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CHRIS JONES
One of the unique things about Iron Pony
is the size of the space...
It depends on how you look at it -- if you count all
of our offices we’re probably pushing 150,000 sq.
ft but we say that 133,000 sq ft. is dedicated to the retail space, receiving space, sales floor, etc...I think another important thing to mention is that we never intended on selling any motorcycles. We did parts and accessories back when it was called ecommerce and we used to produce catalogs. During the recession, a lot of the local dealers started struggling and we just started buying, so now that’s become a huge part of our business. We’ve heard for twenty years about how unhappy people were with local dealerships, but the thing that pains myself and a lot of our top team members was that a customer could come in and we could sell them all the accessories, but if they tip their bike over and they need a footpeg or an OEM side cover -- we had to send them to a dealership or a competitor, so we kind of hated that. A couple of deal- erships down the road closed down and before we knew it we had sixteen different dealerships under the same roof. You wouldn’t think that you’d buy a Super K-Mart building and then have to add onto it ‘cause you ran out of space that quickly. I remind everybody that when we bought the Super K-Mart, we were parts and accessories only. We filled the entire building with nothing but helmets, boots, tires, jackets, gloves, rain suits, and we were quite happy doing that. But we’re quite happy now that we’ve moved into the dealership realm and we’ve really grown quickly with each of our brands. We’ve created almost like a Bass Pro Shop
or Cabelas reality when people come here -- we have people that schedule their bike trips around a day or a half-day here to get their bikes serviced, or look at the 20,000 helmets we have in stock, or 10,000 jackets we have in stock. People really love going through our closeouts or buyout areas and it works out really well for everybody.
What do you think makes it so alluring to traveling motorcycle/powersports enthu-
siasts? Well, I use the analogy sometimes as we grow whether it be with bankers or naysayers who say how this won’t work or why it won’t work -- we’ve really kind of created an atmosphere that’s worth coming in and seeing. We stock so many brands of aftermarket products, we’re open seven days a week, we keep retail hours and have the same hours through the
winter; there’s no on-season and off-season. I tell our people all the time that of course we compete against other motorcycle shops, but what we really are is a retailer and we’re competing against other retail es- tablishments. We’ve got to think mentally like a retailer not like a motorcycle shop.
Iron Pony offers motorcycles/vehicles from fifteen different brands — what’s the reasoning behind offering so many and does that pose challenges from a busi-
ness perspective? Absolutely. One of the first challenges was to get all the brands to allow one another inside the building, because each one of the OEMs likes to be exclusive to a dealership. The reality is that we do enough door swings here and there’s enough space that we’re able to give each of the brands the actual space that they truly want to have.
I think the value of having all the products under one roof is that when a customer comes in that they can look and see the different brands instead of having to go three or four different places. If you have the best product, then you should be confident that you have the one that the customer is going to buy. It’s a huge undertaking balancing all of the requirements and requests of the different brands and our CFO does an outstanding job. I think most of the OEMs, if not all of them, are really happy with us now although we ap- proached it in a different way. We kind of approached motorcycles as an expensive helmet or an expensive jacket; we put a price right on there and that’s pretty much what we want out of it. The good thing is the synergy: we can look at a customer that spends good money with Iron Pony and we can sell them parts
and apparel, hard parts, and we can also sell them a motorcycle. We have what I think is the finest service department in the United States and we’re open seven days a week; I think at last count we had twenty-one technicians give or take in this location, we have three to four delivery or pickup trucks runnin’ around at anytime. We also have an ecommerce division where if you’ve been to our store and you like it, we can ship you something and you’ll have it tomorrow. With the inventory that we have -- we’re not one of the largest in the country ecommerce wise -- but we’re a good mid-level in the ecommerce division and we do very well there with our size, volume, and the number of aftermarket brands that we have.
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