Rust Bros. vs West Coast Conversions

 Yeah, as per my last post, I recently dislocated my shoulder eating shit on a run. It happens. It was the first time the shoulder went back in more or less by itself.

That happened the first time I ever dislocated a shoulder, which was in Melbourne when my bike wheel got caught in tram tracks in the rain, disappearing from beneath me and I flew over the handlebars to eat shit. A driver stopped to ask me if I was okay, and I picked my bike up as I told him 'I think my shoulder's dislocated' and it went back in as I said that.

That was my right shoulder though, and I got it examined in an emergency room and the doctor said it looked okay, no deformaties and discharged me. It was the next day, putting on a t-shirt that I discovered it hurt like a mother-****.

So, with my recent shoulder dislocation, the same thing happened. By the evening all the shoulder girdle muscles pulled up sore and were effectively imobilized. Because it's my left it kind of ruled out drawing or typing, even washing the dishes, my major occupations here, so I wound up on the couch binging the car restoration shows on Netflix.

This started with Gotham Garage - Rust to Riches. A quality reality drama. Lame jokes, beginnings, middles and ends, staged haggling exchanges and big reveals, with quirky characters that all remain PG rated. 

Pretty much any given episode of that show, they'll finish two cars so its quite satisfying. As compared to unconstrained, perhaps more authentic Youtube channels that follow builds the shops are doing in painful detail over the course of 8 months, and you get a 1 and a half hour update on fitting the spare tire 3 months into the build.

Anyway, I ran out of that and Netflix suggested I should keep the binge going with Rust Valley Restorations.

This show is different, but in a good way. It's more like my beloved Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, minus Gordon Ramsey coming to help the business at all, and a study in incompetence, dumb luck, and unconstrained addiction.

Again, stuff happens every episode, though you wont necessarily see a car get finished. They might visit one of their mums and blow something up on a farm. 

You get this fly-on-the-wall view of a business made up of kind likeable people who have seemingly no idea how to run a business. 

I ran out of that show too. By now, I had a problem though, and impatient to wait for new seasons of either businesses future endeavors, I resorted to watching West Coast Customs.

It was a hold-my-nose consumer decision. The opening credits turned me off. Anything where the presenter identifies themselves as a CEO, and within 15 seconds of the shows opener (and Netflix trailer) the host says '...what started as a $5,000 loan from my grandfather became this...[shows knuckle tattoos that read "self made"]'

I mean, you just said you got a loan from your Grandpa. That's the very antithesis of "self-made" which is never true, or at least never the most plausible case. To believe oneself to be self-made, requires some fine tuning of the scope. 

Anyway, turned off, my problem drove me to dive in anyway.

West Coast Customs, looks, superficially like a successful business, in contrast to Rust Bros. I went into West Coast Customs as I did with Rust Bros, blind. algorithms threw these shows up. So I didn't know, West Coast Customs was the shop that did 'Pimp My Ride' for the first 4 seasons on MTV. 

I didn't know there was an intermediate show called 'Street Customs' or whatever. 

Anyway, here would be my brief summary of 'West Coast Customs' (WCC): "A cautionary tale in the perils of success."

Season 1, episode 1 begins with customizing an Armored vehicle for Virgin Gaming. (Now, the episodes strike me as at the very least, out of chronological order on Netflix.) but after watching Gotham Garage and Rust Bros. this was a very in-your-face-corporate-gig to begin with. So like many of the shows that followed it, you see 3D renders of the concept they are trying to build. And we get the first caution of success - corporate gigs, and subsequent boredom.

I skipped most of the episode, and just watched the last 10 minutes. And really, I can see how it might seem cool to hang with Richard Branson for a few minutes and a photo shoot, and get a big corporate gig to try and push a division of a well known brand. It's almost a 'behind the scenes of an instagram post' show. Money and budgets aren't discussed, from what I've seen, at all in WCC, so I'm being hyperbolic when I say that we get 40 minutes to see the journey of customizing an armored car in exchange for a photo op with Richard Branson. 

I can immediately see, why WCC turns out to have never managed to rate as a tv-program. The reality of big money is boring and ugly. I would say for anyone who has watched the first 3 seasons of Rust Bros. needs must watch a few episodes of WCC to get a heterodox perspective and contextualise what the Rust Bros. are doing with their lives and finances.

In the culture war, there's a lot of jibber-jabber about 'Woke' media, and WCC predates diversity quotas for Academy Awards and DEI/JEDI etc. becoming an expensive signal that leaves its fingerprints over media products like the MCU, Star Wars, LOTR: The Rings of Power, the Wheel of Time, Doctor Who etc.

What's unfair, and what I'm going to say, is the woke-stuff is identical to the corporate-stuff in principle. One culture says 'Hobbits and Elves have to be black, because these interest groups want to see black Hobbits and Elves.' and Corporate culture says 'The armored vehicle has to be Virgin red, not McDonalds red, not Ferrari red, not Honda red, not Coca-Cola red but Virgin red.'

The lesson is more for the woke, because (Inside) West Coast Customs as a show, just doesn't work for me, and I attribute that to corporate culture. So don't imitate corporate culture. Both cultures currently, try to force an affiliation with stuff people like. Anybody who has been inside a corporation, has probably experienced C-suite and the marketing department attempting to make the employers passionate about the brand.

So, I'm like 'Virgin Armored Vehicle...odd choice for a first episode, but probably just wanted the star power of Richard Branson to launch the show, even though nobody but Militia members probably dream of ever owning an armored vehicle.' So I go to episode 2. the client is Alienware (A computer manufacturer) and they are customising an RV/bus. Episode 3. the client is a smoothie company, converting another RV. so I skip these two episodes.

In episode one, on the edges of the shots of the Armored vehicle, you can see interesting cars on the periphery the shop is also working on. All of them intrinsically more interesting than a corporate flagship vehicle. So I was searching for those, where they don't strip out an RV and fill it with couches and tv screens and then wrap it in corporate logos, and the first I found was a muscle car... for Monster Energy Drinks to give to Jonathon Davis (lead singer of Korn, somewhat dating the show).

That episode I watched start to finish. and it's like an interesting build, because it isn't converting a bus or a 4-wheel drive into a corporate banner. It's converting a modern GTO muscle car into a 60s muscle car as a corporate banner to gift to a celebrity. Davis seems really appreciative of the end product. But being the first full episode I watch, I start to get the impression that the shows host Ryan, the 'self-made' man from the intro, does almost nothing of the actual building the vehicles.

Therein lies another cautionary tale of success, Ryan creates business for his business, but this translates into creating problems for the business. The corporate gigs that almost exclusively populate the show - (indicating that the business is only viable when you have corporations that can write off a vehicle as a business expense against tax.) - come with tight deadlines, budgets and specifications. 

Here Rust Bros. and WCC have something in common - jobs in the shows tend to revolve around the business owner agreeing to a job for too little money to be delivered in too little time.

Where Mike, of the Rust Bros. tend to discover that the frame is rusted out or the engine is bust, and he lives by a code of 'No Crap Leaves the Shop' it winds up costing Mike as his employees/friends throw their hands up in the air in frustration that Mike is driving himself out of business.

Ryan by contrast, it turns out shunts the costs of underquoting and overpromising onto his employees. WCC (the business) got investigated by the US government resulting in him having to back-pay employees for their voluntary overtime that was actually illegal. 

Jonathan seemed stoked by the Monster energy muscle car. I think this reflects better on Jonathan than WCC. I can't read his mind, and I wonder if he, like I, would be like 'this car's awesome, can't wait to get all the Monster energy branding off of it.' like I would. Sure it's risky if your record label is an energy drink (when did that happen?) but I'm making a presumption that the show worked something like this...

INT. Executives are meeting with representatives of the marketing department.

Marketing people 'We are chasing the 18-34 year old market, and they love this Pimp My Ride show on MTV.'

Executive 'Great can we buy an ad-spot?'

Marketing people 'No, the show no longer runs. But we can do something better.'

Executive 'What's that?'

Marketing people 'We can get a ride "pimped-out" to be a totally "pimp" Landcast Crop Irrigation tractor to feature on their new show 'Inside West Coast Customs'.'

Executive 'Cowabunga! That's totally wizard! People don't watch ads, but this will be a 40 minute ad for how cool our Crop Irrigation systems are TO THE EXTREME!!!'

Marketing people 'Yeah and a superbowl ad costs 30 billion for 4 seconds, this would only cost us $500k for a car and it's all a tax wright off.'

Executive [does Fonzi thumbs] 'Heeeeeeeeeey! That's the ticket. Now let's all do the bartman!'

END SCENE.

Which is to say, WCC are a somewhat successful advertising firm, where uncaring, unfeeling corporations commission billboards with wheels to justify a 40 minute ad for their brand and WCC, to then be forgotten or written off.

That's (apparantly) what success looks like.

It doesn't work as compelling television though.

I watched another episode where HP had some SUV converted into pretty much the exact same car but with HP logos spray painted all over it and a bunch of HP computers, tablets and laptops crammed into the trunk. Also an episode where they took some rich guy's Audi and coated it in Chrome and crammed in a bunch of LEDs to make a Tron car. Probably the most intrinsically interesting build of the episodes I watched.

The breaking point though was when Discovery commissioned WCC to build a hot-dog cart for a hot-dog vendor that warned people not to enter the Discovery HQ lobby when a nutcase strapped with bombs was taking people hostage.

We see Ryan, the host fly out to Discovery HQ get told the story, then fly back to LA, meet with some food truck owners that tell him a hot dog vendor needs a grill to grill hot dogs on, a steamer to steam the buns and a sink for sanitation. Then they buy a hot dog stand and customize it with a sign, tv screens, speakers, awnings...

It's not exciting, and while being "different" you wonder how they are going to wring 40 minutes out of decorating a basically finished second hand hot-dog stand.

The magic trick... is that they can't. The episode turns out to be an ad for WCC's partnership with Best Buy.

At this point, we discover the show Inside West Coast Customs, is ostensibly a retelling of the Pixar Movie 'Ratatouille' removing the young chef and the rat, and focusing exclusively on the former sous-chef's expansion into frozen ready meals using the former head-chef's brand.

The episode is mostly dedicated time-wise to this partnership, that results in the chief electronics guy's workstation in the WCC shop being converted into a 'Best-Buy' shop, and running some Best-Buy staff through Ryan's '7 step customization' process - the frozen meal analogue to car customization soon to be available at any Best-Buy location I guess.

Then the hot-dog stand is presented to the hot-dog vendor with underwhelming results. And I was done. I'd seen enough.

Comparing WCC to Rust Bros. The High Price of Success

"Cheap fabric, and dim lighting. That s how you move merchandise" -Morty Seinfeld.

Maybe Rust Bros. perpetual financial strife is a fiction, it's hard to tell whether the History channel has a policy of like 'don't interfere with nature, don't try to save the antelope because you could be killing the lion.' type strict documentarian policy. 

Mike and his shop appears to grow through the 3 seasons in staff members and shop capabilities, despite you never really seeing them get a payday. There's also an episode where it's revealed Mike has bought back vehicles he'd sold in previous episodes, which to me leaves open the possibility that the sales and the happy customers were staged in the first place. (Much as I'm 100% certain every barter scene in Gotham Garage is a staged exchange.)

What is convincing is how often the cast members injure themselves through sheer stupidity and incompetence, not just in hit-to-pass races or demolition-derby's, or just using a blowtorch cutter without gloves and burning themselves, or smashing out a car window with their fist while holding a hammer. 

I wondered if the Rust Valley Restorations ultimately ended with a death-on-the-job or some such debacle, so I gave it a google. Turns out the business has a 4.9 out of 5 star rating on google, with some 1500 reviews. Most, obviously, are not customers of the business but fans of the show. But going through it you find reviews from actual customers and tourists that testify to a 'what you see is what you get.'

Mike's 'No Crap Leaves the Shop' contrasts directly with the supposedly more-successful West Coast Customs whose business model is better described by Morty Seinfeld. Otherwise expressed as 'only crap leaves their shop.' admittedly I'm ignorant of the work they've done for clients like Shaquille O'Neil and Justin Bieber. There's nothing to suggest WCC are actually incompetent, especially since Ryan and WCC appear to have little to no attachment to or interest in the staff that work overtime to fulfil the contracts Ryan agrees to. 

It just turns out the money might be in the corporate gigs. Whereas Mike of the Rust Bros. appears to refuse to sell his vehicles to customers that don't appreciate the cars, even when they are rusted skeletons. 

Pimp My Ride the show that gave WCC I'm sure 100% of their brand equity, was like most reality TV - fake. The builds were based around gimmicks the proverbial 'Yo Dawg, I heard you like bowling so we put a bowling alley in your bonnet so you can bowl while you driving.' Or a hydraulic skate rail so a skater now had a portable 2m skate rail available at the rear of their car wherever they could park their car to skate.

Nothing I saw was practical, the customization was superficial, centred around gimmicks and cramming TV screens and gaming consoles into piece of shit cars. 

But it was a successful formula. It got WCC the corporate clients with big $$$ to make more gimmicky crap. 

Here's Ryan's 7 steps to customization:

1) Wheels & tires
2) Graphics
3) Accessories
4) Interior
5) Audio
6) Detail (Wax on, Wax off, as mister miyagi would say)
7) Safety & Security

Inspiring right? and my impression of the show was you order wheels and tires from a parts catalogue, you get your computer guy to print out the graphics. Accessories you get from a parts catalogue. Interior you have done by a Mexican guy who hasn't seen his daughter in three years. Audio you get out of a pre-packaged box and install. Detail is buying car-wash products. Safety and security is optional.

Raising the eternal question - is it better to go bust trying to do good work, or get rich making crap?

That's the high price of success. Ryan doesn't make or even customize cars. He is a suit, minus the suit. Mike is an old man you constantly see on his back head under a car or down in a muddy field going through shit. Despite the incompetence, the disorganization and the poor judgement on display, Mike and the rest of the Rust Bros. characters and even the more successful businesses in the area like JF Customs etc. that the show follows, are all likeable and like the Rust Bros.

The Rust Bros. was a dream first, and struggles to become a business. I want them to learn, grow and ultimately succeed. I don't know what West Coast Customs was meant to be, there appears to be a vision at it's core of not having to outsource any part of the customization process - you have bodywork, wiring, paint, interior etc. all in a one-stop shop. There's economies of scale and value added there. I'm not sure it's a dream though.

It's more a business strategy that might work or may not.

Complicating the comparison, is the fact that if business teaches us anything, ever, it's how often success can be illusory.

WCC just from the initial impression, seems like a strong candidate for a business that actually isn't that successful. Ryan is reportedly worth $20 million. But once I contemplate how much of that is likely tied up in illiquid assets, I wouldn't be surprised to learn on any given day that WCC is broke. Ryan is a guy who's success is hanging out with celebrities. Maybe he and Shaq literally hang, but I feel mostly it would be more there's photos of him with a bunch of celebrities.

Let's presume though, that Ryan's business brings in dollars, is on the up-and-up and is heading for the moon, even if the business isn't subsidized by a TV studio budget. Let's say that even without a 40 minute program watched by a few 100,000 18-34 year old's HP and Alienware and Virgin and Disney and whoever else is targeting that demographic would still pay them half a million to make a crappy custom RV wrapped in corporate logos and pumped full of flat screen tvs.

If that's what success in the car-shop world looks like, I'd rather fail. I never get the sense that anyone likes Ryan. There's so many scenes captured where nobody seems thrilled or excited. Furthermore, most interactions with Ryan and his staff appear to be him telling people they will have to work overtime. 

Ryan says things like 'everyone's replaceable.' In looking for the intro to WCC on youtube, I found the new intro that must come in in later seasons somewhere, and just like the initial intro involves Ryan following the $5k loan from his Grandpa with his knuckle tats 'Self-made' (presumably because 'self contradictory' is too long for a knuckle tat) the new intro features Ryan's voiceover stating 'We are West Coast Customs' while the visual is Ryan standing alone (and he is the only person to feature in the opening) in front of like 7 cars.

Rent Seeking, Passing the Buck - The Message We Get

“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

― Abraham Lincoln, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

When we talk economic systems, conversations tend to ricochet off rail road lines called 'capitalism' and 'socialism' which is a false dichotomy. For example there's also at the least 'communism', 'georgism' (a bit obscure), 'mercantalism' and 'feudalism'. 

Say there's a small village cut off from a city and its market's by a river, and somebody builds a bridge. They build a bridge and charge a toll. People in the village are happy enough to pay the toll, because they can access the city and sell their surplus produce for cash money now. It's a valuable service they are happy to pay for. This describes a capitalist economy.

But in practice, for example, what happens is that the villagers pay for the construction of the bridge, and then some friend of the local lord pays some $$$ for exclusive rights to collect tolls for the bridge. Or someone just sets up next to the bridge and collects the tolls. Or someone builds the bridge pure capitalist style, but then the villagers are like 'we could build our own toll free bridge!' and they do, but the original bridge builder petitions the lord to tear down the villager's bridge to enforce their strict monopoly. Or in practice somebody built the bridge, recouped their costs in tolls and started making a profit, and then they put up the tolls so they didn't have to work anymore and the villagers had to work harder, and then they passed the title onto their child who never worked a day in their life, and passed it onto their child, and their child until the bridge was falling down so they levied a tax on the villagers to repair and restore it.

In economic speak a 'rent' is an unearned income. Typically, one obtains rents by virtue of owning something. 

Ryan is a rent seeker. He owns a brand, and a shop. Despite the 'Self made' tattooed on his knuckles, it is likely that Shaquille O'Neal and MTV contributed most of the equity in the WCC brand, and by pretty much handing him a monopoly through 'Pimp my Ride' probably contributed most of the equity into the shop.

If finished cars are considered the "bread" in accordance with Abe Lincoln, Ryan and his corporate clients eat the bread, and his staff at WCC do all the sweating and toiling. By contrast, Mike owns land and assets in the form of all his car chasses and parts sitting on said land, and he owns a shop for restoring those cars. Mike's customers eat the bread, and his staff, and Mike sweats and toils to make it.

Mike could be a rent seeker, but the question is whether he should.

Profits are considered 'maximised' when marginal cost (MC) equals marginal revenue (MR). WCC for many years, had all their staff on fixed salaries, like corporate office workers. No penalty rates, no overtime. So for Ryan, his payroll is actually pretty much a fixed cost. He paid out the same amount of clams whether his staff work an 8 hour day, or 14 hour day. Marginal costs to Ryan are the materials - losing parts that have to be replaced, breaking parts that have to be replaced, etc. When Ish has to redo the upholstery on a chair, the MC goes up for the materials but not for the labour.

Mike at Rust Bros. when they damage a part or screw up an engine and have to rebuild or replace it, it isn't just the cost of the parts, it's the cost of labour too. Mike is running a business where his employees get paid, they can eat the bread and get fat. Hours along with parts, are the MC for Rust Bros.

What about MR? That's really how many jobs you can get done, how often you are turning over cars and selling them. But a simple example might be, if you get all the accessories done in chrome and it costs you $700, but it increases the sale price by $1,000. The chroming is a MC, and the increase in sales price is MR. I believe that putting a swimming pool in your property is a MC that decreases the value of your land MR. 

Mike operates most of the time on a FR, which is to say, the cost of the job is fixed, he quoted someone $20,000 and he won't ask for more. Then they discover that the frame is full of rust and it's going to cost $500 in parts to repair and $500 in labour. The revenue is fixed but the MC bumps up so Mike loses money. Profits are maximised when MC=MR and in the Rust Bros. case the MR is usually = 0 which means to maximize their profits, the Rust Bros. need to have no marginal costs.

Looking at the Rust Bros. business model, what we have is a field full of depreciating assets - Mike's collection of classic cars rusting in the field. What is unknown is how much those assets have depreciated by and Mike is constantly underestimating them. He's making the classic mistake picked up by Kahneman and Tversky of assuming the best case scenario.

Ryan's business at WCC is actually pretty similar. The revenue is fixed - the big difference is that Ryan doesn't draw on a field full of depreciating assets, he buys new and used cars to convert, or his clients provide them. MCs only occur through surprises and breakage. Like the Monster Energy muscle car takes longer than expected to fit onto the GTO frame causing delays down the production line. etc. But these MCs are passed mostly onto the staff. They pay in the form of voluntary overtime.

When Ryan says 'everyone's replaceable' to camera, that's when he becomes a rent seeker. He owns the capital, he literally doesn't work on the builds, so we really have to look at the employees as a separate entity. They have a FR of their wages, and MCs in terms of delays and overtime, and damage etc. When things go wrong MC increases, yeah for Ryan, he has to order new parts, but mostly for the employees. If they tape off an armoured truck, paint the wheel rims and then realise they didn't get the brand's exact pantone red, it's a 5 hour fix, which the painters have to do and Ryan didn't pay them any additional wage for it. 

Maybe their wage is decent, maybe it's more that the work is steady and there aren't that many custom shops. But it's the job insecurity that obliges them to do voluntary overtime. Aka working for free.

So making up some numbers, Ryan get's $500k for a job, the build lasts a month and $80k is budgeted for wages, (8 employees working 160 hours = $62 an hour) but instead of 8 hour days over 5 day weeks it turns into 14 hour days over 6 days a week (working on Saturdays) due to delays and redos and shit.

That turns the job into 8 employees working 336 hours. Without overtime penalties, just a flat hourly rate of $62 an hour the MC should at least blow out to $166k, instead what happens is the workers are still paid $80k so in effect that hourly rate more than halves to $29 an hour. I made these numbers up and the US govt investigation into WCCs found some workers were working for $6 an hour. 

The workers at WCC and Mike are more similar to each other than Ryan and Mike are, even though they are the owners. Also, Mike does work.

Mike's workers want Mike to succeed. There may be issues with workplace culture, where as is often the case with employees , they don't think big picture and take advantage of their boss' personality and disorganization. But that's really on Mike, especially when he undermines his own shop manager Avery. 

WCCs success or at least revenues might be contingent on having a reality show (the ability to do builds that are functionally just paid advertisement) but pulling out the tv show aspect and assessing both businesses we have an owner over in Canada losing money, and an owner over in LA accruing money (maybe). 

But the message we send in calling Ryan a success and Mike a failure is the Tom Sawyer whitewashing message Mark Twain satirized - where Tom Sawyer was not only able to persuade his friends to paint the fence for him, but pay him for the privilege. 

WCC were eventually forced to pay back wages it should be noted. But not really damages - like employees being taken away from their families. Maybe by season 4 it's all legit, and WCC suffers in competitiveness as Ryan is forced to stop underquoting his corporate and celebrity clients. I don't know, I don't intend to keep watching it.

As Cooper, Mike's son points out in maybe the first season of Rust Bros. Mike has a viable business, he just needs to learn to quote properly. The tricky thing is, his assets aren't stored in a manner where he could accurately assess how much they've depreciated. They aren't stripped so he can't tell if under the seats and flooring if the bottom is all rusted. They can only assess the doors, fenders, hoods etc. 

But that could be fixed with a margin of error.

And so to move out of these two niche businesses, I think the two shows while no doubt being 'fake' in terms of staged conversations, coached customer reactions etc. TV magic. They do reflect the macro-economy in a somewhat realistic way.

Our economy is largely based on seeking rents and passing the buck. There's the military industrial complex for example, and 200 year government leases where some private citizen is given the exclusive rights to monopolize some public asset. There are government sanctioned monopolies and PPPs (Private public partnerships) I've worked for firms where the only real customer was a government department that contributed 90% of the revenue, with small ad-hoc clients making up the rest. Yet there were CEOs and Directors and department heads drawing big wages with company cars, and sales execs and lots of highly paid individuals whose sole function was to squeeze down the MC of the casual employees that actually fulfilled the government tender for them, and as a form of hidden unemployment are probably the sole reason for the government tender in the first place. 

Capitalism is not bust. There are people who create tremendous value, like that bridge builder out there. We just tend to confuse someone who built something that improved our lives with parasites who contribute nothing but earn similar money. There's a big difference between Gina Rinehart and Bill Gates not just in their net worth, but in their give-and-take. Bill Gates love them or hate them, created something valuable if not optimal. Gina merely owns the rights to something valuable.

The Price of a Dream

By now, it should be pretty obvious, that I'd rather be Mike, and certainly rather work for Mike than touch Ryan or WCC with a syphilitic dick on the end of a pool cue on the end of a rake.

But suppose Mike hired a consultant to turn Rust Bros. around. And that consultant said 'big money is in the high end celebrity and corporate clients. They have deep pockets, and zero fucks given.'

And basically Mike is faced with the choice of going broke trying to restore classic cars, devoutly adhering to the original vision that had him fall in love with them. Or knock out cheap shit with gimmicks like a TV screen in your cup holder and another one on the steering wheel. Get a kid to spend 30 minutes creating a tile print of a corporate logo that can then by vinyl wrapped around the car, and most importantly start exploiting your labour, and don't pay them to work hard but pay some asshole to work them hard.

The price of a dream is often failure. It's a potent counter-argument to a frequent moral of another reality tv show I enjoyed 'Gordan Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares'.

It's hard to reconcile the two.

Let me diverge a little to explain Gordon Ramsey's lesson. 

A fine example is in season 4 episode 2 of Kitchen Nightmares UK. The business is the Fenwick Arms, a traditional style pub, with an eccentric owner, that is going bust. The restaurant is basically a vanity project, an expensive one. The owner's mind is set on success being via a 'wow' factor. The big problem is what makes the eccentric owner go 'wow' doesn't map onto the local population at large. Mostly he buys 'fancy' plates. 

So Ramsay comes in does his usual thing of swearing and shouting. But I liked Kitchen Nightmares, largely because what was authentic is that Gordon cares, about food, about people. He'd get frustrated at people ruining themselves financially. He frequently gets frustrated that the hospitality staff are quite good, hard working, dedicated and loyal, and the restaurant owners are fucking things up for them.

Gordon works with the owner, and comes up with a campaign to promote the relaunch of the Fenwick Arms - "Real Gravy" and arranges a satirical protest through the town demanding real gravy. He customizes a strategy to get the eccentric owner to buy in. And the relaunch at least is successful.

But when Gordon revisits the Fenwick Arms to see how they are doing, he discovers the owner has basically reinstated his failing business model, demoralizing the staff and resulting in near complete turnover. 

It's not a unanimous, but recurring theme on Kitchen Nightmares - owners resolve that they'd rather fail their way, than succeed Gordon's way.

This might seem to make it hard to reconcile with Rust Bros. But there was something rare on Kitchen Nightmares. That was where Gordon went to a struggling restaurant, tries the food and finds it all delicious. There was a little Jamaican or Carribean restaurant this happened at. 

I think if Gordon went to Rust Bros. he'd approve of the cars Mike and co. are putting out. Classic cars, restored beautifully. He'd find the problems in the quoting, the storage conditions, the auditing, the stock take, the organization etc. 

I'll make the distinction between 'price of a dream' and 'price of a delusion'. The Fenwick Arms was a delusional vanity project. Not a dream. Menus put together by people who don't know what food is. Naming dishes you never eat, and are seldom ordered after yourselves. Serving frozen reheated dishes. Can't be someone's dream of a restaurant. The person is deluded. A narcissistic delusion.

And WCC, well, I think it isn't a delusion, just narcissistic. The dream Ryan appears to have achieved is feeling important, having celebrity friends and being rich. If metaphorically speaking, Gordan Ramsay was able to come in, sit down and eat WCC cars, he'd be finding the middle was cold, and frozen. Disgusting amounts of cheese and a talented but underappreciated and justifiably disgruntled work force frustrated by management.

I feel fictitious or not, Gotham Garage probably best illustrates an actual choice between the dream and selling out. They get high end clients, but don't like working for them. They are too picky, entitled and demanding. It isn't fun building for people that are really demanding. They don't get to create.

So instead, they try and rethink the dream and build custom concept cars to sell at auction. I'm suspicious as to whether in reality they really did sell. That seems fake, and maybe it's just the story of the show that keeps the show interesting. But decisions like that seem plausible. 

I should be able to think of a real world example. I did enough case studies in marketing. Certainly there's "prole drift" my favorite condescending marketing term that describes what WCC did. They don't produce custom cars like Gotham Garage does. They produce frozen tv dinners, via Ryan's 7 steps, none of which he takes himself. 

Prole drift happened involuntarily to Burberry, particularly in the UK. They even tried to litigate to stop it from happening. Basically, Chavs the british equivalent to Trailer Trash, Bogans in Australia, Narcos in Mexico, started wearing knock off Burberry gear. It became synonymous with Chavs, destroying it as a luxury brand.

But there's other examples, like luxury car brands facing the temptation to put out an economic 4 door saloon so they can get some of that sweet Toyota Camry volume business. And then they lose their traditional customers who hate that the Griswalds now think themselves equal.

In Conclusion

I like this conclusion. The lessons of Rust Bros. vs WCC illustrate that staying true to a vision or dream is complicated. Sticking to your guns can be costly or profitable, admirable or not. There's a frontier or equilibrium to be found. It may not be as simple as doing what works, giving the customers what they want as we might learn from Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. 

Are you dreaming? Or are you delusional? Or are you, simply a piece of shit?