Twin success Brothers lock onto American Dream

Anger, desperation, bull-headedness, determination, persistence … times two.

The elements needed in pursuing the American dream, according to Adam and Eric Xavier.

And if you’re trying to turn the motorcycle-security industry on its head, add physics and metallurgy.

One thing not mentioned in pursuing the American dream is to stock up on ramen noodles and water. You just might need a steady diet to survive. The Xaviers can attest to that.

The brothers Xavier, fraternal twins, are responsible for inventing RoadLok, a motorcycle lock that stays attached to the bike, unlike other motorcycle locking devices.

They call it an M-I-D, or motorcycle immobilization device. Their headquarters is in a nondescript building in a fringe warehouse/residential section of Middletown.

The one phenomenal aspect of the device is the speed at which it was created, developed and brought to market less than a year. The way they did it is a bit mind-boggling and yet makes perfect sense when dissected.

That was good enough for Eric. He quit his job.

“The only reason I wanted to go to Orange County was because of the OCC guys,” Eric said, referring to the TV-famous and constantly fractious Teutul family of Orange County Choppers.

With no plans and no place to live, the fresh-faced young men packed up the jeep and headed south.

Along the way, they stopped at a gas station and picked up a paper looking for a place to rent. They chose Middletown simply because of its name “it was in the middle of everything.”

With a room rented, the next order of business was to open a bank account. Rolling into the parking lot on their motorcycles, they encountered another biker who wanted to talk to them once they were done with their banking. They emerged from the bank and the stranger says, “You guys seem pretty smart, I have an idea for an invention. Car alarm with cameras.” He figured with our college experience we could help him patent it,” Adam said. But before he talked about the invention, he wanted to go riding with them that night.

He was supposed to meet them at 5 p.m., but didn’t show up until 7 p.m., walking his motorcycle. The whole front rotor was bent. “He said he was so excited to go riding that he forgot to take the lock off,” Adam said. Repairs would cost about $700.

So, over the next few weeks while the brothers talked to him in his driveway about his invention, they drew on a napkin what would be the RoadLok prototype.

The damage to the motorcycle “put it in our face,” Eric said. “It was actually anger: How come nobody can make anything that doesn’t damage your bike? We were mad about it. That’s why there’s the old saying, ‘if you want something done right, do it yourself.’ So Adam and I did it ourselves.”

Rent, school and car loans also became pressing matters.

“Everybody invents something in their lifetime; we had desperations,” Eric said. “We would do whatever it took to get where we had to go.”

Whether that meant Adam spending a couple hundred hours drawing up the original business plan or writing their own patent applications, they were determined to do it.

They also realized they needed a steady stream of income to just get by and pay the bills. Eric went first, taking a job at Men’s Wearhouse in Nanuet. It was for the summer. He quit three days after Adam got hired as a financial analyst at Alliance Capital Management in White Plains.

The brothers formed a limited liability company and named it New Hampton Technologies. The name made it real.

“We had the attitude to treat it like a big company,” Eric said. “When I quit and he went to Alliance, I developed the business plan more. When Adam quit Alliance at the end of October ’05, I got a job as director of marketing for a software company in Chestnut Ridge.”

He did double duty, developing a branding campaign for the company and launching its new software platform and working to attract investors for RoadLok Security.

There were some nights the Xaviers sat in their apartment wondering if they were going to succeed. They agree the winter of 2005 was the most depressing.

Earlier that summer, they had sent an application for funding to an angel network in Troy. They never heard back; the reason was the application was sent down to Robert Hannan, managing director of the Orange County Capital Development Corp. (OCCDC), who was starting an angel network in the county. Hannan had sent an e-mail to Eric in September, but it went to his junk folder and he never saw it (Hannan later told him about it).

In December, the brothers were desperate and wrote to every investor they could think of, including Warren Buffet. His typewritten reply is locked away.

The Xaviers and Hannan finally did hook up in December and were put in touch with John Galanti, president and co-founder of Hudson Valley DataNet.

“Everybody at the show went wild for it,” Eric said. “It was 100 percent product acceptance.”

The brothers returned home. They still didn’t have a partnership with Abloy yet, their lock manufacturer.

“Hannan wanted us to present to the entire angel network, his guys, about 23, 24 investors. A lot of work to do. We dove right in,” Eric said.

And they kept their wits about them.

“We realized early on and it’s in our first business plan in order to get this validated in the marketplace, especially since it’s a new technology, after you get over the education of why it’s different, then we have to validate it. We realized we needed an endorsement from an insurance company,” Adam said.

The reason GEICO Insurance Co. “endorses us is because you can’t damage your bike with it,” Eric said. “It’s the reason we invented it in the first place. There’s this other aspect, when you have a disc lock that comes off the rotor you have a compromise; if I’m going to lock my bike I need to carry this big disc lock. The compromise is if I leave it home, then I can’t lock the bike.” Pointing to the mechanism, he says, “This is always there. It takes away the compromise. So insurance companies like it. It’s always on the wheel.”

The Xaviers say it’s the first time a lock is being endorsed by an insurance company. In turn, RoadLok offers a discount to buyers insured by GEICO.

Motorcycle thefts increase each year by 4 percent on average, Adam said. RoadLok is trying to slow down the opportunity theft.

As far as seeing the impact on thefts, Adam said, “That’s tough for the first couple of years. Until we can get data. The National Insurance Crime Bureau, they lag by a year with data. Where we are going to see an immediate impact is on insurance claims for damage on attempted theft. We should see a decrease in the claims on that.”

“I don’t think it was a very appealing market,” Adam said. “We have 1,700 different kinds of motorcycles. Typically, they don’t have components across the brand that are the same.”

The lock the brothers developed for the Harley is created by a caliper manufacturer, Georgia-based Hawg Halters Inc., known in the industry as HHI.

“That’s where our partnership came into play; HHI is one of the best caliper manufacturers in the Harley market.”

The brothers built it in a way to make it as mass marketable as possible.

“I just don’t think the other manufacturers got that far or just had the desire,” Eric said.

“Think about the way the market has been going with security. Eric and I have always been security-minded because of our father; we always look at ways to protect our own things. When we sit down and look at a motorcycle, we have a different way of looking at things.” Their father, Daryl Xavier, domestic sales manager at RoadLok, was a police officer in their hometown of Ovid and later retired as a police chief from a town near Rochester.

Orange County Choppers puts the locks on their motorcycles. “OCC bought a licensing kit from us. Our engineers set up the parameters and they can design them anyway they want, but they have our pieces and kit and keys inside it,” Eric said.

The brothers designed every aspect of the lock and keys and even chose the metals to manufacture them.

“Adam and I aren’t formally trained in Web site design, engineering, physics,” Eric said. “But we do know how to educate ourselves, because we went to college. With this, Adam educated himself in metallurgy. He can tell you anything about any alloy related to aluminum, boron, whatever titanium. He went to libraries, the Internet, called metallurgists … that’s how he figured out the exotic metals we use in this.

“Adam also taught himself about machining, when a machine comes in to cut this stuff Adam knows about tolerances.

“We came to the table with everything covered: how we’re gonna brand it, how we’re gonna finance it, all the way down to its actual physical engineering in that cylinder. We had everything, soup to nuts. And that’s why it went so fast with the funding.”

They don’t have any idea if it relates to their being twins; however, Adam offers that it does involve the idea of physics and spatial relationships.

“And we don’t understand why we have a grasp like that. A lot of people look at us and say we couldn’t have designed this,” he said.

“They see our credentials,” Eric said, and “they’re like, ‘Which one of you guys is the engineer?’ Naturally, we hire engineers now, but what they do is the computer side of stuff. We actually have to sit with the engineers and lead them through this as why it has to be this way. Initially, they say, that’s not possible.” The brothers let the engineers mull the concept and after a couple of hours they relent and agree it’s the correct way.

Eric drew the initial lock on a napkin and then gave it to Adam to make it practical for an application. RoadLok was simple; the name came from a traffic jam, as in the road is locked up.

“Everything about it came from us,” Eric says. “The way the pin works, even into the design as why it has a groove all the way around it; so if you put a drill on it, this thing just spins a hundred miles an hour and won’t even come out. And when you get the cap off, there’s internal pieces to prevent more drill attacks. The whole idea behind the engineering of it was us.

“The development of spatial relationships; when you’re an infant and you start interacting with your surroundings you become aware of yourself and space and time. We shared a womb for nine months, and when there’s somebody in there you get very aware.”

“You actually have physical contact months before a normal human,” Adam said. “Yeah,” Eric said, “with things other than an umbilical cord. There’s no real reflex action when you’re in the womb because it’s just the umbilical cord. With him and I there was a lot of kicking,” he said and flexed his arms in defense. “So we’re very aware of physics and spatial relationships and that sort of thing.”

Taking the twin aspect a step further, Eric said, “One of our biggest advantages, if you ask any of our 13 investors why they believed in us to give the ultimate contribution the wallet I think a pretty common answer is we’ve got each other … They also liked the fact that neither of us is married or have girlfriends.

“I don’t get involved in the finance, that’s his world, it’s a different animal than marketing. We have a support structure with ourselves. If he’s down about something, I’ll bring him up and vice versa. That’s what we have that not a lot of startups have. A lot of startups are just one guy trying to do everything.”

“When you try to explain to them why this little tiny pin will stop their big bad Harley (from moving), it’s kind of hard. It’s impossible to do any damage to this (pin) with any motorcycle produced,” Eric said. “It’s simple physics,” said Adam.

Since it was released to the public on Dec. 2, more than 1,000 units have been sold, mostly via the Web site, www.roadlok.com.

Since Harleys are different from sport bikes, Adam built their product into the caliper. Not being caliper makers nor wishing to be, the brothers enlisted the help of HHI to make the item. They now have four pending patents and seven trademarks.

The presented their business plan to the Orange County Angel Network in May 2006 and received a second round of funding. They say without the OCCDC they wouldn’t be at the point they are now.

And although they’re not offering specifics, the brothers say they have seven or eight other ideas around which companies can be built.

“We chose this one first because it would require the least amount of capital and would be the easiest and fastest to get to market,” Adam said. “We became a globally recognized brand in nine months.”

They say that they are going to grow their Orange County operation exponentially and eventually want to sit on the angel board and invest in other businesses.

“It’s the American dream, but doesn’t seem real yet,” Eric says.