BOB ON BOARD

If you didn’t have enough going on with all of that you’re now the latest board member for the National Powersports Dealer Association.

Mark Sheffield and I just joined up. I’m excited about that. My peers on the BMW side of the industry have always known me to be outspoken…Somedays I think BMW identifies me as a thorn in their side, but I’m an honest thorn in their side.

Dealers have needs, manufacturers have needs… but there ought to be a lot more middle ground for us to meet in the middle, come up with an agreement that everybody wants to sign versus backing off in the corners, weapons drawn.

I’ve served on the BMW dealer forum for two shifts. I did BMW as Financial Services Advisory Panel for one two year program, so I know that works pretty well. I try to engage BMW as often as possible suggesting they use their dealers as a resource since our resource is our customers.

I’ve been very active in the Maryland Motorcycle Dealers Association and we are now merging with the Maryland Automobile Dealers Association, because we have the same attorney and the same lobbyist. I find 95% of the issues to be addressed, resolved, discussed and negotiated are the same for OEMs and Dealers. The moment the MIC opened up their organization to dealers, we joined and we’ve been very active, I’ve been down to Washington a couple of times to lobby politicians.

As the NPDA was forming, I was watching it form, and I’ve known many of the people that are on the current board for quite a number of years. We joined them immediately. In fact, we joined for three years, so this is not a short term commitment. This is what we’ve needed all along. Another dealer in Oregon and I have been trying diligently to get a BMW dealer organization together, so that we can speak as one collective voice, not to be yelling at BMW, but to be having a cup of coffee at a table and asking, “how do we make this better for you, for us, and the customers?” The world should be a win-win whenever possible.

I’m excited to be part of what Bob Althoff and the founding board members started. Everyone brings her own piece of expertise, her own perspective on different issues. There’ll be a lot of hard work ahead because we’re young. But I’m excited, I got to communication out to every BMW dealer in the country before I came to AIMExpo and I believe one or two already signed up…’ll start following up with the 30 plus or minus dealers out of 160 that I talk to all the time and say “you’ve got to join.”

Now we have this great opportunity with Tucker, so there’s a better financial incentive for them if they’re on the fence. But I’m pretty sure that now that we have this growing organization, I can convince the majority of my peers to participate. I think that this is going to be the organization that’s going to help the powersports industry grow for the dealers, for the manufacturers of the motorcycles and for the manufacturers, and distributors of all the other products. The end result will be that the consumer is going to get a much healthier organization out there from coast-to-coast that is there to take care of their needs to make motorcycling fun. I see nothing but positives there.