Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars | E94

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The foundation of a brand is authenticity.

You can't project your brand

as something that's contrary to what you really are. John Ennesty, founder and CEO of Ennesty Performance Engineering, a leader in high-performance vehicle tuning.
For three decades now, he's been pushing cars beyond their limits. My parents didn't have much.
That was the driver towards entrepreneurship. I kind of had to find a way to make money.
There wasn't really any choice around that. I'm a little bit of a Warren Buffett when it comes to horsepower.
I look for value, I look for undervalued vehicles where there's more potential that can be extracted. When we have an idea and a passion for something, it's that passion that can carry us through the unknowns, carry us through setbacks and failures.

For every one thing that I've learned,

I've probably had to fail 10 times as many times.

What's sustained me through a number of tough times is just...

John Ennesty, founder and CEO of Ennesty Performance Engineering, a leader in high-performance vehicle tuning. For three decades now, he's been pushing cars beyond their limit.
He's already set a world speed record. We'll talk about it.
And now as a Venom F5, he's chasing the 300 mile per hour. Oh my God, John.
First of all, why cars? And maybe take us back in time to your childhood. When did this love start? Maybe it started when my dad was younger and I'm the first born child.
And he had a 1964 Pontiac GTO muscle car. And I'm told that I would sit in his lap and he would let me drive and shift through the gears.
So I think it started before I could remember. So it's something that's

been, you know, now 62 years later, I've been programmed into my DNA and now my kids and now

we had our first grandchild a few weeks ago. So maybe in his DNA as well.
Oh my God. Congratulations,

first of all. So you and Hope, we'll talk about her as well.
Speaking of more car lovers. So take us back in time to your childhood.
What fueled you into this drive and success? And was there like a specific moment? Yeah, I can think of several. When I was in junior high, I was hanging out with my friends a few streets away from home.

I knew I was supposed to be home at a certain time.

I kind of blew it off.

And then my dad had another muscle car.

I think this was a 1968 Pontiac GTO.

He comes flying down the street.

He rolls down the window, and I'm over talking to my buddies.

He's like, hey, you're supposed to be home.

I'm like, okay, okay, I'm coming. So I come to go get in the car and he basically just slaps it into gear and doesn't let me even open the door.
And he does this big burnout, spinning the tires, making a big cloud of smoke for a couple hundred feet. At which point I knew I was in big trouble.
But then again, I'm probably 12 or 13 at the time. And I look over at my buddies and they're all like, man, that's the coolest thing we ever saw.
I'm like, okay, well, maybe I can have a little bit better status with my friends in junior high by having a cool car anyway. So I guess my dad by default kind of made me look cool that day.
So that was one. Again, I always enjoyed just anything that was mechanical or fast or the sound, the excitement from cars.
And then had motorcycles and built my own motorcycles before I got my first car. And my first car I bought with my own money.
I worked at a grocery store and saved up a couple hundred bucks and bought a car from my neighbor across the street, which is a 1969 Olds 442 convertible. I lived in Kansas City.
And so I just drove that thing all over and raced anybody that would race me and was always working on it in the driveway and tinkering with it. So yeah, that's kind of where it got started back in the late 1970s.
Incredible. So take me there though, John, you didn't study how to modify a car.
And I think you modified your very first car already, like you already tinkered with it. How did you even know what to do? It wasn't like YouTube days.
Yeah, sure. No, this is all pre-social media, pre-YouTube.
You know, back in the olden days, you just kind of learn by doing and you just kind of learn by associating with other people that did. So in school, I'd had other buddies that like cars and would tinker with their cars and they might know something or they might know a guy that knows something.
My neighbor across the street worked at a Ford factory up in Kansas City. And so he would help me with my car from time to time.
But we just kind of learned by, it's like a lot of things, there's a lot of trial and error. And so for every one thing that we would learn that would work, we'd have to fail many, many times.
And so that's just kind of how we got going. Amazing.
And then when you grew up, you decided to go, if I'm not mistaken, right to entrepreneurship instead of the typical normal jobs, etc. First of all, why? And was it scary? I mean, you didn't come from, I think, a lot of money.
So that should be scary.

That was the driver towards entrepreneurship. My parents didn't have much.
We always had a roof over our head and food to eat. We had the basics, but that was it.
So if we want to play a sport, if we want to go on a trip with friends, or if we want to do anything, we had to earn money. So I learned that at an early age.
I had a paper route at a hospital that I was doing when I was probably 11 or 12 years old. Before that, I did work literally on a paper route.
You've heard these stories where literally you get up at 3.45 in the morning and it's snowing. And you go get in the back of this truck, which is not heated, by the way.
And you're riding around neighborhoods, rolling up newspapers. And they had this machine that would tie it with a band of string and then you throw the newspaper on somebody's lawn and i remember doing that again i was probably 13 14 years old we might make like two dollars or two and a half dollars and we would do all that before school so i guess one thing that i was really thankful for my parents number one that we that we really had no entitlement.
There was no, here's your allowance. If we wanted money, we had to work for it.
So we learned a solid work ethic at an early age. And then I've always kind of enjoyed doing my own things.
I used to buy firecrackers down in Branson, Missouri and resell them to my friends up in Kansas City, things like that, or the newspaper route. Again, I had some different jobs in high school.
And then when I went to college for a couple of years, I was a party pick guy. So I would show up at a frat party, sorority party, and I'm the guy taking pictures and got paid to do that kind of stuff.
But then I started my own version of that. And then I moved from Kansas City to Houston when I was in my early 20s and was always just entrepreneurial.
I think the last W-2 paid job that I had, I worked at a Bennigan's restaurant. I waited tables for a couple months.
And at that point in time, I had a friend of mine who had a Corvette, an old 73 Corvette, which had the T-top roof panels that would come off. And I had this idea to start a business to make these soft bags that you could put the roof panels in because nobody offered that at the time.
And so I was trying to earn up money at that working at Bennigan's so I could start that business. That didn't end up working out, but I just kept trying different things.
And then a few years later, some guy that I'd met said, well, hey, there's this new business back in the 80s where commercial real estate and schools and hospitals used

a lot of asbestos for insulation on pipes and in different construction materials because

of the fire retardant properties.

But they were also a carcinogen and they would cause cancer.

So that was kind of a new industry back then of removing asbestos from commercial buildings.

And so I want to see you next time. but they were also a carcinogen and they would cause cancer.
So that was kind of a new industry back then of removing asbestos from commercial buildings.

And so I went to some schooling, learned about that, started a business,

went and did that and actually had some success from that.

And so I wasn't married yet.

I wasn't dating my wife yet. So I had a little bit extra money and decided to start buying some cars and tinkering with the cars and decided to dabble into car racing.
Did your parents force you to do all these jobs, like the 3 a.m. thing? Or is that something that you wanted to do? I was always motivated.
Again, they were very matter of fact about it. They're like, well, we don't have money for that.
We don't, you know, if you want to go to McDonald's, we don't have money for that. Okay.
You've got shoes, but if you want those nicer shoes, you're going to have to figure out how to make some money. Yeah.
And at the time, my dad had an issue with PTSD from the Korean war. So he had an addiction issue and he wasn't working a lot of the time.
My mom had to really work to support the family. So I'm like, I got to kind of at least do my part, At least, you know, if I want to have a car or a motorcycle or go and do stuff with my friends, I kind of had to find a way to make money.
There wasn't really any choice around that. Amazing.
So to some extent, it was also a huge gift. Yeah.
Yeah. My mom passed away recently and her funeral was last week.
And it was definitely a gift that I got from both of them. And when I had my newspaper route at the hospital up in Kansas City, they would generally give me a ride there.
They would get up early to get me there so I could go pass out newspapers and make a little bit of money. They were supportive and encouraging.
And I got that early on. And that was truly a gift that 50 years later, I've hopefully paid that forward into our kids.
That's incredible. I need my kids to listen to that because they're not going to get up for 3 a.m.
anyway, unless it's from some kind of a flight. So you get into car racing and you become this crazy guy from Texas that basically shows up with tools, helmet, right? Spare wheels and just goes.
Tell us a little bit about this time because I think it wasn't that typical. I mean, you went into something that wasn't that common.
Whatever I thought I knew about cars, again, it came from my little community of car friends. But in an early age, I don't even remember how young I was, but I was probably eight, nine or 10 years old.
I would go with my mom to the grocery store. I didn't have any interest in shopping, but I would go over to the magazine rack and read car magazines.
Couldn't afford to buy any, but I could, for the 30 minutes that she was shopping, I would just pull up MotorCrad, Hot Rod Magazine, and so would read about these things and read about racers and Indy 500 and drag racing and things of that nature. So something that I always had an interest in.
And then fast forward to in my mid-20s when I had my asbestos abatement business, and I read about a guy, his name was C. Van Toon, and he was an automotive journalist, but also a big car guy.
and he bought a Mitsubishi Eclipse. Actually, it was an Eagle Talon, which was back in the early 1990.
It was an all-wheel drive, turbocharged, four-cylinder, little sports car. And he put a roll cage in it, and he took it to Pikes Peak, and he raced it up the top of Pikes Peak back when that was a dirt road.
And I'd read about that in 1990, and I thought, well, man, my name's not Unser or Foyt, and I'm not going to be, or Andretti, and I'm not going to be going to the Indy 500, but I want to find some sort of form of racing that I can do. And I thought, well, maybe I could go find a car and modify it and take it to Pikes Peak.
That was the inspiration. So I was looking around at the marketplace.
I'm like like what's the car that I could afford that I

could modify that would be cool and fun that I could race at Pikes Peak and back in the late 80s early 90s my dream car at that time Porsche made a very special car and they're very very valuable today called the Porsche 959 so it was a 911 that was all-wheel drive it had 450 horsepower, twin turbo, six cylinder engine, very high tech car for the time. And at that time, those cars were hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You couldn't get them in the US. And so I thought, what car could I find and modify that I could make into my own poor man's version of a 959? And I read again, a motor trend about a car called the mitsubishi 3000 gt vr4 so it has all-wheel drive it has a twin turbo v6 it has active aero so the rear wing and the front splitter would change aerodynamically to improve performance that was a car that i ended up buying from a local dealer here in houston for maybe thirty two thousand000.
So maybe it's $60,000 in today's money. And so I could afford it and I had a plan to modify it.
And so the moment I got it, I'm tinkering with it. And I don't need more horsepower to go to Pikes Peak, but I do need a roll cage and certain safety things.
But there are certain aspects about the car where I felt like it had more performance potential. So I guess maybe in a way in my automotive career, I'm a little bit of a Warren Buffett when it comes to horsepower.
I look for value. I look for undervalued vehicles where there's more potential that can be extracted from that vehicle.
And so I was able to do that with the 3000 GT and modified it from 300 horsepower to probably somewhere between four and 450 horsepower. And before I went to Pikes Peak, I'd read about, again, in another car magazine, there was a race that some guys had started in Nevada up north of Las Vegas called the Silver State Classic Race.
So they would take a 90-mile stretch of highway between two small towns about four hours north of Vegas, the state would allow them to close that road and have a race where you basically just show up in your car and you go from point A to point B as fast as you can. Back then, they didn't have very many rules.
They've got a lot more rules now. So I read about that race.
I thought, okay, I want to go do that. So I modified my car.
This is a few months before Pike's Peak. I didn't have a roll cage in my car yet.
I drive the car out there, like you said, load my stuff in it, go out there and competed in the race. I wasn't sure how fast the car would go or how fast I would drive the car.
Actually, some old timers that have done the race several times told me, they said, don't enter a class faster than 140 miles an hour. And I thought, well, I think the car will go faster than that.
And I think I'll drive it faster than that. But I listened to these guys.
And so I entered the 140 class and went out and just was having a good time and ended up passing like 20 cars. I got fourth place overall.
I think I went across the finish line at 180 miles an hour, something like that. And my average speed for the 90 miles was 164 miles per hour.
So it took me 34 minutes to go 90 miles. And so at that point, for sure, I was hooked slash addicted to racing.
And so I did that race. Then I did Pike's Peak.
And these days, I don't have a budget for a crew. I don't have a budget for, I didn't even know I needed a crew.
I didn't even know I needed a truck or a trailer. And I would show up to Pikes Peak and here are major like IndyCar type teams, like NASCAR type teams with major crews.
And I'm just this guy over here pulling my wheels and tires out the back and luggage and whatnot. And I went and picked my wife up from the airport in Colorado Springs for the race.
Anyway, so I didn't win anything at Pikes Peak, but I competed. I finished.
She and I went to Aspen for a little vacation afterwards. We were engaged at the time.
And then I also thought, well, now that I've got a roll cage in my car, I wondered if there was a class that I could compete at at the Bonneville Slopats, where they would do the top speed stuff. And so I got a copy of the rulebook, I found a class that I fit in.
And so in August, so that same year, this is 1991. So I did the Nevada Open Road Challenge in May, then I did Pikes Peak in July, then I went to Bonneville in August.
And I set a two-way average there of 177 miles an hour, which in today's terms doesn't sound very fast, but doing that at Bonneville, it's very difficult. So set a record there, drove it there, drove it home.
And then they do another open road race in September. That's called the Silver State.
And then I got second place overall in that race. And my average speed was 167 miles an hour.
So I went a little bit faster. So anyway, I do all these races.
And at the time, I'm not doing my asbestos abatement business as much. I'm engaged.
We're in love. We're having fun.
We get married, go on the honeymoon. And I come back from the honeymoon and I'm looking at my bank balance and I'm like, man, I used to have a lot more money in the bank earlier this year before I started all this car stuff and continuing the romance and buying a house and so on and so forth.
And I mentioned this to some racing buddy of mine. He's like, oh, you just learned the first rule of car racing.
I said, what's that? He says, if you want to make a small fortune in car racing, you start with a larger fortune. And so this whole year, I'm watching my bank balance.
Well, I'm not watching it because I know what it's doing and I don't want to be reminded that it's going in the wrong direction because I was having fun. At which point I thought to myself, well, I really like the car business.
I really like modifying cars. I think I'm pretty good at it.
I think I'm a pretty good driver. I want to keep doing some of the racing.
And I thought, you know, guys before me, guys like Carroll Shelby with Ford, a guy named Alois Roof, who's still alive, who is a very famous Porsche modifier, who I'd started reading about back when I was at the magazine rack when I was nine years old. And another gentleman from here in the US, a guy named Reeves Calloway, who modified Corvettes and Chevrolet products.
Those guys seemed to have made a career out of modifying cars for other people. And I thought, I wonder if people would pay me to modify their Mitsubishi 3000 GT or other vehicles.
So I came back from the honeymoon, told my wife, I said, you know, I think I want to start this car business to modify cars for other people. And she's like, you want to do what? So I explained it to, all right.
Well, that's okay. Let's do that.
And so that was October of 1991. So here we are almost 35 years in October of this year, the anniversary of our business and our marriage are kind of within a few weeks of each other.
So yeah, now here we are almost 17,000 modified vehicles later. but I guess it does start with that entrepreneurial spirit, that spirit of,

I have a dream. I think I can do something.
I don't know how I'm going to get there. I don't know who's going to help me do it.
But I think it starts with that passion, that desire that there is always that degree of unknown. And I won't say for me, there's ever the fear.
I think I get more excited about the unknown than I do the fear of it. I do try to at least be a little bit more deliberate in terms of trying to understand what do I know and what do I not know.
But back in those days, I would definitely jump before I would look, you know, leap before I would look. So, but I think that there's something to that.
I was watching, I was just getting over the flu and I was kind of watching some reruns of a TV show called Hell on Wheels. And it's about the Wild West and these guys that built the railroad after the Civil War.

And I think there's kind of a certain American spirit, whether it's amongst racers or people before us, to where as entrepreneurs, when we have an idea and a passion for something that ultimately that passion and that desire to create a car or a business surrounding some idea or product or service, it's that passion that can carry us through the unknowns, carry us through setbacks and failures and things of that nature. So after 35 years of that, you know, I can talk at length about the entrepreneur.

I do have podcasts about car stuff all the time, but I think it's fun for me to kind of, because I'm just as equally as passionate, it may be even not more passionate about entrepreneurship and what goes into creating a business. And I want to go there, John, because I think this is exactly where our audience is, because for them, they would say, oh, my God, there is so much risk in now putting all the eggs in this one basket, right? How can I, just by modifying cars, I can actually make enough living to sustain myself? Now I'm married, I have hope here, and I want to make sure I take care of her.
So how is those early days? If you take this back in time, I assume you had no clue that you're going to create this massive empire. It was more like, let me sustain my hobby, right? For sure.
Yeah. Let me talk to that.
So for the early years, we had our first child in 94. So We had a couple, three years with no kids.
So back in the early days, it was just, I'm answering the phone. I've got one or two mechanics.
And we would pretty much work on anything that came in the door. And as I recall back in those days, we ran a small ad in a magazine called Turbo Magazine.
But another interesting thing that was very, very helpful to the business, and I did know it early on, is so when I went to Bonneville, interestingly enough, so when I was telling you about the gentleman who raced the Eagle Talon at Pikes Peak, his name was C. Van Toon.
Van ended up becoming a friend and Van ended up becoming the editor at Motocron from the mid-90s up until the early 2000s. So he was a very accomplished journalist and was the editor-in-chief at Motortrend for maybe five, six, seven years.
So I first met Van because before I went to Pikes Peak, I sent a letter to the head of Mitsubishi Motors in the United States, a guy named Dick Rekia. I don't know where I found this guy's name, but when I was young, I was feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof.
So I'm thinking, I'm just gonna go to Pikes Peak for the first time and I'm gonna win my class. So I sent this guy a letter inviting him to come to Pikes Peak to watch me win.
Amazing. Ignorance is bliss.
And so I got a nice letter back after Pikes Peak from the public relations department at Mitsubishi saying, hey, Mr. Reiki was busy and was not able to attend Pikes Peak, but we would like to send a journalist.
We hear you're going to Bonneville now. We want to send a journalist to Bonneville to do an article about you for the Mitsubishi magazine that they would send out to all of their car dealers.
And so I'm at Bonneville, and this is kind of a funny story. I'm at Bonneville.
One of the rules at Bonneville is when you have a car at Bonneville, when you're in the pit area, so the area where the cars are being worked on, their rule is that car has to be towed. It can't be driven, okay, for safety reasons.
And I had read that in the rule book. I drove there, so I didn't have a truck or something to tow it around.
And so one of the people that worked at the race, they warned me. They're like, look, you can't drive that in here.
Well, he came up on me another time, saw me driving around, and we were getting ready to get into a fight because I'm like, look, dude, I've explained to you I don't have a tow vehicle. Here comes this minivan, and out pops these two guys.
One guy works for Mitsubishi. His name is Joe Jacuzzi.
We became friends then and we're still friends to this day. His dad invented the hot tub and he worked in the public relations department at Mitsubishi and he brought the journalist to write the article, See Van Tune.
And so these guys were like, they kind of diffused the situation and they were like, oh, we're going to help John. We've got the minivan over here.
We can tow him around. I'm telling you this whole long story is Joe was been within the PR department at Mitsubishi for a few years.
And he said after Bonneville, he says, hey, look, after Bonneville, why don't you come down to LA? I'll take you around and I'll introduce you to like the editor at Motortran and the one of the editors at Car and Driver. And I'm like, wow, I've read about these guys.
And he said, hey, by the way, if they like you and if they ever ask to do a story on one of your vehicles and they write something nice about your vehicle, your phone will ring and people want to buy your product. I'm like, OK, that sounds good.
So I went and did all that and gave my car to a couple of these different media outlets. And a couple months later, this nice little article came out and my phone started ringing.
I didn't know what earned media was. I didn't know what PR was.
But my friend Joe, and again, we talk all the time. We're still friends to this day.
He just retired as the VP of communications for Chevrolet. So he's been in the car industry most of his career.
But Joe taught me a very, very valuable lesson very early on that this is before the internet. This is before YouTube, social media.
So car magazines, they could make you or break you back in the day. So I would just foster relationships with these guys.
Anytime over the years, they would call me up and say, hey, we need a fast car to do X, Y, Z. I was always, yes, I'll do it.
Yes, I'll do it. Yes, I'll do it.
But for those first five years of the business, our bank balance never fluctuated much above $15,000 and not much below $5,000. And all I'm trying to do is just make enough money to help pay our house payment and get to the next raise.
Well, then after our first child came along, I'm like, all right, I got to make this into a real business. This can't be a hobby business.
But for those first five years, I kept thinking, is this the year that cool cars is out? Is this the year that people are like, you know, fast cars, that's just kind of a fad. I'm ready to move on to something else.
And that's kind of what I thought for the first five years. But over time, I thought we kept getting more notoriety.
And then a vehicle came along the Dodge Viper, and we started modifying the Viper, which was a pretty radical car back in the 90s, a V10 with 400 plus horsepower, and we took it to 500 horsepower and beyond. So we got a lot, a lot, a lot of media coverage.
I'm talking about dozens of car magazines and many, many covers. I mean, probably dozens of covers of magazines.
and people seem to kind of know who we were. So this is maybe now we're five, seven years into this.
And I thought, are we a brand? Are we starting to become a brand? People seem to kind of know who we are. And at the time, different automotive companies would, I would read about brand managers was kind of a thing that that term that they use back then.
I thought, well, maybe I need to be my brand manager and make sure that our cars look a certain way and perform a certain way, which they always did well. And so I think maybe over time, I realized that the compounding effect of this media coverage and building good cars for clients, we were building a brand.
And so we started to treat it as such. Nowadays, if you've got a great product or service, social media allows people to accelerate how quickly the world learns about that.
But again, I found for our almost 35-year journey that it probably took us those first 10 to 15 years just to build a name, just to gain credibility in the marketplace. And I think that's been a very, very important foundation for what we've done.
And I love that, John, because I think there's still, even in today's world, with social media and everything, like, yes, it's easier to continue publishing. But on the other hand, it's also hard to rise above the noise, right?

So I think a lot of people are actually 10, 15 years of overnight success, but it feels overnight success when it blows up. But again, you're trying to do something really, really hard and to sustain yourself on that and to sustain a family is not easy.
before it goes viral were there areas or were there times that you said oh my god

should i just be looking for a regular job? Am I crazy? No, I don't think there was ever a moment where I'd considered changing businesses, changing careers. There's nothing else that I wanted to do.
I wanted to be a pilot when I was young. Actually, I'm getting ready.
I started taking flying lessons lessons in my mid-20s. And I finished all the ground courses, got straight A's.
And I ran out of money after flying eight hours. And today, after our podcast, I'm taking my first flight lesson to finish getting my pilot's license almost 40 years...
Well, 30-something years later. So anyway, you being in this truck, I may pick your brain from time to time.
But anyway, no, there was never anything else that either interested me or that I felt like I had a calling or a skill set. I'm sure I could have done other things.
I could have done sales or creative things or business things. But automotive was always my number one passion.
So was there. Yeah, I felt like we have a gift there.
Not just for me personally. I mean, I've got my skills and talents.
But I always felt like I could identify and attract talent within our organization. I mean, we wouldn't be anybody without the talented people that have helped us build our company and the really cool customers that have believed in us over the last 30 plus years.
And I'll definitely want to touch that. And I think what I'm also hearing is that just no fear of opening the doors, hustling, almost creating your own luck, right? You're not just waiting for the press to show up.
You're going above and beyond trying to get in front of. Yeah, there's a cool little video floating around out there where Steve Jobs, when he was a kid, somehow looked up in the phone book, one of the Hewlett Packard founders' phone numbers and called him up and asked him some questions.
And I think his point with that video was just basically, we've told our kids this since they were little. If you don't ask, you don't get.
So I've always been pretty good about if I want help with something or need help, just asking whomever I could. And so that's worked out fairly well.
And we try to now pay that forward when somebody reaches out to us, if we can help them. So it's cool.
That's amazing, John. And we'll talk about it because you're doing so much now for others and I will want to touch it.
But before that, you create, like you said, I think Venom 1000 Viper, which is one of the most powerful cars at that time. And it does go viral.
Did you need to do something for it to go viral? Or you feel like just by the fact that you already kind of had a little bit of a brand, you already competed in some things, did you feel like you needed to be active? Back in the 90s and into the 2000s, the magazines were the big thing. But obviously then you had the internet come along, a lot of car chat boards about all kinds of car subjects.
And that was kind of a thing.

And I think YouTube maybe came along 2006, 2007,

something like that.

There were a couple of other different automotive

video websites and we tried them all,

but we started our YouTube channel

pretty much within a year or two when YouTube began.

And to your point, we had 1,000 plus horsepower

Dodge Vipers back in those days, the Venom 1000. And so, yeah, they still get millions of views.
And so what a great platform because something I learned early on in our business, maybe we were just early modifying Vipers. There was an article that came out in Car and Driver magazine.
An older gentleman, I think, who lived around Atlanta had read about it, called me up and said, hey, I read this article. I'm coming through Houston.
If I came by your office, could I meet you or go for a ride on one of your cars? I said, sure. So he came by, took it for a ride in the car.
He was, I think, very surprised on how fast it was. And when he got back to my office, when his hand stopped shaking, he pulled out his checkbook.
He wrote me a check for 10 grand or something, a deposit for modifying his car. At which point I thought, okay, this is my absolute perfect closing tool.
All I have to do is just give somebody that's a potential buyer that's qualified. If they get a ride in the car, as long as it doesn't scare them too bad, they're going to want to buy it.
And I would tell people, don't come over here and don't come for a ride with me unless you're prepared to ride a check because you're going to be addicted and you're going to want to feel that, right? And so with video, with YouTube, now that was like, okay, here's a way just short of coming to Texas and going for a ride with John, here's a way where you can feel that excitement. I have a look at our YouTube engagement of late, but we get several million views per month.
And yeah, it's a great way to share with, again, whether it's a potential buyer, a potential customer, or just an enthusiast, a young person, whomever, that finds our stuff interesting and cool. Obviously, YouTube is now involved in every form of social media.
And now we're all scrolling all these little short videos that we get fed all day long, right? So yeah, however people want to consume their entertainment. I always tell people, I've been saying this for years, that our company, Hennessy, is as much in the entertainment business as we are in transportation.
If you need transportation, you can go buy a brand new vehicle from most manufacturers for $35,000, $40,000 that's safe, that's reliable. Cold air conditioning has all the connectivity.
It will get you where you want to go. So every dollar spent over 40 grand is based upon entertainment and passion.
People come to us, they want us to entertain them, to give them something interesting, something that's different, something that's fun. They can either enjoy themselves, share with their family and friends.
And it's probably also status and coolness and other things. I never, ever thought of way back when.
But yeah, there is definitely a status factor for whether you're buying a Mercedes, a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, and now even Hennessy. We're a very unique American brand.

And I think people,

not just in America,

but around the world

do identify with the American

high-performance cool factor

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Now back to the show. So let's talk about this because at some point, I don't know the exact year, but you decide this insane undertaking, which is to create your own car.
That's a huge undertaking. Now you're competing with really big players.
It's very expensive. Tell us a little bit about that decision.
Before the Venom F5, we built a car that was about 90% our own called the Venom GT. So if you go back to, you know, this is almost 20 years ago, Road & Track invited us to a test where they were having a shootout.
So the magazine wanted to get some of the fastest cars on earth together on a runway to see which car could go from zero to 200 miles per hour in the shortest amount of time. So we brought a Venom 1000 Viper.
There were several other fast cars there, Lamborghini, Mercedes SLR. And the fastest car besides our car was the Bugatti Veyron.
So 1,000 horsepower, million dollar plus car. At the end of that contest, we beat the Bugatti by four seconds.
So we're on the cover of the magazine. It's a great article.
It's good for business. It's great for the brand.
But we don't really rest on our laurels for very long. We don't celebrate for very long.
We're always kind of looking at what's the next mountain to climb. And as I started to think about, I want to build a faster car, but we could keep adding horsepower, but maybe we could find something that was lighter weight.
So I joke with my guys about taking a Lotus Elise, which is a tiny little car and taking out the engine out of the back of that and putting our massive V10, twin-trombo V10 with 1,000 plus horsepower. Anyway, I came up with some renderings.
I was at a trade show in Las Vegas called the SEMA show, and a guy named Mike Spinelli, he was working for a website called Jalopnik at the time, put a camera in my face, and he said, hey, Hennessy, what's new? And I pulled this picture out of my backpack and I said, this is the Venom GT concept car. This is something that we're thinking of building.
And so that article came out maybe a week later and maybe a week after that, some sheik from Dubai called me up and wanted to buy one. And so make a long story short, I had no business plan.
I basically said, yes, yes, we'll build it for you. By the time I built his car, I realized that I needed to sell four more cars to pay for it.
Anyway, we are now in the hypercar business. We used the tub of the Lotus, but all the body work, everything from behind the seats with the engine transmission, that was all new.
It was about 90% of our own car. When we had success with that, we sold about a dozen of those from 2007 through 2015.
Along along the way, it would irritate me. There's always haters on the internet and on social media.
Some of the haters would say, well, just a modified Lotus. Anybody could do that.
And that would irritate me. So I thought, well, let me just come up with a slightly different design.
So I was going to design that car differently.

And a good friend of mine who's a very, very successful, one of the top chief marketing

officers and one of the biggest companies

in the world, I sent him an email telling him what I wanted to do. And he basically challenged me,

said, John, you won't get credit for building your own car until you build your own car.

That was 2013. That's kind of the moment in time I had to accept the reality that if I wanted to

build my own car, I had to find the right

designer, assemble the right team.

That was a journey to begin that process.

Thankfully, along the way, the success that we had with the Venom GT in 2014, we went

out to the Kennedy Space Center where they used to land the space shuttle in Florida.

And we beat Bugatti.

At that time, Bugatti had gone at 267 mile an hour top speed. We went 270.
So we beat Bugatti by just a little bit. That was great for business.
And also, we had begun a relationship with the people at Shell Pinzell, and they were very excited about what we were doing. And so when the idea of the Venom F5 came up, I gave them a presentation a few years later.
And they said, hey, look, we don't mind giving you some budget to help you with maybe come up with a design. And so in 2017, we came up with the exterior design of the car, built a full one to one scale model that we took to the big SEMA show in Las Vegas in November of that year, unveiled the car.
again this is a concept and i think we got like six orders in the next six weeks as a result which

then basically gave us the budget to begin the engineering process and developing the car and then we finished the first customer car at the end of 2020 during covid and that was kind of that's a crazy story all that sounds like a crazy story to itself. So now we have about 25 people that work exclusively on that program.
We just delivered our 28th car to a client in Chicago about a month ago. It's been a fun, exciting journey.
And since that time, Bugatti, with their Chiron Supersport, they ran a little over 304 miles per hour back in 2019. And we would like to try to beat that speed record at some point.
We've been working on it a while. It's been a bit of a bigger challenge than I was anticipating to try to get a car to go over 300 miles per hour, but we think we're fairly close.
So when and if that happens, you and the rest of the world, I'm sure we're all about it. And I'll definitely root for you, crazy guy.
But you mentioned two things that I would love to drill a little into because I think our audience, this is exactly what they need. Money mindset or fear of anything related to money.
The bigger you go, the more people you have, the more responsibility you have, the bigger amounts you need to lose and the debt becomes really scary. How do you cope with anything related to that? I would say for the first, oh gosh, 20 years of our business, in flying terms, I was dead reckoning.
I don't even know if I was even VFR. In car terms, without having good financials or accounting, I liken it to driving the car by being in reverse and looking through the rearview mirror.
So we began moving towards having some good accounting systems maybe 10 years ago and really for the last 10 years. I now have a staff of probably six or seven people in our accounting department.

So, again, I can run a company, see my pants with probably 20, 25 people to some degree. And I do get questions from young entrepreneurs all the time.
What do I need to succeed? And I say from the beginning, have great accounting. Have great accounting.
And I think since we've had data and financials and forecasting, then it's much easier to understand what are the capital requirements? What if we take this risk? What happens if we have a slow sales month? So on and so forth. Other thing about having great accounting is it allows you to have bankability.
So as you grow and make money and then have assets, then banks will loan you money. So that's a nice thing too.
But I think even for me, I'm a classic bootstrapper and can manage tight cash flow and all of that. But that's just a stress that I'm okay with, but I don't think it's stress that my employees need to necessarily have to worry about.
So as we've grown and whether, again, we have three different businesses. We have our Hennessy Performance Business, which modifies cars, which last year modified 563 vehicles.
This year, our goal is 1,000. So we're really growing on that side of the business.
Hennessy Special Vehicles, which designs and manufactures the Venom F5. Then we have Tuner School, which teaches people how to modify cars.
And then Hennessy Academy is kind of a subcomponent of that. But again, I would encourage to your, your viewers that having solid accounting as a business person, if they're not the accounting person, hire somebody who is.
That's incredible because you're right. A lot of it is visibility and are you going blind, right? And maybe one more question before we go to some of these amazing schools that you built.
You talked about haters. And I think if there's one thing that prevents people from going all in on something is how much hate and how easy it is to hate, especially now in social media world.
What did you need to do in order to bypass the haters? Or maybe you don't see as much in cars, like, I don't know. But I mean, I know we see it all the time.
So I'm just curious. We've told our kids as our kids were growing up, especially in junior high, that if you don't have some haters, you're not pushing hard enough.
You're not relevant. You're not doing anything.
So I think having haters to some degree is a sign that you're relevant in the marketplace. Oh, I love that.
But ultimately, I figured that people wanted our brand and our name. And so very early on, that would be like after having accounting, make sure that whatever intellectual property that you're generating, your name, your trademark, that you're getting proper protection.
And we found a great intellectual property attorney to help us with that many years ago. And so we are pretty active and spend money shutting people down on a pretty regular basis that try to copy our names or use our trademarks in the marketplace.
So I think that's an important differentiator. But again, I think that haters are just a part of life and we just become used to it.
But the moment that I don't have a hater, the moment I'm not getting hated on, then I become irrelevant. I would much rather be relevant and have haters than not have haters and be irrelevant.
Oh my God, I wrote that down. This is so good.
And the other thing that I noticed is how much you understood the concept of brand before we really understood the concept of personal branding and social media branding. Like you understood the power of a brand, I don't know, 20 years before most people caught up to that.
Why do you think you saw it? Maybe it's because of the press or what did you see that let you anticipate how important a brand is? I guess I just liken it back in the car magazine days where people seem to know who we were. And I'm like, if we're a brand, then maybe we should manage that carefully in terms of just in terms of making sure that we have a consistent identity, that we know who we are, that we're communicating who we are to the world.
And I think we've done a good job of that. Well, something we've done internally now that we have almost 120 employees, now we've done mission, vision, and values with our employees and making sure, okay, well, I think most of them know what we stand for and what we do, but we've written it down because we have new people all the time.
And do they really understand it? And so I think the foundation of a brand is authenticity. You can't project your brand as something that's contrary to what you really are.
Oof, that's powerful, John. I think for us, being consistent that we're this American company that believes in pushing boundaries, that believes in climbing the next highest mountain, and that believes in our people, and believes in delivering exciting, powerful, simple, functional products and services.
I think the president of Starbucks said it really beautifully as well. Like, we're not about coffee, we're about the people.
And I think you're saying it so beautifully, right? It's not necessarily the cars, it's the entertainment, it's all the other things. In the essence of what we do is how do we make people feel? So for some people, if they like the status of having the name Hennessy or Velociraptor Venom on the side of their vehicle, does that make them feel a certain way amongst certain people? Great.
How do they feel when they press the accelerator and they hear the sound and they feel the acceleration of our car? How do we make them feel when they call our office to talk to us about servicing their vehicle or whatever they might need? So I think what kind of feelings does our business, does our product, does our service, do our people, what kind of feeling do we give our clients? That's super, super important. And another thing that I noticed, and this goes back to Turner School and other things, when you see a problem, you jump on it, even if it's completely not necessarily related, right? Like in your case, I feel like there was just not enough engineer and you're like, okay, let's go teach a hundred engineers to, you know, and now you have this pool of employment and now you're doing it again.
Can you talk a little bit about? So 2009, as our business was growing, I looked at some of the best technicians that I had working for me and most of them had started off sweeping the floor. And then over time, if they had a strong work ethic, if they got in early, stayed late, and they were good listeners, and they followed through with what they were doing, the technicians with more skills would apprentice them and bring them under their wing and show them things so they could have more skills, so they could have more opportunity to move up and earn more money.
And I thought, what if there was a way where I could start a school to where people could come in and learn all of the basics that we do in our business to where if that person applied for a job, I would give them an entry-level position. Because when a big magazine article would come out, I would get emails from young people typically saying, hey, where can I go to school to learn how to do what you guys would do? So I would send them to different other schools that would do restorations or car repair.
And they would come back and they're like, no, I don't want to learn how to do restoration or car repair. I want to learn how to modify cars.
I thought, okay, I need more people for our organization. So now we have about 90 students a year come through Tuner School.
We have two different classes. They're 14-week-long semesters, like you would go to college.
I would say more than probably 60% of our workforce have come out of tuner school. And so it's not only learning skills on how to modify cars, but also being immersed into a community of other like-minded car enthusiasts that all talk to each other.
And so it doesn't matter where you're looking for a job. Mostly guys, there's some females, they come from all around the world and they've all got jobs when they graduate.
And they go all over the country, all over the world and do all kinds of cool stuff. So it's been after doing that for, gosh, now over 15 years, it's really kind of neat to see how that has evolved.
And now we've taken that and pushed a lot of that into an online program called Hennessy Academy. So if somebody out there is under the age of 18 or lives outside the United States and or doesn't have the budget to come to Tuner School, there's a lot of that that they can learn online through Hennessy Academy.
And we also talk about we'll have to have you come on that and talk about entrepreneurship. I would love that.
Yeah, that would love that. That'd be fun.
So again, it's kind of a way to pay that forward to, again, I look back to where I was at in my teens and my early to mid-20s and trying to figure it out and ran out of money for college. And I don't know if I was really cut out for college, but I think there's a lot of other people out there that are looking for a positive future, either through entrepreneurship or a passion of some kind.
Hey, I have a passion for this, or I have a skill set for that. How can I monetize that? How can I do more of that? And again, for every one thing that I've learned, I've probably had to fail 10 times as many times.
So I think some of these things, some of the stuff that you're doing helps accelerate that process and helps kind of minimize some of the failure. I agree.
And again, I think also when you fail, just not understand that it's normal and you're not alone on it. I think that's also a big piece of it, right? Every failure is an opportunity for learning.
And failure is not final. I tell people all the time, you know, if you really believe in something, just never give up on it.
Right. And I tell people I eat failures for breakfast.
I just like continue. It's like, move on.
But I love that, John. So if you take yourself, maybe look at yourself back in time, you know, one of the questions that I love asking, like, would there be an idea or an advice that you would tell yourself earlier on that you wish you knew? There's always the old catch all of leaving yourself.
I go back to what sustained me through a number of tough times. It's just the passion for what we're doing.
It started off with the passion for wanting to win a race or wanting to have some success. I would say that's really now, again, 117 employees, almost 120 employees.
We have five kids. They all work in the business in some form or fashion.
Really, it's a passion for our people. It's a passion for our employees.
It's a passion for the people that we interact with in the industry. It's a passion for our clients.
That comes after 30 years of doing this and having 17,000 plus vehicles that we built out there. So again, I think that when everything's going great, life is grand.
But when the tough times come along, it's like what sustains us. And I think for me, ultimately, what's kind of helped see us through tough times over the years is just our love for each other and our family.
You know, my wife being kind of the backbone with the kids and really believed in me when after 9-11, we didn't sell anything for like three or four months. We went from having hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to basically being running on a fume.
So again, I'm sure everybody's had a tough time after 9-11. We're not any different.
I'm just saying that over 34 years, when you're in business long enough, you'll have had to make it through some cycles, right? So entrepreneurs, if you're just kind of getting going out there. In my experience, it took us those first five to 10 years just for people to kind of know who we were, right? And then beyond that, to make it from the five to 10 years to 30 to 35 years, we've had to experience a few down markets.
So just hang in there. Hang in there and love what you do, which I think is, I mean, it shines through you, John.
You're just like ecstatic about it.

So that's beautiful to see. Enjoy the people that you're going through the journey with.
And it's

not about the destination. It's about the journey.
John, thank you so much for the time and sharing

all this beautiful ideas and tips. And I took so many notes and thank you for doing that.

Thanks for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.
Look forward to doing it again sometime soon. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.
If you did, please share it with friends. Now, also, if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this 30-minute free training at leapacademy.com slash training.

That's leapacademy.com slash training.

See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy with Zilana Gulancho.