As I write this, it’s MotoAmerica race weekend at Barber Motorsports! Normally, I’d be trackside with my family and the rest of the Bison team, as I have been for the past 5+ years. Instead, I’m in Oklahoma City watching the Live+ stream while my son Carter and wife Tosha are in Birmingham holding down the Bison booth! In fact, I just saw them on my screen in real time. What a time to be alive.
Last weekend, I was at Circuit of the Americas with Carter for MotoGP while providing support to our North America Talent Cup racers but Tosha wasn’t there. The event prior to that one was the Daytona 200 - Tosha, Carter and Ryan attended, I did not. Seeing a pattern here? Well you’re not alone and it’s brought some interesting questions our way from our customers and sponsored racers!
“Is everything okay with you and Tosha?”
“You guys aren’t separating are you?”
“Wait… where’s your RV?”
Before I elaborate more on this, I want to start by saying YES everything is great with Tosha and I! Don’t worry! We aren’t splitting up or going through a phase. Rather, we’re shifting our approach after five years of travelling full-time with our lives revolving around motorcycle roadracing and trackday calendars across North America. Let’s dive into the changes we’ve made and what to expect when planning to connect with us at a race track or other event.
What We Were Doing
Back in 2019, Tosha and I made the decision to quit our day jobs, buy an RV and start traveling to grow our company from a grassroots level. It’s a pretty wild story and there is a lot of documentation out there about that process, but if you’re interested in learning more about it and how we functioned on the road, be sure to check out our travel channels on YouTube and other social media platforms @lackeysbetrippin or Lackeysbetrippin.com!
Anyway, at that time, the business was functioning with just three people: Tosha, myself, and one contractor in charge of social media and marketing. It didn’t take us long to realize that shipping & receiving wasn’t doable from our RV, let alone coordinating the logistics of having things shipped to RV parks and racetracks along our route! So, we almost immediately hired Tosha’s mother, Kathy, to handle shipping, receiving and quality control based out of Wichita, Kansas.
Now, it’s important to remember (and we often forget) that we always intended for the full-time travel plan to be temporary, with a max of about 3 years. In addition, Tosha and I never truly intended on quitting both of our jobs and going full-time on Bison together. As the business blew up and more orders rolled in, we realized it required both of us to be completely hands-on at all times - and it wasn’t long before we’d made two more hires including a marketing specialist and graphic designer. Since those early months, the Bison team has grown steadily and before we knew it, there were ten team members working in unison to keep this thing steaming along smoothly.
The Highs Come With Lows
These past couple of years have taught us a lot about “balance”. We realized that even with all the added team members, our family was at risk of overextending ourselves - and overextension leads to burnout. Burnout almost immediately leads to the death spiral of any business, as it’s nearly impossible to recover from once it sets in. Last season we made some adjustments; buying a large enclosed trailer and more comfortable motorhome. We vowed to travel less and also spend more time enjoying our trips as a family.
As it turned out, that didn’t happen. In fact, not only did we continue traveling with the goal of attending as many events as possible, we throttled up even further and went global with trips to Italy and Portugal shoehorned in between events in America. At the same time, our new rig was proving to be more of a headache than we anticipated! Any potential free time that might have otherwise been spent with the family was instead dedicated to crawling under and climbing upon the RV and trailer, making repairs to get us down the road to the next event.
Remember, for almost every single week of the race season we were going through this cycle:
Monday-Wednesday: Travel to the venue.
Thursday: Setup.
Friday-Sunday: Work the booth, then teardown and pack up.
Monday morning: Repeat.
This is an absolute grind by itself, but when you factor in unforeseen circumstances such as breakdowns or other delays, the stress level increases exponentially!
While I was grappling with retaining my sanity with on-the-move RV diagnosis and repairs, our kids were feeling the drag as well. It’s easy to forget that Carter and Edith have sacrificed for this business and lifestyle just as much as Tosha and I. The first 2-3 years were fun, with work intertwined with a healthy amount of extracurricular activity. We visited a countless number of landmarks and attractions during those years, plus they had friends at almost every event we attended. Over the past couple of years, however, the activities dwindled and their paddock friends attended less events.
Planning Ahead
To be honest, we saw the writing on the wall back in 2022-23. We knew full-time travel was not sustainable as the kids grew older and our business continued to grow rapidly, and it was time to wind down this temporary lifestyle we adopted to grow our business. It was “mission accomplished” and we had officially outgrown the labor-intensive grassroots growth model. We saw an opportunity to wind down our full-time travel, but at this point trackside accessibility and dealer events had become a huge staple of our business! How could we do both? Replicate ourselves, of course!
Last season we spent a lot of time developing and implementing our Bison Partnership Program. The simplest way to explain this: Bison wants to work with you and reward you for your efforts to grow the brand no matter who you are, what you do or what you’re looking to accomplish. Partnership tiers range from Ambassadors who get Bison Bucks for referrals, to Trackside Partners who essentially buy in as franchisees with the ability to set up and sell at events nationwide.
This model has proven successful thus far, making several people good money while they attend events and hang out with their friends! More importantly, instead of having to wait for the Lackey family to attend an event in your area, chances are there is a Bison Partner nearby! Definitely a win-win-win, and we’re already seeing competitors scramble to come up with their own version of this model - one going so far as to lift the program from our website almost word-for-word.
Growing the Team
With business increasing and partners onboarding over the past year, we’ve also been busy adding internal team members. After all, growth means nothing if you can’t sustain it - and you don’t sustain momentum without keeping up excellent customer service while also improving your products and adding new ones! As such, we’ve added several new team members this past year including: two additional Gear Customizations Specialists, a Partner Program Specialist, and two Product Specialists. Our expanded team makes us more equipped to provide exceptional customer service than ever before - even as we grow and look ahead to the future.
Locked and Loaded for the Next Chapter!
So, will you see the Lackey family at events in 2025 and beyond? Absolutely. We’re committed to the MotoAmerica season, as well as International events such as e-Skootr Championship and WSBK races Transportation and lodging will of course be different, which means no big Bison rig and slightly smaller inventory at some events. You also won’t get the entire family at once very often, with most events seeing some combination of Carter, Tosha and myself and/or other Bison team members.
And what’s next for the Bison brand? The changes and additions made in 2024 have us incredibly excited and optimistic about the future of the brand. If the last several years were spent laying a solid foundation and ground floor, the next several years will be spent building skyward through the addition of new products, new partnerships and improvements to existing products. This can only be accomplished by putting the right people in the right places and maintaining a company-wide commitment to bring you the best motorcycle gear and accessories possible at the best prices, with the best customer service you could ever hope for!
We appreciate everyone who has supported Bison over the years, as well as those of you who are considering joining The Herd in the future! None of this would be possible without you, and we can’t thank you enough for giving us the opportunity to serve the community we love so much!
Go Fast, Be Safe,
Rob Lackey
Co-Founder, Bison Track LLC