The South Shall Ride Again

Chambers named one of his models, the NBF Hellcat, after Forrest, and it is the ghost of Forrest and his ilk that drives Chambers. Just as Chambers can wax poetic on the aesthetics of riding a Confederate, he can quickly digress to lectures on the so-called War of Northern Aggression, which in his view had little to do with race or slavery. "It was the last real conflict between those fighting on the side of individual empowerment and those advocating centralized power," says Chambers. "Everything else is spin."

It is that mind-set that informs not just Chambers's thinking but his sense of mission. He stands against what he sees as the hegemony of Yankee capitalism with "its lust for money," which, he believes, has for more than a century undermined the South's efforts to create a homegrown industrial base. Badass motorcycles like the Hellcat are simply Chambers's form of in-your-face payback. "I want the bike to represent a different North American culture that was never allowed to express itself mechanically," he says.

None of the metal parts on Confederate's bikes (outside of the engine) are cast. They are machined from solid aircraft-quality aluminum. The gas tanks, made from carbon fiber, are similarly crafted.

Into such distinctive features Chambers has sunk a lot of money that will be hard to recoup. Some call it engineering overkill. Kittrelle says such touches are "today's fad" and "engineering du jour," adding expense without necessarily enhancing performance.

It currently takes the company about 100 hours to build one motorcycle, during which about 50 of the company's 62 employees touch it. "There's a ton of waste out there," Chambers concedes, looking out on the factory floor, where at any time about 15 bikes are under construction. The waste is only compounded by Chambers's penchant for making design changes in the middle of a model year or for pulling bikes off the assembly line to add features at customers' requests.

But Chambers claims those inefficiencies will soon be in the past. Starting with the 2001 model year, the company will focus on building one stock model a month. (Confederate makes five different models.)

Still, the road ahead seems impossibly steep -- and Chambers's numbers impossibly rosy. This year the company produced 300 motorcycles and came close to breaking even. But Chambers intends to build 1,000 units in 2001. The year after that, he expects to make 2,500 units and a pretax profit of $25 million.

That seems a distant vision, given that Confederate continues to cycle through cash droughts. Only now is Chambers buying an inventory-and-accounting software program and hiring someone to manage it. "If I can't control my inventory, I can't control my cash flow," he acknowledges.

That lack of attention to detail raises the stakes because he is playing with other people's money. To date, Confederate has consumed about $12 million in invested capital, and Chambers, who once owned the entire company, now owns just a third. He has 30 fellow shareholders to contend with, and further dilution is in store as the company strains to close on a $5-million private placement. His interim chief financial officer is an investment banker, Ike LaRue. LaRue and Ed Reardon, Confederate's sales consultant, bring skeptical eyes to the business. Reardon allows that Chambers is a visionary but then says dismissively, "Mat didn't even know what the book-to-bill ratio was until I told him."

"Operations is not Mat's strength," echoes investor Tim Hood. He has ridden his Confederate from Baton Rouge to the factory for a look around. "When I walk through the kitchen, I can sense the level of efficiency," he says. You can tell by Hood's tone that what he senses here would not pass muster back in Baton Rouge.

Hood, like many around Chambers, is drawn to the paradox that Chambers personifies. "I kind of fell in love with the product," Hood admits. "Mat does recognize there are shortcomings in operations, and he always solicits my opinion. But sometimes he proceeds to do what he wants to do."

Confederate currently has no senior management, save Chambers, and its board has yet to be approved by the shareholders. Chambers has acknowledged that he needs a chief operating officer and has begun interviewing for one. One candidate, asked what he thought of the company, said he enjoyed speaking with Chambers but called him "a dreamer." Yet "the company can't afford to take shortcuts, and Mat knows that," he said. "When you start a small manufacturing company like this, you get only one chance."

A few weeks after the interview, Chambers, who had previously raved about that candidate, called him "lacking," adding, "He's never ridden a motorcycle."

The dealer
Chambers and LaRue are hot to take the company public in the next year, ostensibly to reward their workers but perhaps also to defuse investor impatience. Confederate, after all, is a manufacturing company that has yet to break even. What kind of respect can it expect from Wall Street?

Despite his contradictions, Chambers does have his champions. Don Atchison is one -- for now.

For much of his life Atchison -- who rode his first motorcycle at age four, when he was too short to reach the clutch pedal -- was in the thrall of speed. Then his best friend ran off the road and died while racing Atchison through a canyon in Arizona. "I figured I'd better slow down after that," says Atchison. "So I bought a Harley."

It might as well have been a Buick. "It weighed a ton and was hard to stop," Atchison recalls. That's when he found the Confederate. "It was a very raw, very purposeful, very artistic machine," he says. "I was beyond impressed."

In late 1997, Atchison traveled to Louisiana, where he and Chambers fell into feverish conversation. "I could see he was not in it for the bucks," says Atchison. "We never talked about cost of goods sold or price points. The words I kept hearing from him were 'simple,' 'organic,' 'uncompromised.'"

Atchison, a former executive, was stoked. He told Chambers that he wanted to distribute the Confederate and sell the bike as if it were sculpture. Chambers thought that was a cool idea.

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