Canadian emigré builds life around bikes

Although it’s been 30 years ago, David Pearson remembers it vividly. The day after throwing a high school graduation bash, he headed south for the United States.

Several months earlier, Pearson had won a lottery granting him permanent resident status and as soon as he graduated high school he was gone.

“I had a 1978 Honda 754,” Pearson recalled. “I put a cardboard box in the back seat with all my stuff, duct-taped it closed and bungee corded it to the seat. I had $345 in my back pocket and my goal was being in Florida.” It took him three days to make the trek. “It was quite an adventure,” Pearson said. “It was pretty cool, one of the coolest experiences I ever had.”

The original plan was to head to college, but that didn’t quite work out.

“I had this goal, like most people, of going to college. Lawyer was on my target list but I couldn’t afford college,” Pearson said. “I ended up shucking oysters in an oyster bar on the ocean, then worked my way up to a bartender. Those were the days of Tom Cruise and ‘Cocktail’ so it was pretty cool.”

But those days soon ended and Pearson headed west, finally running out of money in Colorado, where he started a motorcycle touring company.

“That was awesome,” Pearson said of the touring company. “And I had a helluva time. It was a cool job, but it didn’t pay very well. But it led me down the path into the industry.”

He ended up getting to know some Harley dealership owners, who convinced him to buy a small dealership in Burlington, Vermont.

“I sold my house and sold everything I had other than one motorcycle and dumped everything I had in my retirement account and put into all into the dealership,” Pearson said.

About four years later, his wife was on a marathon, cross-country riding excursion and ended up spending a night in Santa Fe and got to talking to the owner of Santa Fe Harley-Davidson. Shortly thereafter, the couple, along with David’s brother, bought the dealership.

The dealership in Vermont is now paid off and he’s slowly passing it on to his partner.

“I go back and forth a lot and do a lot of leadership training,” Pearson said. “Six or seven years ago, I was inspired into organizational health and to work better with teams. It changed the fundamentals with how we work with and manage people; how we lead them.”