Behind every show and production, there are always lots of faces of talented and committed people who make everything possible, but are unfortunately rarely seen on screen.
Nonetheless, in “Bad Chad Customs” things are always made a different way. Besides the incredible talents of Chad Hiltz in shaping dreams in the form of cars, his fianceé Jolene MacIntyre stands out for herself for her personality, smarts, and hard-working attitude. Credited for being the one making Hiltz Auto’s business side work, Jolene is known for pushing everyone in the team forward, and taking the company to the next level, whether it’s through “Bad Chad Customs” or the several other projects she’s created through it.
However, have you ever wondered who Jolene is and how has she’s come so far down the road of business? How did she take Hiltz Auto to TV. and what else does she have in mind for the shop? Keep with us to know this and so much more about the woman behind “Bad Chad Customs” success.
Who Is Jolene MacIntyre?
It takes only a couple of minutes watching “Bad Chad Customs” to understand that there is more than one person making everything possible in the show. However, out of all of them, Jolene MacIntyre is the one who not only keeps the business running but also does everything possible to make her fiancé’s talents known all over the world.
Graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in commerce from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, Jolene knows all about business. Although she is sometimes seen lending a hand in Hiltz Auto’s garage, Jolene’s real magic takes place in the office and at the content creation desk. As she said during an interview with The Motorsports Agency, her day starts with planning the business’ everyday goals, schedules, and budgets, becoming the leading voice of the team by setting the plans of action she thinks will take Bad Chad and the entire business to success.
While Jolene is proud of taking the business’ reins when it comes to the technical side, she considers herself the baseball equivalent of a rover for the garage’s team, as she’s never afraid of getting her hands dirty, as long as it gets the job done.
How Did The Business Start?
Although it was Jolene who co-founded what we know nowadays as Hiltz Auto, Bad Chad was already working on cars before meeting her. As it happens, Chad Hiltz has been working with his hands since his teens, finding new ways of building all sorts of things as a way of self-expression, and making money: ‘I learned very quickly that there’s no money to buy things. So that’s, I guess, where it started, is to make things’, he told AutoWise, saying that he rejected the concept of buying, and felt more compelled to build what he wanted.
After working on cars and in steel fabrication for years, Chad had an established business but which unfortunately hadn’t gained lots of traction outside his Nova Scotia town. So, meeting and dating Jolene completely changed what his business had been until then, as her vision took over: ‘I decided to build a business and a brand around him’, as Jolene told Medium.com in 2021, adding that despite having limited resources at the beginning, she invested lots of time growing Hiltz Auto as a business first, and then expanded its presence online by creating original, compelling, and entertaining content out of it.
Soon, Hiltz Auto and Bad Chad had grown an audience online big enough to attract the attention of a TV production company, which would later launch “Bad Chad Customs”, gaining the business international fame.
Mission As An Entrepreneur
While the effort is often well compensated when projects turn out well, the path to success is usually long and enduring for entrepreneurs who only have a dream and small budgets to make things possible. To overcome the adversities and complex situations which get in the way of any young project, entrepreneurs and leaders surely need a clear vision of what they want, so not to lose focus of their goals.
It’s no different for Jolene, who for years has been relentlessly developing a brand around Chad Hiltz and his business, to show the world what they’re made of. As she admits it herself, her first and foremost inspiration to keep that special project moving forward is her admiration for her fiancé, who she described as someone with ‘an incredible ability of teaching, leading and inspiring others’, as she told Medium.com.
https://www.facebook.com/badchadcustoms/photos/a.682988128382099/3831483996865814
That being said, Jolene’s mission is to encourage others to find that person, goal, or dream which fuels them to grow: ‘Our mission is to inspire greatness. Each and every day when we create, our focus is to inspire the next person to get out and work on their passion’, she told the magazine.
What Keeps Jolene Focused?
Jolene’s beginnings managing Hiltz Auto weren’t easy – as her initial goals were directed at growing the business and traction online, she forgot to develop some other parts of the project, which she didn’t realize right away were just as important.
One of those mistakes was the lack of YouTube content produced by Bad Chad during the first couple of years of the business, carelessly left forgotten, to grow an audience on Facebook and Instagram. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 restriction period in 2020 took place that Jolene corrected that error by creating content specifically made for Bad Chad’s YouTube channel, turning what she initially considered a mistake into a lesson.
Instead of blaming herself for her missteps, Jolene chooses to see the unexpected as an opportunity to fuel her fire: ‘Once I figured out that mistakes and obstacles are only meant to sharpen to you, I started embracing them’, she told Medium.com.
That being said, what keeps Jolene focused on her goals is her will to move forward and accomplish her dreams. Whether that determination comes from her thriving for success, her inspirations, or simply by her courage, Jolene is simply not someone who gives up easily.
TV Show
After spending a couple of years producing car restoration content for the internet, Bad Chad and Jolene had successfully accumulated hundreds of thousands of views on their Facebook page. Their projects were so successful that it wasn’t long until the pair was contacted by TV producers, who soon turned the business into the focus of “Bad Chad Customs”, helping to expand the brand that Jolene had worked so hard to turn from a concept to a real-life project.
Nonetheless, just being on TV wasn’t the end of the road. As Jolene said in early 2021, she planned on “Bad Chad Customs” becoming a number one car-centered show, along with a ‘household name’ in the field, and obtaining international partnerships: ‘the reason I can confidently say all of that is because we are willing to work day and night at it’, she told The Motorsports Agency.
While Jolene’s goals might have sounded a little too ambitious, the truth is that “Bad Chad Customs” has already accomplished a huge part of those objectives by gaining the hearts and admiration of its audience.
Putting The Show Together
There’s no forgetting that TV isn’t an easy industry to work in, so it’s no wonder that “Bad Chad Customs” fans often question what it took to make the show a reality.
During a questions and answers session on Bad Chad’s Facebook page in January 2023, Jolene agreed that some aspects of the show took some time to put together. She explained that after being contacted to film the show, she and Chad had to personally search for a team, given that their shop was usually just both of them.
Things weren’t as easy from then on, as they had no option but to hire the few available friends of Chad who were up to the challenge, as the partners they had previously contacted let them down. One of the new members of the team was Chad’s son Colton, who at the time of the show’s 2019 premiere had just matriculated from high school.
Chad was seemingly against having his son in “Bad Chad Customs”, not for his lack of experience, but for the pressure it might put on him. In the end, Chad consented to make the show a sort of a family endeavor, which is also one of the factors why the show became so well-liked in the first place.
Do They Keep Cars?
While Chad and Jolene put a huge effort into making “Bad Chad Customs” as real as possible, there’s no denying that some real-life aspects aren’t as portrayed on screen.
Although one of the show’s most attractive features was the pressure the staff was put under when a deadline was close, the truth is that customers weren’t exactly real ones. As Jolene affirmed on a Facebook video from early 2023, she was in charge of finding people from their town to appear in the show as customers, as the Los Angeles-based production company working alongside Discovery didn’t know the area.
While the renovations were afforded by the network, the cars didn’t leave Hiltz Auto even after they were finished. Instead, Jolene affirms that the restored car stays in their basement due to Chad’s resolution to preserve each of them as a work of art. Nonetheless, Hiltz Auto was initially not ready to store more than a couple of cars, leaving the couple no option but to buy extra land to build a storage room for their valuable creations.
The guys at Bad Chad Customs continue to convert the rusted '71 Pinto into an homage to European performance! Stream the latest episode of Bad Chad right now on the MotorTrend App! ➡️ https://t.co/3JQjXRwP1u pic.twitter.com/XiyXOeTQAp
— Automobile Magazine (@automobilemag) October 4, 2020
How Did She Get Together With Chad?
While we only knew about Jolene and Chad upon their TV show’s premiere in 2019, the pair had been together for a some time before that.
The couple met around 2016 in a place called West Side Charlie in New Minas, Nova Scotia, when Chad dropped by the tavern to promote the event Rockabilly Weekend. At the time, Jolene was working in the place full-time, but had recently graduated from college.
As admitted by Chad in a YouTube video on their channel, he was immediately attracted to Jolene upon seeing her in the bar. She and her friend Reggie asked Chad about the car she was driving out of curiosity, but that was the beginning of it all, and Chad eventually convinced Jolene to give him her number.
Chad texted Jolene quite often, but didn’t obtain a positive response for the next couple of months. She eventually texted him back, and their acquaintanceship turned into a friendship when he visited the tavern just to see her. As affirmed by Chad, he was afraid that his ‘too rough around the edges’ personality wasn’t compatible with her academically oriented interests, but as they shared more time, things simply worked out on their own.
Jolene and Chad officially started dating in early 2017, just a couple of months before they became engaged. Then, even in early 2023, marriage doesn’t seem to be high on their agenda.
What Happened To Her Bugatti?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Jolene is responsible for giving form to “Bad Chad Customs”. As it happens, the first restoration that she and Chad worked on together was restoration of Ralph Lauren’s $40 million Bugatti, one that Jolene had desired for the longest time, and Chad promised to make for her.
While Jolene’s Bugatti isn’t the same car owned by Lauren, but a replica built from scratch by Chad, the personal value and significance of this car are worth several million. The build of Jolene’s dream car was filmed by her using only her phone and the limited knowledge about content creation she had at the time, but the results were good enough to gain the pair their first followers online.
By uploading the Bugatti’s build videos on a weekly schedule, Jolene discovered that social media was more than just a helpful tool, and could be the key to Bad Chad’s success.
That being said, Jolene’s Bugatti is more special than any other car in the personal sense. As Jolene told Monsters & Critics in 2019, she plans for it to be her wedding car, and is waiting for the special occasion to happen to finally show it to the world.
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Current & Future Projects
Nowadays, Jolene and Chad are focused on growing their brand and sharing their views about the car restoring art with the rest of the world. thanks to their social media. By using platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, the couple has successfully gained around half a million followers combined.
That being said, after “Bad Chad Customs” wrapped up its second season in late 2020, not much about its comeback to the small screen has been known so far. Regardless, in a 2022 video, Jolene revealed that she and Chad were happy with having total control of their content, while not dealing with the tight TV schedules from the past.
While this seems disheartening for those waiting for a third “Bad Chad Customs” season, the most important thing is to see Jolene and Chad fulfilled with what they do nowadays.
