Hey John.
Thanks for the compliment. After reading back through my posts, they did kind of come off as a bit self rightous, and that wasn't my intent. So that was a lot of exchange to simply clear up the word "biggest".
I do agree with you though, Autosport does offer probably the largest catalog of coverage for a very large range of cars. From my point of view, I was thinking simply of raw numbers. Since both those companies are privately held, we'll probably never know who actually sells more units.
SPC is a different company from Hamburgers. SPC made a lot of its products for sports cars and Cobra kit car markets. They've been players there for a long time. Hamburgers is still in business as its own company and still offers primarily oil control products, but they have moved in to some air flow stuff and valve covers as well. They do still offer a few mopar oil pans and valve covers, and I'd imagine all those jigs are well amortized and are pure profit makers for them by now, so why kill them off.
So, onward.
Yes, $32K is a chunk of change. Would they do it for less, possibly, but maybe they wont even do it for that amount. That is something you need to ask them about. If you can convince 21-32 people to provide a 10-20% deposit to begin development, would that be enough for Autosport to start tooling up, I don't know. I just took a stab at development costs based on what I know my company does when we look at changes. Their actual costs may be higher or lower and their flexibility in development may be different. That may need to be some point blank questions to them about how much do they want to start development, how long is their development cycle, does that include any certification work, what is their annual or lifetime sales expectation of the part, and what exactly consitutes market research in their eyes to begin building cages. Surely they have some methodology they use to decide to go in to production, obviously those cars that are heavily in to autocross action, but really, how many Nissan Sentra cages could they have they sold. I'd like to think they would sell more E body cages than that. Is it absolute OEM production volume? Does the fact that Dynacorn repops Challenger bodies factor in to that at all? Lots of possible questions can be used to drill down to their expectations for production.
Sales growth and advertising is always a tricky thing. Some companies don't hit mainstream media because they do not want to get that big. They have their nitch and are comfortable there. Have you ever had anyone tell you they don't want to sell you any more product? I have and its kind of weird, but in this case we were buying in volumes that exceeded the business parameters of our supplier. They were uncomfortable with it and offered to freely share the original suppliers with us if we would cut back on our spending with them. I was shocked to say the least, but we took them up on it and have maintained the relationship ever since. Weird stuff.
Tony
