XtremeX Wasn't Supposed To Happen

XtremeX wasn't born from a business plan, a market study or some grand ambition to build a supercar company. It started almost by chance on the drive home from a family holiday in Taupō.

A friend of mine had been badly injured in a motorcycle accident. On the drive home with my wife and kids, I made a decision: that was it. The bike was going.

There was just one problem. Motorcycles were what I did with my weekends. If the bike went, what was I going to do instead?

My first solution was beautifully simple: buy a nice car.

Then curiosity took over.

I found a broken one advertised for around $80,000 and thought that was surprisingly achievable. Then I looked at what a working Lamborghini cost. Around $150,000.

And somehow my immediate conclusion was:

After another twenty or thirty minutes of thinking about it, I had to admit she probably had a point. It was a lot of money to spend on something that could spend most of its life sitting in the garage.

So I ruled the idea out.

Briefly.

One thing ADHD has always meant for me is that once a problem or idea gets into my head, I tend to keep pulling it apart and looking for another way to make it work.

And then came the thought that changed everything.

What if we built something around it? A business that gave people the opportunity to experience a real supercar without having to own one.

That was the moment the idea for XtremeX was born.

Before The Lamborghini, There Was A Maserati

Turning the idea into a real passenger experience was considerably harder than simply buying an exotic car.

The early days were full of roadblocks: commercial insurance, vehicle and driver compliance, understanding the legal framework for operating on the road, and a long list of details we had never needed to think about before.

Our first attempt was a Maserati GranTurismo S — a 4.7-litre V8 Italian exotic that looked like it could be the perfect starting point.

Unfortunately, during the compliance process we discovered that the Maserati could not be made to work for what we needed.

That left us with a fairly simple problem:

We had reached the point where we either stopped before we had properly started — or doubled down and found another way.

Then The Customers Arrived

We were a completely new business with no reputation to fall back on. Back then, we felt we had to do everything possible to show people that XtremeX was genuine and that they could trust us.

So we went all in.

Our original experiences were around an hour, and we operated almost door-to-door — carefully planning each booking so we could finish one experience, drop the customer off and still have enough time to reach the next.

It wasn't the most efficient operating model we would ever create, but at the beginning efficiency wasn't the only goal. We were trying to win trust one customer at a time.

For the first two weekends, we were fully booked — essentially eight-hour days on both Saturday and Sunday.

And naturally, Wellington chose those same weekends to give us some of the worst weather we could have asked for.

The customers were fantastic. People had booked, they were excited, and they still wanted to go ahead.

The Business Started To Take Shape

Those first weekends taught us a huge amount.

From the beginning there was constant reflection: what worked, what didn't, what customers actually wanted and what we could do differently next time.

The original one-hour experience began to evolve. We eventually introduced our first shorter ride at around 15 minutes, and over time the way XtremeX operated became more focused, practical and sustainable.

What had started as a way of making a Lamborghini ownership idea make sense was becoming a real business.

The Gallardo would go on to create plenty of stories of its own — including the slightly embarrassing story of how I accidentally bought the red one when I thought I was buying the white one.