How "I've Been Bucked" Got Started

The drive home from Townsend took four hours. Brian LaFluer didn't say much. He just kept thinking about all the Georgia Broncos he'd seen that week — parked in fields, lined up at the trailhead, tagged on license plates from Savannah to Dalton. Hundreds of them. None of them had known each other existed.

By the time he unloaded the trailer, Georgia Broncos had a Facebook page.

That was years before I've Been Bucked. But it's where the idea started.

Brian had been a Bronco owner since he found a 1969 on Craigslist while his wife Erika was away for work. He rented a truck and trailer the same afternoon. Six months later he had three first-gen Broncos and a steep learning curve and no one nearby who had been through it before him.

That's the part that stuck. Not the wrenching or the sourcing or the builds. The isolation of it. The Bronco community was real and large and scattered, and nobody had given it a way to find itself.

Georgia Broncos fixed that for one state. By 2019, the club had grown from Brian and Erika to forty members in a single week. It reached 500 paid members. As far as Brian knows, it became the only Ford-sanctioned Bronco club in the country — a distinction that came through years of showing up, not through paperwork.

Brian served as president until July 2024. Then he handed the role to someone who could carry it forward and started thinking bigger.

The question was the same one from that drive home in Townsend. Every Bronco community had figured out how to organize locally. Nobody had built something that worked at a national scale. Nothing that let a first-gen owner in Georgia know that a sixth-gen owner in Nevada was part of the same herd.

The answer was a coin.

Brian's military background put the format in his hands before the brand had a name. Challenge coins have been used in military and first responder culture for over a century. They mark the people who show up. They travel. They hold meaning the way a patch or a sticker never quite can. He couldn't think of a better fit for a community that doesn't leave anyone behind on the trail.

I've Been Bucked launched in 2026. The first 100 coins went to the people who were there at the start. The rest go to anyone who earns one, finds one, buys one, or gets handed one by a fellow Bronco owner who thinks you deserve it.

Every Bronco has a story. Every coin proves you were part of one.

That's what this is.