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

Alright, Michael thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of being an entrepreneur or creative is the kind of crazy stuff that happens from time to time. It could be anything from a disgruntled client attacking an employee or waking up to find out a celebrity gave you a shoutout on TikTok – the sudden, unexpected hits (both positive and negative) make the profession both exhilarating and exhausting. Can you share one of your craziest stories?

I can still feel the heat and smell the smoke from this being branded in my brain! This was that time when I unequivocally knew that “we made it”. It was the opening day for media at the brand new (at the time) Circuit of the Americas or COTA as we call it. We were invited out by none other than tire giant Pirelli. And yes, every single big hitter in the automotive media industry was there and here we were banging it out with the big boys. The two most vivid memories for me were when one of the c suite guys from Pirelli stopped their entire parade from going onto the track to just let us drive the head vehicle right behind a Ferrari Enzo that we got to chase which as you can imagine a big “we made it” moment for us being recognized by the heads of Pirelli. The other memory and I still can’t believe this happened is when THE Mario Andretti drove Playboy Playmate Pillar Lastra and me around COTO in a 3 seater, Judd v10 powered F1 car. I specifically told Mario to NOT GO EASY on both of us since both Pilar and I come from racing backgrounds so you can push the limits with us. So you can imagine in my mind that was the definitive you have made it moment!

Michael, 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?

Well since I very young age I already knew that this was what I was going to do with my life and you were either on board or get the hell out of the way. Lucky for me my father is a gear head and my mother backed me 100% just as long as I did what I loved and put all of myself into it. That being said High Tech Corvette actually fell into my lap. I was at a car show talking about the details of the new Lamborghini Gallardo and seemed to unintentionally attract a crowd while talking about it. It was not long after that that Brian (the owner/founder of HTC) pulled me aside and said he had a job for me. At the time I had zero clue that he owned HTC and when he dropped the bomb on me I almost fell to my knee, and as the saying goes the rest is history. The services we produce are all in the automotive media realm. We do everything from covering racing of all types, car shows and what made us huge our girl reaction vids. Because of our size and reach we regularly get in the millions of views on vids and this has helped multiple businesses get their name out there in a huge way. Before TX2K was as big as it is today it only had a small following but after having their name on the intro and outro of a few of our girl videos the show started to grow at a rapid rate to where it is today!

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

At one point what is known at TX2K was a small gathering of like-minded high-horsepower individuals who brought out their cars to see who was baddest at the strip and on the streets. At the time TX2K have a fairly small gathering compared to what it is today. At the time 2K had only a few hundred people who would gather for the show and that’s when 2K reached out to be featured on some of our girl videos. Long story short because of the massive reach we got on our girl vids the eyes that were put on 2K made the show grow into what it is today where thousands and thousands regularly show up to the event.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We built our audience all natural! Believe it or not, we were able to grow our social media channels with basically zero financial input. I grew our FB/IG page almost 100% organic and it has proven that you can get REAL GROWTH by going the all-natural route. One of if not the biggest factors for growth is without any doubt time, time and time. If you think you can just snap your fingers and go viral I got a rude awakening for you. The irrefutable truth is in the pudding, I grew the HTC FB page from a mere 40k followers to just over 2mil over (you guessed it) time. The same applies to our IG page, it was given to me with roughly 15k followers and we are currently over 215k followers from an all-natural approach with ZERO dollars injected so it can be done but what would I know ;)

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hightechcorvette/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hightechcorvette
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-cole/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/hightechcorvette