– Costa Mesa, CA
It’s a difficult thing to find out what you want to do and where you’re meant to be. It’s even harder when you seek to make that thing your living. Often, it requires sacrifices, vast amounts of help from friends and family, and an almost single-minded determination to see it through. Even then, results aren’t guaranteed.
All that makes Mike Burroughs’ success with his StanceWorks channel on YouTube even more amazing, particularly since he didn’t start out with ambitions of being in front of the camera. I wanted to better understand that journey, so I drove down to Costa Mesa, California to talk with him and check out his space.
If you’re an automotive enthusiast with even a passing interest in European cars, especially BMWs, you’ve almost certainly heard of StanceWorks. What started as a forum for enthusiasts of lowered Euro cars turned into the repository of some of the best non-commercial car photography on the internet. The website still exists, and people still post photos of killer-looking modified cars, and it’s still a one-man-show, yet Burroughs’ focus now lies predominantly on his increasingly popular YouTube channel.
The channel really got its start when Mike announced that he was going to rip a perfectly good Ferrari 308 apart and turn it into a Honda K-series–powered time attack car. This caused a stir on the internet, and many Ferrari enthusiasts pulled at their hair and gnashed their teeth before gathering assorted torches and pitchforks.
Despite the highly polarizing nature of the build and the fact that it would require a ton of custom fabrication skills that Burroughs didn’t necessarily have yet (like TIG welding), he managed to go from working yellow Ferrari, to stripped and reinforced chassis to rolling chassis, then finally to running and driving time attack car in two and a half years. To celebrate it being “finished enough,” he packed it into a shipping container, shipped it to Australia, and attempted to drive it in the World Time Attack Challenge.
Of course, it’s not all Honda-powered Ferraris and jet-setting for Burroughs. He’s in his Costa Mesa, CA shop seven days a week – usually with his very sweet German Shepherd Chloe to keep him company – working on a handful of projects to help keep his burgeoning YouTube empire going.
Speaking with him about his frankly monstrous work ethic, Mike told me, “Sure, it can be a grind sometimes, but ultimately, I’m here doing what I love, and if working seven days a week is what it takes to allow me to do this and keep a roof over my head, then it’s not that big of a sacrifice.”
It’s obvious how true that statement about doing what he loves is when I visit Mike’s shop (not for the first time, admittedly). It feels halfway between a hardcore race car fabrication shop and your grandpa’s smoke-hazed garage, where he’d go to escape the world and listen to Hank Williams. The walls are covered in gorgeous vintage wheels and even a real rear quarter panel from a Porsche 935 race car that Mike scored on Marketplace.
The roll-up door is usually open, and Chloe is generally lying on the concrete, never too far from where Mike is welding something or making hoses for one project or another. Friends of Mike’s who run a Euro car shop called Leichtbau a couple of doors down from the StanceWorks garage wander in and out to help, get opinions, or sometimes just to crack jokes. It seems like a pretty good way to make a living, but that got me wondering how all of this works on a practical level. How do you make the money work, especially considering the kind of work being done and the fact that it’s being done in Orange County? It’s not a place known for cheap rent.
“Honestly, the biggest part of it is my sponsors. Companies like H&R, Send Cut Send, CSF, and Pennzoil cutting the checks and donating product is huge,” said Burroughs. “I absolutely couldn’t be doing this without them. Next is my patrons on Patreon. That community is also awesome, and in addition to the money they bring in, that space and the Discord channel we have set up to talk is fantastic and a nice way to engage in a way that you just can’t in YouTube comments.”
These elements, coupled with steady, sustainable growth on YouTube, helped turn StanceWorks from a dream that allowed Mike to scrape by, barely, into something that feels like a real, sustainable living.
Mike credits part of that change to his stepdad, Jim Scoutten – a name that should be familiar if you’re at all interested in shooting sports or if you watched the Motor Trend TV show in the 1990s. Scoutten passed away last year, but before that happened, there was a shift in their relationship that proved incredibly meaningful.
“We were talking, not that long before he passed, and not just like, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ but having a real conversation,” Burroughs said. “We were talking about the channel and how it was doing, and I was excited because things had been getting better and better. He asked me then what my plan was, and not in a ‘when are you going to get a real job’ way, but my long-term plan. What was my next step, etc? With him having been on TV for so long, he understood on a different level what I was trying to do and had great advice. It was less like a parent talking to a kid and more like us talking as equals.”
I asked Mike what his plans are for StanceWorks, both short-term and long-term. The short term will have him putting a bow on his supercharged, Coyote-powered Ford Model A project so he can sell it, as well as finishing up his Audi Ur-Quattro project that’s currently waiting for an engine build.
That Model A sale and the sale of a few other cars, including a dream-spec BMW E28 (which is currently waiting for its new owner to pick it up), are being made to free up cash for a build that is somehow even more ambitious than the Ferrari time attack car. He showed me the initial pieces of that build, and while I can’t spoil the secret for you, it’s arguably one of the most extreme project vehicles on YouTube.
In the long term, Mike is betting big on that next secret project to take his channel and his skills as a builder and fabricator to the next level. While it’s impossible to predict the future, knowing what I know both about Mike and about that next project, I think it’s a reasonably safe bet.
