Randy Gentry always hated putting his dirt bike away for the winter as a child. And he was never impressed with what he believes is the lack of agility snowmobiles have to offer riders. 

So starting at 14, Gentry, now 26, started working on an idea that would enable him to stay on the dirt bike year-round by making a snow bike.

He replaced the front tire of the motorcycle with a small ski, then removed the bike’s back end with a small, tractor-like assembly as a substitute for the rear wheel, enabling the bike to push through deep snow.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve been taking things apart and putting them back together in the way that I want them to work,” Gentry says.

With his mechanical inclinations now firmly in place, Gentry now operates MotoTrax Inc., which has become profitable in the last couple of years. Founded in 2015, the company manufactures the assembly parts necessary to convert the motorcycles for snow use.

Last week, Spokane entrepreneur Tom Simpson invested $1 million of his $5 million Kick-Start III venture fund in MotoTrax to assist its continued growth. It’s Simpson’s second investment in the company.

Simpson says he first saw Gentry present MotoTrax at the Inland Northwest Business Plan Competition in 2015. Simpson made his first investment in MotoTrax in early 2016 from the Kick-Start II venture fund, which is now fully invested.

MotoTrax now has attracted $1.6 million in total venture capital, and the company last year reached $1.5 million in gross revenue, up from $250,000 in sales the year before, says Ezra Eckhardt, former president and COO of Sterling Bank and a member of MotoTrax’s board of directors.

The company sold 350 kits last year, a fourfold increase from 2015. Sales are even more robust this year, with MotoTrax expecting to top $5 million in total revenue. The average assembly kit costs $5,000, and the company has a targeted goal of selling 1,000 kits this year, Eckhardt says.

MotoTrax occupies 5,300 square feet of space in a warehouse suite at 3517 E. Trent. The company has five full-time employees, including Gentry and COO and General Manager Sam Crooks, and at the height of its rapidly approaching production cycle, will soon add another two to four employees to meet customer demand, Crooks says.

In addition to being owner and founder, Gentry is one of five members of MotoTrax’s board. Other board members include Crooks, Spokane-based Gestalt Diagnostics LLC CEO Dan Roark, and Liberty Lake-based Amphenol Telect CEO Wayne Williams. All of the board members have invested in the company, Eckhardt says. 

Eckhardt, known by many here as a former executive at Sterling Bank and its 2014 acquirer, Umpqua Bank, is currently the COO of WaveForm Systems Inc., a Portland-based mobile medical service provider. 

MotoTrax now has the capability to manufacture 20 percent of all required parts for production, Crooks says, and still is growing its ability to make the necessary parts for its kits.

The majority of the remaining parts are produced by Hydrafab Northwest Inc., a Spokane Valley-based fabrication and manufacturing company, he says.

As for Gentry, he was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Idaho, when he began entering—and winning—area business plan competitions. He quickly amassed $80,000 in startup earnings from his competition victories to launch the idea of making responsive and nimble snow bikes.

Because of Gentry’s Moscow, Idaho, ties, the company was based there before moving to Spokane in May. Eckhardt says it was in the company’s best interest to relocate. 

“It was better for everyone involved to move the business here because the company now can put everything into a material management system allowing for faster assembly,” he says. “It’s also improved communication among all the partners involved.”

The conversion kits are easy to install, and can take as little as 30 minutes to an hour to complete an installation, Gentry says.

“Snowmobiles are hard to ride. I always felt as if I was on an ATV on the snow. I wanted to be able to get off the ground and turn my bike in an instant in the snow if I wanted,” he says.

Gentry was born in California but grew up in Weippe, Idaho, which is a three-hour drive southeast of Spokane. He says he can’t remember a time in his life when he wasn’t tinkering.

“One of my earliest memories was getting an RC (remote control car) for Christmas, maybe it was a birthday, and after about six months, I took the tires off and added tracks to it,” he says.

Gentry says it was never his goal to become an entrepreneur building and designing assemblies for snow biking.

“At first, I was just looking for something to keep me from having to put my bike away for the winter,” he says.

Upon arriving at the University of Idaho, he gradually began to believe that there might be a strong market for potential snow bike enthusiasts.

“I figured there had to be at least 10,000 people like me in the U.S.,” Gentry says.

Gentry says MotoTrax sees a strong future in the sport of professional snow biking. He notes that, for the first time, snow bike racing was included as a featured sport in the Winter X Games last January. The Winter X Games is an annual extreme sports event hosted, produced, and broadcast by ESPN Inc.

MotoTrax served as a sponsor to snow bike racer Darrin Mees, of New York.

“Mees came to us looking for a sponsorship to ride. It was really cool getting to watch our kit ride on national TV,” Gentry says.