The South Shall Ride Again

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If Chambers would help him, Atchison knows he could roll out other Iconoclast stores. "Ideally, I'd like to have worldwide distribution rights," says Atchison. In fact, "Mat said he was going to give us $800,000 to support us," he says, adding that the offer was made to help Atchison expand his Denver showroom.

Chambers says that Confederate needs to get its product out into the market and "see which dealers perform for us." LaRue seconds that. "Right now," he says, "if a dealer wants the bike, we're going to sell it to him. We need to get our bike out there in the most inexpensive way possible." LaRue even sees Confederate selling motorcycles directly to consumers over the Internet, with buyers able to custom-assemble their bikes.

"We are going to get shopped," says Marcia Zanetti, another die-hard Confederate dealer, worriedly. Chambers persuaded Zanetti and her partner, Hector Valdes, to move from Albuquerque to Los Angeles so they could open a Confederate-only store in the Iconoclast mode, right across the street from one of the largest Harley-Davidson dealers in southern California. She stuck her neck out for Chambers, and she wants him to return the favor. "He's got to protect his dealers," she says.

Zanetti says that Chambers gets swept away by grand visions, which take his eye off the ball. "I tell him, 'Mat, you can control your future if you are willing to delegate,'" Zanetti says. She recalls that at a recent trade show (which she calls "a motorcycle rally with booths and beer") in California, a customer came by the booth, asking her if the motorcycle could be customized in a certain way. Chambers, who happened to be there, jumped in and said that was impossible. "He killed the sale for us right there," says Zanetti.

Force of personality
Perhaps every entrepreneur walks that line between dream and delusion. When Mat Chambers says, "I'm one of the most flawed people you'd ever meet," it's hard to tell whether that's false modesty or an honest admission.

On the factory floor, where his gleaming motorcycles take shape each day, the dream is palpable. The lead time for one of those $30,000 creations is two months and counting. "Every bike we build is spoken for," says Chambers. People want this motorcycle -- people like Nicolas Cage, who owns two, and Bruce Springsteen, who bought one. Even if the company is flawed, perhaps the motorcycle is too good to fail.

Either way, Mat Chambers won't give up on his stubborn devotion to the product, no matter what the cost is. When tweaking the design for the next model year, "we redesigned and retooled every jig in the shop. That obsoleted 100,000 parts," he says. "That shows our commitment to the product."

Chambers vows that his company will earn a long-term profit not just by building a superb machine but by "taking it slow and laying down some deep roots." He refuses to suffer the fate of the South, "colonized" by the mercantilist North, which was simply eager "to get the fruit off the vine and eat it. All those guys were fighting for was the digestion of the South. And once they had it in their belly, everything was just about money."

Edward O. Welles is a senior feature writer at Inc.

Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

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