Andy Reid | Isolation Island Concours d'Elegance

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I knew that this wasn't going away. And people go, Oh, well, you know, we'll be going moderates and moderates canceled.

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I know it's canceled. I didn't say anything because I have so many friends who are stakeholders. I didn't want to be bad news. I'm like, this is not going to happen. So I'm like, yeah,

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there goes a year. Yes, talking to some friends of mine in the hobby. And I was like, yeah, this isn't gonna be a year. One of them's a doctor. He's

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like, yeah, Pebble Beach is a pipe dream. And I'm like, okay. So I was looking at Facebook one day, and my friend boo Gwynn, who's the PCA chairman of the PCA, Executive Director of the PCA I think, is his real title. And he put up his thing, his little video, he put up golf, cars and coffee on the carpet. And it was little diecast cars. And he put them on his carpet. And he made a video and I said, this is really funny. And I have some I didn't have I had like, probably 10. So I put them all out. And I said, Hey, I

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got one touche. Like, that's so cool.

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And I was thinking about it. And this is like, I know what it is, is March 28 of last year. And thinking, huh? What if you had a con core for toy cars, judged by Concord judges, because the Concord judges like named one of the big Concord to Paul Russell, Ken gross. You know, name, you know, anybody, right? Bill Warner, they're not doing anything, just like me, because they're in the same boat as I am. So everybody's free. And so I called up, boo. And I said, so I'm going to steal your idea. Do something, please. What are you doing? I said, That's you're not stealing it. It's your own idea. You just took it to the next level. I said, great. You cool that is? Yeah. Okay. So I called that call I called bill Warner. But he wasn't my first call. I called Michael firm and the photographer up I said, Hey, so if I made a diecast, car concor weird, the judge on Facebook, on Facebook for model cars, would you do it? He said, will you be in charge? Yes. That sounds totally fine. So he said yes. Then I called Tommy Kendall, who's a pal. I said, Hey, so got this crazy idea. And since none of us are doing anything, would you touch this thing? You guessed it great. So he said yes. And then I called Paul Russell up from Paul Russell and company. And I said, so if I do, he goes, he said, Yes. And so I called the Warner up. And I said, Hey, Bill. So I've got this harebrained idea for this concore of toy cars for Concorde, do it online and people judge it and you know, people like you. It's like, that's a great idea. It's crazy said you ever heard. And it's a great idea. And Bill Schaeffler who founded Fairfield Concord company, same thing, because that's a crazy idea. And it's brilliant. And I went, Okay, I go, Well, I don't know what to call it. And I was thinking I can't Concord the carpet. He goes, Yeah, but that's, that's, that's, I get where you're going with that. But it's that, you know, but what if you call it something different? I said, Okay, so your brainstorming goes, how about isolation Island, Concord? And that was the name. I said, that's the perfect name. And so we launched it on April Fool's Day of 2000. Very appropriately. And we put it out there, we had no, I had one sponsors for my insurance agency, Haywood insurance. And the other sponsor I had was motorolla G, who does car thing, many different car things, video presentations, they do the back end with what we're using right now, the tools you're using right now, for people like Keith Martin's podcast, things like that. So he also does t shirts and hats and artwork and all that it's a wonder of motorolla is a great site. They were other sponsors, because my friend Matt is a friend and a client. And he agreed to help. So he created my logos. We made little awards about this big for each car that were scaled to the size of the car that were custom made for each owner and each car. And so we launched this thing. We said, okay, what's going to happen and I said, Hey, donate, donate to a charitable organization affected by this situation that you will choose. I don't care who it is, but give a donation and give like five bucks or a buck, whatever you can, if you can't afford anything, don't you don't have to give anybody if you can give a buck to five bucks to a charity. And we put it out there on Facebook. And I messaged about 100 of my Facebook following friends saying this was their that's the that's the that's the extent of the marketing. We did. And in the first round, we had 285 entrants. And I went, huh. And so I made mckeel my mckeel Haggerty, my head judge, he was good at the whole time was fantastic. And he gave me a lot of his time and his time is very valuable. And he was just terrific. We had a blast doing it. And Bill was my one of my buddies. have advised bill Bill mckeel. And Bill Warner bill Schaeffler and mckeel are on my board of advisors, they're kind of people that helped me steer the thing, because they'd all run conco done things like this. And so they were very, very useful. And, and just terribly gave me a lot of time. So we did this thing, and we get awards, and we did it. The first time we did it, we just did the text on Facebook as fate we did on Facebook. That's basically what Facebook was the only place I played on the internet and in business before. And I knew that the only way to do this after talking to a lot of friends rapidly was to do it on Facebook, if I wanted to execute immediately, and get it and be first out of the gate with something Amar around this deal in our hobby space that we could all do. Facebook was the only solution that was a cost effective that I could actually do because I could just build it in page and figure it out. And so we did that. And we had all these entrance and they all want and people all cheered. We got all these followers, just like 3000 4000 followers on the thing still.

Unknown Speaker  5:59  
And then we did it again. And I reach I didn't have any spot. You know, no one was getting my insurance agents who was sponsoring the awards, and that was it. But we didn't have any we have the cost of mailing costs and all that stuff. And so I had like Thompson ski from BMW, and Eric Keller from enthusiast Auto Group, which is like the greatest place to buy a BMW M car. He has the best ones on the planet. They are my BMW, just as I said, Tom, is BMW want to sponsor this crazy thing? And he goes, Yeah, and I went great. And so that called Rob Moran, Mercedes, who was one of my judges. So Rob, does Mercedes want to sponsor this thing? They said, yeah. And I called Ray Shaffer. I said, Would Porsche want to sponsor isolation? And he goes, I think so. And so he hooked me up with the club can thing and they sponsored it to me. And I talked to Haggerty and they're like, Well, finally, after two rounds, you finally asked us and I said it just didn't occur to me that would go more than two rounds a bit, because we were doing like every two weeks, we did one round two weeks, another round. I was like, wow. And so we did, we first learned it was a it was 60 hours a week of work. My friend Dirk, the Jaeger, who was my co founder, who I brought in to do my initial photography. And to help out with it, we kind of ran it together, I ran the head of it, but he filled in my gaps all over the place. And when we needed example, photography for class three, he shoot his Die Cast collection in his studio for the presentation because we didn't have any, because no one had done it. Right. So we didn't have any template photography to use for examples. And so he's a brilliant car shooter. And so he shot these amazing photographs of his collection that looked like real cars. So we did this thing, and we got sponsors. And so people kept on donating. And we started getting people that have one pebble multiple times as entrance. Many of them and people people know. So you get like the john Shirley's and people involved, right? Literally, I'm not just dropping names, they they are in it. Peter Gleason, who has a very exceptional collection of race cars. And BMW is primarily and Seattle added another tremendously nice guy and one of my great friends. But, you know, I think we had six Pebble Beach winners, Best of Show winners entering their toy cars in our Concorde and really going after it. And, but what it did is it gave these people something fun to do, and people made friends that had never met. And we made a $350 price cap on the cars. And so what let it do is that you couldn't just buy an amalgam amalgam model for $10,000. And when, because it wasn't legal, and we had a couple people try to enter stuff that wasn't legal. One of them is a very big collector, and I sent him packing and he never came back. I'm like, that's fine. I asked bill about it. I said, Well, he's a big deal. He's bills like, You're the king. It's your show what you say goes and I said, you know, that's very much thanks for doing but you know, we're not doing this and he probably I know I'm gonna run into this year and he's and I'm gonna get some seat heat from it, but I'm okay. He's not a client. But, uh, so we did this thing, and people like being friends, they entries got better and better. And you were looking to paid so you saw some of the quality of these entries, right? And they got really good really fast. And what's great is, the pictures are great, and they're beautiful. But the stories these people told about these cars, and they're these toy cars, like you know, like this guy, there's a perfect example this is my favorite all time ever. diecast car and favorite LMP racecar ever. It's that V 12 LMP art car. It says protect me from what I want. Lack of charisma can be fatal. The unattainable is invariably attractive. You are so complex. You don't respond to danger. It's got loads of great stuff on it. I've loved this card since since BMW did it. It's got All these funny sayings on it, protect me from what I want is the best one. And you know, that never worked for me. But so the stories of people why people love these thing things. It's often like my dad had a reliance seminar. And it was my I remember growing up on it, and this is the same color as his. And this is the story of our time with this real car, and how I bought this car to connect with it. Or I watched the 1967 Sebring race. And this car one, and I recreated the scene of 1967 Sebring that I got to watch when I was three years old. And just these extraordinary editorial tales of passion and love for the hobby came across. And what's interesting is I was on a panel with Sam saundra button and a number of others from other concours about the impact of online concore. And they said the one thing that was lacking from theirs was the community aspect. People didn't get to talk and share and get to be pals. Ours did, because we put the darn thing on Facebook comments happened. And people would have dialogues. And they get to know each other and they'd share other stories. And while I had this too, and here's my story. And like we made we put people together globally around the world who had never met, who are now fast friends. So we had that walking around pebble and meeting people experience. Virtually nobody else pulled it off because

Unknown Speaker  11:27  
they all built websites. And we only use Facebook because it was the only solution. It was we didn't want to I mean, I know what what good web design is. That was not good web design. It was quick and cheap. You betcha. And we had a we had a budget of my credit card, right. So it was coming into my pocket. But we also raised over 100 grand for charities, which blew my mind. That's fabulous. Yeah, it was just and again, we we've tried. Our whole idea is none of my friends in any part of the hobby. Were having any fun in March, April, May, June, July, August, because we weren't going anyplace. And I just wanted to make fun for everybody. And people had fun. I mean, when I went back to the sixth and seventh round to rally deals from Mopar, who is the head of Mopar. He's not even the head of design. He's like the Big Cheese now. And he'd still show up the judge with enthusiasm. That's huge. Or Bobby Ray Hall, who was a judge or David Hobbs who was a judge or bill Warner who is starting to prepare for his own 2021 concor. They always gave us the time and it was just because they saw what we did I think we got nominated for an octane award. Last year octane magazine does an award for and we didn't win it. But we got just getting nominated. We made the shortlist with pebble beaches virtual concor with the with the one that they did a Peterson with a Peters we were in the same league with Peterson virtual Concord. So I felt like we did pretty well by just showing up and being mentioned. This has been Jeff Sterns connected through cars

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