Reality Bites; The View from ASR

 

I thought the toy line was a good idea, but there was a certain sense of unreality to the encounter and discussion I guess because of the venue and circumstances. And I guess that’s how I’m going to segue into making that chance meeting relevant to ASR and the skate industry; good ideas with a sense of unreality.

 

 

Almost every skate company owner/manager I talked with at the show had basically the same things to say. They were concerned with the state of the industry and overall competitive conditions. Specifically,

 

1.     Growth seems to be slowing and profits are harder to come by.

 

2.     Deck margins especially are declining due to blanks and oversupply.

 

3.     There are too many companies with no business reason to exist.

 

4.     There are too many wood shops with too much capacity.

 

5.     The companies that are investing in team and marketing and benefiting the industry are giving a free ride to the companies that don’t.

 

6.     The top five to ten companies in the industry ought to cooperate to stabilize and rationalize the industry, but probably won’t.

 

7.     Differentiating your brand is getting harder. You are faced with the need to spend more marketing dollars exactly when it’s toughest to afford.

 

 

What they said was pretty much the same thing that’s been said in every industry that has experienced fast growth followed by a period of maturing and slower growth. For example, Harvard Professor Michael Porter in his 1980 book Competitive Strategy said it.

Professor Porter who, I am quite sure, hasn’t spend much time skate boarding, took a whole chapter to talk about the transition from fast growth to industry maturity. He noted the following tendencies, and that they are more or less the same in every maturing industry.

 

Slowing growth, he said, means more competition for market share. Because fast growth is no longer supplying opportunities for growth, the focus becomes on attacking the market shares of others. Competitors can become more aggressive, because they realize their survival is at stake. There are lots of misperceptions and irrational retaliations for the perceived and real attacks of others.

 

New products and applications become harder to develop. Don’t look now, but basically a skateboard is a skateboard. My money is on the companies who are continually finding small ways to differentiate their products.

 

International competition increases, according to Dr. Porter. I recently talked with a French snowboard factory that’s started taking shop orders for decks. Easy business he says. He can make money doing as few as fifty decks for a shop.

 

Dealer margins, according to Dr. Porter, will fall. But at the same time their power increases. Kind of makes sense when there are more companies, more products, and less perceived difference among product. Companies looking for a survival strategy will offer retailers lower prices, discounts, maybe some increased dating on orders to try and generate cash flow. Great for the consumer. Not so good for brands and retailers trying to sell a specialty product at higher margins.

 

Industry profits will fall during the transition period, and the fall can be temporary or permanent. Cash flow declines when it is needed most due to lower margins and greater expense incurred in trying to provide better customer service and differentiate “me too” products. Raising capital becomes very difficult. Companies with the smallest market shares are the most affected.

 

There is a danger of over capacity as more and more manufacturers rush in to meet the seemingly endlessly growing demand for this hot product. Over capacity accentuates a tendency towards price warfare. The result I’ve seen with the snowboard is that it became something of a commodity. And there’s a lot more technology and actual product differentiation in a snowboard than in a skateboard.

 

At the end of all this, the whole basis of competition in the industry has changed permanently. The euphoria that can characterize a company’s management style during the fast growth period has to change. Doing more of the same won’t work anymore. When you could grow quickly, raise prices and have high margins you could get away with anything. Hey, cash flow can hide a lot of mistakes.

 

I don’t want to belabor the point, but you might also pick up a copy of the March-April 1997 issue of the Harvard Business Review and read Professor George S. Day’s article called “Strategies for Surviving a Shakeout.”

 

Now I know it sort of stretches the bounds of reality to talk about the Harvard Business Review and the skateboarding industry in the same breath. I talked with professor Day and I think I can assure you he’s never been arrested for skating the railings at city hall. I also know he’s not Richard Novak or George Powell writing under an assumed name.

 

So how come he’s managed to write an article all about the evolution of the skateboarding industry (even though he never uses the word)?

 

 

There’s one, minor, inconvenient, sort of annoying, little fact that has to be faced. Please pay attention. That fact is that skateboarding is no different from any other industry in how it will go through its growth cycle. The companies in the industry will respond to changes in the competitive environment just like companies in any other industry.

 

Every company in the industry will do what it perceives to be in its own best interest. Each will create a projected scenario explaining how it will be a successful survivor while its competitors succumb to changing competitive pressures. Failing companies will resist closing their doors even when every objective analysis of their risk and potential return indicates that they should. Ultimately, only companies with a clear competitive advantage under the new market conditions will survive.

 

Each will truly want to support the industry, but won’t be able to agree with other companies exactly what that means. As a result the “you first” principal will tend to prevail and each will wait for somebody else to step up to the plate as the leader. That is probably inevitable in an industry where there is no clearly dominant company.

 

My suggestion is that you start by accepting two facts:

 

1.     The basis for competition has changed and is changing in predictable ways. The “good old days,” if they ever existed, aren’t coming back.

 

2.     Fact one is really important.

 

If you accept this, then it’s time to start recreating your business to succeed in the new competitive reality.

 

Begin by not chasing market share. Not that market share is a bad thing, but blindly chasing it in a competitive frenzy often leads to a financial disaster. Remember that any company can get one hundred percent market share- all they need to do is give away the product. Unless, of course, somebody else does the same thing, in which case I suppose you’d have to pay the customer to take your product. But hey, you’d have a big market share!

 

Which is a somewhat sarcastic way of saying that your competitive strategy has to be tied to your financial capabilities. Try this. Realistically, what can you expect your gross profit margin to be? What are your general and administrative expenses for the year? What do you need to spend on sales and marketing to have a chance at a viable marketing position? What other money do you have to spend on interest, taxes, commissions, etc? Now add twenty percent to your total estimated expenses for stuff you couldn’t have imagined would happen in your wildest dreams.

 

Given your gross profit margin and these expenses, how much do you have to sell to earn a reasonable profit? Figure it out right now, on the nearest available piece of paper. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. Given the risk you are taking and how hard you’re going to have to work is your business a good deal? Can you sell that much? To give you some perspective, recognize that if you’re earning five percent before taxes, you could be doing just as well in thirty year U. S. Treasury bonds with basically no risk. And no effort on your part.

 

So make some hard decisions. Some business decisions. Don’t let the hype of a trade show substitute for sound business judgment.