New shop in Htown??
05-30-2007 | 06:17 PM
#45
Wow ok. I'm not going to spend time debating you, John and Andrew.
I am offended by the things you've said, and I'm sure you're offended by the things I've said.
I'll admit I've made mistakes. I mean I did go into this thing really young which was my first mistake. And yes my parents could support me so perhaps there was poor judgment in some business decisions that were made. When you have all the money in the world you tend to throw it around without keeping a good track of it.
I know I spent over 100k dollars building an LT1 car that broke the world record (thus giving us... 100k + dollars worth of advertising).
And I still have the receipts a few feet from me of over 60k dollars spent to build multiple setups for Stevens car... and that car never even wore an HPE badge even though 75% of it was built in our shop 2 years ago. (btw. this is not to be confused as a bitter subject because I have a completely great relationship with Josh and Steven and am 100% supportive of their en devours)
Other things have hurt the business like... accepting checks. I remember the time when we got over 7k dollars of bad checks from a customer in Conroe who came in and picked up a complete heads/cam package. Apparently somebody in the shop knew him, so we took the check. Never got any money or parts back on that deal. He was in jail for check fraud about a month later.
Rick Intrau used to brag to my former friend Jacob Hutchins (red LT1 Formula) about how he stole over 100k dollars worth of parts and money while working here. Wow, what a guy...
Yes I had a hard time putting my foot down. I was always the nice guy. So I continued to get screwed...
Jacob Hutchins was a friend who bought a cam/bolt on package for his C5 from us, and it ran real good at the track. I thought it could go close to 10's on motor if we just added some heads, so I gave him a set of cnc'd LS6's on an I owe you basis. He was a friend. I mean he would come up with the money, eventually...right? Nope, that's been over a year and a half now and he continues to ignore my phone calls and pesterings. He even owns his own shop in Lake Charles called Racetech.
He's actually good friends with another former customer of mine named Garret Wilson, he was a real doosey too. We built a 427 for his C5 and I told him it would probably make over 520-530 to the wheels. It was basically the exact same setup as John's car, but with an automatic. Well for whatever reason it was way off... thinking back, the only thing it could be was the converter. But the car only made 470 to the wheels with a 427 and ETP 265's. So thinking maybe there was something wrong with the heads, I threw on a set of ETP Stage 3 5.3's which made within 5 hp of the 265's... So I ordered a complete LS7 conversion and put the LS7 heads on for him. Still only made about 470-480... So he came in a rage because his car was "down power" and wrote a check for 4800 dollars worth of the final bill... HPE ate the 2 sets of heads and labor of all the R&R. So we were already out a bunch of money from the deal. But it was what it was. Good customer service, that's the way it works. Sometimes you gotta eat **** even if you did nothing wrong. Well if my loss on the car wasn't already enough, in his rage he stole a C4 torque converter (good job idiot), and put a stop payment on his check.
Less than a week later I found out the car went 9.6's (on nitrous) in the 1/4 mile... lol So maybe his motor wasn't down power afterall and he was upset for no reason.
During about that same time frame we had over 13k dollars worth of parts get stolen from the back of the shop. It was a week after I fired Scooter. After investigation we found that Rick Intrau, Scooter/Raymundo Guerrero, and Kyle Somner... all pitched in on the deal. I served them all felonies about 4 months ago. Only Rick has paid his restitution. Scooter actually moved back to Dallas who I assume is just going to flee the law for as long as possible.
And lets not forget the most recent hit we took, Charles El and his proposed plan to buy HPE, instead in the process draining our bank account of 44k dollars.
The list could literally go on and on. Truth of the matter? I fucked up. I fucked up big time because I trusted people. Hopefully some people will realize that all these nice things John and Andrew have to say about me, are not quite as they seem. I'm not admitting that I've never done anything wrong, which is the exact purpose of this post... it's to prove that I have!
If I've learned anything, it's that if you're going to start a business, you really better be ready to man handle that thing and keep up on your books. Taxes and all that stuff will kill you. And starting up, yeah... I mean sure 800k dollars seems like a ton of money. But for a shop that has expenditures of 30k a month, you better be making money or else that's 30k a month in expenses you've gotta come up with on your own! And that's exactly what I had to do the first 12 months at least! Most business's operate on negative profits for the first 2 or 3 years.
Right now HPE is in no position to be going out of business. We've been so busy the last 6 months our techs can barely keep up. I am getting out of it though. I'll still be here, but I'm not going to be the owner. I'm just going to be doing tuning and sales. I'm done with the owner bit. It's driven me almost insane. I love cars, selling packages, and tuning. But the business has become so big that the demands of me to take care of it have pulled me away from doing the things that I love. So that's why I made this decision.
We're in the moving process. We're moving to 11950 Perry Road which is right on 1960 in the Willowbrook area. For the next 2 or 3 weeks we're going to be busy with that. Gary Harmon will be the new owner of HPE and taking over the important things that have been draining the life out of me. He's an established and experienced businessman who can turn this place into a profit making machine, and leave people like Me, Dan, Miguel... and soon hopefully also my old friend Elie and possibly another tech to replace Josh (who has to be able to weld please) to things we love to do. That is what has made HPE so great. It's been driven by those who are passionate about performance, and edging out the competition. Over the last 3 years we've become one of the leading, most experienced and talented LSx shops in the nation.
That's all I have to say...
Chuck
I am offended by the things you've said, and I'm sure you're offended by the things I've said.
I'll admit I've made mistakes. I mean I did go into this thing really young which was my first mistake. And yes my parents could support me so perhaps there was poor judgment in some business decisions that were made. When you have all the money in the world you tend to throw it around without keeping a good track of it.
I know I spent over 100k dollars building an LT1 car that broke the world record (thus giving us... 100k + dollars worth of advertising).
And I still have the receipts a few feet from me of over 60k dollars spent to build multiple setups for Stevens car... and that car never even wore an HPE badge even though 75% of it was built in our shop 2 years ago. (btw. this is not to be confused as a bitter subject because I have a completely great relationship with Josh and Steven and am 100% supportive of their en devours)
Other things have hurt the business like... accepting checks. I remember the time when we got over 7k dollars of bad checks from a customer in Conroe who came in and picked up a complete heads/cam package. Apparently somebody in the shop knew him, so we took the check. Never got any money or parts back on that deal. He was in jail for check fraud about a month later.
Rick Intrau used to brag to my former friend Jacob Hutchins (red LT1 Formula) about how he stole over 100k dollars worth of parts and money while working here. Wow, what a guy...
Yes I had a hard time putting my foot down. I was always the nice guy. So I continued to get screwed...
Jacob Hutchins was a friend who bought a cam/bolt on package for his C5 from us, and it ran real good at the track. I thought it could go close to 10's on motor if we just added some heads, so I gave him a set of cnc'd LS6's on an I owe you basis. He was a friend. I mean he would come up with the money, eventually...right? Nope, that's been over a year and a half now and he continues to ignore my phone calls and pesterings. He even owns his own shop in Lake Charles called Racetech.
He's actually good friends with another former customer of mine named Garret Wilson, he was a real doosey too. We built a 427 for his C5 and I told him it would probably make over 520-530 to the wheels. It was basically the exact same setup as John's car, but with an automatic. Well for whatever reason it was way off... thinking back, the only thing it could be was the converter. But the car only made 470 to the wheels with a 427 and ETP 265's. So thinking maybe there was something wrong with the heads, I threw on a set of ETP Stage 3 5.3's which made within 5 hp of the 265's... So I ordered a complete LS7 conversion and put the LS7 heads on for him. Still only made about 470-480... So he came in a rage because his car was "down power" and wrote a check for 4800 dollars worth of the final bill... HPE ate the 2 sets of heads and labor of all the R&R. So we were already out a bunch of money from the deal. But it was what it was. Good customer service, that's the way it works. Sometimes you gotta eat **** even if you did nothing wrong. Well if my loss on the car wasn't already enough, in his rage he stole a C4 torque converter (good job idiot), and put a stop payment on his check.
Less than a week later I found out the car went 9.6's (on nitrous) in the 1/4 mile... lol So maybe his motor wasn't down power afterall and he was upset for no reason.
During about that same time frame we had over 13k dollars worth of parts get stolen from the back of the shop. It was a week after I fired Scooter. After investigation we found that Rick Intrau, Scooter/Raymundo Guerrero, and Kyle Somner... all pitched in on the deal. I served them all felonies about 4 months ago. Only Rick has paid his restitution. Scooter actually moved back to Dallas who I assume is just going to flee the law for as long as possible.
And lets not forget the most recent hit we took, Charles El and his proposed plan to buy HPE, instead in the process draining our bank account of 44k dollars.
The list could literally go on and on. Truth of the matter? I fucked up. I fucked up big time because I trusted people. Hopefully some people will realize that all these nice things John and Andrew have to say about me, are not quite as they seem. I'm not admitting that I've never done anything wrong, which is the exact purpose of this post... it's to prove that I have!
If I've learned anything, it's that if you're going to start a business, you really better be ready to man handle that thing and keep up on your books. Taxes and all that stuff will kill you. And starting up, yeah... I mean sure 800k dollars seems like a ton of money. But for a shop that has expenditures of 30k a month, you better be making money or else that's 30k a month in expenses you've gotta come up with on your own! And that's exactly what I had to do the first 12 months at least! Most business's operate on negative profits for the first 2 or 3 years.
Right now HPE is in no position to be going out of business. We've been so busy the last 6 months our techs can barely keep up. I am getting out of it though. I'll still be here, but I'm not going to be the owner. I'm just going to be doing tuning and sales. I'm done with the owner bit. It's driven me almost insane. I love cars, selling packages, and tuning. But the business has become so big that the demands of me to take care of it have pulled me away from doing the things that I love. So that's why I made this decision.
We're in the moving process. We're moving to 11950 Perry Road which is right on 1960 in the Willowbrook area. For the next 2 or 3 weeks we're going to be busy with that. Gary Harmon will be the new owner of HPE and taking over the important things that have been draining the life out of me. He's an established and experienced businessman who can turn this place into a profit making machine, and leave people like Me, Dan, Miguel... and soon hopefully also my old friend Elie and possibly another tech to replace Josh (who has to be able to weld please) to things we love to do. That is what has made HPE so great. It's been driven by those who are passionate about performance, and edging out the competition. Over the last 3 years we've become one of the leading, most experienced and talented LSx shops in the nation.
That's all I have to say...
Chuck
05-30-2007 | 06:23 PM
#46
As always I wish Steven and Josh good luck with their new shop. Chuck and I got into it years back but I'm sure it's smoothed over now. He gave me a free tune since I was kind of stuck. Wish you nothing but the best Chuck.
05-30-2007 | 06:56 PM
#49
Originally Posted by WS6NIGHTMARE
So I guess all the rumors I had heard were true. But damn, way to let it all hang out Chuck 
Chuck
