The White Brothers’ headquarters sits in a Yorba Linda business park surrounded by green hills that taunt the off-road enthusiasts who work at the maker of motorcycle accessories.
But employees of White Brothers, which counts about $30 million in yearly sales, have to drive out to Riverside or San Bernardino to get their kicks. Their bikes wait in the beds of monstrous trucks with oversized mud tires in the company’s parking lot.
“You can’t ride around here,” said Tom White, founder and president of White Brothers.
At 51, White still takes the trip almost every weekend to race his motorcycle on the hills, dunes, and berms of Southern California’s low desert a few hours away.
His company makes and distributes aftermarket parts for dirt and street motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, personal watercraft and mountain bikes. White Brothers sells everything from clutch springs and air filters to its own apparel and sunglasses. The company recently received what it calls a multimillion-dollar investment from Prudential Capital Group and has been using the money to expand.
“It’s a hot industry right now,” White said.
White is in the process of spending close to $2 million on updating his 80,000-square-foot headquarters. He is spending about $1 million on a 1,000-square-foot lobby he calls “world class” and that is set to feature collector motorcycles and other memorabilia.
To handle a growing number of orders, White also is spending $600,000 on an automated conveyor system. White Brothers currently ships an average of 8,000 parts per day. The rest of the money is being used to expand the facility’s office space, which it bought last August.
“We have 24-foot-high ceilings and want to use every cubic inch of it,” White said.
White Brothers has three buildings in Orange County, one down the street from its headquarters and another in Anaheim. It also has a distribution facility in Louisville, Ky.
White got the money through an investment holding company, Yorba Linda-based Motorsport Aftermarket Group Inc., which received $39 million from Prudential Capital to put together a string of companies in the motorsport aftermarket industry.
Arnold Ackerman, who has formed similar holding companies bringing together separate businesses in specific industries, heads up Motorsport Aftermarket. In 1999, Ackerman’s firm and its partners created Kelmscott Communications, a consolidator of commercial printing companies, which acquired numerous companies.
The group now owns part of White Brothers, but White said his stake in the company still is “significant.”
“I wasn’t planning on bringing outside equity in,” White said. “What they wanted to do was accelerate our growth. We needed more money to take the next step.”
Rivals such as Parts Unlimited of Edgerton, Wis., and Tucker Rocky Distributing of Fort Worth, Texas, are much bigger.
Motorsport Aftermarket already has another company under its fold and is planning to acquire more, according to White. It may not have to look far.
“Orange County is a mecca for motorcycle performance companies,” White said.
Four of the five largest motorcycle makers,Kawasaki Motors Corp. U.S.A., Yamaha Motor Corp., Suzuki Motor Corp. and American Honda Motor Co.,have Southern California headquarters. And most of the industry and aftermarket manufacturers,along with race promoters and publications,are located in the Southland.
“It is great to be around so many other motorcycle companies,” White said.
Cobra Engineering, a manufacturer of exhaust systems for Harley-Davidson and other bikes, is moving into a building next door to White Brothers.
White himself is a former professional dirt track racer who started a research, design and custom motorcycle shop in Garden Grove in 1975. He eventually did research and design work for Yamaha and developed a product line for four-stroke Yamaha engine systems.
In 1981 he moved the company from Garden Grove to Stanton, where he bought a building. But for three years after that the company had no growth, White said. The motorcycle industry was just starting to get bigger and the young company did not have a lot of operating experience.
“We had to learn how to market, to put together a good catalog and mature our whole operation,” White said.
People were brought on to help with the company’s catalog, its staple for income, and an outside agency was tapped to handle advertising, he said.
“We sharpened up internal operations and had a better product mix. We began to grow rapidly again,” White said.
By 1982, the company had 10 employees and was pulling in a few million in revenue per year. This year, White said he expects the company to do $40 million in sales.
“The motorcycle industry is doing very well right now and (all-terrain vehicle) sales in 2000 were up more than 30%,” White said.
Last year, White brought in about 20 new workers to handle the growth and is expecting to hire 20 or 30 more this year. Company employees mostly distribute accessories, but some also make exhaust systems for motorcycles and also make forks for mountain bikes.
According to White, about 70% of his 145 employees regularly use the products they handle, whether it be mud tires for off-road motorcycles, suspensions for all-terrain vehicles, performance pistons for a personal watercraft, custom exhaust systems or performance forks for mountain bikes. n
