Rebuilding the Reputation of a Brand | Chris Riesenberg with Race Tech 1

Suspension is one of those things that a lot of us just don’t understand. What adjustments actually affect what? There are also many options out there for you to choose from when it comes to who services your stuff. Race Tech is privateer proven and they have service centers all across the United States. Chris ‘Checkerz’ Riesenberg is the Marketing Director for Race Tech and recently gave us some time to tell us all about it.

For the full interview, check out the YouTube video right here. If you're interested in the condensed written version, scroll down just a bit further.

Jamie Guida – Vital MX: Give us a little bit of your background for those that don’t know you. How did you get involved with Race Tech?

Chris ‘Checkerz’ Riesenberg: Like most people that work in the industry I grew up riding dirt bikes. I’ve loved dirt bikes since I was a little kid and kind of chased the dream. I was lucky and fortunate enough to have very supportive parents and sponsors growing up and was able to do a lot of the amateur nationals. I was a good local guy. I got to be a front runner on the local pro scene, and I tried to race one national; the last national ever in Ohio. It didn't go well. I wasn't very much of an outdoor guy anyway. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. And then I did a little bit of arenacross for a while. I was pretty good at that because of my background racing fair races and money races. But I was never going to make a career out of racing dirt bikes. I made the decision to go to college, which I quickly learned wasn't for me. I wanted to do something different. And I happened to stumble into working for Rainbow Studios on the MX vs. ATV games as a track designer, something I was doing as a hobby for some of the games that had already been released, moding them. They saw some of my work and the job was available. They surprised me with a phone interview and a flight to Arizona for a job interview and hired me on the spot. That got my foot into the industry. I started working with the industry companies and riders. We signed up almost every privateer you could imagine to be in the game. Before I started there were ten guys max, and they were paying all of them. I said, “You're doing this wrong. The value is to all the companies, like the gear company that's on the riders. Let's go to them and ask them to help get the riders signed up in the game. All these privateer guys, it's a dream for them to be in there. Let's go add some authenticity to the game and give them an opportunity for something cool”. We ended up with 90 riders or something like that. That made it easy for me to learn who all the privateer guys were, and they were all stoked to meet me because they wanted to be in a game. The biggest project I got was working with Red Bull and we got James Stewart on the cover and The Compound in the game, and that was really sick. I had no experience on the marketing side prior to that. I learned as we went, and I had no budget to work with. Transitioning out of the MX vs. ATV stuff, the title got to a point where I didn't feel like it was getting any better. My goal was to work on the best motocross game on the market and I wasn't seeing the progress. I was getting really frustrated. A lot of it was on the corporate side, not necessarily on our side in-house. And it got to the point where I was just frustrated and I called my current boss, Rob Brown. He was my suspension guy over the last year. I raced arenacross and we'd become pretty good buddies. He was working at Race Tech at the time. I designed a logo for him and a website and some general marketing stuff. I didn't know it was marketing at the time. I was just helping a buddy out and I just called him on the way home and said, “Hey, if you know of anything in the industry, let me know because I don't want to go anywhere that's not in the industry, but I'm looking for something new”. And he goes, “Well, actually, I want a marketing guy and you'd be perfect for it”. And he put me in touch with Paul Thede and pushed to make that whole process happen. I transitioned over to Race Tech with no marketing experience. Paul and Rob said, and it stuck with me to this day, “It's okay, you'll figure it out. It's okay to make mistakes. Just don't make them twice”. They gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do. And if it went wrong, I wasn't in trouble if I learned from it. The name of Race Tech at the time was less than stellar. Our goal was to get this product out there and show people that it doesn't suck. I started calling all the privateer guys I could, and Rob and A.J. at the time who was our trackside support guy. They were at Milestone doing supercross testing two or three times a week, and it started to snowball. The privateer guys out there saw that these guys are using this stuff, the bikes are working well, and these guys are here providing support. The next thing you know half the night show’s on Race Tech. We chose to go down a route of ‘how do we develop’ the best product and let's work with a lot of privateers, because then we get a lot of different riders riding, a lot of different motorcycles across all brands. 

Vital MX: What is it about Race Tech that makes the privateers want to come to you?

Checkerz: There's three things. One is just the support in general, and we're willing to pay attention to them. We aren't distracted by a very high-level race team effort where a lot of our staff has to put their attention. We're able to spread it across the privateers in general with support at the races,  and there's Race Tech centers all around the country. You get into nationals and guys are on the East Coast and need a rebuild and they don't have time between races to ship stuff back and forth. A lot of times they don't have a spare set of suspension. For me to locate a service center in their area that they can go to during the week or even one that's at the races every weekend to provide that support for them to do a rebuild or if a seal pops or any type of setting change or anything like that, they have support around the country. The final one is the stuff works; it's proven to work. And we're also one of the companies that you don't have to go buy “A” kit stuff to be competitive and make it work. We're able to work within your budget to give you something to be competitive on at a very high level with a production setup if needed. On the engine side, it really comes down to a really, really good engine package that also has reliability. 

Vital MX: People may not be aware that you do engines as well.

Checkerz: We have to handle the engine side a bit differently because we don't want to be ‘engine builders’. We want to be an engine machine shop. And what that means is we are developing a good engine package in house, and we want to provide the machining work to provide you a good head. And we'll give you recommended parts, and we'll tune the ECU for you. But we want to send it to either yourself or another engine builder to put the thing together. At the end of the day there's a lot of our stuff out there that you don't know ever came from our shop. And that's okay. We're fine with that because as long as we're growing their businesses by giving them a great product, then we're doing our job. 

Vital MX: How do you deal with learning what the evolution of marketing is? What's the next best thing? What works the best?

Checkerz: It's an ongoing learning process, and I'd be lying if I told you I had all the answers. In the 11 years I've been doing it, it's changed a ton. When I first started, it was working with all the privateer guys and that side of things. And local racing, in general, grassroots racing is a huge part of what we do as well. You won't see very many amateur events go off without Race Tech being part of them. What has changed is it used to be magazines and magazine editors and getting our product on magazines, feature stories. We still do that. But it used to be that was the most important thing you could possibly do. It's still important to be there for the guys that are reading print and to have the relationships. But a lot of the stuff has shifted to video and online and podcasts and social stuff. We've been successful with it and it's good, but it's just a learning experience and it's definitely changed the dynamic and is really difficult for me as somebody who's just a fan of the sport and the industry to go and pay a bunch of money to Facebook or Instagram for just generic ads versus supporting a media outlet that's going to the races and supporting the industry. I try to keep as much of our advertising money endemic as possible within the industry. One of the many things that Paul told me when we started was, we're not a branding company to go out and pay to slap your logo all over everything. “We are a performance company”, he said. The best way to sell Race Tech is through word of mouth. Even with the PulpMX Show, that only works because I put Steve on our suspension, and he can share his real opinion of it. The same with the Keefers of the world or the Jamie from Vital’s of the World or the Michael Lindsay from Vital. I want them to try the product, believe in the product, and then share their experiences with it in a podcast form. It is all about talking. 

Vital MX: There's a lot of tools on your website to help consumers as well. Can you talk about those?

Checkerz: Absolutely. The website is a plethora of information. We are constantly working to evolve the website to make it better and easier for users to find what they're looking for, because there is a lot of information there. It's not just a listing of products for your bike, but you go on there and you can find spring rates that we recommend for your bike as well as all the spring rates available. We'll give you oil levels and where to set your sag as well. Air pressures if you're on an air fork. There are general notes about the suspension in general, whether you're tearing the fork completely apart or if you're setting it up as a user. And the other side of things is there are instructions that are step by step on how to rebuild or re-valve your suspension. Even all the way to putting your forks on your dirt bike properly so that they're parallel. Because I will tell you, I got back from Loretta's not long ago and guys come over and complain about a harsh front end. Nine times out of ten the reason why is usually their forks aren't parallel. They bind up their forks when they put their front wheel on the bike. I've had this with a well-known media outlet. We went out testing one day and they said it was one of the worst setups they've ever ridden, and it was a proven setup that we've used for years. So, we had a pretty good idea that it wasn't the actual setting and loosened the axle and the pinch bolts and the fork went, ‘pop’, back into place and they tighten it back up. The test driver looked at them like, ‘you’re not going to touch it?”. He goes, “Go ride it”. They came back and said, “this is incredible”. A media outlet that's been telling people that their stuff's good or bad for ages and who knows if it was our stuff or somebody else's that got reviewed, that the stuff was terrible, and it really wasn't the suspension. It was the way that they put the wheel on the motorcycle. And if you think maybe ‘I can rebuild my own stuff’, it'll give you the instructions, the tools required. If you need special tools for it, we also have a full listing of tools that we sell. The main driver of Race Tech’s business is the warehouse in the back and selling parts and tools and bits and pieces and Gold Valves to other tuners.

Vital MX: For those that do want to take on the task of working on their own stuff or learning, Race Tech also offers seminars.

Checkerz: Yeah, once a year it's a weeklong course and it's split up into three different classes. We teach suspension and the ins and outs. Paul and Rob use their years of experience and many, many, many careers within the industry have started there. They're coming up in the fall, I believe, in November. The information is on the seminars tab at the website. If it's something you want to do and are interested in, whether it's to start your own business, building suspension or maybe you have a motorcycle shop already and you want to add to the service department and you want to learn suspension it's a way to be profitable and make money.  Paul's basically giving away years and years of knowledge for almost nothing. But it all goes back to we want more suspension tuners out there because that allows everything else to work well in our business. We can provide you with parts and fluids and bushings and seals and springs and valves and all that. It's in our best interest to get as many people out there tuning suspension as we can. The goal is to work together to get more people to understand that their suspension can be better.

Vital MX: How did you become the master of the air wheelie?

Checkerz: Well, I think it all started when I was younger. I was not a tiny kid. All the years of riding on a 125 and not being the smallest meant really stretching jumps out of a corner. I learned to put the front end up pretty easy and confidently. And now I have the power of a 450 and I just kind of did it by accident once. We were messing around, and people were laughing, and I saw some pictures of it and I was like, ‘Holy crap, that's actually pretty vertical. That's kind of cool’. So, I kept doing it more and more and then it became my thing. If it makes people laugh, I'm going to keep doing it. If people think it's ridiculous, I agree it is ridiculous, but I'm not going to stop.