HOPES & DREAMS

Connect. Engage. Unite.

In these pages you will read about things that are near and dear to me. Not to say that everything in Dealernews hasn’t been worth perusing over the decades of my reading… It’s just that things I have hoped for and dreamed of might, maybe, perhaps be coming to fruition.

With AIMExpo’s show directory serving as the core of this edition, we are one step closer to a much needed rallying point for dealers. As COVID proved, dealers really do miss the opportunity to get together. Back in the day, the Dealernews Dealer Expo would annually Connect all of us as an industry. That legacy lives on as we gather in Las Vegas to Connect, Engage and Unite once again.

As for Engaging, you will also read about the Iron Lilly Project in this issue. At its heart is a major motion picture which will portray all that is good within our industry. It is the true story of a 20-yearold woman who dared to open a motorcycle dealership in 1912. She was widowed with three young children, but somehow single-handedly kept the doors open through the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 which infected 500 million people (a third of the world’s population) and killed an estimated 50 million (ten times the death toll of our most recent pandemic).

Oh, and she kept the dealership going through the First World War, the Great Depression, World War II and a plague of locusts, or two!

She was a Suffragette, an avid rider, race promoter and a pioneer in our sport. She was an influencer and community builder before there were such things and she left an indelible thumb print — the inclusivity that defines us today — more than a century later.

You’ll have to buy a ticket to learn more and to fall in love with Lilly the way I did decades ago.

However the movie intends to do more than to celebrate an amazing woman; it aspires to lift our industry at a time when we need it most. Our industry needs vitality and growth to stave off recession and ruin. Only mass-market storytelling can really do that.

Speaking of which…

The National Powersports Dealer Association, of which I am honored to serve, has been working for more than a year to Unite dealers and grow all our businesses. By working with some powerhouse media partners NPDA seeks to bring a 24 x 7 x 365 Powersports Channel into being and Engage in some much-needed mass-market storytelling of our own.

We as Dealers have waited too long for someone to ride in on a white horse to lead our industry to the promised land — to spread the contagion of riding and to invite the masses to our lifestyle. To date, no white horses have arrived.

Our role as Dealers is to grow final demand for the great products our OEM partners engineer and build. It is we, not they, who must do what we do best — sell our community, inviting the masses to come lead “richer and fuller lives” — as an old friend and industry leader, Scott Miller, used to say.

Yes, 2023 is going to be a year in which to Connect, Engage. Unite. like never before.

Dealernews will have to “lead, follow or get out of the way” as the case may be. But the magazine will assuredly continue to chronicle the destiny of our incredible industry as we have done since 1965.

By Robin Hartfiel