When “Total Chaos” Is Your Job: How Nicole Pitell-Vaughan Became the Go-To Builder for Off-Roaders

Pitell-Vaughan was a longtime supporter of the Rebelle Rally, even before she and her husband Matt’s company became an official partner. She competed in an African rally in 2015 and 2016, the Gazelle Rally helped her refine her communication, operation, and management skills. The experience she gained from that, she wanted to support a program in the US to help grow women in the sport.

She’d gained her appreciation of women’s true strength and resilience from her mother.

“My dad didn’t raise me. I was raised by my mom, and she got me my first BMX bike to keep me outside and out of trouble,” she recalled. “It was because I spent so many of my younger days outside riding around that I got into what I do. It was then that I fell in love with the dirt.”

She raced and won and raced and won some more. The adrenaline set her on a track for competing in larger vehicles, namely pickup trucks.

Read: Tackling the Rebelle Rally, the Female-Only Off-Road Rally, As A Newbie

Nicole and her husband met in Lake Elsinore almost immediately after high school. Nicole was pursuing a business degree while her husband worked at Suspensions Unlimited, a fabrication shop specializing in off-road. With his appreciation for suspension and chassis engineering and her love for off-road sports, it was a match made in heaven.

“My husband and I started this in the garage when I was going to Cal Poly for business and he got a hands-on education supporting a man named Larry Roseiver on suspension and chassis design, so he has no formal degree,” she said.

The two combined their strengths to start Total Chaos Fabrication in 1997. However, like most companies that made it big, they had a rough start. Of course, they had fun while refining their products.

“A lot of the initial product line was based on trial and error. We were driving pickup trucks when Matt was racing SCORE, we would go chase him out in the desert races. And we would break parts and have to fix them or replace them.”

Nicole continues, “So that’s where suspension came into play. We were just kids in our twenties with no fear and just wanting to figure out how to make our trucks go faster.”

Read: I Took My Son To the Ford Bronco Off-Roadeo Where He Learned About Himself, About Me and Off-Roading

Then, Matt came home one day and asked Nicole what she thought of him leaving his job and working from the house to build Total Chaos Fabrication. She thought that sounded great.

“You know, I was in college. You’re twenty, you don’t realize how stressful that can be for someone who wants to do this kind of thing later in life. We didn’t know any different. Our college carpool partner was our first employee, he’d come over and cut parts for us on an optic eye plasma cutter.”

Like all great things, their business had to endure some pressure before it became a diamond.

“And then 30 days after we made that decision, we got a 30-day notice to get out of our rental house,” she said. “This was Thanksgiving Day, and all I was thinking was, ‘How am I going to take my finals?’ We began looking at industrial units, and we needed to find a shared partner because we couldn’t afford both an industrial unit and a house.”

As luck would have it, Matt’s friend, Eric, was eager to find a place to rent, too—since the young business needed a financial break—and it was the boost they needed to rise up.

“Talk about putting that business degree to work!” joked Nicole. “The crazy story is I’m still renting in that same area, and we’ve just blown through walls. So what was a really catastrophic situation was actually a push forward by the universe to just make the next move happen.”

She’s learned to roll with the punches in this industry, as well as learning to be adaptable when the going gets tough.

“That’s happened in my entire career. Sometimes you don’t understand why something so crazy is happening in your life, but it’s kind of the level-up moment.”

One of the reasons Nicole and Total Chaos Fabrication sponsor the Rebelle Rally is that she can continue to test her products. In fact, the 2024 Rebelle was an opportunity to test her suspension systems on the new 2024 Toyota Tacoma.

She recruited two women who had competed before, who happened to be engineers, and Total Chaos built a rally-ready Tacoma completely outfitted with their bolt-on equipment. She did some pretesting, and at the end of 500 miles of hard testing, they called “Wreck and Destroy,” and she gave them the keys.

“There was no better place than the Rebelle Rally to say that they never changed a tire and they never pulled out a tool. That was a fresh prep, a brand new build, and it landed third in the Rebelle.” Nicole is understandably proud of everything that accomplishment represents.

We talked about her accomplishments, and Nicole showed me an envelope that was right behind her desk. It was her list of goals from the last fourteen years. Same envelope every year for her bucket list items for that year.

For 2024, number five on her bucket list items was to get one of her Total Chaos Fabrication vehicles on the podium at Rebelle. And she did it.

“That was rad, to open my bucket list and have them nail it,” she beamed.

Nicole encourages people to create their own bucket list at the beginning of each year and refer back to it. It’s such a rewarding feeling to be able to check things off the list, and it inspires Nicole all year long.

Many of Nicole’s Total Chaos Fabrication customers are men, and when I asked her about how many of her customers were men and how many were women, she replied,

“The raddest thing is watching it change right under my nose right now. When I started the company, I’d say it was 98 percent to two in the early days,” she said. “It was that slim, men to women. I’d say [today] it’s down to 60-40. I talk to so many women on the phone, I see them share our posts, it is unbelievable.”

She is quick to specify that the growth is in the Toyota space.

“When you start looking at the Ford and Chevy spaces, I don’t see it as popular to females yet. But in the Toyota space, I am blown away at the number of women who not only call to inquire about their own parts, but the ones that are turning their own wrenches on their own cars… It’s rad. It’s the raddest thing.”

“I always have people say, ‘You’re a woman, how did you not let that impact you or affect the trajectory of your career?’” She says she’s never let her gender get in the way. No other woman should, either.

“Throw that out the door. Confidence, experience, and just [being] who you are… I don’t feel that gender should stop you in the automotive space. There are some incredible women in the sport right now.”

She emphasizes that there were some hurdles and stereotypes in Total Chaos Fabrication’s beginning. One company told Nicole’s husband they’d never go anywhere because there’s a woman in the front seat of Total Chaos Fabrication vehicles. She refuses to be dramatic about it.

“It’s okay! Everybody’s like, did you get mad? No! It motivated me!” She is clear that it was only one man who ever said that, but Nicole is specific that she spent a lot of time learning in order to get comfortable and confident. All experience was valuable. And there was no pride getting in the way of getting the job done.

“I’ll use cheater bars, and every now and then I’ll ask Matt for help,” she says. But that’s not a thing she worries about or gets worked up about, and no one gives her any guff about it, either.

What people did express doubt about was the fact that she and her husband were running Total Chaos Fabrication together.

“I do remember people saying we would never be successful in a marriage because we work with each other every day, and 25 years later, it’s the best laugh I have,” she said. “I spend every day with my best friend, it’s incredible.”

“There are days we don’t even see each other at the shop. We have a business to run. I literally spend every day with my best friend, and we built something from nothing.”

It has helped her to heed some advice they received from a mentor early on. “If you can’t afford to pay for it cash, you shouldn’t buy it. And we’ve taken that philosophy financially all the way to where we sit today. And that has made some things in our business trajectory take longer than some of our competition, but I’m totally okay with that because obviously it wasn’t meant to be at that time.

“But I’ve never put my company in a position financially where we’re in trouble. And that’s why we’ve survived many economic peaks and many economic valleys,” Nicole explains.

Like all good things, there have to be some growing pains. Nearly 20 years ago, Nicole and her husband were forced to rebuild Total Chaos Fabrication—a business they worked so hard to build from the ground up.

“We were indirectly wiped out by a fire in 2007. We are a metal fabrication company. No one expects a phone call from he fire chief at 3:00 in the morning asking us to come down and unlock our doors,” she recalled.

“It was a cabinet shop next door that somebody arsoned, and it indirectly took us out. I learned the hard way about insurance and something called Business Income Loss, and I wasn’t covered for it. All things in my career have happened the hard way. So many things in business and life come from adversity. How do you deal with it? Grit.”

They came back from the brink, but it helped her realize running a business required a thicker skin.

“Those challenges are what shape us. When I’m asked how these things happen, I leave these meetings so humbled because I forgot the thousands of challenges we’ve faced that have become the next step or the next door of opportunity.”

It was the people around her who proved to Nicole something about loyalty.

“There were four people back then who were part of our five-person team who are all still together today. They believed in us since before 2007; this group of people was going to take care of me. And that’s why we don’t have a bunch of turnover. Our people are humans, hand-selected. We strive for talent and ethics. But I’d prefer ethics over talent. I can train you to do a process, but your parents trained you to be a good human.”

She believes that the synergy and cohesion of Total Chaos Fabrication are so good because she has focused on good people.

“I do things every day to scare the shit out of myself to remind me I’m alive. I love supporting women who want to go outside of their comfort zone.” She loves seeing women participate in off-road events, challenging themselves no matter their age or circumstances.

In Africa, she had to “separate herself from the comfort of the boys. It was the first time I packed my own car and had to do it all myself, halfway around the world.” 

Nicole Pitell is inspiring, whether ripping through the dunes or talking about what she’s managed to build with Total Chaos Fabrication parts. Most impressive is the life she and her husband have built together. Despite offers to buy her business, Nicole and Matt chose to keep it.

She emphasized that she wouldn’t want to not be doing exactly what she is doing for Total Chaos Fabrication, the Rebelle Rally, and her life. And there is no bigger reward than that.