Life in the Real World; Hoisted by My Own Petard

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I’ve had the luxury, over the last couple of years, to be able to dispense advice and commentary from the relative safety of an observer’s perch. Suddenly and, amazingly, of my own choosing, I’ve given up a perfectly comfortable life style to reenter the snowboard management fray. I must be out of my mind.

I’ve done this at a time when the snowboard industry consolidation, if measured by the number of companies, is probably entering its final year. But we’ve become part of the winter sports industry. That industry is going through some hard times, and the continued scurry to embrace snowboarding as its savior is perpetuating some tough and irrational competitive conditions that aren’t going away quickly.
 
When I last sat in the management chair, in the early 90s, industry conditions were, well, just a bit different. Remember when we could sell everything we could get made, there weren’t enough factories to go around, and raising prices ten percent each season was a no brainer? Ah, those were the days.
 
Since that move from management to consulting, I’ve dispensed a bunch of advice in this space. I trust it was at least worth what you paid for it. Four ideas have stuck with me.
 
·       Protect Your Brand Name
·       Know Your Numbers
·       Find a Niche
·       Don’t Kid Yourself
 
How has the relevance of these ideas changed as the industry has involved? Maybe more interestingly, am I taking my own advice? Let’s see.
 
Protect Your Brand Name; It’s All You’ve Got
 
I’m there. I get an “A.” Maximizing sales isn’t the goal. Increasing sales at a respectable rate, selling out every year and earning a profit is. Growing too quickly can mean lower margins and higher short term working capital requirements. Who needs that? The best advertising and promotion that can be done is the kind where the retailers says, “Say, I sold it all at full margin, and when I called to order more, they were all out!” Next ordering season the poor sales rep, with any luck at all, will find himself faced with having to control the increases requested by the shops to make sure they sell out again. And you didn’t spend a single marketing dollar to get that.
 
Then there’s the issue of gray market sales. Avoid them, I’ve said. It’s not that simple. Your distribution can get better year by year, but it will never be pristine. The impact on sales if you arbitrarily cut off all the sales that might be gray market could be too severe. Every snowboard brand has some gray market sales. Everybody. And I think most of us know where they are. When the boards are going to somewhere Hitler and Stalin fought a tank battle, it’s pretty clear they aren’t staying there.
 
Four or five years ago, brand name hardly seemed to be an issue. If it was a snowboard, it sold. With hindsight, it looks obvious that those who succeeded managed to grow while controlling their distribution and bringing some brand equity to their name. It was a fine line to walk. One the one hand, you had to get out of the awkward “tweens,” that level of sales between, say, five and fifteen million dollars where you needed to act like a larger company, but couldn’t afford to. On the other hand, if you tried to push sales too hard, your credibility as a brand suffered. To put it succinctly, you had to perform and grow according to the market’s expectations, but no faster. Too slow or too fast and you were toast.
 
So building your brand was just as important, and difficult, as it is now. It just didn’t seem quite so urgent.   
 
Know Your Numbers; Cash Flow is Everything
 
Opps- so far, I’m only a Cplus to B minus on this one. I’ve got the numbers thanks to some good systems and people. In fact, even as I write this they’re sitting on the desk next to me waiting to be studied, analyzed and dissected (“Crunch me, crunch me!” I hear them whispering). But I’m finding that management issues during the first month or so have left me with precious little time to spend the consecutive hours required to really get into them. I can wing it pretty well because I already know the financial model of a snowboard company, but that’s no excuse.
 
They are also not “my” numbers yet. They’re somebody else’s. Cash flow, I’ve said, is a living, breathing thing. By creating your own model, working with it and thereby internalizing it, you develop certain instincts for how the money moves through a business. In a highly seasonal business like snowboarding, there’s probably nothing more important than the dance of the cash flow. I’m prepared to give myself something of a break on this issue, because I haven’t really been at it long enough to have the necessary gut instinct for this particular company’s cash flow.
 
At a time when everybody is struggling to make a profit, and so few are succeeding, knowing and managing by your numbers should be at the top of everybody’s management priorities. It always should have been there. Five years ago, however, flush with high margins, soaring sales, Japanese prepayments and COD terms to retailers, knowing and working with your numbers didn’t seem quite so compelling. In truth, it wasn’t. You didn’t have to invest as much money, and you got it back sooner. Boy I miss the good old days, where various management miscues could be hidden behind ravenous product demand.
 
 Find a Niche; Know Your Customers and How You Compete
 
I can console myself on this one by remembering that when I gave the advice, I acknowledged that it was not a trivial thing to do. In fact, I said it was time consuming, detail oriented, hard work to really figure out who your customer is. I know the market niche and the basis of the company’s competitive advantage. But as far as what kind of consumers are actually buying the stuff, I haven’t even gotten around to asking the question. Let’s give me an incomplete.
 
And let’s acknowledge that it will always be an incomplete. The process will always be never ending, unless the market stops changing.
 
A niche, it turns out, is a necessary survival mechanism. The hundreds of companies who didn’t have one, or the basis for creating it, aren’t with us any more. Creating a niche is a long term process, and it was five or more years ago, when it didn’t seem to matter, that you had to have begun the process if you wanted a niche you could defend in current business conditions. Some companies found theirs, then lost it in the struggle between growth and credibility I described above. Some stumbled on it, and kept it in spite of themselves.
 
Don’t Kid Yourself; Make the Hard Decisions
 
The rumors are always worse than the truth. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. Change is easier when you make it before you have no choice. Bullshit is inevitably dysfunctional to an organization. Etcetera.
 
We kidded ourselves as an industry for a long time. Sure there was going to be a consolidation, but it would be somebody else who would be the consolidatee. We were brainwashed by the wonder years. No hard decisions required. We couldn’t bring ourselves to believe that snowboarding was just another industry, as susceptible to competitive trends as any other.
 
Guilty. Along with most of you. In my first snowboard management incarnation I was a believer. Even though I knew better from my experience in other industries. The excitement was contagious, the opportunity apparently endless. The bullshit smelled great.
 
Never again. I’ll have fun, but I won’t lose my perspective and objectivity. May I suggest that you shouldn’t either?
 
Well, I guess these four ideas have held up pretty well. They weren’t any more or less valid five or seven years ago then they are now. The irony is that in the past they were easier to ignore, but paying attention to them then might have made consolidation a little more manageable for some companies. Like compounding interest, little changes can have a big impact given the advantage of time.

 

 

Building a Business; Issues for Would be Skate Entrepreneurs

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When a market gets hot, people start companies.   Where the capital costs and entry barriers are low, they start more rather than less. When there’s enthusiasm for the industry and the lifestyle, they often start them for all the wrong reasons, and without adequate or any business planning. It looks like easy money, but it usually isn’t. 

 
Well, God bless naïve, enthusiastic entrepreneurs because if everybody understood the risks and stresses of starting new businesses, none would ever be started. I don’t want to discourage anybody from starting their business, but I’d like them to know what they are getting into, what’s going to happen if they have some early success, and why it’s too late to begin when the market is already hot. The genius of the entrepreneur is in starting his or her business before everybody else sees the opportunity.
 
Just for fun, let’s say you want to start an independent street shoe company. Now? Today? Okay, okay, stop laughing. Pretend it’s two years ago.
 
In the Beginning
 
You’re a sponsored skater with a good reputation, and a following among local retailers. You don’t like the shoes available to you. Conversations with retailers you know make it “obvious” they’d be receptive to some new colors and designs. Response to your color sketches and description is positive. “Cool! We’ll buy them for sure,” they say almost without exception.
 
“Kaching!!!” you think. Easy money, here I come. Not that anybody gets into the business for the money of course…….
 
Let’s make this simple. Magically, you’re through the product development cycle and are ready for production. You did all the work yourself.   A friend introduces you to a manufacturer who loves you and your shoes so much he agrees to produce a thousand pairs with no up front money and to give you 60 days after delivery to pay. Orders from some retailers materialize, though not from everybody who said they would buy and not always as large as you’d like. You successfully grovel, taking the “I’m just a poor skate entrepreneur” approach to your new customers, and they reluctantly agree to pay you cash on delivery.
 
Your shoes arrive on time (right). All the people who said they’d buy your shoes buy them (sure they do). They all pay you cash as promised (uh-huh). You put the money in the bank and earn interest until you have to pay the factory that made the shoes for you. The shoes all sell through great (of course). Reorders flow in like water over Niagara Falls during the rainy season. What a terrific business this is. Here’s what your income statement for this little business looks like after the first 1,000 pair.
 
Net Sales                                                          $25,000            
Cost of Goods                                                  $15,000
Gross Profit                                                      $10,000 (40 percent)
 
Operating Expenses                                          $2.000
 
Pretax Income                                                   $8,000
 
Remember that everything went perfectly. Also, you worked for yourself for free and did everything yourself. Your operating expense was almost all for travel and communications. At the end of the day, you’ve got yourself a nice little 32 percent profit margin. Isn’t that wonderful!
 
Having run a distributor that was selling imported product, I am here to tell you that everything working right is a full-on, drug induced, hit your head while skating without a helmet, hallucination.
 
But it’s a great hallucination to have, so let’s assume it continues except for a couple of little things. You’re so hot that your next order is for 10,000 pairs.
 
The Next Step Up
 
Your supplier still likes you but, hey, this is business. With an order that size, he wants a letter of credit or a deposit up front, and you’ll have to pay him the balance when he ships the shoes. Remember, though, that this is a hallucination, so he gives you a break and says you just need to pay him when the shoes ship.
 
Your retailers still like you but, hey, this is business (you’re starting to hear that a lot as your company grows). They want 45 -day terms just like they say they get from the other companies. The 10,000 pair cost you $150,000 including freight and duty.  Your supplier says, “I’m ready to ship, send the money.”
 
Details like this can really put a damper on perfectly good hallucination. The bank won’t lend you any money, your credit card limit isn’t quite that big and none of those lottery tickets you’ve bought have been winners. You need $150,000 or you’re out of business. Let’s assume somebody comes along and lends you the money for only an exorbitant interest rate and doesn’t want 50% of the equity in your company to do it. Remember, this is a pleasant hallucination.
 
The shoes are delivered to you and, in turn, to your customers. You’ve sold the shoes, you’ve got the same 40 percent gross profit that you had when you sold 1,000 pair, but this time it’s 40 percent of $250,000 or $100,000.
 
Inconvenient Realities
 
The expense side looks a little different though. You had to get some help warehousing and delivering the product. Retailers want some service so you need some phone lines and somebody to answer them. Some promotional product has to go out the door for free. The guy you borrowed the $150,000 from wants interest. You’re still making money at the bottom line, but that 32 pretax margin has evaporated. Maybe if you’re lucky it’s still as high as 15 percent but heading south fast as you become an established company.
 
Oh, and by the way, you’ve got no cash. You retailers aren’t paying you for 45 days and, strangely enough, not all the cash shows up exactly on the 45th day. But the people you’re hiring to man the phones and deliver the product don’t seem to want to wait 45 days to get paid. It’s the lament of the entrepreneur to their accountant- if I’m making so much money, how come I can’t pay my bills!?!?!?!
 
Now, awaking from our dreamlike state, we find that the supplier wants a letter of credit before he’ll produce any more, and the order isn’t really big enough to get his attention anyway. Retailers are asking about your team and your promotion budget. Some shoes sell and some don’t. Certain retailers you really want to be in want a credit for the ones that haven’t moved. There’s so much to do that you need to hire more people to help you. The government wants you to fill out a bunch of paperwork, and they want their piece too. You’ve got every cent you can find invested in the business and it’s barely enough-for the moment.
 
Congratulations- you’re no longer an entrepreneur, you’ve a manager. Overall, your income has increased. But your net margin on each pair of shoes sold has declined as the cost of running the business gets bigger.
 
You didn’t do anything wrong. This is all normal stuff. Every time volume increases and margins decline, more working capital has to be invested in the business. Working capital is nothing but the money you have to spend to pay bills, get product made and market your brand while you wait for retailers to pay you. Almost every successful, growing business I’ve ever seen has working capital crunches as a normal part of growth.
 
Managing by the Numbers
 
What can you do to avoid this financial hang grenade?   Nothing. It comes with being in business. But you can try and minimize its impact by a little planning. Do it on a computer or with a piece of paper. Here’s a format I’ve used with some success in a variety of businesses. Don’t get fixated by the categories I’ve used. Change them to work for your business.
 
                                                            Jan.      Feb.     March. Etc.
 
Beginning Cash Balance
Sources of Cash
            Cash Sales
            Collection of Receivables
            Borrowings
            Other
Total Sources of Cash
 
Total Cash Available
 
Uses of Cash
            Product Purchases
            Payroll
            Rent
            Utilities
            Advertising
            Phone/Fax
            Etc.
Total Uses of Cash
 
Ending Cash Balance
 
The beginning cash balance is probably whatever is in your checking account. The ending cash balance each month becomes the beginning cash balance for the next period. Depending on how quickly your situation is changing, your estimate of expenses can usually be based on your historical experience. But remember that just because you get your phone bill in July doesn’t mean you pay it that month. Typical many of your operating expenses will be paid in the month following receipts, and your cash flow has to take this into account.
 
Don’t get too caught up in the process of creating a perfect model. Get it done and work with it. Modify it as you learn more. Look at your projections versus what actually happens. Creating the model isn’t really where you get the benefit. Using it and watching the variables change with each other is.  It’s a lot like learning a language. You only get better with practice and as soon as you stop speaking it, you start to lose it.
 
Rules to Live by
 
Rule one, then, is don’t try to grow your business faster than you can finance it.
 
Rule two for the budding skate entrepreneur is to know the difference between starting a company and running one. Get the help you need.
 
Rule three is that it’s easy to sell when you’re new and small, and harder as you grow. Know how you’re going to compete.
 
Follow these three rules and maybe the glamour of having your own company won’t wear off so quickly.

 

 

How a Brand Makes Money In the Snowboard Business

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Don’t get too comfortable. This is a short article that won’t take long to read. It’s a direct result of that moment in Vegas when I finally decided I wasn’t dreaming and that there actually were a bunch of new snowboard brands and new factory capacity. What makes it even worse is that some of these companies appear to be backed by financially solid parent companies, and can afford to lose money for a really, really long time.

I had thought maybe we were making some progress in getting through the consolidation, but now it looks like we’ve got some new fodder for the irresistible business cycle and we can all be miserable a little longer.
 
To make money, do these things:
 
·         Realize that all you have is your brand name and do everything you can to build and protect it. If you don’t have a recognized one, you probably can’t expect to make any sort of reasonable return by starting to build it now.
 
·         Base your product orders on your preseason.  Don’t kid yourself about reorders. Business people I respect are ordering no more than 10% above their preseason bookings, and some are 5% below. If you have to count on reorders to break even, you might want to ask yourself if your company has a future in snowboarding.
 
·         Be clean at the end of the year. You’re better off agonizing over sales you lost than inventory you have left. Leave your retailers sold through at full margins and anxious to increase their orders next year. You aren’t giving up sales; you are just delaying them a year.
 
·         Don’t chase market share right now. I’m beginning to think market share is a code word for losing money.
 
·         Respect the fact that closed out, brand name product may be among your toughest competitors this year.
 
·         Sharpen your pencil when formulating your advertising and promotional budgets. If you’re ordering product based only on what’s already booked and you aren’t fighting for an increase in market share, aren’t there some things you can do without?
 
That’s it.
 

 

 

Hard Learned Lessons; You Can Do Everything Right and Still Get Screwed

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This is the industry. Snowboarding. Some are in it to make a buck, some because they love the sport and just want to make a living doing what they love. Occasionally, the two collide and the golden rule prevails; the one with the gold makes the rules. When there’s a business lesson to be learned that might help some others, I get involved. My name’s Harbaugh. I carry a pen (well, actually a key board).

 I was working the day watch out of the precinct office when the phone rang. The boss’ name is Stouffer. My partner is O’Brien.
 
The story you are about to hear is true. The names, places and other details have been changed to protect the innocent.
 
Dum, Da Dum Dum……..Dum!
 
“The fact is I thought I had everything covered. I thought I was on the money with that letter of credit. I thought there was no way I’d get screwed with that letter of credit.”
 
Ralph thought he finally had it made. All he really loved to do was build stuff and when he learned to love to snowboard and found that he could make money building boards, it seemed like it was all coming together.
 
Not that it was easy. There were the usual startup/entrepreneur/cash flow challenges. It was 1994 when he took a salary for the first time; $25,000. The company did 4,000 boards that year with fifteen employees, one press and a simple production line. They produced for half a year. 1,500 were their own brand (let’s call the brand and the company “Burp”), and the remainder for other brands.
 
A 1995 order for $1.3 million and 8,000 OEM boards convinced him he was over the hump.
 
“I was completely ready for it. I had the process down and I knew where I wanted to go. All I needed was the volume to get up so I had enough machines. So I had a constant flow through the shop and I figured hey, get it to that point, get it running smoothly and then I can concentrate on Burp.”
 
The first 5,000 of the 8,000 board order were manufactured, shipped and paid for. The buyer called back with a problem with the inserts, which was fixed at Burp’s expense. Before making the rest of the boards, they created four samples with the insert problem corrected and sent them to the buyer for approval. They were approved, in writing, and Burp geared up to produce the boards to that newly agreed upon standard.
 
That’s when the buyer tried to cancel the remainder of the contract. But with the materials bought, that wasn’t really an option for Burp. It took the buyer around a month, until October, to determine that the boards would be produced under another label, and the order was upped to 4,000 from 3,000. A shipping schedule was agreed to and Burp began to produce.
 
The first 400 boards are shipped and paid for with no problem. The second 500 are ready to ship on time and on schedule and the buyer says “Hold it, we don’t have an address for you to ship them to.” A week later, Burp finally gets permission to ship them; to the buyer’s warehouse.
 
Ralph is starting to get nervous. He’s been shipping these boards, and getting paid, under a letter of credit. The buyer’s delays have meant that there are only fifteen or so days to ship the remainder of the product and present the documents before the letter of credit expires. It could only be extended with the cooperation of the buyer, and Ralph isn’t feeling too confident that they will be willing to do that.
 
Another thousand boards go out the door and at this point, the nameless buyer owes Burp $350,000. Another week goes by and another 500 boards are ready to go. His bank tells him he hasn’t been paid for an earlier shipment, and the buyer’s bank pleasantly informs him that their are discrepancies in the letter of credit.
 
A letter of credit is an agreement whereby a bank agrees to pay the beneficiary (in this case, Burp) a certain amount of money based on the presentation of very specifically prepared documents usually indicating the shipment by the specified means of certain goods. If any detail is incorrect, the account party (the entity that had the bank issue the letter of credit; in this case the buyer) can refuse to honor the letter of credit. Incorrect details are called discrepancies.
 
I can’t recall ever seeing a letter of credit without a discrepancy. Ralph was new to the letter of credit game and didn’t know about discrepancies.
 
“I called them (the buyer) up and asked what’s up. They drug it out for three or four days. I stopped manufacturing at this point because I didn’t have any money to pay my guys for two weeks and this is like three weeks before Christmas. Bad scene. ******* is the heroin user capital of the world. I’ve got some burley ass dudes working for me, 38 of them. And when you come to them and tell them they can’t get their pay check…..three days before Christmas, your talking about some pretty pissed off guys.”
 
The buyer claimed there were only two and a half instead of the industry standard three turns on the inserts. Ralph didn’t know what the hell the industry standard was, but he knew he was producing the boards to the standards they had all agreed to in writing. He put the extra half turn on the boards in the warehouse at Burp’s expense.
 
For the next few weeks, Ralph is the beneficiary of an education that’s not in the curriculum at any business schools. For reasons Ralph has a hard time figuring out, the CEO of the buyer gets involved. He pressures Ralph to ship the remainder of the product, but won’t pay what is already owed. He tells Ralph he’s going to take his house through some mysterious legal mechanism that was never made clear. Endless conversations, attempted negotiations, and confrontations go nowhere. People show up from the buyer with a truck on three separate occasions to pick up the product, but they have no authority to pay for it.
 
When December 31 comes around, the CEO suddenly disappears from the picture. There’s no resolution, and no decision maker for Ralph to talk to. He’s $550,000 in the whole, his business is on the verge of collapsing, and he’s got nowhere to go.
 
“These guys lied to me, straight up lied to me. This guy told me that a company check could not be revoked, a wire transfer could not be revoked, every time he’s telling me this I’d call my bank and say, listen, if a wire transfer comes from *************** how long does it take? They said it takes about four days. Okay, can it be revoked? Sure.”
 
Having run out of options, and with his company and personal assets on the line, Ralph filed a lawsuit against the buyer for $4.8 million. His attorney told him he’d win, but it would take something like three and a half years. Both he and his company would be in bankruptcy almost immediately.
 
His attorney went back to the buyer and made a deal. The buyer got the product, Ralph got some money, they signed mutual releases and walked away from each other. But the money wasn’t enough to cover all the debt.
 
Ralph’s only solution was to sell the company. There was plenty of interest, but when the smoke has cleared, there was only one buyer for the company remaining. Let’s call it the ABC company. ABC was willing to buy the assets and pay the creditors $0.45 for each dollar they were owed over three years. Ralph’s job was to convince them to take that. Overall, the deal was worth something like $400,000.
 
Ralph spent six months trying to bring the only three creditors who didn’t quickly agree to the deal into line. He couldn’t do it. Ultimately, it got too late in the year to make the season and ABC pulled out. At this point the major secured creditor, the bank, finally said they’d do it, but it was too late.
 
Ralph went back to ABC. The bank foreclosed on the assets, and ABC bought the assets, including the Burp name, from the bank for $85,000. The unsecured creditors got nothing and the bank got less than it could have gotten had it agreed to ABC’s original deal earlier.
 
Ralph works for ABC now. He’s running their factory, doing what he likes to do, and the business is well capitalized.
 
“At the end of the day, if everything had worked out, and I had made the product and shipped it and they (the buyer) accepted it, I would have been in the plus; not substantially, not like I thought I would be, but I would be in the plus. I would have paid back all my trade debt no problem and I would have been half way strong going into next year. Instead I was sitting there with $350,000 worth of debt.”
 
SIDEBAR:
 
Hard Lessons Worth Remembering:
 
1)    Letters of credit are gnarly documents
2)    Agreements are only as reliable as the people you make them with.
3)    Nothing ever works out quite the way you expect it.
4)    There isn’t always time to learn; know what you don’t know.
5)    A bank’s decision making process can be hard to figure out.
6)    When all is said and done, all you’ve got is your integrity, your ethics, and the relationships you build with people.

 

 

SIA Member Services; Run Your Business Better: No Charge

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I think the first time I heard about SIA it was when somebody asked me to write a check for membership. “What are we going to get out of this membership?” I asked. “We have to be a member to go to the show,” was the less than enthusiastic endorsement. So I signed the check.

Turns out there’s more to it than that. SIA offers its members no charge services that, if utilized correctly, will add to your bottom line. The mystery is why so few members utilize them. Maybe a little publicity will help.
 
The Credit Services Program gives companies a picture of the payment status and credit quality of retailers they are doing business with. Produced seven times a year (January through May, August and October), this report shows the amount and status of all reported debt more than 60 days past due. It includes not only information supplied by SIA members, but by the credit associations of other action sports trade groups.
 
The report I received in August was about an inch and half thick. The only cost to participate is the time it takes to complete a form which shows the name and address of the account and the amount 60 days or more past due. There’s room for a short comment on the account status.
 
The information is reported by a member number. The name of the reporting company is not disclosed except to Riemer Reporting Service, which assembles the data.
 
Let’s say you’re doing about $2,000,000 in business annually (an estimate of the mean revenue of SIA members). Your business continues to be highly seasonal, and your customers are demanding better payment terms. SIA reports that overdue accounts represented 4.8% of sales at wholesale, or $96,000 for your typical SIA member.
 
Not all of that will ultimately be uncollectable. But after taxes, a lot of businesses are lucky to drop 4.8% to the bottom line. Better management of your bad debt expense can easily be the difference between a profit and a loss.
 
The in season cash flow affects are harder to illustrate, but may be more important. As I’ve said in this space before, companies pay their bills with cash, not with profit. A lot of snowboard industry companies live hand to mouth during the period between the arrival of product and collection of receivables.
 
What happens if, on average, your collection period goes from 60 to 90 days? How much more money will you have to invest in the business? Where will you get it? What will it cost?
 
Just for fun, let’s say you can borrow money at 10% annually.  To carry $2,000,000 in receivables an extra 30 days costs you about $16,700. The calculation is oversimplified, but you get the picture.
 
SIA’s Credit Services Program is part of an effective program to reduce your bad debt exposure. Checking credit references is important, as is your history with the account. But nobody ever handed out bad credit references, and conditions change from year to year. If by participating you can sell more product to accounts that pay, and pay on time, isn’t it worth the few minutes it takes to fill out and send in the form? You bet.
 
Often, public relations doesn’t make it on our radar screens, though when somebody says “advertising and promotion” we perk up and get out our check books. To paraphrase Clauswitz, public relations is advertising and promotion carried on by other means. Working with SIA, you can do some good public relations work that’s inexpensive to free.
 
Sort of my accident I got my hands on SIA’s New Products, Best Values publication. This annual publication, distributed to hundreds of media people and anybody else who wants it, gives each company a chance to briefly describe its latest products. Having a listing is free, but only 30 board companies participated this year. Since the show, SIA has distributed about 1,200 hundred copies.
 
We spend six or seven thousand dollars on a Transworld ad that we wonder if anybody is going to notice, but we won’t take the time to get some information in the hands of people who are specifically requesting it.
 
Call SIA and get their free booklet on press relations. Tell them you want to participate in New Products, Best Values. Then call them again and ask what you should be doing about public relations and how you can do it. The information and advice you can get for free would cost you thousands of bucks from a public relations firm.
 
Finally, there’s the Cost of Doing Business and Compensation and Benefits Survey. It’s just as expensive as all these other SIA services; you got to participate.
 
Inaugurated only in 1994, this survey is focused on developing accurate financial information on the snow sports industry. Only participants receive the report. The submitting company is known only to an outside accounting firm that receives the information. The tabulated data is released only in composite form. It shows expenses as a percentage of sales, not in hard dollar terms. In other words, participants are well protected from disclosure of proprietary information.
 
The data is broken down by small and large companies (with $5 million being the cut off) and by hard and soft goods. Right now, limited participation is making the information less valuable than it will ultimately be. Only 82 companies (out of an SIA membership of 850) are participating, but less than 20 are snowboard or snowboard related. SIA is prepared to run the data for snowboard companies separately as soon as there’s enough participation to make the numbers meaningful. 
 
There are two basic reasons to participate. First, it will let you know how you’re doing compared to other companies, highlighting what you’re doing right and where you can look to improve. Second, it can be very valuable in dealing with your bank or other financing sources.
 
For most industries, banks have “common sized” financial data that allows them to compare your company to others in its industry. Not so with snowboarding; until now. This kind of data is something of a security blanket for bankers unfamiliar with an industry. It will allow you to explain how your company is doing compared to similar businesses. The fact that you even have this data and have considered its implications will improve your credibility, giving you and your banker a common point of reference.
 
Using SIA’s services and information correctly will improve the way you manage and finance your business. Do yourself and the industry a favor; participate. Fill out the forms and send them back.

 

 

Where Have All the Snowboards Gone? The Apparent Imbalance Between Production and Sales

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I seem to remember from my first economics class that if supply goes way up and demand doesn’t keep pace, prices can be, well, negatively impacted. When I look back at the 1994-95 season, I am disturbed because it appears that there were more boards produced than were sold to retailers; maybe a lot more.

Below, I try and estimate just how many more. With so little hard information out there, that’s a tough thing to do with any confidence. But because the answers will affect how we run our businesses and how successful we are, it’s worth the effort.
 
My information is based on what I’ve read, some third hand conversations, rumors, insights gained working with snowboard companies, and some educated guessing. My numbers are not precise, and I’d like nothing better than for somebody to prove me wrong. 
 
If I were to guess how many boards were sold to retailers during the 1994-1995 season in the United States, I might estimate 225,000. Conventional wisdom says that the U.S. is one third of the total market. If that’s accurate, there were approximately 675,000 boards sold to retailers world wide.
 
My instinct is that the number is over 800,000. Using that number for discussion purposes, let’s talk about how many boards were produced.
 
I’m pretty confident that Pale and Elan together produced over 400,000 boards. Let’s say that Burton, Morrow, K2, Lamar, Gnu/Libtech and Rossignol together made 450,000 in factories they own or control for their own brands or others.
 
That’s a total of 850,000, which would be consistent with my estimated sales number if I wasn’t ignoring Atomic, Spaulding, Blizzard, Carnival, Thermal, Surf Politix, ASM, Niedecker, Volkl, Dynastar and a host of others that make their own and/or other brands.
 
At a minimum, I think production for the 1994-95 season was 1,100,000 snowboards. One knowledgeable source said the number was closer to 1,500,000. That means there would be between 300,000 and 700,000 unsold boards out there, not counting what retailers still have.
 
That raises some interesting questions. Like, for example, where are all these boards?
 
Maybe a distributor has them all in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for a good time to unload them.
 
Japan. They got to be in Japan. That’s actually the opinion of some people, and if you accept the conventional wisdom that there’s enough pairs of skis in Japanese warehouses to satisfy the market in 1995-96 if not a single additional pair was imported, it at least seems plausible. Certainly the Japanese have the balance sheets to support holding that much inventory.
 
Maybe it doesn’t matter where they are if they exist. At some point in time, they will appear on the market. Are your brands so well positioned that customers will still pay full price rather than buy a new, one year old board with essentially the same construction for a huge discount?
 
Think on it. What do you need to do differently as the market changes?