My Character, or lack there of......

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Brad@TheCorvetteShow

Gordon, thank you, you have been a friend to me since day one here and I can't thank you enough. You have been and always will be a class act, and my friend as trying as it can be at times.

Thank you brother.

What the hell are you trying to do!? Ruin my image?

Seriously though bro, thanks, and hang around.

If I dwelled on the past, and the mistakes I've made (personally, professionally, etc), I'd have sugar coated and eaten the barrell by now

You can't dwell my friend.

Dave Ramsey says' it best when he says "don't waste time worrying about things you can't change."

Unfortunatly, I've been both the victim of and in past times, the instigator of repetitive bitching and belittling. Not something I'm proud of, but I let my pride over ride my common sense, judgment and briefly, my honor

Through it all, the one thing I've found over the years is that repetitive belittleing is usually result of a smaller than average penis.

Thank God I Stopped when I did

Personally, I think you've aired it out more than sufficiently here.

Don't sweat it, and move on with your life.

Hang around, enjoy the aggravation and the addiction and don't let it ruin your holiday.

Take care bro.

Gordon

[gmjunkie]

Originally Posted by Shadow

What the hell are you trying to do!? Ruin my image?

Seriously though bro, thanks, and hang around.

If I dwelled on the past, and the mistakes I've made (personally, professionally, etc), I'd have sugar coated and eaten the barrell by now

You can't dwell my friend.

Dave Ramsey says' it best when he says "don't waste time worrying about things you can't change."

Unfortunatly, I've been both the victim of and in past times, the instigator of repetitive bitching and belittling. Not something I'm proud of, but I let my pride over ride my common sense, judgment and briefly, my honor

Through it all, the one thing I've found over the years is that repetitive belittleing is usually result of a smaller than average penis.

Thank God I Stopped when I did

Personally, I think you've aired it out more than sufficiently here.

Don't sweat it, and move on with your life.

Hang around, enjoy the aggravation and the addiction and don't let it ruin your holiday.

Take care bro.

Gordon

Been there,Done that!!

[vett boy]

This thread is about Character ,you must be an expert seein' how you izz one

[spiceman]

This is the kind of forum we have herein.
Plenty of friends, and certainly some fella's with an ear to lend. (and women with big ti....'s, )
Oh Lord got off the subject again.
Good to know the story, as the people you refer t will never see my business.
All too many times and especially in the high performance business where the extra dolla be spent, this kind of thing happens. Due dillgense my frind. And as a teacher, well rack this up to another learning lesson.
Best holidays to you, and THANKS by the way, for your intellect passed on to the children who trully need your understanding.

Spice

[Ms. AntiVenom]

Originally Posted by vett boy

This thread is about Character ,you must be an expert seein' how you izz one

Arent we all!

[Lou G]

Man, hell of a story. Sounds to me that you have come out of this stronger and a better person. My best to you and your family. And thank you for the work you do with children.

[zzzona]

quote: I also know to NEVER EVER do business with friends and to NEVER EVER take anything for free or in trade. That is a mistake I will not make again. There are no freebies in life, everything has a cost regardless...

AWW...that is not ALWAYS true....


WE LOST TOUCH BUT............
You can always pick up the phone and call me even though you moved to BFE......

MERRY CHRISTMAS..........

[RevXtreme 1]

I agree that it took alot for Brad to post this and allthough he is right on several points, I want to correct a few:

Brad did come and want to be a part of RevXtreme, but having no$ and having $400k invested myself, Brad offered to trade the computer service (which he was paid for) and help promote. The main skill was to post pictures on the forums as I did not know how. This worked fine for a while, but personality differences rubbed most of the employees & my wife the wrong way and faced with long term employees threating to leave if he was allowed to stay prompted the seperation. I had asked Brad to show me how to post pics in threads & he refused, so I read online how & after a 15 minute struggle, I found it was easy as heck. Brad did well with the computers, no issues there.

I still felt sorry for him having no money, so I did offer to help him & show him how to lap valves & assemble cycinder heads (Brad, you have the video....please post it so everyone can see how "I" did something wrong?) I laid everything out and gave him a demostration (again, any mechanic here can watch the video Brade made of the 2-3 valves I lapped and installed for him) of how to do it (not a hard job). I then watched and guided him through a few and he took it from there and when I came back and checked at times he seemed to have it. The problem with his motor I was told by other techs that helpped him later was he had not calculated valve to piston clearance and when starting the motor hammered the valves with the pistons and and that caused his head damage. I was not present, and had nothing to do with the assy of his block or bolting the heads on or assuring the proper pushrod length was used. I'm sure Brad feels it was all done right, but a motor is not something just thrown together and I lent him tools, (the cherry picker was our only one and he was allowed to use it for the weekend, it takes only a few hours to drop a motor in and when we did not have it back by Monday we were at a stoppage for paying customer cars....which is critical we get builds in & out as promissed). So that pretty much ended the relationship I tried to still be kind to him, but the employees refused to have him set foot back in the shop. We then had to rent one and pay the cost for several days to take care of our paying customers.

So nothing I did was detrimental to Brads motor, as the video will show. He assembled it, not anyone at RevX.

Next, Kyle Briese, our best tech at the time but with no tuning ability, when the december slow down came he was laid off for 2 weeks, and when called back to work when we picked back up he refused saying he had enrolled in school and could not work. I still allowed him to have a key and use the shop at night to do his side work (no shops allow a tech to do side work, but again, I felt bad as he was short on $ and even paid him to do some night work. So, he was never "fired". Every year before that I refrained from laying the techs off and paid them (out of my OWN pocket,) to come in and clean & basically work on their own cars and goof off as I had the $ and felt it the right thing to do. I also paid them for every holiday off, lent them $ when needed, paid them every sick day, and gave them unlimited use of the shop & dyno 24/7 at my expense as a fringe benifit. But after the economy took a down turn, and I lost everything in the realestate market (had fully leveraged 2 1/2 mil spec homes & 1 rehab and road the housing crash all the way down) as well as found that my partner at the time, who had not ever put a dime into the business but was in control until we parted with him scamming my wife & I out of a final $36,000, had been pocketing cash & not depositing it (employees witnessed it and have givn the statements....so far close to $180,000 is "unaccounted for" and the accountants are not finished with the paper trail as he controlled everything and I ran a professional race team and was mostly the financial backer. So that year I simply had no more money left to :donate" to every sad story that came my way (most know how I go to great expense to make a customer happy & when a tech screws up, yes..it happens to all, to stand behind it and make it right instead of telling the customer "tuff" as so many dealerships & shops do) so with no way to cover another full payroll for no work done Kyle was laid off, NOT fired. The only employee (and Brad was never an employee, but came by after school to work on advertising ideas...such as the name he gave us" RevXtrem Motorports, that we never adopted officially). The only employee fired was Ryan who was charged, tried, and found guilty of stealing in excess of $1500 from RevXtreme.

On the tunnel plate, Brad did talk the customer into buying the tunnel plate, but he bought it himself and sold it and took the commision and after the customer got the bill and came back to us with a thred on CF showing the same vendor Brad got it from was selling them retail for 1/2 of what Brad sold it to him for, we appologized and refunded him. So there was no "earned" commision with it turning out to give us a black eye.

The entire job ended up costing us a ton of money after it was done as he also bought a RPM trans and a Yank TC....but the Yank TC came with the wrong legnth snout the first time and took out the pump on the trans. RPM stepped up and covered it even though they showed us it was Yanks fault and they had battles going with Yank on this same issue (Yank had changed control and quality went down hill). We then sent the TC back to Yank, they told us nothing was wrong, and charged us the $200 fee plus shipping to inspect it, we put the new trans back in and it does the same thing. Take it all out again (at our expense) and RPM AGAIN (great service) fixes it but tells us they cannot back it if we use the Yank again. (BTW, the customer provided the Yank) We send the TC back, pay ANOTHER $200 pus to them telling us it is fine, do it one MORE time and the same thing happens so we fix the tranny out of our pocket, send the converter to FTI in Deland, they call us and tell us as sone as they clamped it in their converter lathe to cut it apart they see the snout is welded on not ture...and the snout wobbling had taken the trans pump out all those times. Yank refused to stand behind it and to this day we will NEVER buy another Yank, only FTI makes our converters. The point being, yes, Brad sold the build, but we lost $1,000's and had every car in the shop delayed weeks to make it right for the customer through no fault of our own (Rich knows how this is with World) so Brad is not to blame for any of that fiasco except the tunnel plate.

As far as "How I treated customers" I would like one example of a customer NOT being given service up & beyond shop norms, and at my expense every time.....NEVER while I have been in control, and thats since the fall of 07, spring of 08. How my ex partner may have done things was beyond my control as I was the investor and did not run things until when Brad came into our lives. I have spent $10's of thousands to correct and stand by anything done by the previous owners (I think some can recall the poster on here a year or so ago telling about his sons car that was blown up on our dyno by the "un named tuner" I have issues with....and how I reached in my own pocket and built him a new motor since it happend at RevX.)

On the tolls Brad did not return, I had no knowledge that Brad had asked to borrow them on the CF with our sponsorship in his name and only found out after the customer posted up that he lent "RevXtreme" the tools and they were never returned. I then found out by contacting him that it was Brad, and at that time we had CF remove Brads signature. As of a year ago, I was in contact with the gentelman to see how it turned out & he at that time stated it was still unresolved, but did not hold us responsible.

Bottom line is, My ex-partner who scammed us out of so much $ (yes, enough is documented to post in public so no slander...detective Mike Thorne was kept informed throughout the entire process when we tried to take legal action but it was determined since he was a partner it is a "civil" matter) and the owner of the Mafia Girl site who has staged a 2 1/2 year campaign to slander us along with our expartner after he talked me into doing on $6k plus heads/cam/FAST 90, 90mm Billet TB, TC, etc. on credit and he only paid $1700 of it, Brad has been active on that forum in that thread spreading lies as well for the past 2 years.

So does Brad really believe he did nothing wrong in his engine assy? Maybe, he was a enthusiest trying to learn...nothing wrong with that. But he assembled it with the exception of the 2-3 valves I lapped in showing on the video (again, please post the video Brad so we can all view it). Again, I'm told this second hand, but Greg from Antivenom can vouch for most of it as he was aware of what happend after Brad tried to get it running.

Does Brad think he did RevX a valuable service? I believe he does, but we are still bruised from the events and his not paying his full bill and the negative exposure with the tunnel plate & the tool fiasco. I do believe he had his heart in it and meant well, but when a business has over $20k a month to cover in costs before 1 dime is made, there is no room for blunders and employee discontent.

I have offered to Brad that if he goes back to the other forums and corrects and clears up the damage done, that all is forgiven and we go our seperate ways....but just a few months ago Brad psoted on the site that we had "stolen" a customers Z06 from him......a total outright lie that again caused us monetary damage along with his 2 years of other slander. He did delete it shortley after that when the former owner was contacted and told to set Brad straight. We facilitated the sale of it for the broke owner with one of our customers and to date the buyer has lived up to his agreement (although he has paid a few payments late, he always made it right).

If Brad makes an effort to correct the wrongs done, publically on the sites he has slandered us on we will NOT include him in the legal action and he can go his seperate way without any more hard feeling from us for the damage caused.

[spiceman]

Originally Posted by RevXtreme 1

I agree that it took alot for Brad to post this and allthough he is right on several points, I want to correct a few:

Brad did come and want to be a part of RevXtreme, but having no$ and having $400k invested myself, Brad offered to trade the computer service (which he was paid for) and help promote. The main skill was to post pictures on the forums as I did not know how. This worked fine for a while, but personality differences rubbed most of the employees & my wife the wrong way and faced with long term employees threating to leave if he was allowed to stay prompted the seperation. I had asked Brad to show me how to post pics in threads & he refused, so I read online how & after a 15 minute struggle, I found it was easy as heck. Brad did well with the computers, no issues there.

I still felt sorry for him having no money, so I did offer to help him & show him how to lap valves & assemble cycinder heads (Brad, you have the video....please post it so everyone can see how "I" did something wrong?) I laid everything out and gave him a demostration (again, any mechanic here can watch the video Brade made of the 2-3 valves I lapped and installed for him) of how to do it (not a hard job). I then watched and guided him through a few and he took it from there and when I came back and checked at times he seemed to have it. The problem with his motor I was told by other techs that helpped him later was he had not calculated valve to piston clearance and when starting the motor hammered the valves with the pistons and and that caused his head damage. I was not present, and had nothing to do with the assy of his block or bolting the heads on or assuring the proper pushrod length was used. I'm sure Brad feels it was all done right, but a motor is not something just thrown together and I lent him tools, (the cherry picker was our only one and he was allowed to use it for the weekend, it takes only a few hours to drop a motor in and when we did not have it back by Monday we were at a stoppage for paying customer cars....which is critical we get builds in & out as promissed). So that pretty much ended the relationship I tried to still be kind to him, but the employees refused to have him set foot back in the shop. We then had to rent one and pay the cost for several days to take care of our paying customers.

So nothing I did was detrimental to Brads motor, as the video will show. He assembled it, not anyone at RevX.

Next, Kyle Briese, our best tech at the time but with no tuning ability, when the december slow down came he was laid off for 2 weeks, and when called back to work when we picked back up he refused saying he had enrolled in school and could not work. I still allowed him to have a key and use the shop at night to do his side work (no shops allow a tech to do side work, but again, I felt bad as he was short on $ and even paid him to do some night work. So, he was never "fired". Every year before that I refrained from laying the techs off and paid them (out of my OWN pocket,) to come in and clean & basically work on their own cars and goof off as I had the $ and felt it the right thing to do. I also paid them for every holiday off, lent them $ when needed, paid them every sick day, and gave them unlimited use of the shop & dyno 24/7 at my expense as a fringe benifit. But after the economy took a down turn, and I lost everything in the realestate market (had fully leveraged 2 1/2 mil spec homes & 1 rehab and road the housing crash all the way down) as well as found that my partner at the time, who had not ever put a dime into the business but was in control until we parted with him scamming my wife & I out of a final $36,000, had been pocketing cash & not depositing it (employees witnessed it and have givn the statements....so far close to $180,000 is "unaccounted for" and the accountants are not finished with the paper trail as he controlled everything and I ran a professional race team and was mostly the financial backer. So that year I simply had no more money left to :donate" to every sad story that came my way (most know how I go to great expense to make a customer happy & when a tech screws up, yes..it happens to all, to stand behind it and make it right instead of telling the customer "tuff" as so many dealerships & shops do) so with no way to cover another full payroll for no work done Kyle was laid off, NOT fired. The only employee (and Brad was never an employee, but came by after school to work on advertising ideas...such as the name he gave us" RevXtrem Motorports, that we never adopted officially). The only employee fired was Ryan who was charged, tried, and found guilty of stealing in excess of $1500 from RevXtreme.

On the tunnel plate, Brad did talk the customer into buying the tunnel plate, but he bought it himself and sold it and took the commision and after the customer got the bill and came back to us with a thred on CF showing the same vendor Brad got it from was selling them retail for 1/2 of what Brad sold it to him for, we appologized and refunded him. So there was no "earned" commision with it turning out to give us a black eye.

The entire job ended up costing us a ton of money after it was done as he also bought a RPM trans and a Yank TC....but the Yank TC came with the wrong legnth snout the first time and took out the pump on the trans. RPM stepped up and covered it even though they showed us it was Yanks fault and they had battles going with Yank on this same issue (Yank had changed control and quality went down hill). We then sent the TC back to Yank, they told us nothing was wrong, and charged us the $200 fee plus shipping to inspect it, we put the new trans back in and it does the same thing. Take it all out again (at our expense) and RPM AGAIN (great service) fixes it but tells us they cannot back it if we use the Yank again. (BTW, the customer provided the Yank) We send the TC back, pay ANOTHER $200 pus to them telling us it is fine, do it one MORE time and the same thing happens so we fix the tranny out of our pocket, send the converter to FTI in Deland, they call us and tell us as sone as they clamped it in their converter lathe to cut it apart they see the snout is welded on not ture...and the snout wobbling had taken the trans pump out all those times. Yank refused to stand behind it and to this day we will NEVER buy another Yank, only FTI makes our converters. The point being, yes, Brad sold the build, but we lost $1,000's and had every car in the shop delayed weeks to make it right for the customer through no fault of our own (Rich knows how this is with World) so Brad is not to blame for any of that fiasco except the tunnel plate.

As far as "How I treated customers" I would like one example of a customer NOT being given service up & beyond shop norms, and at my expense every time.....NEVER while I have been in control, and thats since the fall of 07, spring of 08. How my ex partner may have done things was beyond my control as I was the investor and did not run things until when Brad came into our lives. I have spent $10's of thousands to correct and stand by anything done by the previous owners (I think some can recall the poster on here a year or so ago telling about his sons car that was blown up on our dyno by the "un named tuner" I have issues with....and how I reached in my own pocket and built him a new motor since it happend at RevX.)

On the tolls Brad did not return, I had no knowledge that Brad had asked to borrow them on the CF with our sponsorship in his name and only found out after the customer posted up that he lent "RevXtreme" the tools and they were never returned. I then found out by contacting him that it was Brad, and at that time we had CF remove Brads signature. As of a year ago, I was in contact with the gentelman to see how it turned out & he at that time stated it was still unresolved, but did not hold us responsible.

Bottom line is, My ex-partner who scammed us out of so much $ (yes, enough is documented to post in public so no slander...detective Mike Thorne was kept informed throughout the entire process when we tried to take legal action but it was determined since he was a partner it is a "civil" matter) and the owner of the Mafia Girl site who has staged a 2 1/2 year campaign to slander us along with our expartner after he talked me into doing on $6k plus heads/cam/FAST 90, 90mm Billet TB, TC, etc. on credit and he only paid $1700 of it, Brad has been active on that forum in that thread spreading lies as well for the past 2 years.

So does Brad really believe he did nothing wrong in his engine assy? Maybe, he was a enthusiest trying to learn...nothing wrong with that. But he assembled it with the exception of the 2-3 valves I lapped in showing on the video (again, please post the video Brad so we can all view it). Again, I'm told this second hand, but Greg from Antivenom can vouch for most of it as he was aware of what happend after Brad tried to get it running.

Does Brad think he did RevX a valuable service? I believe he does, but we are still bruised from the events and his not paying his full bill and the negative exposure with the tunnel plate & the tool fiasco. I do believe he had his heart in it and meant well, but when a business has over $20k a month to cover in costs before 1 dime is made, there is no room for blunders and employee discontent.

I have offered to Brad that if he goes back to the other forums and corrects and clears up the damage done, that all is forgiven and we go our seperate ways....but just a few months ago Brad psoted on the site that we had "stolen" a customers Z06 from him......a total outright lie that again caused us monetary damage along with his 2 years of other slander. He did delete it shortley after that when the former owner was contacted and told to set Brad straight. We facilitated the sale of it for the broke owner with one of our customers and to date the buyer has lived up to his agreement (although he has paid a few payments late, he always made it right).

If Brad makes an effort to correct the wrongs done, publically on the sites he has slandered us on we will NOT include him in the legal action and he can go his seperate way without any more hard feeling from us for the damage caused.

I'm just a dumb ole boy retired from Chevrolet G.M engineering, but I do know that Zora ran the Studio, and none of the engineer's had a say of WHO, When or Where. Secondly, were worked as TEAM player's. We NEVER talked behind the back of one another, and when a problem might come along, you voiced the problem, and Zora whould say OK it's out and said, now carry on and be rid of it NOW.
End of story. Most likely a shame for everyone. But tell you what , you got employee's runing your business? GET rid of them.
Spice

[RevXtreme 1]

Spice, you need to come down & do some consulting for me.....I AM to easy of a pushover for the employees and have never been able to be stract enough cause I'm always trying to please everyone. Serious, I'll trad work for knowledge!

Originally Posted by spiceman

I'm just a dumb ole boy retired from Chevrolet G.M engineering, but I do know that Zora ran the Studio, and none of the engineer's had a say of WHO, When or Where. Secondly, were worked as TEAM player's. We NEVER talked behind the back of one another, and when a problem might come along, you voiced the problem, and Zora whould say OK it's out and said, now carry on and be rid of it NOW.
End of story. Most likely a shame for everyone. But tell you what , you got employee's runing your business? GET rid of them.
Spice