American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 236 March 2019 | Page 20

not having the right kind of inventory,
we have lost a lot of dealers’
confidence.
“So, we have to be very thoughtful
about the products we push through
Tucker, or elsewhere, or offer dealer
direct. Key to this will be building up
the team, adding established market
knowledge and understanding. In the
past 90 days we’ve already brought in
the likes of Greg Blackwell, a well-
known and respected industry
veteran, we’ve brought back John
Potts who was very well known on the
Vance & Hines and Performance
Machine side of the business. We’ve
also just announced two further
admirable in the face of adversity, this
year it felt like a weight had been
lifted.
Not one to bury himself in
spreadsheets or stay cloistered and
anonymous, Charvat is clearly a
natural born leader of men and
women who wants to be visible and
accessible to the employees he leads.
His own enthusiasm and passion is
infectious. In a very short period of
time it appears to have filtered
through the company and injected a
new lease of life into a team that, let’s
be honest, has certainly been up
against it in a variety of ways in recent
years.
“vertical integration may
have looked good on a
white board”
appointments at Tucker - an internal
promotion to the new VP Sales post,
Jason Potter, former Western Region
Sales Manager, and brought back
another well thought of team member
as VP Marketing, Jim Barker.
“Taken with other hires such as Greg
Heichelbech at Kuryakyn and
Mustang, the team already looks very
different to the one the business had
a year ago. I think this speaks well to
the start we have made, to our
preparedness to make the necessary
changes and our determination to
meet the challenges.”
Indeed, seeing MAG alumni Terry
Vance being embraced by a new
management culture that sees a
former industry leader and legend
such as him as an invaluable asset also
speaks to that determination.
Charvat is a very engaging character.
He is obviously enthused about the
“these are
just the first
steps”
position he’s taken on, and highly
motivated by the passion of the
employees he has met, and they by his.
Compared to the ‘vibe’ at the past few
Tucker shows, while the
professionalism and positivity of the
Tucker team has always been
20
As the conversation continued, we got
to discussing the relationship between
the MAG brands and LeMans/Drag
Specialties, their primary distributor
prior to the LDI acquisition in 2014,
and the somewhat uncertain or at
least apparently confusing evolution
of those relationships since the
association with Tucker was
established.
For Charvat the key word there was
“relationships”. He told us that,
moving forward, the MAG brands
would indeed seek to sustain and
develop their relationships with other
distribution channels “on a selective
basis”. He accepts that the
suggestion, in the months following
the acquisition, that an organization
such as Drag Specialties, which had
significant history with the brands and
significant ‘skin’ in that game, would
now buy its Vance & Hines inventory
(for example) through its primary
competitor, from this new ‘vertical’,
rather than direct from V&H as it had
been doing was naïve at best. Charvat
sees that assumption as exactly the
kind of mistake that he would now
seek to correct.
“This was another example of the lack
of understanding of the relationships
that already existed at the time and
their importance in the powersports
industry,” Charvat said. “There was
the mistaken belief that an
organization like LeMans, a player like
Fred Fox, would simply roll over and
think that buying from their primary
competitor was fine.
“That was never going to be the case.
That was quite justifiably perceived as
a threat and could only destabilize the
very valuable brand relationships that
had been so carefully built, and that
AMERICAN MOTORCYCLE DEALER - MARCH 2019
had already existed for so long. So
while I can’t go into all the details yet,
in part because some of that still needs
to be worked out, I can tell you that we
will be working on unwinding some of
those decisions and looking to restore
a platform for relationships that are
better for all concerned - better for the
other distributor and therefore better
too for the brands, and above all better
for the market’s dealers too.
“We will need to approach each of the
issues we are faced with, each of the
challenges and each of the prior
decisions on an individual basis, on
their specific merits. Since those
decisions were made the market itself,
the retail environment, has continued
to evolve and we have to be realistic
and cognisant of that, as all
distributors and businesses have to be.
But for sure there can and will be
changes and better ways of building
better relationships and, as I have
indicated, where that involves
unwinding prior decisions, we’ll do
that if there is a better outcome
available.
“Our path to market, our channel
strategies need to be based on what is
best for all concerned, including the
end consumer. But Tucker is not going
to be selling on Amazon, for example,
and we are going to be as rigorous as
possible in enforcing a MAP policy. If a
dealer insists on buying brand direct
and wants to have an online business
of their own, then fine, but they are
going to have to play by the same rules
that the big boys do.
“Above all, Tucker has to focus on
doing what is essentially a simple task,
and doing it well. Tucker is in the box
moving business. While there is
subtlety and nuance surrounding
doing that well we have to recognize
the reality that dealers no longer run
deep inventory and look to their
distributor of choice to absolve them
from the need to do so.
“Our job is to make sure that the
inventory is where the dealer needs it
to be, when he needs it there, and that
it is the right kind of inventory. Simple.
Fred Fox has been the past master and
our job is to be the best possible
competitor he can have. If the
powersports industry has two or more
great distributors doing a great job
then everybody wins - the consumer,
the brick and mortar shops, the
vendors, the brands and, as a result,
the distributors themselves.
“The secret sauce, if there is one, is
how do you help your dealers to be as
successful as they can be, in an
evolving marketplace. If we can figure
out that recipe, if we can help them to
want to do business with us, to be able
to do business with us, then that is
how we earn their business, respect
and loyalty. Our job is to make sure our
dealers want to buy from us rather
than another guy by being a better
partner. That is the secret ingredient,
“inherently
flawed
decisions”
but the objective itself is actually pretty
simple.
“A big part of that is the value we can
add to the simplicity of the logistics.
The differentiators that enable the
dealer, in turn, to make the sale, and
do so more often. Logistics is such a
straightforward proposition these
days that pretty much anybody should
be able to do it well. The added value
that will make the dealer want to
choose us as his supplier of choice will
be the sales support that we can
deploy at scale to help them make that
sale.
“That value proposition is incredibly
important and that will be our
differentiator. Vendors could do it
themselves, but they cannot be geared
to do so. They can’t have a sales force
of 120 or more people, but we can, on
their behalf, on a shared resource basis
for all our vendors, and that means our
class-leading independent vendors
just as much as the MAG brands. The
dealer then can draw on the kind of
resources that make the difference in
making the sale. Resources that the
vendor simply can’t deliver, but that
can make all the difference to the
dealer’s ability to prosper.”
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