Wow, get busy with stuff and apparently the internet has decided that I've been thieving for years to build my money pit... and not responding to a thread I haven't been emailed about is an admission of guilt?
First of all, to the norotors personalities that barf this speculation that I've essentially stolen money to buy high-dollar parts for my own car - I hope you never come under fire on the internet. The claims are baseless (truth is, the only reason I have expensive goodies is through partnerships with the manufacturers), realistically indefensible (what can I do, post my Quickbooks files?), and infuriating - all from people I think of myself as helping individually, and as a group. I guarantee none of you yelling from the bleachers would be so disrespectful in person.
I've always liked this community, which is why I was excited that Blake wanted to make me a vendor here - I've never thought of the tiny v8-swapped-RX7 group as something I can build a business, much less a lifestyle off of, so it's always been more about helping the members than making money (hence most of our stuff sold here was group buy, heavy discounts, etc). The support I've gotten in return has been great for the most part, and I've made quite a few friends - that being said, if I could trade the current headaches and 'bad press' coming from people who have never given me a $, I'd seriously look into it lol.
I like to handle things like this by discussing the issues, and the people who are actually involved - lots of times there's way more smoke than fire. We've had delays caused by manufacturers just as often as caused by my shop's workload, but most commonly what we have had is a mismanagement of customer expectations. I tell someone I can get their parts in a week or so to me, then it takes 10hrs of work, and they expect it to be to their door inside of a week and a half - I haven't had that sort of turnaround in years, to be honest. This got increasingly bad during the run-up to SEMA 2013 where we spent WAY more time than we should have getting customer cars done and essentially slapped the body panels on my car to push it there, and then got burned on the largest of those customer cars' invoices. Shop time was so scarce that I had an opportunity to race the 2014 season for free essentially, but couldn't afford the time, but I put customer needs ahead of my own motorsports desires.
As far as money goes, I'm certainly not swimming in income here, but I didn't build my business to "rob Peter to pay Paul" either. Cash flow is definitely a fluid situation within any business, but customers who pay for things have those parts ordered (and thus paid for)... people that place deposits on harnesses or group buys or whatever always have the option for a refund, but if I've already placed something on special order and the manufacturer has a restocking fee, I'm not in the business of paying for the customer changing their mind. I've reached out to the last couple people that would like refunds for parts ordered, and have checks ready to go out for all but one (waiting on a mailing address).
A couple of months ago I moved shops down to San Diego, where I have some really interesting engineering work, and a great girlfriend - of the seven cars I took down with me, only a couple are left (the G35 that 'snaketits' posted about is heading back up to him as soon as he gives me a destination), and I hope that with less projects happening concurrently, that my stress level and the aggravation of my customers will go down a ton. I'm not interested in being anyone's punching bag when trying to do them a favor, and frankly don't care where the community buys their body kits, coilovers, or gauges. The 'technical sales' portion of the business will move forward, with a better web presence, much smaller parts catalog, and more parts made or stocked by me in San Diego - less shipping/stock hassles, and hopefully with much better communication we can keep customer expectations right on the ball with reality.
I'll try and keep a closer eye on things here, but as with anything else, direct email to me is the only way to guarantee I see something. Blake, thanks for playing referee here, and I hope that you don't feel that I've done you a disservice (I don't blame, or mind, you pulling Jordan Innovations from the vendor list for reasons well covered by the couple of constructive posts in this thread). I'm so tempted to post some Big Sean lyrics about karma, but instead, cheers guys, and carry on.
