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More thoughts on jobs and working

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In semi-related news, I now have a Garmin Varia radar/camera on the back of my bike. It's kinda fun to review the rear-facing camera footage after the fact.

When I get smushed by an angry pickup truck driver, my family will be able to retrieve the footage and see exactly how fast said pickup truck was going when it smushed me.


 
Vegas Dave
@Matty Sorry to hear about this good sir.

Anything stopping you from going into biz yourself? Seems like a booming market that you know well and could thrive in if bozos like this are your "competition"?
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I mostly sell traditional pedalbikes, which isn't a booming market as much as it is a recovering one. But yes, that's the next step I'm going to explore - the Quebec guy is an independent sales rep so he's on pure commission, but that means he can rep tons of brands and doesn't have the same obligations as an employee. Whereas I'm an employee on base salary plus commission, and I'm expected to log in 40 hours a week representing only the few brands we carry (3, soon 4, but really mostly one because the other ones are tiny boutique brands.)

I had a long talk with the Quebec guy on Thursday and have another one scheduled on Monday, will ask him more questions about how it works for him. He's also losing his shit right now - he threatened to run over the owner and his family with his truck during our last call.

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Right right. One of my dealers did the white label thing during the pandemic and he regretted it. He showed me the bikes and they're not the same quality as the factory branded ones. His bikes were made by the exact same factory that makes mine.

MOQ is usually one container to be competitive. You could do less, I think as low as 10 units, but that would hurt your margin big time - lower volume discount and much higher shipping cost per unit.

One container is around 250-300 pedalbikes which is a significant investment for carbon fiber bikes. Would be right around $300k for the aforementioned entry-level carbon gravel bikes.

But yeah you want to sell name brand stuff in general, not white label, unless you can afford to have someone watch over production at the factory. Manufacturers are lazy assholes if you let them be lazy assholes.
 
Working at the distributor level is interesting because you get a good glimpse of the struggles at every level. The manufacturer needs to pump out product quickly to make money, which can easily affect quality. The distributor is oftentimes the one that does the true, final quality control, and they send back faulty product that needs to be redone correctly. Manufacturers push back hard against this unless the fault is severe.

The distributor wants to pre-sell as much of its orders as possible to minimize risk, so they delay new orders until a full container is pre-sold to retailers (through yearly booking programs.)

So the retailer typically waits a long time for their orders to come in, and they then refuse to pay for bikes that aren't selling at retail. Retailers will typically freeroll their distributor (i.e. only pay after the product sells, which is against their payment terms, but there are usually no consequences for slow-paying other than a ding on an unofficial credit score that's used in the industry).

Basically, everyone wants the other guy to be the one left holding the bag, but it's usually the distributor that bears most of the risk, unless the manufacturer is nice. Manufacturers typically aren't nice.

And then there's the wildly unpredictable retail customer who takes a quick look at your product and decides that this year's paint job is lame, so product sits and the whole batch needs to be sold at a loss to maintain cashflow. Who takes the loss is another struggle - it can be anyone up the chain. Then the retail customer thinks the clearance price is the "true price" of the product and they remember that price forever. Try to raise the price to a point where you're making a healthy margin and you get accused of ripping people off. lol

Everyone's a giant asshole.

So yeah, not getting my new models before June (which probably won't even happen) means I'm unlikely to collect ANY commission in 2025. My base salary is what I was making 24 years ago at my first job.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeee

Thanks for coming to my TEDx talk.
 
Yeah. Carbon fiber bicycles are luxury products that are super labour intensive. If you want one, buy one now from one of the big four manufacturers. The current discounts are below cost and I've confirmed that Trek and Specialized are eating the loss on unsold post-COVID bikes. That's nice of them.
 
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