We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cory Fourniquet a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cory, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

Drive and passion with an end goal in mind.

I have found in my corporate career, and now my time as a small business owner, that you cannot move forward and progress without drive and passion. They go hand in hand.

You cannot be successful by accident, in my experience, we just are not that lucky. We all dream of hitting the jackpot someday and living off the interest on some faraway island, but life does not deal many people that hand. To that end, to be successful you must have the drive to make it toward a goal. Even in the jackpot scenario, you would be required to put in the effort of buying a ticket. Having drive just means you make the most of situations around you. Put forth effort when others are not. Look for opportunities in underserved areas and make the most of them.

Whatever industry, career, or situation you find yourself in, have a definable goal. Make sure progress toward that goal can be measured as it will help keep that drive alive inside of you. As you work towards the goal, celebrate little victories. Enjoy the ride.

Passion is what helps when drive is not enough. Passion is what motivates you to keep pushing when circumstances might say otherwise. I have found, even in my dream of reviewing cars every week, it is my passion that makes it worthwhile. What is the phrase? “Find a job you love and you will never work a day in your life.” While I cannot say that is a completely true statement in its literal sense, it does capture the sentiment well. I love what I do. I have loved cars since I was nine years old. Getting to discover the latest and greatest vehicles in the industry and share them with other future automotive journalists brings me great joy. However, in order to make the fun stuff work, paperwork, reports, and administrative things must take place. It is my passion for cars that fuels me through the doldrums of admin work when I really just want to be behind the wheel of something new and fun.

To be successful, have drive towards a goal that you are passionate about. The rest will fill in behind that.

Cory, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have loved cars ever since I saw my neighbor’s 1997 Chevrolet Camaro. It was a cool blue/green color that changed when the light hit it. The shape of the car looked like nothing else on the road. I asked my parents every question I could (in the pre-Google age) about what that car was. I bought books and stared relentlessly at pictures of the Camaro over the years. As I got older, I noticed there were other cool cars on the road too, so I started reading more about other vehicles. I subscribed to magazines. I obsessed over what my first car would be. My next car. The next one after that.

Through high school and college, I wondered how I would make a career over just loving cars. Would I design and engineer them? Would I sell them? Would I write for one of the magazines I subscribed to? Most of those options led me far from home here in Texas, mostly to cold climates that I did not want to call home. I went to college locally and earned my business degree. I found a nice career as a corporate analyst and quickly found all the coworkers I could talk cars with. After watching channel after channel rise from nothing on YouTube, I realized that I could start my own automotive outlet. It wouldn’t have to be much, but I could have fun with cars in my “free time.” After consulting and planning with my wife and a longtime friend, I started GT: Garage Talk in January 2020.

The pandemic proved an interesting time to start a business. In some ways, it leveled the playing field for my small outlet versus channels that had been around for years. Without travel, we were all reporting on new vehicles from our homes. The same information big outlets and magazines had was available to me, I just had to know where to look and what to do with it.

As my channel grew and the world started returning to some semblance of normal, I was able to attend events and get firsthand content. Car shows in Chicago, LA, and around the nation started making a big impact on my content, opening other doors for future work. Visiting dealerships to see what vehicles they had on their lots amid a supply shortage also allowed me to show consumers what was on the market and available to drive.

As we hit milestones of growth on my GT: Garage Talk YouTube channel, we celebrate. As we see tremendous growth on our Facebook page, we rejoice. Our Facebook page has outpaced the growth of our own YouTube channel and the Facebook pages of popular YouTube car reviewers with much larger audiences. I feel quite proud of the growth we have seen on both platforms but am really pleased with how Facebook has ballooned for us. I say us, meaning my wife and me. It really is just the two of us making GT: Garage Talk work at this point. It is our goal to close out 2023 as one of the largest independent automotive review pages on Facebook, and we are well on our way.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Starting my own business was certainly a big pivot point.

Growing up I did all the right things: good grades in school, a college degree, get a career. Big, bang, boom. Check, check, check. In fact, I was blessed to go straight from my internship during my last semester of college into a career. Not many get the blessing of finding what was an 11-year career right out of college.

However, the world was changing and so were my desires for how I spent my days. I wanted a career that would allow me to be with my wife and son more, and to see him grow up, and I was beginning to see how corporate life in a windowless cubicle would not fulfill that for me. I began discussing with my wife, brother, and longtime friend the possibility of starting an automotive podcast with the goal of reviewing new vehicles for a living. I began making connections with people in the industry and drawing the path to success. For over a year and a half, my dream job was actually my side job, as I continued on with my corporate job during working hours. When circumstances changed in mid-2021, my wife and I decided it was time to make the transition from GT: Garage Talk being the side hustle to the main focus of my days.

It was not easy, especially not for my wife, because at the time we took a pretty hefty pay cut from me leaving my job. Insurance for me and my son had to be found, expenses severely cut back, and more support needed to be given to my wife who was now the main provider of our family during the transition.

Here we are nearly two years later and we are seeing the fruit of the transition. It seems each new day opens a new door and opportunity. The best part of it all, I get to see my son grow up with my own eyes, not in video clips on my phone sent to me in text messages as I spend hours in a cubicle on how best to sell peanut butter.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I have mentioned it before, but starting a business from nothing in the middle of a global pandemic did not prove easy.

Sure, it leveled the playing field for some content from manufacturers, but it also limited the connections I could make and the expected content I could create. Even though magazines and larger YouTube channels were also relegated to the same level of digital assets I was, they already had large audiences that would forgive or understand the change in the direction of their content. I had to establish an audience from nothing while only having access to the same press images of vehicles that were provided to the established players in the industry.

I had to find new ways to engage with the audience I wanted to build. We did things a little differently. In the absence of the typical bracket challenge frenzy of March 2020, with the cancellation of the NCAA tournament, we created our own bracket challenge and let fans vote on their favorite dream car. We had a lot of fun matchups that first year, and learned a lot about making the bracket better for the next year.

We started a car show unlike any other that focused not on the shiny new cars, or the pristine collector’s cars, but rather on the daily drivers with dings from parking lot mishaps.

When we noticed that there was not a strong presence of any of the big YouTube channels on Facebook, we began to focus on building content for that platform. Many write off Facebook as a place for older audiences, but our audience is primarily under 45 years old, the key demographic many car companies are trying to reach.

For the life of GT: Garage Talk, we have had to adjust and pivot on the fly. We started solely as a podcast with weekly episodes, but have even changed that to a monthly release schedule with interviews from people throughout the automotive industry.

It is and will continue to be a learning experience as we grow and adapt over the years.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.gtgaragetalk.com
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/GTGarageTalk
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GTGarageTalk
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-fourniquet-b126a4150/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/GTGarageTalk
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/gtgaragetalk
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtgaragetalk