Following years of hard work and little pay, entrepreneur Benjy Steele and his namesake business are finally going hog wild.
By Justin McElroy
HQ 53 | AUTUMN 2004
When Benjy Steele says he has a big family, he means it. However, Benjy’s family is not just counted in aunts and uncles, but in a cheering sea of green and white, in a Little League team enjoying a pile of barbecue, and most centrally, in the roaring chrome of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, upon which Benjy Steele has built a life, a legacy and a family.
Steele got his first taste of the Harley lifestyle from his Uncle Billy, who would give the pre-teen Steele rides through the Monaville, West Virginia coal camp where his mother was raised. Steele’s mother was staunchly opposed to the practice, which, of course, made it that much more irresistible. Though he had a passion for bikes, Steele was not allowed to own one while he lived underneath his parents roof. He put the thoughts of the Harley lifestyle aside while he pursued higher education, picking up his undergraduate degree in Social Studies and a master’s in Special Education from Marshall University.
His schooling complete, Steele got his first job in teaching. Steele, who jokes that he “attempted to walk on to the Marshall football team, and was run off,” also took up coaching duties. He used his first paycheck to buy a motorcycle. The year was 1977.
During his teaching career, Steele spent much of his free time restoring classic cars and motorcycles. So in 1987, when Harley-Davidson began looking for someone to replace the Tri-State dealership that had gone out of business two years prior, everyone thought he was the perfect man for the job. Everyone but Steele.
“They started trying to recruit me, but I wanted somebody else to get the dealership so I could do paint work for them on the side,” said Steele. “I just didn’t know the motorcycle business. I knew motorcycles, but I sure didn’t know business.”
But Steele decided to give it a try, and proceeded to endure months of interviews and background checks with Harley-Davidson. Finally, in the middle of teaching his 7th grade geography class at Lincoln Junior High School, Steele received the phone call that he would be flown to Milwaukee the next day to be awarded the Harley dealership.
Soon after receiving the call, Steele found a 6,000 square-foot building in which to start his business. Though the building had been the victim of fire and roof collapse, Steele was happy – he had his own space as well as $53,000 he had obtained by selling or mortgaging almost everything he owned. To put it lightly, the dealership did not do well at the outset.
“It was terrible, just terrible. Harley-Davidson allocated motorcycles, which at that time was controlled by market share in the area,” Steele explained. “Our entire allocation that first year was 19 motorcycles. To put that in perspective, there was a Saturday last year where we sold 19 motorcycles in one day.”
Adding insult to injury, at the end of the 1988 model year, 11 of those bikes were still gathering dust on Steele’s showroom floor. Steele had just two paid employees during those dark days. At the time Steele was not collecting a paycheck and neither was another full-time staffer – his mother. Surprisingly, the staunch motorcycle prohibitionist was supporting her son’s new business venture.
“She was just a great mom,” Steele said. “Although she didn’t want me riding motorcycles, she respected that my passion was so strong. I guess if I had taken up alligator wrestling my mom would have supported me. She was just that way.”
In the first 10 years of Benjy’s Harley-Davidson, it was purely a labor of love. Neither he nor his mother garnered a paycheck in the establishment’s first decade, with Steele relying solely on his teaching paychecks to get by.
” There were times when I had to sell my own motorcycles just to pay the water bill,” Steele said. “So we don’t talk about the ‘good old days.’ They were days, but there wasn’t anything good about them.”
There was bit of good news in this era – Steele met his wife, Kelly, and to hear him tell it, it was a match made in hog heaven. “Yeah, that’s how we met. There’s a silver Fat Boy in the museum, and it’s pretty special in the fact that it was the first year of the Fat Boy, a very collectible motorcycle. It’s pricey, but it’s not for sale because it’s the one Kelly and I started dating on.”
But just when things began to pick up for Benjy, tragedy struck. In 1997 his mother passed away, the victim of an inoperable brain tumor. The woman who had been so opposed to the bikes when Steele was a boy left a large hole in the Harley dealership.
“Anytime you lose somebody that dynamic, like my mom was, and who watched it grow from the very beginning, they’re always kind of ingrained there. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t go looking in a file folder and find, you know, something my mom did. It’s tough, but I know there’s a Harley angel up there watching over us.”
In the way that tragedy and elation so often mix, however, Steele found out the week after his mother’s diagnosis that his wife was pregnant with their second child. With neither his mother nor his wife able to watch the store during the day, Steele figured it was time to give up his teaching career and throw himself into the dealership full time.
Steele’s undivided attention was not the only addition to the Harley-Davidson dealership. In 1998, inspired by a Cleveland, OH Harley dealer, Steele added a 50s-style diner to Benjy’s Harley-Davidson’s arsenal of attractions.
“The biggest thing was it brought people in who never would have come otherwise,” Steele said. “Let’s face it, we’ve got an awful lot of customers who really like our barbecue, really like our hot dogs, and have absolutely no intention of ever riding a motorcycle.”
Rather than being perturbed that people would come to his Harley-Davidson dealership solely for the chow, Steele seems gleeful when the diner is brought up, thrilled to have his extended family of customers grow by any means necessary.
And grow it has. By any standard, Benjy’s diner was a huge hit, drawing scads of foot traffic to the dealership, but Steele wanted more.
Benjy’s Harley-Davidson expanded once more in 2003 with a free Harley museum open to the public, which Steele believes could be the best private collection of motorcycles and motorcycle art in the country. The little 6,000 square foot “dealership that could” has grown to 66,000 square feet and now encompasses an entire city block.
One of downtown Huntington’s few business success stories, Benjy’s has seen substantial growth over the last decade in all phases of operation – new and used motorcycle sales, service, parts, accessories, clothing and the diner.
The dealership is rated #1 in customer satisfaction for its district, a key factor to its phenomenal growth. Steele says the majority of his customers come from a 100 mile radius, but adds that as much as 20 percent of his sales come from customers across the United States who value the entire “Benjy’s Experience.”
Perhaps the largest branch of Benjy’s extended family is the Marshall football team and fans, which thrill at every home game to Steele’s custom buffalo Harley roaring across Joan C. Edwards Field. Steele says the unique practice actually got its start as an “in-your-eye” from Coach Bob Pruett.
“[Marshall] was playing in the MAC Championship, and they kicked us out of our home locker room because we were technically the visiting team, and Coach Pruett just went nuts,” said Steele. “He wanted to do something to get the fans and the team fired up, and he called me on my cell phone. I was delivering a load of bikes to Atlanta, but I said ‘Coach, I’ll be there.’ So we did it, Marshall won, and because he’s a pretty superstitious guy we’ve been doing it ever since.”
From motorcycle enthusiasts to Marshall fans to people who just like a good meal, there are few in the region who haven’t been touched in some way by “Benjy’s Harley-Davidson.”
To put his success in perspective, Steele’s original $53,000 investment was surpassed three times over by his most recent T-shirt order. Whether or not all those T-shirt buyers will also buy a motorcycle, it’s obvious that Steele wouldn’t have it any other way.
“You know, to me, the biggest family is our customers. We’ve got 250 people out there eating barbecue on a Friday night,” said Steele. “It’s a lifestyle, it’s a family. Everybody’s got something in common, and that’s the motorcycles and the passion for them, just like what’s always driven me.”
