I left school at 15 and I came to America at the age of 19.

Well, eight weeks ago I didn’t know what a TED talk was,

and to be honest, I don’t know why I’m here today.

But I do appreciate the opportunity to be with you guys

and share my story, my journey, my hopes and my dreams.

And I, having left school at 15, you know, for me I didn’t really have any future.

Well, I came to America 28 years ago

and that represented the land for opportunity for me.

And in those past 28 years I’ve been able to build 3 things,

a successful clothing company,

a film location business,

and also a restored raced driven and collected quite a lot of classic Porches.

A Porsche is a passion for me

and I’ll talk about that in detail in a little bit.

But all 3 of those things share one common bond,

I had no education in them and I didn’t really think I would end up in that particular field.

I didn’t really know where I was going.

But all three of those things have a common thread, a common bond.

And that common bond for me really is freedom.

Freedom to do whatever I wanted to do

and dream sort of to be able to,

I suppose, uh, live my life to the fullest and do whatever I wanted to do.

So, coming out to America really was a journey, and I’ll start my journey in 1977.

1977 in England was sort of a special year.

We had this, uh, punk rock thing going on

and we also had this Royal Jubilee thing going on.

But for me, it was the start of a very memorable moment.

My father took me to the London Earls Court Motor Show in 1977.

And back then I fell in love with this car, it was a white Martini Porsche.

Now, any kid growing up anywhere in the world in the late 70s early 80s,

chances are you probably had a choice of 3 cars on your wall:

Porsche Turbo, Ferrari Boxer, or Lamborghini Countach.

For some reason I chose Porsche,

I even wrote a letter to Porsche when I was 10 years old.

And essentially said to them, hey, I want to design for Porsche,

And they wrote back to me and said, well call us when you’re a little bit older,

which I thought was pretty funny and they sent me a sales brochure

and 35 years later they’d end up writing me a letter back,

but I’ll get to that story a little later on.

So I’m this young kid growing up in Sheffield.

Sheffield was a grim northern steel town as shown by this picture right here.

You know, there wasn’t necessarily many Porsches on the road,

So I filed that dream away, I had the poster on the wall,

and I was watching Motorsports as a kid also in 1977.

England had the James Hunt, he was a Formula 1 world champion.

And we also had Barry Sheene, he was a two wheel motor GP champion back then.

So even though I didn’t grow up with any sort of fancy cars,

my father was a salesman, I grew up in a working class background.

I did have this dream early on, and somehow this dream involved Porsche.

I also, back then, was a pretty competitive middle distance cross-country runner,

sort of a solo sport guy, and I used to love getting out there and running.

I became quite competitive. I joined this club called the Ellen Show Harriers.

They had this guy called Sebastian Coe set quite a few world records,

and ran at the ’80 and ’84 world Olympic games

and he was sort of inspirational to me.

Around that same time, I also fell in love with something called heavy metal music.

Now growing up in Sheffield there are a lot of rock bands you know, may it being a sort of slightly depressed grim, northern city,

but there was a lot of music and a lot of fun.

So, fell in love with Porsche, doing some middle distance cross country running,

fell in love with heavy metal music,

and I decided at the end of the 5th year I would leave school.

I left school in 1982, basically with 2 O-Levels and no real future.

By that time, I’d also figured out I could go drink in a pub.

So for some reason that was great for going to clubs and having fun,

but wasn’t so good for a middle-distance cross-country runner athlete.

So that sort of faded away,

but there was the little thing that stuck with me was the passion and sort of the drive

and I think till this day, those memorable moments from earlier on are still with me.

I’m still running around, I’m still chasing around, I’m still running after my goal.

So, I bummed around on the dole for a little bit,

doing our jobs and stuff like that.

And, uh, I started to hear this comment quite a lot – cut your hair and get a real job.

Well I was on the dole working construction, living at home, no car, taking the bus places.

And for a year or two, that was okay.

By the time I turned 17 I decided okay,

I’m not gonna cut my hair, but maybe I should think about getting a job.

So I actually took a year longer in leisure and recreation study course sports management at a college.

And I heard about this thing called “Camp America”. Well what was Camp America? I didn’t know,

But apparently Camp America sent kids to work at a summer camp in the United States of America.

Growing up as a kid, of course, I watched a lot of American TV.

Most of the shows I loved centred around action and cars – Starsky and Hutch, Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPs.

So I had this American dream and it involved Evel Knievel .

And long story short I took a leap of faith and I applied to Camp America.

It was a little bit of a strange feeling, and I had these strange feelings in the past,

and somehow when my gut tells me to do something it generally is a good thing.

Go on your gut feeling.

So by pure luck I suppose I was accepted into Camp America, got on a,

a flight to New York, took a Trailways bus from New York,

that’s the bus I took, to Detroit. Now Detroit was great, it was somewhat similar to Sheffield,

former industrial city, also happened to the sort of, automotive hub of the United States.

But I wasn’t in Detroit, I was

30 minutes north on a summer camp working with, in a city,

underprivileged kids, that happened to be from Detroit.

Now that was a big culture shock for me.

Cuz you know, I’m this heavy metal guy from Sheffield, north of England,

I’m sort of in the middle of nowhere,

I had to adapt pretty quickly.

So I adapted pretty quickly on this summer camp

and when that camp was over, I got back onto that Trailsway Bus,

and took that bus out west.

I landed in Los Angeles, 1986, Union Station, 4am in the Morning.

You know, I’d watch all those TV shows but I found myself being awakened on a park bench at 6am in the morning

by a LAPD guy who told me you can’t sleep here.

And I was sort of a little bit disappointed, I’ve seen all these shows in and around LA but where are all the beautiful people?

Where are all the rock stars and movie stars?

That wasn’t happening in downtown LA.

But quickly I found my way to Hollywood and uh, over the next couple of years,

you know, I sort of did a few odd jobs,

but there was one pivotal moment that happened within 3 days of being in Los Angeles.

Found myself at this YMCA hotel right off Hollywood Boulevard.

I went shopping on Hollywood Boulevard and I saw these great PVC Alligator Print pants are on sale for $9.99.

So I bought myself a pair but didn’t really fit good.

So went back to the youth hostel, bought a sewing kit and sewed them inside out,

and decide I’m going to go to the street that everyone was talking about called Melrose.

So I ended up going down there to Melrose and walked into this shop that was called Retail Slut.

It was a punk rock shop and there was a guy working there that was in a band called Faster Pussycat.

His name was Taimie.

Pivotal part to a story here.

Taimie says to me,

he realized I was from England, struck up a conversation,

and said “where did you get those pants from?”

I said, “Hey,you know, I got them from England.”

I had to think quick on my feet.

I said, “Why? Do you want to buy them,” just sort of jokingly

and he said, “Sure. Yeah, how much are they?”

So this point I hadn’t thought about selling these pants but I said first number that came to mind, 25 bucks.

He said, “Okay. I’ll take eight piece.”

So I ran right up to Hollywood Boulevard, bought eight pairs of pants,

went back down and sold them to him $15 profit per pant.

I realized in that one hour transaction, I’d made more straight away, literally within being in LA for three days,

than I made in a whole week working construction in England.

So I thought, oh, maybe LA is a place for me, seems pretty easy.

They speak English, a lot of rock and roll.

It was Guns N’ Roses, Motley Crue.

It was a great time over the next few years.

Fast-forward to 1989.

I’m selling second-hand clothing on the Boardwalk in Venice,

going to Yard sales, buying old Levi’s, cowboy boots, Western shirts.

I am in the clothing industry now.

Venice Beach back then was a major tourist attraction, lot of European people coming through.

And little by little this grew into a business, which became known as Serious Clothing

and we ended up outfitting everyone from Alice Cooper to Madonna and everyone in between.

We started wholesaling a small chain called Hot Topic.

Back then Hot Topic had five stores and would grow to over 500 stores.

So we sort of went from making a little amount of clothing to making thousands of pieces of clothing.

Well, in 1994, we realized being in Venice wasn’t so easy for a clothing company.

We moved downtown and rented a loft in a warehouse for the next six years.

Serious Clothing then started doing a lot of music videos

and also a lot of outfits for magazines and stylists who call in all the time.

Serious Clothing had its own unique style.

We took fabrics that were not necessarily garment fabrics for use in car seat fabrics and made them into jackets and things like that.

Non-conventional materials thinking outside the box and basically doing what we like to wear.

Well, by 2000, we realized we paid two people’s mortgages and we needed, hey, let’s buy our own building.

So we ended up finding this building.

Oh, that was me back then, forgot that little picture.

So that was me pre-beard, that’s sort of circa 1994.

Serious was one of the top 10 clothing companies to watch.

So anyway, 2000, my wife Karen found this building in the Arts District.

People said, “You’re crazy. No one wants to be there former desolate industrial area.”

Well, long story short.

We took another leap of faith. It felt good in our gut feeling.

Why we’re paying two people’s mortgages when we could own our own building?

So we bought that building.

About a year later, right after 9/11 in 2001,

there was an article in the LA Times about lofter interpretation.

We got a phone call, would we be interested in renting the building for a music video.

Bang! Before you know it, we’re in the film location business.

Well, hey, we’ve been filming since 2001, over 100 days a year

doing things from low budget still shoots to big budget movies

and over a dozen reality shows like America’s Next Top Model.

So we met a lot of interesting people but we didn’t plan to build a film location.

We were building our dream, live, work house,

where we lived upstairs and operated our clothing company out of downstairs.

So we’d accidentally fallen into another somewhat lucrative business.

This is LA. It’s movie town.

We’ve met quite a lot of interesting people.

They always say, “How did you get here?”

Well, we tell them, “We followed our gut feeling.”

So remember that little story, I was a ten-year-old when I fell in love with Porsche.

So fell in love with Porsche as a ten-year-old,

I didn’t buy my first Porsche till 1992.

Serious Clothing had become quite successful from ‘92 to 2000.

I was racing around and getting quite a lot of speeding tickets.

2001, I took my aggressive street driving to the track and joined the Porsche Owners Club.

I went through their program, learned how to do club racing, instructing

and for the next five years, was doing 50 track days a year.

Turn around to probably 2008, 2009, I spent a lot of money raising an decided, okay, my next passion:

I love these cars.

Why don’t I try to restore a few of them?

Well, I didn’t’ have no mechanical background but I had passion.

I often talk about passion goes a long, long way.

You know, if you’ve got the will and the desire and put the motivation and a focus, things tend to happen.

Also a little bit of luck and a leap of faith really help out as well.

But I asked a lot of questions and I started restoring a couple of cars.

So I got a little bit of interest in European car magazines and I started this blog online.

Well, there is a thread on the Porsche forum called Pelican parts.

And I called my blog Porsche Collection Out Of Control Hobby.

And I was sort of like a catch-all of what I was doing.