Lessons From the Battlefield
Hi Friends!
As of a couple of hours ago, Arizona Car Week 2025 has come and gone! Although it wasn’t perfect, this still feels like a pretty major accomplishment and I think a lot of improvements were made as a result of everyone’s efforts this year. Collectively, this community took what has traditionally been 8 to 12 or so of mostly auction focused events and turned it into more than 30. Between the four drive events, four auctions, the art show, cars and coffees, drive-ins, show events, seminars and concerts, private parties and get togethers and of course the outstanding Arizona Concours d’Elegance, this was quite a week and quite a project. Nothing about this was easy and I definitely learned a lot.
Here’s the five biggest lessons I learned while wrangling together Arizona Car Week 2025:
1. Things will never completely go your way (and that’s okay)
Although, I took surprisingly few L’s over the course of all of this, I was definitely prepared for them. I was also prepared to not let any comparatively minor setbacks wreck the entire process either. It’s so easy to get psyched out and give up over what are ultimately insignificant things. I didn’t want this to be another example of that and so, while I was very big picture focused, my means of getting there were almost entirely the opposite.
I’ve been telling my Team Members basically the same thing over and over again since I started in this business: Never focus on the mountains. Just put your head down and only look at the pebbles. If you get over enough of them, eventually the mountain will be behind you. I was very conscious of the mountains over the course of this, but I also understood the process it took to get over them and that if I slipped and fell a little bit or stepped on a pebble that maybe was a little bit sharp and cut me somewhere, the goal was still there and it was in front of me and I needed to make sure to keep going and that I got over it. Mountains are big and pebbles are small. You shouldn’t let a couple of difficult pebbles stop you from conquering peaks.
2. You have to kick your ego completely out of the equation
Probably my most commonly uttered phrase during this process was “it’s not about me”. I think that little reoccurring soliloquy probably saved me, my sanity overall and kept the wheels on this thing throughout. The fact is, A LOT of stuff really, really pissed me off while putting this together. Whether it be a non-performing vendor, a lying city council person, a car oriented organization of some kind coming up short in its obligations, sponsors vacating, other event organizers trying to screw each other over or even something as minor as an obsessive online troll (which believe it or not, we did have a couple of), wanting to reach through my screen or through my phone and strangle someone was a fairly commonly reoccurring desire. I just had to take a step back, breathe a little bit and understand that not everybody’s objectives are the same as mine and that I’m not entitled to have other people always see things the same way that I do. You just have to let people do what they’re going to do and either move on without them, move around them while they continue to do their thing or give them a reason to understand what you’re trying to do and to hop on board. You can’t take anything personally with something like this. This is putting the mission first and it kept me out of a lot of conflicts that nobody needed to have, that nobody would have benefited from and that could have totally derailed the entire project if left to get out of hand.
3. We really need to cool it with Cars and Coffee
Easily, one of the most frustrating things I ran into when approaching people to either partner on events or to throw their own was the utter and complete lack of creative thinking that many so gleefully demonstrated. Smart people with cool businesses, great locations and everything needed to come up with something unique, creative and memorable and the answer always seem to be the same thing:
Them: Cool! Let’s do Cars and Coffee!
Me: What are you going to call this Cars and Coffee?
Them: I don’t know. Cars and Coffee?
Me: What time do you want to do this Cars and Coffee?
Them: I don’t know. On exactly the same day and at exactly the same time as everyone else?
Me: Ok, so you’re doing the same thing as multiple other people at the same time with the same cars?
I hate to break it to folks, but this doesn’t really help. Now, you’re creating competing events that are all pretty much completely homogenous. That benefits no one and we can all do better. This space has become way too reliant on this concept and we need to try to break away from it.
Another case in point example of the pitfalls associated with thinking like this, would be automotive TV (which basically no longer exists and largely for this reason). Ever since Gas Monkey got popular, that’s been the formula. Two kind of edgy looking guys, howling at each other, finding a broken car, breaking it worse, then restoring it to some degree of presentability, doing burnouts and howling more. This has been nearly every single legacy media produced car show (of course, outside of the Top Gears of the world – which are also pretty much all shot now too) going back well over a decade and a half. Shows like this suck. We know that shows like this suck. We don’t want these shows and we don’t watch these shows, but yet somehow, there were always more and more of these shows.
I’m not saying that Cars and Coffee should go away completely. Clearly it’s a viable concept, but we need to get out of the rut of defaulting directly to these types of events, at least kind of or we’re going to wind up in exactly the same place as we are with television and I genuinely don’t think anybody wants that.
4. You have to be physically right in order to handle what’s mentally required
I’ll be perfectly honest, this was grueling and physically one of the more difficult things that I’ve done over the course of my career. People saw the hours I was putting in during car week and assumed that was the story, but that was a small fraction of it. What they didn’t see was the hours put in on marketing materials, websites, emails, press releases, event logistics, government BS, venue negotiations, keeping people around you from losing their minds, piles of social media posts, etc. The list goes on and on. To a large degree that was the easy part too.
The week leading into car week was filled with all the last minute panicked shenaniganry required to put ourselves in the best positions we possibly could come event time, but additionally I was also getting up stupidly early in the morning to do local morning news shows and then staying up almost all night crossing all these T’s and dotting these I’s in as many places as I could think of leading up. By the time the smoke cleared, I’ve had one day off since Thanksgiving, less than 10 total for the entire year and almost every day has been 15 hours or more. The last two weeks have consisted of two hours or less of sleep per night and maybe one meal if I’m lucky (I lost nearly 20 lb last week).
I’m a guy that takes physical fitness really seriously. I spend several hours a week in the weight room and in 2024 I put in about 1,400 rounds in a boxing ring. Doing something like this would have certainly been impossible from a physical standpoint without that, but being able to stay on top of my game mentally (which admittedly could be perceived as a questionable statement if you ran into me yesterday or this morning) would have been completely out of the question.
These two things go hand in hand and without one it’s difficult to have the other. Fortunately, at least some degree of improved physical fitness is a gift that almost anybody can give to themselves at almost any age. It’s just one of those things you have to make a commitment to do and then follow through on. The benefits are incredibly worth it though. No matter your situation, it’s something always comes with rewards. You just have to start.
5. There’s always next year
Myself and my event partners came up with probably 50 event concepts (aside from the gratuitous Cars and Coffee ideas) over the course of putting this whole thing together. Of that 50, five for me really stood out that I thought were super cool and I was really passionate about seeing them become reality. Of that five, only two happened. Of that two, one of them got so chopped and screwed by the time it became a thing that it was barely recognizable and in all honesty probably shouldn’t count as being the same thing at all.
As frustrating as this was, this kind of turned out to be an unrecognized gift. This means that I’ve already done significant leg work, worked out a number of bugs and I’m now in a position to where I’ve got a head start on 2026. I can now develop these ideas even further and make them that much better when they actually happen. Was there a tremendous amount of frustration in throwing in the towel for these events in ‘25? Absolutely, but there’s always next year (and believe me, there will be a next year….).
So the question now becomes, how do I downshift from this? The answer there is I’m not really sure. I do have multiple businesses to attend to and the Concours in the Hills and Copperstate 1000 (which I have roles in both) aren’t really that far down the road either, but my life has pretty much completely revolved around this for quite a while now and it’s going to be weird to not be staring down the barrel of it all for the time being. I think this is a day by day scenario though and I’m going to start tomorrow, by shutting my phone off for the day (which is something I haven’t done in about 5 years) and getting that process moving one baby step at a time.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge