Try the small ones first and work your way up the food chain to cheaper
prices. Try the newest distributor for your area and get your foot in
the door with a larger order. Most if not all the ordering can be done
online and once past the first order they don't care. Our first order
was around $1000 and we do about three orders a year that avg 1500
each. I will say that the first distributor we went after said no do to
our credit history, i changed it to my personal one (made it look like
i owned the shop) and had no problems setting it up.
Most if not all will require
Business license
insurance
some require a photo of your shop or sales area (get creative)
We started with XYZ then went to Hawley, then JBI and now Quality
Each time we move up we get better terms, shipping and service
If you still have problems im sure the bigger shops on this list can
help you out.
Patrick
STLbikeworks
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Rigel
Christian
<rigelc@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I had an interesting discussion with someone who worked at a smaller
today. I had called in order to try and cultivate a
business relationship for our local co-op, which is in desperate need
of tools and consumable parts like bearings and cables. He mentioned
that a lot more co-ops were inquiring about accounts.
He also told me the reasons why co-op/DIY shops were problematic from
his end, and it's a reasonable criticism from that perspective.
Individually, we simply dont do the volume of business necessary to be
attractive to a business interest. The time necessary to administer
and verify an account that does maybe a couple hundred dollars worth
of business a month for the higher traffic shops kind of burns your
profit margins, which are not large at that level. distributors count
on reliable, volume business to stay afloat, and take a smaller cut of
profit on the assumption that that's the type of business theyll be
doing.
I've know that some of the longer running co-ops and collectives have
relationships with distributors, but clearly many of the newer ones do
not.
I'm curious about a couple of things.
1) Does your collective have a relationship with a parts distributor?
2) Regardless of the answer to #1, roughly how much does your shop
spend on tools/consumables/things-that-one-would-get-from-a-distributor?
It seems to me that in the first few years of a
co-op/nonprofit/collective situation, lots or most of these
organizations leverage either existing ties to, or the goodwill of
LBSes.
My suspicion is that in some edge cases, where the bike or DIY culture
isnt all that strong, this can be a fairly significant issue for a
fledgling operation, in terms of both finances and social capital.
The idea that i'm trying to push here is that of a sort of buyers
club. Disregarding for the moment the perfectly valid criticisms of
the legal structure of 501(c)3s, if there was a nonprofit that could
act as a go-between for a parts distributor and a number of regional
shops, that would serve the needs of both the for-profit distributors
AND the co-op shops. distributors wouldnt have to deal with as much
volatility from taking on co-ops as charity cases, and co-ops banding
together could drive the price of a lot of the most necessary
consumables and parts down even further than their current distributor
relationships can offer. in the ideal case, of course.
I would appreciate any input people have. I dont know if this has been
suggested before (I suspect it has), but i didnt see anything in my
archive of the last year or so. If I'm totally off base in my
assumptions I'd like to know that too, where i went wrong, and what
the real deal is.
cheers.
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