(Re)born to Be Wild

The Mike's Famous name was like a gauntlet that Schwartz laid at his own feet. He knew that if he didn't live up to his own boast, the name would make a mockery of him.

What lay ahead for Schwartz was, in many ways, more difficult than starting from scratch because he had bought a company based on a business model that was becoming irrelevant. "The dealers were mostly developed by a cadre of enthusiasts," explains one Harley dealer. "It was kind of a club, and it wasn't customer-focused. You'd hear stories of customers who rode up on a competing brand of motorcycle and were snubbed."

But by the early 1990s, a new kind of Harley customer had surfaced--a customer who was a lot less likely to put up with that kind of treatment. This customer was in his mid to late thirties, educated, demanding, and sophisticated. If he didn't like the way he was treated when he walked into a dealership, he would not think twice about walking out.

As Schwartz saw it, there was opportunity in the disparity between the old-style Harley dealer and the new breed of Harley customer. He knew the business would always attract the hard-core bikers, but he also wanted the clean-cut baby boomers with unfulfilled dreams or midlife crises--consumers who might be tempted by a ride on the wild side but who might just as easily choose a home theater system or a sailboat. He knew the demographic because he was the demographic.

Schwartz wasn't thinking of his business as just a Harley dealership anymore. It would be a tourist destination, like Hershey's Chocolate World or Legoland. "In the retail world, the big shift in the '90s was from selling a product to selling an experience," says Mike Rubin, president of MRA International, a Philadelphia consulting firm that helps clients develop leisure, sports, and retail projects. "Mike needed to create a draw so that people were motivated to get off the highway. It had to feel like a place that a motorcycle caravan might pull up to but that was still family-friendly."

So Schwartz decided to add a restaurant and a museum. "If I was pitching to families," he asks, "was a Harley place an acceptable place to stop? Maybe. If it also had a restaurant, would that make it better? Probably. And if there was also a museum? There's no way you'd associate a museum with someplace dangerous."

Schwartz was prepared for the restaurant to be a loss leader--an attraction that might not be profitable on its own but that might beckon travelers off the highway for a snack and ultimately lead them into the dealership. "I went to the rest stop five miles down the road and I also counted the cars that stopped at Cracker Barrel," he recalls. "These people might wait an hour for a seat on Sunday--for ordinary food and to buy a trinket." Schwartz figured that if he could snag .5% of those customers, sell each one of them $6 worth of food, and entice 10% of them to buy a T-shirt, he'd have a sustainable business.

Schwartz was making the dealership work. By getting basic management and financial systems in place, and in general behaving like a guy who really wanted to sell his product, he kicked sales up to $3.8 million in 1995, his first full year in business. But to really reinvent the business, Schwartz needed a new location, and he quickly set his heart on the most heavily traveled road in Delaware: I-95. Directly to the south, roadside restaurants are few and far between; to the north lies two hours of New Jersey Turnpike rest stops. Schwartz thought he could offer weary travelers an attractive alternative. In February 1996, nearly a year after he started looking, Schwartz's dream location became available. Just south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, on I-295 but right off I-95, there was a 5.8-acre tract of land that had been home to one of the first Howard Johnson Motor Lodges. The ramshackle buildings, including the original orange-roofed HoJo's reception hut, were highly visible from I-95.

With traditional financing from a local bank, plus cash from his growing dealership, Schwartz signed an option to buy the abandoned site for $1.36 million.

"We really didn't know how to sell motorcycles"

Schwartz knew what he knew, but he was also keenly aware of what he didn't know. And he wasn't shy about asking for help. He hired a prominent land-use attorney; signed on a former New Castle County economic development director to help him with the land use and development process; retained consultant Rubin for guidance on the overall concept and the mixed-use elements of the dealership; and hired Jack Rouse Associates, a Cincinnati designer of themed entertainment attractions.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT