's now on the scene. And so y'all say, all right, that's somebody. And this is the part, is this the part of the story where, you know, Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon realized they could make money by creating this rivalry or, you know, whatever we call it, business partnerships, something like that, right? Yeah, definitely.

I mean, at this point where we are, you know, Dad is or Hulk is negotiating to sell to action. And then while Joe and Kim Barbie were working over here to create this Del Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon brand thing. So I think what happens is this takes place and then motorsports traditions goes along. Yeah. So Fred. So Fred has everything.

So you sort of, but the way the chips fell, they didn't fall in your favor because your intentions are, you're working on this thing to create, you know, a collaborative brand, Chase Authentics, but then the company sells.

Yeah. And Fred Wagonals, who's already mad at you. Well, yeah, sort of. Is not a fan. Is now the owner of the company?

Yes. But at that point, time, that's a problem for you. Well, no, when Dale sells it, Joe's my man. This takes place in 97. 97. Yeah. I'm on the board of directors, and I'm president of Sports Image, a wholly owned subsidiary of action performance. So I'm a board of director of action, publicly trade a company, and I'm president.

And then Fred goes on with publicly traded money. He acquires Penske's rights. Oh, yeah. And we help negotiate that. He acquired Yates's rights. And he acquired all these other companies, and he's publicly traded. And Fred's just building. Same concept, I was going to do.

Yeah, yeah. But now he's doing, and he's monetized on a stock market, and people getting acquired are making money. So there's nothing wrong with what he did. I got it. That's fair. That's fair. My plan didn't involve money.

My plan involved. We'll pay you later. We're going to build a better mousetrap. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And so this is also when your dad is building his deal. Dell and Hart Incorporated.

Yeah, D-E-I headquarters. So he gets his 30-mill for the company. Yep. Yeah. And in there, as to acquire those rights, and I think with Dale doing so well, which he should have, and I think that was a credive purchase for Fred, some of those acquisitions, Fred just had to get the rights and he probably overpaid for some of them, guaranteed driver X, Y, Z, $2 million a year when he was only really worth $1 million.

Yeah, or $5,000. Or the driver saying, if Dale has four souvenir rigs, I want one, which was a bad thing. It became a massive, I mean, it became massively chaotic and confusing in terms of egos, you know, who was who, who was selling. You know, we were going into Walmart and Walmart, you know, they wanted obviously Del Earnhardt and certain skews, but you had to meet certain minimum order quantities and all these things. And then you would have a, you know, Rusty Wallace who would come in and they would raise their hand to say, well, I won't as much as Del Earnhardt. Well, we know that this doesn't sell as much, but yet this is what they won't. I mean, everybody wanted to be equal to my dad in terms of everything.

And it got massively chaotic and egos and all these things came in the way. I mean, we were in some very uncomfortable meetings many times. You're trying to appease every. You bought their company. You made promises. Now you have to appease them. Yeah. But it didn't make financial sense.

It didn't make financial sense. Yeah. And yeah, and that makes me think of, and this is, you know, this is sort of then and now. But, you know, the economics of, like, even when we talk today about a souvenir trailer, and even back then, it was the same thing. You know, we're carrying these souvenir trailers because we're going to talk about how souvenirs change and that business change. But we carry souvenir trailers to the racetrack, you know, there's a lot of cost involved with that. Obviously, the cost of the product, so on and so forth.

but then you've got the people hauling up and down the road, the travel, the fuel, the hotels, you know, all of those kinds of things involved. And a souvenir trailer, which I think is fascinating, at a break-even point is a million-dollar sales break-even point. And you're talking about, you know, I can't do the quick math in my head. Joe's the mathematician, but, you know, I just think about selling Wyatt's, you know, souvenirs and what I mean, I'm making a, I'm selling a couple thousand dollars a year and stuff, you know. and the massiveness of what you need to call four Earnhardt trailers versus two rusty trailers versus

one Del Jarrett trailer versus one Bobby Lobani trailer, let's say. We have that same thing today, you know, the same economics exist. So when these fans see these trailers out there and they see drivers combined on them, or they see brands combined and things like that, that's kind of the financial model behind it of why that is, you know, built the way it is, right? Yeah, you go back 95, 96, 6. 60, 70 trailers would park. And parking was an all-day event.

Today, you're going to have 10 to 12 trailers. Yeah. And there's going to be three different companies on there and that. So pure economics and today's inflationary thing, you could argue that thing has pushed itself to a million four. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So it really evolved.

Yeah, so 97's here. We're owned by action performance. and so where does the rubber meet the road for Mattis? Well, I still believed in the dealer model. Yep. And I believe, you know, the reason Fred bought the company is because our performance. And they were heavily into the distributor model, which is lower margin and more risk on the accounts receivable side. So you have, like, Fred, I have 11 customers.

I don't want 200. I want it 200. and then those 11 customers would have to basically disseminate to everyone else. And you start getting inventory issues and they weren't forecasting right. And you just made too much product. And it wasn't working. I never really bought into, if you bought this company for this amount of money and you bought it based on how we ran it. And we just couldn't.

I went into Fred one day after 18 months. And again, I'm president, board of director. I said, after 18 months, I'm like, hey, Fred, a house divided soon falls. We can't have two masters. You got to punch my ticket. He said, you made my day. I just said, you got to get rid of me. Because I couldn't take it.

And I wasn't going to deliver what he wanted. And he was going back to Dale complaining, going back to Don. And Mattis isn't listening. And you're sitting there as president and board of director, and you got these fiduciary responsibilities. punch my ticket. Yeah. And it was interesting. I mean, from my perspective, it was us and them. So, you know, them were in Phoenix, Arizona, because that's where action was headquartered. And us were here in Charlotte, you know, and, and we all, we had a good thing. I mean, we all had a good thing. We worked hard. And Joe was our guy. I mean, we were, he was like, you know, just Jehovah to us. You know,

we were like rolling around, just following everything. I mean, we were rocking and rolling. And That was a big deal for the employees and for the changeover for Joe to leave. Do you remember how you were told that he was leaving? I think you got us all right there in the company and told us. And so, and I don't remember, we had a T-shirt. Of course you did. Joe made a T-shirt for the occasion. No, I didn't make that one.

Joe didn't make it. We made the T-shirt. But we all wore it in protest of Joe leaving. What did the T-shirts say? You go Joe Mattis. Yeah, you go Joe Mattis. The status quo was another one. Yeah, you go Joe Mattis, and they were black and they had it on the front.

And I can remember us being in that lobby all lined up with our T-shirts on in that area. But, yeah, it was a really big deal. I mean, a lot of sweat and tears and all went into what we did. And it was changing. Yeah, so it's a good lesson for any business and culture. Yeah. So actions, Arizona-based. extremely doing well and they had their culture and that's okay yeah and then they came and acquired us

and we had our culture those two cultures that's the hardest thing to do in the business when you're combining the businesses to to to get that culture and that heartbeat on the same get everyone on the same page yeah absolutely and it never happened everyone on the same page and it just is hard yeah yeah and so fred was having happy to fire me. And I had a contract. And I had a lawyer called Stoke Codwell. Yeah. He's our keys. Still out of lawyers today. And so I get my non-compete from Fred. And he basically said, Mattis, get on the train, take your kids and go back to Pennsylvania. And I get my non-compete for Fred, which Stoke looks at. And my non-compete is every NASCAR licensee in the sport and every race team in the sport.

So you can't go to work for nobody. I can't go to work for anyone. And Stokes said, you can't sign this. I said, fine, I'm out of here. How long was the non-compete? I don't even know. Yeah. I can't remember.

Yeah, it didn't matter. Go ahead. So Stokes tell me, don't do it. I said, I'm doing it. Because remember this thing called Chase Authentics? Fred didn't know about this. Chase Authentics wasn't meant to be yet. It's just coming.

and Chase Authentics wasn't in the non-compete. Wow. That was still just a concept. Well, no, it was there, but it wasn't above the radar. It wasn't enough to put on a non-compete, that's what you're saying. He missed it when he called up and got the NASCAR licensee, unless he missed that. So we start Chase Authentics officially. Who's we?

And you, yeah, who's we? It's Ken Barbie. You and Ken. certainly spent endless hours on it. And Jeff had Bob Brannett and Don Hock on it. And we sat down in front of Dale and Jeff and went through the concept and all of that. And Dale was getting hearing this. It wasn't like Dale, but it wasn't, it takes a long time to do it right.

And we weren't hurrying. Well, and they didn't really know what you were doing. I mean, like it was a concept that was new. So it wasn't like, yeah. Yeah. The plane's still at 20,000 feet on this. So, and then we said, hey, we got to bring in more people. We got to bring in Rusty, Champion, and Terry Labani, Bobby Labani, and Jared. We got to just, we got to have this being an industry solution.

We know you two guys are the big dogs. And so, you know, we set this price of 200 grand. And Dale and Jeff, instead of paying, they had, you know, started, I wasn't going to give my money. It's their company. And so they had 54%, 27% of it. piece and then the other four guys shared up various ways the other part and there were the six drivers and the whole business model had class A stock, class B stock. It was a real business proposal. And the goal was eventually to be the industry solution forever and ever in the

brand and also take it from apparel into like everything in this industry would be that. And we had not made converting over to Chase Authentic. We couldn't have done it without them. I mean, and they changed their brand. And they really educated us, too. You know, I sold into the garment industry, but I didn't understand the industry. And so they were extremely, extremely helpful. And we start this, and it's going well, and we're getting adoption. And all of a sudden, it's making money, and we're writing checks back to the drivers.

You talk about that publicly traded money, and here comes Fred Wagonall again. Man, I love that. I'm Chase Brand. I mean, I love it. I want to buy it. And so you sit down, I sit in a room with Rusty Bobby, Terry, and all that, and Dale and Jeff. And, well, we got an offer $15 million from Fred to bite us. Now this was, you know, figment of really Barbie and Mattisters' imagination.

Now it's a company. 18 months later, we're going to have $15 million for that. this. And I'm like, too early, what are you going to think? You know, it's just the beginning. There's, you know, this is going. When is this? Like 98, 99. Yeah, so this is only like 99. Yeah. And I'm like, it's too early. And well, we're going to vote on it. What do you think the drivers voted? They took the money. Take the money and run. And they took the money. And, yeah, and Fred told him all he made a mistake. Joe's a good guy. Bob, blah, blah, he's going to run Chase authentics. Well, three months later, he fired me. Oh my gosh. He did. So two things I tried to build

and two things he came and I asked to get fired the first time because it just wasn't right. Because you can't be on odds with the philosophy. So philosophically, it was the right thing to do to get fired the first time. Second time bothered me. Then I became Forrest Gumpton. I start running. And I did, I got into running and that's why I don't have. back and legs. Oh, literally you started running. Oh, yeah. The only thing I was so mad, I just ran. And I ran, and I ran. Can't even imagine this right now.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Never I say pigs and valleys? Yeah, that was a valley. Yeah, it was a big valley. So let me ask a couple questions here. Maybe it's random. Where did Fred Wagonal actually get, make his money? I mean, like, where did he earn his bones early?

Before he starts getting all this, you know, before action, performance. He's brilliant. Okay. He's bright and he's a real entrepreneur and he's creative. He's, I think he had something to do with mechanical bill. Bull. Oh, that's right. I think he said he helped invent that. Like he invented. The mechanical bull? Yes. Yes. Yes. I don't know. Every bar in America. Yeah. That's one of those. Yeah. But I mean, there's nothing. I think he was just kind of that guy that wield and dealed, so does. speak. And so you put a little here and got a lot back and put a little here and got like, there's just that. Great visionary, great entrepreneur, very creative, massively energetic.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of good, good, good attributes. Yeah. A Fred, philosophically, him and I never hit it off. But that doesn't make him right or me right or wrong. It's just, there's two different ways to go in business. Sure. Yeah, but he's a bright guy. Okay, so there's that. Now, I got to ask this question. It might be a hard one to answer. I don't know if you may not want to, but if you even go back to the first sale to Fred, the sports image company, and then getting into the chase, like, what are your conversations with Dale? I'm curious. I'm curious if you are human and I would wonder if you felt or if you took a personal, felt like there was, you know, disloyalty towards you. You moved down from Pennsylvania.

Because, yeah, you uprooted your entire world for this. You brought your whole family down. You weren't really given much of a choice. In two and a half years. In two and a half years, it's not a long time. Did you ever think about going back, or could you have went back to the hangar business? I asked my dad in April of 95. I said, this is a mistake, Daddy.

He said, you're not starting this again. And no. Not coming back to me before. And I said, no. Seriously. And that's what I'm telling Marcy, don't come down. It was ugly in the beginning. I mean, you know, you go back to Daytona, seven weeks after I came there, and I put in all these new business practices, three out of five of the tractor trailer.

People quit. People threw the keys at me and said, I'm out of here. And we have to go to Rockingham. They're throwing the keys at me on Monday walking out of the building. And then I have to go to Rockingham. And the fifth guy in the room, fourth guy was Chick and Chuck Sylvie. And I said, hey, man, don't threaten me. Don't give me an ultimatum.

Call me a dumb Yankee. Do everything you can. and he's like, I really love Earnhardt, but I don't know why he hired a dummy Yankee. I'm like, he did. So that's where we are. And then the fifth guy came in the room was Chris Williams. And Chris Williams was really, really, really responsible of putting the team together.

And he played a major role in Earnhardt's souvenir business. He went to Martinsville where he's from and he went to Danville. And we just hired new people. But, I mean, just think about this. I'm on the job seven weeks. And it's falling apart. five people quit on Monday. You know, you come out of that garment industry,

my dad told me, don't ever let him know you're afraid. I didn't let him know I was afraid, but when they left the room, I'm like, damn, I'm afraid. So I'm glad you brought that up because you weren't received well when you got here. Not at all. More reason why I'm wondering how you felt, and did you even have a conversation with Dale when all the stuff was around? Yeah, I want to hear about that.

I kind of, I was real mad. They didn't have my back across the board. And a lot of people didn't. And I felt like there was a lot of knives on my back. But you know what? Be a big boy. Shut up. Shut up.

Why should I? Dale Earnhardt's an icon. I made the choice. He didn't. So you just went on your waist. That's when I got into that whole depression part of it all. And I wasted a year of my life being, you know, pretty upset. Pretty upset and pretty depressed.

But you're talking about the second time, like the chase. Yeah. 99. That one hurts. That one hurt. But did the first one, the first one, I mean, his daughter is working for you. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't. Well, I guess he thought you were still running the company. So like, there wasn't really anything to explain? Well, no, when he, well, when I went there, they were happy to get me the job as president, board of directors and all that. That was a business decision. He decided to

take a lot of money. And then he had a big guarantee. He's got to do it. They had a better offer than I had. He's got to do it. So he, so that's okay. That's business. And then, trying to get there and work with action i mean uh Arizona and all that it just wasn't going to work so something had to change and it was me so I had to go you were at peace on that one but I wasn't happy but I had to go I know but you were at peace I think yeah I was on peace and then the chase authentics thing was still a way to be able to um work with Dale still correct he was part of that company yeah all the drivers yeah all the drivers were yeah and so you and dale I'm just kind of harping back on I'm curious about you

Your relationship with Dale Earnhardt through all this. It's good through all of that chase. Okay. But post that, then I was done. Did you ever have a conversation with him after that? No. I mean, yeah. Hey, Dale, how are you doing?

What's going on? No. Nothing ever crying. Did you ever have a conversation with Teresa? No. No. No. No.

No. There was no crying. Once again, I lost him business. There was crying, though. Kelly said she there was crying the day. It was crying when he left. I throw all my cars. face up on the table. There's a lot of people I dealt with that didn't play the game fair.

Yeah. But you know what? Forget about it. Hey, look where I am today. Well, yeah. Well, and so yeah. Yeah, I'm here. I'm here. Okay. So for both of you guys, the mid-90s, mid to late 90s in the souvenir business, has anything come close to that, the height, that boom that that was based off what I'm hearing you guys say is the 25 anniversary paint scheme that Dale Earnhardt ran in the Winston All-Star race, and then the year after the Olympic paint scheme that started this whole trend of special paint schemes that was always reserved for the Winston, right? That was where it was in the 90s. Is there ever anything like that in terms of money made? Only one. Only one. Which one? When Dale came, went to him. Oh, yeah, 2008.

Dale Jr. Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. So, so, so, yeah, and my perspective would be, so I stayed at action performance from 97 to 2001 when our dad died and in a variety of roles. And my perspective is just greed took over. We started overproducing, over making. You could get, I mean, sitting here looking at this Budweiser number eight car, you could get a car in every color and every finish and race ready and pre-race and sat in a parking lot for qualifying and the version that sat in the shop over, you know, getting ready. I mean, you could, it just got, you know, supply overran demand and it just turned upside down.

And it just turned upside down. It was really bad. It was very bad. And it kept on going. When Dale passed away, that was a big boost to the industry on just the collectibility of that. But that was only a band-aid in the sinking chip. Yeah.

Then it got back to losing massive money. And then in 2005, for some reason, and IAC and SMI bought Fred out. Yeah. So Joe goes to work for NASCAR.com in 2001. Yeah. I get a call in either 99 or 2000 come to Darlington and to see Bray Carey. Remember the TV deal, Bray Carey and George Pine and Brian France.

And they said, what are you doing? And this is when I'm in the lows, right? And I'm still trying to run. Did you run down that? Yeah. They said, what do you know about e-commerce? We have to launch a NASCAR e-commerce site. I said, I know business.

E-commerce is just doing business in the air. I didn't know. At that point in time, I said, what's your goals here? He said, well, Fred Wagonow is starting go-raceing. What was that? Go-racing.com. Go-racing.com. Oh, I've remembered that.

And he is telling the marketplace he's going to have exclusive internet rights. Yep, I remember that. And we want you to start this and launch it before he gets it launched. Now I'm smiling. Now he's got a challenge. Get game on. All right, everybody, just like Joe Mattis said, it's game on. And we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, it would probably be a two-part or it could be a two-parter.

Well, that's now confirmed. this is going to be a two-parter. You just listen to part one of our business of motorsports, Joe Mattis, conversation. It was fantastic, but tomorrow, Wednesday, June 7th, we will drop part two. Kelly and I discuss with Joe a lot about the Dell Jr. years and how that impacted the licensing and merchandising game.

If you're listening to this podcast, there's a good chance that over the years you have spent your hard-earned dollar on a piece of Dell Jr. merchandise. Well, the backstory behind all of that, especially the retirement announcement, where Dale Jr. was leaving Del and Horn Incorporated and going to Hendrick Motorsports, we are going to go deep into that, and wow, what a story. So part two is coming tomorrow. Part one is today. Thank you so much for listening to the Dell Jr. download, and we'll talk to you later. Man, I'm really excited to have Ally help us bring the guest segment every week. It's one of my

favorite parts of the download. We get to talk to so many different people in racing, outside of racing. But everybody that comes in here, I want them to have had a good time. I want them to want to come back. I want them to feel like an ally to Dirty Mo Media. Thank you, Ally, for your continued support of the download and the entire Dirty Mo Media team. Check out Dirtymoe Media on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.