Page 15 - PULSE 4 BOB'S

As much as you are a motorcycle supply shop through and through, I’d imagine
that you do really well on the snowmobile side of things throughout the winter.
Oh yeah, we do a really good snowmobile business especially in the apparel line. The stuff that we can of- fer is just so superior to what you can buy from Arctic Cat or Polaris and we carry extensive amounts of it.
For customers that don’t live in Minnesota, you offer a full range of options on your
website as well as a blog to help newer riders. Online presence is definitely an im-
portant part of business in this day in age.
Yeah, we held onto the catalog as long as we could until about two or three years ago; we slowly tapered back and then we cut it off. We’re thinking about getting a little more into the direct mailing, cause we haven’t done that much at this point. That’s another marketing effort that we’ll graduate back into, I think people like to see paper a little bit more now. Right now we’re trying to focus more on the social media and put an effort towards that. We haven’t delved into that too extensively, but we hired a local guy that’s really putting much more effort into it for us -- to help us be more responsive to customers, more relevant, etc... So, we’re trying to develop that community a little better. We’re trying to develop more programs for cus- tomers to get discounts. We’ve always had some of the best prices in the industry, but we’ve never had a rewards program in place, so that’s another thing we’re going to try and add this summer.
After forty plus years of being successful in the industry, what are some business
ideologies that you’ve stuck with throughout the years that have helped Bob’s
Cycle Supply reach the point that it has today?
One of the biggest things was to give discounts to all riders, not just sponsored riders. We give discounts to beginner riders, new riders, and all classes of riders -- that’s probably one of the number one philoso- phies we’ve had. Also, stock heavy and stock top brands. Those are the two things really; great prices and a huge selection of top quality brands. We’ve got a real core group of employees; we’re employee owned. Slow, steady growth is what we like and we really like to honor our customers. We don’t need the big sales or anything like that -- I mean, we need ‘em and we like ‘em, but we’re really into keeping our integrity and honoring our customers.
WWW.BOBSCYCLE.COM
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