Today we’d like to introduce you to Koby Spurgin.
Hi Koby, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’ve always had a passion for sports cars and talking to people. As a kid I loved playing Need For Speed on PlayStation and driving the high-end cars on those beautiful mountain, forest, desert and coastal roads. In college I started to see more and more rally businesses pop up so I knew that if I wanted to chase this dream it needed to happen sooner rather than later. For those of you that don’t know what a rally business is, think of it like an event planner for people with sports cars. It takes a lot of work to plan the route, pre-drive the route, find great hotels, try the best restaurants and make adjustments on the fly. A lot of these high net worth individuals don’t have the time to go out and plan drives or map out these amazing roads so I do it for them. I charge an entry fee per car, per rally, and it’s a great way for these people to network and make new friends. Hoctane Rally® is a exotic car road rally business and I started my journey by hosting car shows at the Black Gold Harley-Davidson dealership in Allen, Texas. Everyone in the car world wants to host a car show from 9AM-11AM on Saturdays. After a year of having little to no success I needed to set myself apart.
I decided to adjust the scope on my dream and I knew the only way to get people into rallying was to find out who actually likes to drive their cars. I started hosting what I call “brunch runs.” A brunch run is a morning cruise and we start at a local gas station or car dealership and drive the backroads or highways to brunch. In the early days we had a solid, core group of guys and we would also go grab drinks after we ate. I started branding Hoctane as “more than a parking lot” because that’s what all the other guys were doing; just meeting in a parking lot for 2 hours. As my brunch runs started to take off and more people wanted to join in on the fun my network began to grow. Brunch runs turned into amazing multi-day rallies across the state of Texas and up to Oklahoma and Arkansas for weekend trips. What really launched my business was my relationship with Harvest Hall. Halfway through 2023 one my dear friends, Taylor Gould, was the social media manager for Harvest Hall and she encouraged me to host a show on their plaza. I told them that I could put 50 cars on Peace Plaza so I invited 50 people and only 38 showed up. The cars were amazing, but I fell short of my goal and was embarrassed because I made a promise to the venue that I would bring 50. In 2024, Harvest Hall and I agreed to run it back and do 2 shows that year. I wasn’t going to be embarrassed again so this time I invited 70 people. The only problem was that nobody cancelled and they invited their friends too. So here I am expecting 50 cars and I have 65 cars show up. Cars were double parked, there were tons of people and it was chaotic. Some guys wanted to leave early and some of these people that had just rolled up I didn’t know who they were or have any way of contacting them.
2025 was the year I finally felt my business had some swagger and I knew what I was doing. Harvest Hall became a quarterly event and my schedule was filling up. We started off 2025 with 3 huge events in the spring. My show at Harvest Hall was 60 cars deep with brand new Lamborghini, Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche and Audi. The crowd was awesome and people loved the event. Beautiful supercars, the sun was shining and a drink in their hands; it was the recipe for a great Saturday. In late March I hosted a rally down to Waco, Texas to see the Dr Pepper Museum and the Silos. The name was catchy – Soda Pop Rally! We had 28 cars and it was a blast!
The Las Colinas Country Club reached out to my closest friend Camden Sivils, Camden is a full-time luxury watch dealer out of Frisco, Texas and his prior connections encouraged the country club to reach out to him to host a show for their upcoming event in April. Camden looped me in and it’s been a solid collaboration ever since. Our photographer Erik Marroquin came up with the name “Torque & Smoke.” It was the perfect blend of class and sophistication for our car show and BBQ competition. We were originally expecting the car show to be on the circular drive in front of the clubhouse, but it got better. A couple of days before the event Kinsey Thayer, the Director of Member Experience, reached out to us and asked if we were okay pivoting the location to the driving range. This was huge! This was a concourse like experience that everyone in Dallas has been dying to have. The driving range at the Las Colinas Country Club has a gorgeous 360 degree view. We had 50 exotic cars on the grass and the BBQ was delicious! Members and Hoctane guests had a great time drinking and networking with their friends.
The next show was by far our largest event. Harvest Hall in the summer was originally planned for a Saturday morning, but due to rain we postponed the event to the following Saturday from 6pm-8pm. The anticipation that had been building up, the time of the event and the cars that showed up were due for a large crowd. This crowd was so large it felt like I was parting the red sea each time I guided a car onto and out of the plaza. It was insane! In the Fall, we had another Harvest Hall show that could have been postponed, but the venue was dry. I knew that the light scattered rain all over DFW wasn’t going to stop this one. The crowd was less than the previous show, but it was still a packed house with 2 Ford GTs and a Lamborghini Revuelto making their special appearance.
November of 2025 was the most intense it’s ever been for me. I knew I had a Harvest Hall show on the 2nd and I knew that Camden Sivils and I were going to host the Veterans Day Car Show at OMNI PGA Frisco on the 8th. Our good friend, Jay Rampuria, with P1 Motorwerks reached out to us and said that TPC Craig Ranch in McKinney wanted to do a car show for their annual Charity Classic event on the 15th. Back to back to back weekends were now on my plate. I told myself to take one day at a time and one event at a time. I have a lot of loyal friends and supporters that I knew were coming to all three shows, but I want to knock each event out of the park. This Harvest Hall show would be the first one I’ve had in years on a Sunday, but I was willing to make that adjustment for people that can’t take off on Saturdays. That morning, the two nicest cars on my list cancelled. It was a gut punch that was quickly followed up with a kiss from an angel. I had a well known car collector in DFW sign up hours before the show and he was going to bring out his brand new $6m Koenigsegg Jesko Attack. A week ago that car was on a plane leaving the factory in Sweden and here he is signing up for my show. It would be the first public appearance for this car in the state of Texas. The show was a massive success and it was great getting to see so many familiar faces again for the last Harvest Hall show of 2025. The following weekend Camden Sivils and I had another incredible show at OMNI PGA Frisco with 65+ supercars on the boardwalk at PGA District. Our last show of the year at TPC Craig Ranch was also a huge hit and it was such a relief. Three weekends of sun, three weekends of gorgeous cars and three successful shows. 2025 was amazing and I can’t wait to see what 2026 has in store for us.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Great question. No, it hasn’t been a smooth road at all, but I would like to encourage all the entrepreneurs out there that being consistent and working your tail off is the key to success. My first show, I had no cars show up. I still get emotional thinking about that empty parking lot and how far I’ve come. I’ve had my best clients lose interest, move away and screw me over. I’ve also had kids and older adults literally copy me, copy my ideas and comb through who I follow on Instagram inviting everyone, my personal friends and family members to their events. Kids have taken pictures of cars at my events and then use those same pictures to market their own events. Kids will also see what I do and start their own business with their dads sports car. The difference is those people will not continue to show up when they get rejected, they will not continue to show up when it gets hard, they will not continue to show up when it requires consistency, and they will not continue to show up when the sacrifice is bigger than the next shiny object.
Being successful in business is about the law of large numbers, you can’t let one person affect your success and you can’t let momentum in the wrong direction force you to quit or give up. In 2022, I sat down and wrote down 10 things that I noticed in my first two years in business. I would love to share those with you:
1. Marketing is a double edged sword; making a name for yourself (and your brand is great), but marketing will also expose your strategy and your selling position.
2. Mitigate Risk, if you can’t afford the risk, divert the risk; understand the importance of holding LLCs and declaring bankruptcy inside of the LLC.
3. Winning the argument isn’t worth losing the relationship – sometimes you lose more than just the person you argued with.
4. Defense is an important strategy in business as well – the flame that burns the hottest could be a fox in the hen house or a snake in the grass.
5. Pricing your product and pricing your self-worth is by far the hardest balance in business; pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered.
6. Branding is more than just your logo, your website, or your social media. It’s how you represent yourself; the words you say, the actions you take and the people you associate with.
7. Don’t get bullied on contracts (write your own if you have to) and before you sign any document have an attorney read it and get their opinion.
8. If you give someone the opportunity to screw you, most likely they will.
9. Imitation really is the most sincere form of flattery. If nobody is copying you then you aren’t doing it right.
10. You MUST be self-reliant, trust your gut, close your own deals and take everything someone says with a grain of salt.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
One thing that sets me apart from others is that I design everything myself. I designed my website, I design all of my event graphics and I love posting pictures on my Instagram page. I couldn’t imagine letting someone else build my brand from the ground up. When it comes to working with corporate partners and well known venues they like classy designs with appropriate music and a nice brand image. Be consistent and grow organically. Buying fake followers and having trash music on your posts can really bring you down. Don’t be the business that has 45k followers and no comments on your Instagram posts.
How do you think about happiness?
My family, my friends, the gym, OU Football and orange Lamborghinis. My family and my friends mean the world to me because I love having deep and meaningful conversations, but I also love to cut up and have a good time. Surround yourself with the right people and you can help each other get better every single day. The gym means so much to me because of how important your health is, but also how much fun it is to lift more and run faster. I have a slight addiction to pre-workout but we don’t have to talk about that today. I graduated from OU in 2018 so I love my sooner football and I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to go to a football school and I have something to cherish and watch for years to come. An Orange Lamborghini will always put a smile on my face because its been something I’ve wanted my whole life. As a child playing Need For Speed that was the brand, and that was the color. I see them frequently in my line of work, its my phone wallpaper and the dream is not that far away!
Pricing:
- Free (Our Car Shows)
- $30 (Our Brunch Runs)
- $500+ (Our Rallies Range In Price)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hoctanerally.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hoctanerally/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hoctanerally
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kobyspurgin/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kobyspurgin
Image Credits
Erik Marroquin (Last 6 On 8), Landon Skidmore (First 2 On 8) and Chase Felke (Personal Photo).
