#Bike bashbar trial#

People in third world countries can work themselves out of poverty, but it comes at a price.

Looking at this globally, there are a lot of good things that happen. Some brands enforce pricing but the laws vary in each market so most brands feel it’s almost a whack-a-mole type of process. In the bike industry, we now see companies from the UK selling consumer direct in the US at pricing that is about wholesale in the US. Until recently, each national market was pretty much a separate entity with different pricing and costs. But one of the biggest is the globalization of retail. The proliferation of the Internet, Amazon, and other online competition.

#Bike bashbar trial#

It’s trial and error because logic only goes so far.īut what were the changes that affected Performance? They’re pretty easy to point out. People understand prototyping products, but you really need to do the same with not only marketing, but all aspects of your business. But when changes become instantaneous it reduces the number of chances you have to get it right. You make a change and see if it works, and if it doesn’t you change it again. People base decisions on emotion and then rationalize them to make them feel logical.Ĭompanies normally have a cushion built in to adapt changes over time. My ex-wife based a car purchase on color, and management is no different. Some people base a bike purchase on color. Not only customers, but people in management. There’s a human factor in business, that many people in management, even good managers with good training, never deal with head-on. Luckily I did, and it was painful but necessary. But Performance had committed to owning a lot of retail store-fronts so it was not so easy to cut overhead. If your sales are crashing and you are trying to figure a way out, the best thing to do is cut overhead. One foot in quick-sand and you can get out but with two you’re in trouble. The problem was that not only was their Internet business being hammered like mine, but brick and mortar bike shops were being decimated too. One of their tactics was to focus more on brick and mortar bike shops, thinking there’s only one Internet but bike shops are local. Performance, who had a very capable management team, adapted quickly. Remarketing ads, those nasty ads that follow you around and now are on pretty much every web page, took over.Īll of these changes were happening almost instantly. By 2010 that same space would cost me $10K a month for being on it 10% of the time. In 2004 a 100x300 pixel ad cost me $1K a month for being on their “front page” all month. Within four years my sales went from $2M to $1M, as competitors entered the market. He said “The problem with the Internet is there is only one Internet.”Īs other competitors entered the Internet I was about to find out what he really meant. Then something funny happened, and one of my contacts at Performance told me and I didn’t listen. Everything was going straight up, there were no bad times. I was an early adoptor and from 2004 to 2009 my business grew from a start-up to $2M in sales. I happen to have personally experienced one of the disrupting factors of the Internet. Are there any cameras today that still use film? Major corporations now worry about new technologies that will obsolete their business, and that is not only Internet related, it is technology related. Never, in the history of business, have things changed as quickly as they did with the birth of the Internet. To get your copy just click on the Amazon link on the right. James Witherell's book Bicycle History: A Chronological History of People, Races and Technology is available in both print and Kindle eBook formats. If you are in the market for a set of wheels, please, check out John's site. He now owns Neugent Cycling, a firm devoted to delivering world-class equipment at the lowest possible price. He's spent his life in the bike business, at every level.

John Neugent probably knows more about bicycle wheels than anyone else alive.

Performance & Nashbar Bankruptcies Stories: Part 1 | Part 2 Part 3: How the Wheels Fell Off by John Neugent Sign up for our Email Newsletter The Long Story Behind the Bankruptcies of Performance & Nashbar