He Built A $300,000 Truck Brand With Zero Ad Spend And One Daily Habit | Chau Nguyen

Chau Nguyen (0:00)

I basically committed myself to literally three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, for years, for like seven years of posting, posting, posting, while building that following. Built a following, and it drove an amount of leads that you couldn't imagine. You couldn't pay for those number of leads, and we couldn't have paid for it anyway, because we didn't have the capital. The leads that come through organic are like three times more likely to make a purchase, because they already know us.

Tommy Mello (0:31)

Guys, welcome to The Home Service Expert. Today, I got a really special guest. This one's going to be fun. Chau wins with us. He sold his first company to Chag. His second was acquired by Seasoned, then bought a 1974 Bronco that kept breaking down on the I-85. His wife told him their kids couldn't ride in classic cars without modern airbags. That moment led him to build Vintage Modern, a luxury vehicle company doing $60 million in revenue.

He hand builds classic inspired vehicles on modern platforms, each one of them taking 900 hours of craftsmanship. His clients include LeBron James, Jennifer Lopez, Mark Wahlberg, and Kevin Hart, and Tommy Mello.

He has 4 million social media followers. Social media is his primary sales channel. He won EY Entrepreneur of the Year, which is absolutely phenomenal. Today, he breaks down how to charge premium prices for craft work, how to scale without losing quality, and how social media can replace your entire lead generation strategy. Chau, it's a pleasure to have you on, brother.

Chau Nguyen (1:32)

Thanks for having me, Tommy. That was quite the introduction. Great job.

Tommy Mello (1:37)

So talk to me about you built and exited two tech companies, and then you bought this old Bronco.

By the way, I think we've all bought a lot of old vehicles, and I think if anybody's like me, they've decided no more because they sit in the garage, they break down, they're always at the mechanic. But tell me about this moment in time that forced you to innovate.

Chau Nguyen (2:00)

Yeah.

I think the cool thing about this whole story is that I never intentionally set out to build a car company, but I always loved cars. And so I buy this old Bronco, and I went through this phase of cars where I bought old Land Cruiser, FJ40 Toyotas, old Defenders, old Mustangs, H1 Hummer. I kind of ran out of cool cars to buy that were modern, so I started buying old cars. And they all had kind of a similar problem. They all looked cool. They all had major problems. Things we take for granted, right? Like brakes and steering, things that you don't think about. And so I buy this old Bronco, looks really cool from 10 feet away. Everything about that truck, Tommy, was a massive headache and very different from a modern car. And so I broke down, leaked everywhere.

You mentioned, you know, it made my wife's hair smell like gas and her clothes smell like gas. And she's like, you got to get rid of this thing. And I didn't want to get rid of it because I just thought it was such a cool truck. And basically asked myself, why can't it just look classic, but operate like my Range Rover or G Wagon? Because if it could, I would pick that over any car any day of the week. And that's how it all started, just purely out of a passion and a problem. And so that's how it all started.

Tommy Mello (3:22)

So why, you know, talk to me about the early days. So you did a couple of episodes. Can we hear a little bit about those stories?

Chau Nguyen (3:31)

Yeah, a couple of what?

Tommy Mello (3:33)

The early days, obviously, you got chagged and then you got acquired by seasons. So how did you become an entrepreneur?

Chau Nguyen (3:44)

Yeah, I guess I watched my dad wake up every day at 4 a.m. and just grind it out. And he used to work for a big company. And then one day he decided to venture off on his own. And he did it on a much smaller scale. But I was just a witness to bootstrapped, scrappy, single entrepreneur guy. And I basically decided that that was going to be my life. And so I always had the dream of being an entrepreneur. And it is far less glamorous and way harder than I thought it was going to be. But at the end of the day, I'd rather be in control of my own destiny. And so that's what I did. So I started off as a coupon book company, turned mobile apps, built that to a top 100 app on the App Store, learned how to build technology, and didn't raise any capital. So I had to figure out how to do a lot with very little and be very resourceful and built one of the fast growing private companies called Canvas Special, which was a college focused media company turned technology company, and sold that to a publicly traded company in 2014