Jason Thomas on Using Racing Lessons in Life and at Fly Racing 2

If you’re at a Monster Energy Supercross race or even your local track, you will see endless riders wearing Fly Racing. Fly Racing has done a masterful job over the last 20 plus years of evolving and advancing the brand into one of the leaders in the gear game. Jason “JT$” Thomas is the National Sales Manager and Media Relations Manager as well as a former professional racer. We talked to him about the brands history and how he transitioned from wearing the brand to working for the brand.

        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: Your professional career was about 16 years during which you built relationships and a work ethic that led into the career you have now. Talk about what tools transferred from your racing career into doing what you now do now.

Jason Thomas: There's a couple of things. You know, I think discipline of being on a really regimented schedule where you have to train, you have to ride, you’re flying all the time, and you get into routines, which obviously helps for more of a 9 to 5 type of life where you have to be in an office. And you have deadlines, and you have things that need to be accomplished. So, you build that regimen where I think had I just purely gone to college and, you know, I had friends that were in school and they were out till two in the morning every night, and then not up till noon. And then they were still trying to race. I just didn't see a lot of discipline in their life that was going to help them on race day. So, I got into this schedule where I got up early and I was on my bicycle at the same minute every day, and then I was at the track the same minute every day. And I feel like that helped me when I stopped racing, being used to that sort of life because you have to be at the office, I have to be on time and people are depending on you and there are things you have to get done. Secondarily to that, and maybe more importantly, I also learned how to be really versatile with racing. I was always going out trying to find other races to go to. Where can I travel to, what countries were going to have races going on, what opportunities were out there and what door could I knock on to try to get into the next race and make some money? And I've tried to carry on that same approach in my work life now. There are different things I do now, I work with RacerX and I work with Steve at PulpMX, and obviously my main focus is on Fly Racing. But there are all these other avenues that I've taken on now, going into the television side and all these things. Had I not been willing to pursue other opportunities, I don't know that those would have ever come about. I learned that you have to put yourself out there. You have to be willing to take some chances and be uncomfortable at times. But in the end, you can really further yourself by taking some risk.

Vital MX: The Fly brand started in 1998. What year did you first start wearing Fly?

JT$: Yeah, and it's funny, it definitely did start in ‘98, but it was very humble beginnings in those days. I mean, we had handlebars early on. It was like the first product and then we started morphing into other things. They built a helmet and then eventually apparel. But, you know, those early days, I wouldn't say anybody was really doing much with it until 2000 or 2001. I started wearing it at the end of 2002. So, yes, the brand started in ‘98, but it was more conceptually and trying to get products to market in those early days. 

Vital MX: When you start wearing it in ‘02, how did it compare to other gear that was on the market at the time?

JT$: It wasn't great. To be honest, it really wasn’t. And it was heavy. I didn't think that it was very functional, and to be fair, it was early on. And you're working with factories that aren’t experts in this space because when you're that small, it's difficult to get the expert to work with you. That's just how these things work. You know, as volume goes up and you're able to give them more business, you get better factories, and you get in with better developers. That's just how the process works. I remember the first set of gear they brought me. It literally had shoulder pads, like foam shoulder pads in the shoulders. And I'm like, “What is happening here”? I was so confused as to why those would be in there. But they're trying things and they're working through processes. In those days it was just Terry Baisley who just retired recently, he was the Vice President of the company, but he was flying over there. He was the designer, he was the developer, and he has no background in that as far as any real education. So, he's doing the best job he can. But man, it was rough. Did it slow me down? Did it make my results worse? No. But were there some funky designs where you're looking around and saying, “Man, we look out of place here”? Yeah, there were in the early days?

Vital MX: Did you have much input or say that they took to the designers early on?

JT$: Early on, no, because I didn't really have a relationship with them yet. That deal was put together through Subway Honda. I was just an addition to that program. As the years went on and my relationship grew, and the trust level and all those things came about, then yeah, of course I was able to give input and I think they trusted me more and they knew that I was coming from the right place. My heart was in this thing, and I just wanted to see the brand succeed versus just my own personal gain as in, “Oh, I just want a better product”. Well, no, I'm also emotionally invested in this thing now. I've been a part of this company for a long time, and I want to see us progress together.

Vital MX: Over the years that Fly's been developing into what we have now, was it a gradual trajectory of improvement or was there a point where someone said, “We have to rethink everything. We have to change things to become an elite brand and make drastic changes aesthetically, quality wise, etc.”? Was there a definitive moment in time?

JT$: I think the big turning point was when the company hired Jerry Lathrop. Jerry was a protege of Troy Lee and lived in Southern California. He was a helmet painter by expertise, but he also had a lot of training in graphic design and all these things, too. To Craig Shoemaker’s credit, at the time, he went out and poached who he felt was the best new guy that could lead a brand forward. And he was young enough. He had the aspiration, he had the training, he had the knowledge of the motocross industry because he had worked at Troy Lee. And he's still here. I want to say that was like 2007. That could be wrong. But I think it was around that era. And yeah, now we're in 2022 and he's still here and he is our Creative Director. So, to me that was a turning point because now they had somebody that truly had the right background for this and could be forward thinking and get us to go chase down the right factories and really put this on the right path. Before as I mentioned, it was Terry. But he also had different roles. He was in charge of sales, period. End of story. To have your designer, your developer and the person that's in charge of sales for the entire company, there's no way you're going to be doing all those things to the best of your ability because you're splitting time. So, to me if you went back and asked, where did this thing really start to ramp up? That was probably it.

Vital MX: How did your relationship with Fly Racing/WPS eventually become your current career?

JT$: Yeah, so I was racing for them. There were a couple of years in there where Subway Honda went a different direction with Answer and other things that were not in my control. I was just along for the ride, but I maintained relationships through those off years and just got really close with those guys and the team and I was always one of their marquee guys, you know. Of course, they had Andrew Short and guys along the way, but I was a top 15 450 guy that they had a lot of resources allocated towards. So that relationship flourished. And if you look over the course of racing history, they've always maintained those relationships. Whether it's Andrew Short or Trey Canard or now Weston Peick. Damon Bradshaw has been a part of the team for a very long time now and that's not an accident, right? The riders they choose and how they treat athletes as well. I think there's a reason why people want to stick around and want to become a part of that Fly Racing family afterwards. So, when my racing started to wind down a little bit, probably two years before I stopped, Terry mentioned, “hey, you know, you're not going to race forever, but we would like you to become something with us. We don't know the right fit. We'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it, but just know that we'd like to keep you on in some capacity at Western Power Sports and Fly Racing when this comes to an end”. And I think he was trying to be careful because no one wants to hear, “hey, we're watching your race and it looks like you're about done”, you know? He wasn't coming across that way. I think he was just planting a seed of, “When it's time, let's have a talk”. So, I filed it away in the back of my head. I was nowhere near ready to stop racing yet because I think that was 2010 and I was actually having a good season. But flash forward to 2012 and my mindset had completely flipped. I didn't want to be out there anymore. I was honestly more scared of being injured than anything else. I felt like racing had passed me by. I had kind of lost the edge a little bit. So, I approached Terry and said, “I know we had this conversation, but I think that time we spoke about is rapidly approaching”. That set off a ton of other conversation about where do we fit? Do you stay in Florida? My initial thought was I was going to be a Western Power Sports outside rep, which those are the guys if I’m out seeing dealers like I am last week and this week, those are the people that I would be with. And we have around 115 of those around the country. And that's not counting our V-twin division. But that was the easy fit because I could stay in Florida. You can make your own schedule within reason, right? You have to really be disciplined with that. But you schedule with the dealers when you're going to visit and all of those things, which would allow me some freedom to do the things that I wanted to do. I want to write for RacerX and get into the podcast game with Steve and all these things. So, it was the ideal fit. Another side of that is that world is commission based. The better job you do and the harder you hustle; your income can go up. For me, I looked at that like, “Man, this is everything that I could possibly want”, because not only do I get to make my schedule and do all the things that I mentioned, but I can also really make a lot of money doing this. It was just the right fit in so many ways. And in hindsight, I still wish some days that worked out because I think I could have done a good job at it. But I also look back at the decision that they made to be like, “No, this isn't the right path for you and we're going to bring you inside”, ended up being the right one. And quickly, by that summer I knew I was stopping racing. So, I had a formal job interview, came in, met with Terry, I met with the Regional Manager, Jim Chester, who's still in place. I work with him every day now. Some of you will recognize that name. And in the end, they said, “We just don't think this is going to work”. And I was devastated. I was angry, not necessarily at them, but at the situation. And Terry called me right away to say, “just be patient. I know you're upset, but there is a reason that we're saying, ‘no’. It's not no to you. It's no to this position right now”. And Florida was in a real state of flux. If you remember back in that time we were coming out of the great financial crisis. And our industry was not in a good place at all. I think they were worried that the position wouldn't work because the sales numbers weren't very good, and I wouldn't make very much money, and I would quit. And they didn't want it to end that early, and then there'd be no opportunity past that, of course. It was great that they had that foresight. And I know I'm being very long winded here but it's fun to paint the picture of how this was all playing out. So, fast forward six weeks, maybe two months, and I'm still kind of like, “What am I going to do here, man? I don't have a job. Racing is done for me”. I didn't finish college. I went for two years, but I didn't finish. So, I don't have a formal education to present to anybody. And lo and behold, Terry calls me, and I'll never forget this call, I was driving. It's the off season. It was like September of 2012 and I'm driving to a Starbucks. It was in the afternoon, and I was doing some offseason season training, but it was kind of my downtime, and he calls me like, “Hey, what are you doing”? “Honestly, nothing. I'm driving to Starbucks at 3:00 on a Tuesday”, and he says, “Well, I think I have an opportunity. I think I have the answer to what we've been looking for”. “All right, that's a good way to start a call”. He explained to me that he was going to be transitioning to managing and being directly responsible for our fledgling V-twin division, which now it's massive. It's called Hard Drive. He needed to put all of his time and effort into that. In the past he had been the one traveling to see all of the international distribution that we have around the country, because we have a different distribution model in each country, especially more back then than we do now. He would have to go visit them. He would have to present the line to them. He would have to manage their sales alongside them and forecast with them and all those things. But he couldn't do that anymore. He was spread way too thin and probably had been for a very long time. He was laying out this job opportunity and all these things. I was thinking this sounds too good to be true. I'm not qualified for this, but I'm willing to learn. I'll do whatever it takes. He said, “the last thing that I have to mention is this is a Boise position. Yes, you're going to travel a ton. You're going to be all over the world at all times like I've been for the last 20 years. But your home base has to be in Boise because you need to be working with the design team and working with all the infrastructure and the accounting teams and all these things on those accounts”. I took a deep breath because I didn't know if that was a deal breaker for me or not, because I'd never considered it. I said, Terry, “this is an amazing opportunity. Number one, I appreciate it more than I could ever tell you, but I need 24 hours to decide if I'm moving my entire life to Idaho or not. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe I shouldn't even question and just say ‘yes’ right now. But I need some time to think because this is coming out of left field”. He, of course being Terry, said, “Yeah, no problem. No problem. Just call me. This wee is fine. We need to move on this, so we need to do something relatively quickly”. I called my mom, and my dad was there and they're talking about it and they're like, “You have to do this. If you don't, if you turn this down, what is your alternative? This could be a lifelong opportunity for you”. Then I call people I trust, Steve Matthes, people in the industry, and they're all saying, “Dude, you should have said yes on the spot. What are you even considering”? So, I'm clearly the idiot here. If everybody is saying I have to do this, then I do. So, I called them back in under an hour and said, “I don't know what you're going to pay me. I don't know when I can be there yet. It'll be soon. But do not offer this job to anybody else. I'm going to take it. I will be there and let's just start moving forward towards it”. That's been ten years in a month since I moved to Boise. 

Vital MX: I understand the uncertainty. It can be scary to just leave everything you know to take a chance.

JT$: It is. It is. And for me, I didn't have a job, right?  I didn't have any source of income moving forward because I’d been racing for 15 or 16 years. When I started really thinking about it, even if I hate Boise, even if I don't like, I need to go do this out of necessity, I need to take this. Forget about how excited I am about the opportunity, I need this. And yeah, I've been there ten years. I love it. Anybody that knows me knows how passionate I am about Western Power Sports and Fly Racing, and honestly, I'm pretty close to as passionate about Boise. I really love living there. I got very lucky with that because if Terry had told me, “Hey, you have to move to…”, I don't know, I don't want to pick on anywhere in particular, somewhere I didn't really care for in the country. I would have ended up going anyway. And that it happened to be Boise, and Boise happens to be so amazing is so perfect. It's very fortunate. It just happened to be in a place that I truly enjoy living.

Vital MX: Fly Racing has always been very privateer driven. Was that a conscious effort?

JT$: You know, it was. I think in the early days it was necessity based and also a plan, if that makes sense. I think they looked at the landscape and said, “okay, is the brand in a place, and is WPS in a place where we can go out and hire Chad Reed, Ricky Carmichael, Travis Pastrana, take your pick. And they're like, “No, we don't have the resources. We can't support them effectively because we don't have the product in a good enough place yet, and they're just too expensive. They cost more than we can justify for how much racing does in business. What we can do is we can help all these guys that don't get any help and they don't get free gear. And we can really paint the field with riders, and we can do that because we can handle the cost of the materials and we see a need for a lot of these riders”. The genius side of it was not only if you go to a Supercross you see tons of them out there wearing Fly Racing, but when they go home and they're racing local races all summer and they're going to their local practice track, they're the fastest guy there. And I think that's a very understated part of this sport. You go to a Supercross, and you watch these guys race and the guys that don't make the main people think he's not very good. Or go a step further and the guys that don't make the night show and they’re saying these guys suck. I hear it all the time. I hear it from fans all the time. You have no idea how good that guy is. If he was at your local track, he would smoke everybody there and make them look silly. What you're looking at is the very best in the world and comparing them against that. But to think that they're not amazing and to think that every little kid that watches them midweek or on an off-weekend race somewhere and they want to be that guy, that's the value in it. And I was that child. I watched all the local pros that never really “made it”. I wanted to be who they were. I wanted to win the ‘A’ class at the local races, and I never imagined that I would even get that far, let alone live in Supercross for that long. So, that was the genius behind it that. You can, for a very low cost, have all these privateers and really just blanket the country with the fastest local racers in the country. You're not spending $1,000,000 on one rider.

Vital MX: I'm sure you guys have done the research to figure this out, if you were to go get a major rider, what the R.O.I. is? Does Alpinestars really sell that much more gear because Eli is in it?

JT$: Sure. You know, and we distribute Alpinestars gear. So, we have a really easy way to monitor that. To me, it's always challenging to say this spend equals these dollars in our industry. It's really, really difficult. I think over time, if you're trying to create and grow a brand, you can get a much more accurate picture of these were the steps we took over a decade. These are where these were, these are what our sales are now. Did that spend make sense to get us to where we are? Because it's a delayed response many times. It takes a long time for the customer to realize an athlete's in the product and win over their minds and hearts. And then that influences in the end their buying decision for years to come. That doesn't happen overnight. And if you think it's going to happen overnight, then you're probably in for a big disappointment. Specifically, to the Alpinestar's point, I'm very confident that Gabrielle Mazzarolo, the owner, he makes the decision. Yes, he has a board. They have a lot of smart people influencing his decisions, but I know he's not always looking at it, going, “you know what, if we hire this guy, I'm going to sell more”. I would challenge that. He's one of the most passionate people in the sport about racing and winning. And I think he truly just wants to have the best athletes and he wants to win. Does it make financial sense all the time? Probably not. I can't imagine that he can just go, “yep, this spend equal those dollars and that was a brilliant move”. Because you look and they have everyone, not only in moto but in MXGP and in Moto GP and it's everywhere, right? And I think that's much, much more passion based than it is dollars and cents based. In my personal opinion, they could roll back a bunch of spending and still sell as much. They just wouldn't be winning everything. And I really think that's what it comes down to, is they want to win. They want the best guys in their product. And it's commendable. I don't know if it's always the most efficient plan. That's not for me to decide, but it's commendable.

Vital MX: With growth comes new marketing avenues. You've always done magazines and there's the podcast like Steve Matthes at PulpMX. In 2018, WPS partnered with Feld and Monster Energy Supercross. That was a big, big deal. What are the pros and cons of that type of advertising? I have to assume it's very expensive. Is it primarily to get eyes on the branding?

JT$: Yeah, there's a lot to it. You know, the side is absolutely about dealer business. For the average consumer, it's irrelevant. They don't even need to know who WPS is. But when you have 10,000 or more active dealers around the country, probably a much higher number than that, some of these dealers are smaller, but there's a ton of these dealers across the country. Well, they have a decision to make on a lot of products because we offer a lot of the same products that our competitors do. That dealer and whoever's behind the counter that's going to order parts for his customer, he has to decide who he's buying those from. Is he going to buy them from us or he's going to buy from one of our other competitors? We're trying to win over that business. We're trying to make him as familiar and as comfortable with racing as humanly possible. So that's where you see not only us, but Parts Unlimited before us really push that side because we want those dealers to know as much as possible about us, and we also want them to see us supporting this sport and hopefully driving customers into their door and creating door swings for them. So that's really the distribution side, you know, the racing side, obviously we're trying to sell products to dealers and consumers hand in hand. 

Vital MX: Every year or two you guys try to evolve a line or a particular product. The BOA system came out, the revolutionary Formula helmet came out. Talk about making changes and upgrading products and how long it takes. A consumer might say, “why doesn't fly racing make X”? What are the ins and outs?

JT$: Thankfully we have probably the widest line in the sport, and I say that pretty confidently. I think our CFO and our CEO probably look at us and shake their head because our SKU count is so high at times, but we truly want to do the best job we can to service dealers and consumers. And we're constantly looking at the line and saying, “What are we missing? Where in this line can we be better? And what are we not offering”? And you try to constantly improve those things and then add products. We've been doing that. We see a huge opportunity for us to improve in the protection game. So that's where a ton of our focus has been. We're really pushing hard to get products to market and it's really, really difficult right now. We are launching this Revel Lite chest protector, which for most people it's going to be an under protector. Think very minimalist, form fitting, but also CE Stone Shield protected. So, you get that hard shell. But it's built to be under jersey and for no one to know you have it on, that's really the goal of this thing. And if you see the Supercross guys out there now, they're all wearing something like this. For years it was the Alpinestars’ A1, which is really kind of our inspiration for it being as transparent as possible. We're trying to get products, but it is so difficult from all the problems that started from COVID that are still lingering. We were supposed to launch that thing August of 2021, and we're just now bringing it to market this week. So that's the kind of challenges we're dealing with. But to answer your question, the things we're kind of working on, we always look at a cross section of demand and what do we feel like we're missing? What are we being asked for? We always are examining the competition. What are they doing? Well, where are there holes in the market? And right now, we really feel like protection is something that we could do a much better job on. 

Vital MX: The VIP program that you ran at Supercross, that was your baby, your idea, if I'm not mistaken. Will it be back?

JT$: Yes and no. It was actually more the Butler Brother’s MX team years ago. It was their idea. I just took it and ran with it. I need to give them credit on the conceptual part. I just took it and tried to make it into something really, really big. I've had to make all kinds of adjustments and things to it because of COVID. The Butler Brother’s MX team, which was Rocky Mountain KTM, and I don't even know what's going on with it now. There have been a ton of challenges with that team. Fly Racing is no longer affiliated. Western Power Sports is no longer affiliated. So that got really messy, and I just couldn't continue on there doing that anymore. But I've been moving forward with it as much as I can. And for me it's trying to offer people a better experience on race day, right? Show them things they normally wouldn't get to see. I'm basically a sponge all day for them to bounce questions off and to get insight. We have a track walk opportunity and a lot of these guys instead of being on the other side of the fence, let's get a little bit more insight. Let's ask all the questions you never got to ask before. Let's get you as much behind the scenes access as possible. And thankfully the riders have all been super gracious. I'll introduce them to riders and all that stuff. But yeah, it is still going and something that I'm still very, very passionate about.

Vital MX: Recently, the Arrowhead Engineered Products Group bought out Western Power Sports. With change comes good things, probably some bad things, but what do you see the future as for WPS and Fly Racing?

JT$: I think we're still going down the same path. A lot of the same people are there. We all have the same goals. But yeah, anytime there's an acquisition like that, you go through a transition phase, which we're still working through. How do they want things done? Because it's their company now. Of course, we still want to improve brands, sell more products, serve customers, serve dealers. None of that changes, but it's more of the day to day stuff like policy change. And we have more meetings now, which is good. We have more communication, but structurally things are different, and a lot of that stuff doesn't matter at the end of the day, as far as business goes. It's just kind of annoying at the time because there's a lot of uncertainty like, who do I talk to at HR now? And our insurance is changing, stuff like that. Does it matter for anyone else? No. But for us, it's a lot of change. Every day is a new dynamic, but we've kind of worked through all that. The biggest thing is we have a company that is very invested in us continuing to grow. We've had really, really positive conversations about how we can take things to the next level and not only continue the growth path, but let's grab a gear. Let's be better than we were before because the company that bought us is really well capitalized. So that gives us opportunity, right? We can go after riders that maybe we weren't able to before, or we can invest in new categories that maybe we weren't able to before. So, you have to look at every part of the equation. Now, is it tough at times when you have change internally? Sure. Max Steffens just left, who is one of my best friends and has worked there since before I was there. Terry Baisley, retired. Craig Shoemaker was our former owner. Obviously, he's no longer there. Those things are a bummer, no question about it. But you have to look at what are the silver linings, what are these opportunities going to allow us to do that we couldn't do before and make the most of it because it wasn't a negative dynamic. When Terry left, we had the best sendoff party, and he was there for 25 years. You know, he did everything that he could have ever set out to accomplish. So, you can't be sad. You just have to understand that this is the natural progression of things. And this change was what was necessary to kind of take WPS and Fly Racing to the next level and allow us to realize what our true potential could be.