Entrepreneur #1 - Soichiro Honda; an individualist in a nation that prized conformists

The son of a village blacksmith, Honda was exposed to bicycles when they were brought into his father’s shop for repair. He had only a primary school education, but showed a striking aptitude for both engineering and business. Before starting the Honda Motor Company to make motorized bicycles in postwar Japan, he had already built up two successful businesses, one supplying piston rings to Toyota, and another making propellers for the Japanese air force.

Soichiro Honda, some time around 1964 (judging from the bike.) Although he was really more of an engineer than an entrepreneur, he had two great business instincts. One of these was that he knew when to get out of the way; he retired in 1973, in his 60s, even though he could have remained at his company's helm indefinitely. Even more important, he knew how to delgate...

...leaving the day-to-day operations of the company in the hands of Takeo Fujisawa, who has joint custody of my greatest-motorcycle-entrepreneur-of-all-time honorific. Arigato, Honda-san and Fujisawa-san.

Mr. Honda was anything but a typical Japanese businessman. A rugged individualist, he refused to participate in the “keiretsu” alliances between companies, which typically gave big banks a strong influence in business decisions. When virtually all Japanese motorbikes had noisy, smelly two-stroke motors he decided to make a four-stroke. That typified a willingness to plan and invest for long-term success even if it meant ignoring prevailing “wisdom.” One of the motorcycles that benefited from that insight was the Super Cub step-through. It was introduced in 1958 and is still produced almost unmodified today. Honda recently sold the 50 millionth Super Cub, making it the best selling vehicle of all time.

Entrepreneur #2 - George Hendee; two-wheel demon, and dreamer

George Hendee saw the advantages of electric starters for motorcycles, and argued with his chief engineer, Oscar Hedstrom - pushing him to include the newfangled feature in 1914. The electric lights and starter in those models were disastrous, and Hedstrom left the company in frustration. Hendee himself was forced out of Indian a couple of years later, although without him, sales gradually decreased.

Hendee was one of the most successful bicycle racers in Massachusetts at the turn of the century – at one point, he won 302 races out of 309! He started a company making his own bicycles, which sold well, thanks to his racing reputation.

Many of the very first motorcycles were “pacers” used to train bicycle racers. They were typically unreliable but Hendee noticed that Oscar Hedstrom’s ran very well. In 1901, Hendee approached Hedstrom and told him that his dream was to start a company devoted to making motorized bicycles. They called their company Indian, and in short order it was America’s leading motorcycle manufacturer. In 1912, Indian sold over 20,000 units.

Entrepreneur #3 - Arthur Davidson; built H-D dealer network

While his friend Bill Harley and to a lesser extent the other Davidson brothers provided the technical know-how, the early business success of Harley-Davidson was largely due to Arthur Davidson. In 1910 he set out to enroll a national network of dealers. He also recognized the importance of factory-training for dealer service staff, and the importance of advertising if H-D was ever to surpass Indian in annual sales.

Entrepreneur #4 - Vaughn Beals; resurrected Harley-Davidson

By the mid-‘70s after years of AMF mismanagement, Harley-Davidson had lost almost all customer loyalty and profits were in freefall. When a group of company executives led by Vaughn Beals offered to buy the division for $75 million, AMF quickly agreed.

After the 1981 leveraged buyout, Beals led an amazing corporate turnaround. He funded new product development and implemented world-class quality control. It’s impossible to know what would have happened to the H-D brand if Beals had not risen up to save it, but it’s certain that no one else could have done a better job at rehabilitating it.

Entrepreneur #5 - John Bloor; rebooted Triumph

Like Harley-Davidson, Triumph was a company that had fallen on hard times – more than once. In the 1920s the company made an ill-fated move to produce cars as well and in 1936 an entrepreneur named Jack Sangster drove a hard bargain, acquiring the motorcycle business at a good price. Sangster’s business instincts nearly make him worthy of a place on this list, too. He hired the brilliant Edward Turner and after turning a handsome profit on sales, sold the company to BSA for another big payday in 1951. 

The Triumph marque found an unlikely savior in real-estate developer John Bloor.

From the mid-‘70s through the mid-‘80s Triumph died an agonizingly slow death. The brand would have vanished altogether had John Bloor, a real estate developer, not bought the old factory in Meriden. Against all advice, Bloor decided to build a new factory in nearby Hinckley. He spent millions designing new motorcycles that were unveiled at the Cologne Motorcycle Show in 1990. While those first “new” Triumphs got mixed reviews, the company has shown a remarkable willingness to go its own way, producing a line of unique machines that once again have earned it a devoted fan base.

Entrepreneur #6 - Count Domenico Agusta; kept racing in Italian blood

A marvelous promotional poster, produced to celebrate an all-MV podium in the 125cc class at the 1955 Gran Premio d'Italia. The Count with Carlo Ubbialdi (top step) Remo Venturi, and Angelo Copeta.

The Count ran MV Agusta during its heyday between the end of WWII and the early ‘70s. During that time, the company was really a helicopter manufacturer with a small motorcycle subsidiary. The road-going motorcycles they made would never warrant including the Count on this list, but thanks to his own fierce pride and competitive streak, the company also funded the greatest Grand Prix racing team of all time.

When the Japanese factories began to dominate in the late ‘60s, they drove out most of the Italian marques. By lavishing funds from the helicopter business on his racing team, Agusta single-handedly preserved Italian racing honor.

Entrepreneur #7 - Malcolm Forbes; nothing and everything to do with motorcycles

Forbes was the son of America’s first business magazine publisher. After heroic service in WWII, he came home to work at Forbes Magazine, although he nearly became the Governor of New Jersey – he won the Republican nomination but lost the election. So what does running Forbes Magazine have to do with motorcycles? Nothing.

Forbes was a tireless promoter of motorcycling, with a knack for angles that would appeal to mainstream media. Here, he poses with Liz Taylor. Ironically, while Forbes was successful at breaking down some of the social stigma of being a biker, he never came out of the closet - although he was frequently seen in the gay bars and bathhouses of New York. I often wonder if he bought his first motorcycle to go with the leather outfits he already wore...

Forbes discovered motorcycling in the 1960s. He bought a motorcycle dealership in New Jersey, which became one of the biggest shops in the country. Using his high-level business connections, he worked tirelessly to establish motorcycle riding as a respectable pastime. He was an extremely effective political lobbyist always ready to defend motorcycling from legal assault. With his media-savvy background, he managed to plant scores of motorcycle stories in the mainstream media. The social acceptability of motorcycles today owes much to Malcolm Forbes.

At #8 - Floyd Clymer; eccentric serial entrepreneur

Clymer was already famous as a young teenager – at 13 (in 1909) he was the youngest Ford dealer in the country! He went on to become a winning motorcycle racer and soon had a dealership for Harley-Davidson and Excelsior motorcycles in his home state of Colorado. He was an innovative marketer and one of the first people to sell motorcycles to police departments and delivery businesses. In his early 20s he began publishing his first motorcycle magazine. 

Curiously, it was after Clymer sold Cycle Magazine that the U.S. moto-mags started getting things ass-backwards.

His career was put on hold when he served a year in federal prison for mail fraud. He had been offered a chance to plead guilty and avoid prison altogether but he always claimed he was innocent and refused to admit a crime he didn’t commit. When he got out of prison he took over the distribution of Indian motorcycles on the west coast. Here again, he had marketing savvy, arranging for Indian motorcycles to appear in films and lending them to Hollywood stars. When Indian faltered in the ‘50s, Clymer desperately tried to save the brand but failed. He also was briefly the importer of the eyebrow-raising Munch Mammoth motorcycle.

Last but not least, he was the publisher of Cycle Magazine from the early ‘50s to the mid-‘60s and ran a very successful business publishing motorcycle repair manuals.

Entrepreneur #9 - How 'the ice-cream man from hell' built the world's coolest museum

The Morbidelli V-8 is tucked away in a corner; the Britten gets a little more limelight. The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum houses what can, at least arguably, be called the best motorcycle collection anywhere. There’s absolutely no doubt that it’s the best motorcycle museum. The 140,000 square foot facility, set in the middle of a 720 acres ‘motorsports park’ was built between 1999 and 2002, and cost George Barber about $60 million.

What’s striking about the story of Barber’s collection is that it all came together quite recently. He was no Sammy Miller, who’d been on the scene for donkey’s years. Barber only bought the first bikes for the collection in 1988. The fact that it’s now grown to over 1,200 bikes reflects another side of this white-haired gent with a honeyed drawl; he’s also fiercely competitive.

Barber’s dad operated a large commercial dairy in Birmingham, after WWII. He wasn’t necessarily a spoiled rich kid, but he was pretty rich. As a young man in the 1960s, he raced Porsches at Daytona and Sebring. He didn’t treat it like a hobby; his rivals called him ‘the ice cream man from hell.’ When I interviewed him, forty years after he’d hung up his helmet, he still took pains to make sure I wrote down the number of wins he racked up: 63.

The 'ice-cream man from hell' in one of his Porsches.

 When his dad turned over the company to him, George channeled his competitive instincts into the business and, over the next 30 years Barber Dairies’ annual turnover reached $300 million. With no time to race, he started to acquire a few collectible cars.

Funny story about how the collection took shape: Barber had a fleet of delivery trucks for the dairy business, and a garage where the company maintained them. One of the garage employees, a guy named Dave Hooper, was due to retire. Barber worried that Hooper was the type who, without anything to do, would just wither and die, so he asked Hooper to restore a couple of cars.

It turned out that experience beating delivery trucks back into shape wasn’t that transferable to aluminum race-car bodies, and those first restorations didn’t go too well. It was Hooper who suggested that they try restoring a couple of motorcycles, and George went out and bought a 1953 Victoria Bergmeister and a ’59 Panther for his pensioner to work on.

At the museum, when they tell this story they emphasize that, at that point, George had a minor epiphany. He’d always worked on his own race-cars, and he fell in love with the way the bikes’ working bits were not concealed behind bodywork; he could see the suspensions, frames and motors. Talking to him, I could tell that was true for what it was worth, but something else also came out: that old competitive streak.

Even with his substantial resources, by the late '80s, the price of desirable collector cars meant that George would never have the world’s best car collection. He couldn’t even afford to assemble the world’s best Lotus collection; that was billionaire territory, and he only had, oh, hundreds of millions.

“But I realized,” he admitted to me, “that I could have the world’s best motorcycle collection.” He sold off his cars, and set out to do just that, and as quickly as possible.

He bought a warehouse near the dairy. In a year or two, all the floor space was filled and Barber built 20-foot racks to store them several bikes high. Although it was nominally open to the public, the collection was in pretty sketchy neighborhood and few people visited; it was one of American motorcycling’s best-kept secrets. I had friends who sought it out, and came back awe-struck. He was collecting and displaying motorcycles on shelves, the way other people displayed toy bikes. Around the world, collectors and curators grumbled about an upstart American – ice cream man from hell, indeed, who’d upset the collecting apple-cart. He was accused of single-handedly inflating the market for vintage bikes. 

Barber, more recently, with an ex-Surtees MV. He did have enough money to acquire the world's very best motorcycles...

Rival curators just didn’t get it; it was a competition and George was winning. The rest of it was only money. In 1998, Barber sold his company. That meant he had even more cash to spend on bikes, but that he had to move his collection out of the old warehouse, which went with the business. That’s when he bought an abandoned gravel pit on the outskirts of town, and decided to build the best motorcycle museum in the world, to house the best collection. If there was a downside, it’s that with the collection’s small staff fully occupied, he withdrew from AHRMA racing; for years his rivalry with Rob Iannucci’s Team Obsolete had defined AHRMA’s premier classes.

When his park – trust me, it doesn’t look like a quarry any more – and his track, and his museum were finished and his collection was installed, he gave it all to the city of Birmingham. Talk about your gracious southern gentleman, eh? George Barber maintains an office at the museum, but he doesn’t spend too much time there. He’s the kind of guy who’s always looking to the next challenge, and he’s busy with other things. The last time I talked to him he was preoccupied with some big real estate development projects. That’s the competitor coming out, again. After you win, you celebrate one night, and then focus on the next race.

If you haven't been, you owe it to yourself.

Ten entrepreneurs who made things happen

It’s hard to make a good motorcycle. Maybe it’s even harder to make money making motorcycles – but if it wasn’t possible to do so, we’d have nothing to ride! Over the next couple of weeks, I'll post short bios of ten of the most influential motorcycle entrepreneurs.

At #10, “Big” Bill France – promoted the Daytona 200

France is best known as the father of NASCAR and the builder of Daytona International Speedway. The city of Daytona Beach convinced the AMA to hold the 200-mile national championship race there in 1937. After a few lackluster years, it seemed Daytona would lose the race, until France (a mechanic and beach racer - in cars) was convinced to become the promoter. He continued to promote the race until, realizing that it could not continue on the beach, he built the speedway. He opened his track in 1959 and the AMA saw the light and moved the race there two years later. Under France’s control, the race became an international sensation. Over the next ten or 15 years, it became the only American road race with really 'international' stature; Hailwood, Agostini and a host of GP stars often came over to race there. Bill France died in the early '90s, and his son, Bill Jr., took control of the Speedway

Bill France, with his son Bill France Jr., who was an avid motorcycle racer in his younger days.

A friend of mine recently told me a story about going to meet Bill France Jr. shortly after he took over the family business. By that time NASCAR was already a big business, but the most prominent racing photo on the office walls was a shot of Bill Jr. racing a Bultaco short tracker. Over the last few years, many in the motorcycle racing community have been dismayed by some of Daytona Motorsports Group's handling of AMA Pro Racing, and some have wondered if the current head of the family dynasty has lost his love of motorcycles. I think it's more likely that, since NASCAR is so much more important to the dynasty than is motorcycle racing, he simply has to delegate.