I Worked at SuperBike Factory, and I'm not Surprised They've fallen

[00:00:00]Superbike Factory is kind of all over the news right now, and people are all asking the same question. How does the self-proclaimed largest European motorcycle dealer go from rapid growth and expansion to administration seemingly overnight? I appreciate from the outside it probably looked quite sudden, but I can tell you that with somebody with some experience on the inside, it really wasn't. Before I go any further, this is just my account of what I personally experienced there coupled with conversations I've had with people a little bit higher up in the organization um and friends and colleagues that uh were basically there when the doors closed and the whole situation unfolded.

[00:00:37]I'm not speaking on behalf of anyone, and I'm not pretending to know every financial reason why Superbike Factory is going, but I did think there's a lot more to this story than what is being put out on social media. Now, when I started working at Superbike Factory, I joined because I was already in sales, and I saw the opportunity to sell motorcycles, which I thought would be the dream job. It was literally down the road from me. When you start at Superbike Factory, you've got an induction at Macclesfield, which is miles away from where I was in Bristol.

[00:01:04]So, the company will pay for your travel to get to Macclesfield. They'll pay for 2 weeks, I think it was, of induction, which includes staying in hotels, meal allowances, travel allowances, uh which I thought was great. But, when you got there and you saw like what a high turnover of staff there was, that kind of rang alarm bells that they're spending all this money on, you know, recruitment and induction training and all of this extra cost with such a high turnover of staff is just burning money. And then when I eventually started, what I expected to be a traditional dealership experience but with motorcycles ended up being more like a glorified call center. In every other dealership that I've ever worked in, the customer that stood in front of you with their wallet open is the most valuable person in your world because they are ready to buy something. But, dealer Superbike Factory just seemed to have this completely backwards.

[00:01:53]Management at Superbike Factory seemed to only care about how many calls you made on a daily basis. They didn't really care about how many bikes you sold, which is strange coming from a motorcycle salesman. They cared a lot more about literally logging pointless phone calls to people that didn't want to be contacted. In fact, one day I sold quite a few bikes on site, um well above target. Like I hit my nearly my whole target for the month in one day. It was insane. And I thought this was a really good day. I've done really well here.

[00:02:19]Only to be met with, "Why didn't you make this many calls yesterday?" And I was like, "Well, I was busy selling motorcycles. What's the problem?" But yeah, they've just got their priorities completely backwards. And that was kind of the first red flag for me. And then the other one is the company's absolute obsession with value-added products. I get it, right? Every dealership doesn't necessarily make their money on the sale of the car or bike. They make it on extra products. They make it on your ceramic protection, your tire insurance, your trackers and things like that. And every dealership that I've worked in, and my sales etiquette tells me that you tailor that to the customer's needs.

[00:02:56]It's very easy to sell a tracker to somebody who needs to replace their bike because their last one was stolen. It's very easy to sell ceramic protection to somebody that knows what it is and wants to keep their bike in good shape. So, you kind of lead with those things. You don't expect to sell everything to everybody. The then CEO once got on a Teams call with me, and I distinctly remember he was like on a boat or something ridiculous, some proper CEO type stuff.

[00:03:20]And he said, "I can tell you're a thinker.

[00:03:24]And that's good. I'm a thinker, too. The thing is, though, we don't pay you to be a thinker.

[00:03:29]When you come through those doors in the morning, you need to turn off your brain.

[00:03:33]Don't think. Just offer everybody everything."

[00:03:37]And that really struck a chord with me, cuz what he was telling me was, "Don't use your brain. Don't use your salesmanship. Don't use all the training that you've been provided over the last decade to sell things.

[00:03:46]We just want robots that make 100 phone calls a day and offer everyone everything." And that was ultimately the final straw for me, and I started looking for a job pretty much that day, and I left. Without making accusations that I can't back up or getting into any kind of legal trouble, there were several controversies involving staff and the way people spoke to each other, especially even higher up in the company. There were people in positions of trust that really should not be in positions of trust given their background, which was crazy. What really stood out to me as well was it always felt like a startup, even years into the business. Like it always felt like they started the week before, and they were really just kind of making it up as they went along. And to me, I think that's kind of why the the business failed.

[00:04:28]They grew too big, too fast, much faster than their systems and culture and processes can keep up with. I've also heard things, and I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not independently verifiable by me, but apparently the finance partners that Superbike Factory went with weren't entirely happy with the way the business was being run, and they had stipulations in place for how their finance should be applied, and they weren't, basically. And then there's the issues with the bikes themselves.

[00:04:56]You go on Trustpilot and you look at the reviews for Superbike Factory, and they've got like a very respectable 4.7 or something out of five, which looks great. But if you go and untick invited to review, so then you get the genuine like natural reviews from people that haven't been asked to make a review, and that number drops instantly to nearly one.

[00:05:16]And it's just full of very, very angry people upset about the state of the bikes that they've bought. Now, Superbike Factory's whole model is basically about flipping bikes, isn't it? They buy them in, they check them, and then they send them back out the door. That's kind of the whole bread and butter of their business, and you never fully know what is coming through the door. But the company made this massive point about um post-delivery inspections and checking everything and making sure the vehicle was going to be good before it went out the door.

[00:05:42]And yet there are absolutely countless numbers of customer complaints about the state of the bikes as they were in customers' hands. Now, I can't speak about every individual complaint, but I can tell you what that looked like from the inside because with how fast this company grew, the customer care team just could not keep up. They had like a handful of people in this own little room in Macclesfield away from everybody else, and they either physically couldn't keep up with the call volumes about people calling to complain about the state of their bikes, or they were afraid to answer the phone. Either way, if somebody rang with a complaint about their bike or wanted to speak to customer service and they weren't getting through, after a certain length of time they'd be passed through to the only other number, which was the sales team. So, I'd be there trying to sell a bike, and then I'd get a random, very angry phone call from somebody that's really, really not happy about something, the process, the V5, the state of the the bike as it's arrived, and whatever it is. And to be honest, there's not a lot I could do to help them. I was there to sell bikes, not to deal with issues like that. I didn't have the means, I didn't have the information, and the only thing I could do was put them back through to the same number they were waiting to speak to.

[00:06:48]It's just It was absolutely maddening.

[00:06:51]And I had to go through several experiences like that and then immediately go back to try and sell another bike for the company. And to be honest with you, that disconnect kind of started to wear me down, which is another reason why I left. Now, after I left, I saw the company seemingly go from strength to strength. I saw leadership changes at the top. I saw the expansion, the new dealership opening in Crawley when they were really down on sales, which is a very confusing thing for them to do. Whether the final nail in the coffin will come down to financial pressures, poor management, or a really unsustainable business model with the systems they had in place, will be for the administrators to determine what actually killed Superbike Factory.

[00:07:28]And I do want to touch on what happened on that final weekend because that really just reinforced this feeling I have about this company. According to multiple media outlets, um and what has been verified by people who work at the company, staff were told around 4:00 on Friday to notices up on the gate saying that they were having technical issues. Um you can see this in some YouTube videos. People have gone up to Macclesfield and they've seen that they can't get through the gates and there's a notice on the wall saying technical issues. The company already knew at this point what was happening and what it intended to do, but no communication was sent to the staff about what was really happening.

[00:08:01]So, those staff went home and they found out as the rest of us basically did on social media that potentially their futures at SuperBike Factory were in jeopardy and about to be closed. That's a terrible way for people to find out.

[00:08:13]They really should have communicated that better and got ahead of it. So, then Monday rolls around and all these employees who had spent all weekend worried and reading these website articles about the dealership about to basically go go into work and it until 2:00 p.m.

[00:08:29]they're left in the dark. Then at 2:00 p.m. they're called into a meeting and unceremoniously and in only a couple of minutes told that they're not going to have a job tomorrow. They've been being made redundant immediately and they have to leave.

[00:08:42]They're not going to get paid for the last 3 weeks cuz what are we now? The 22nd? This happened on the 20th. So, they're not going to get paid for anything that they did in July. They'll have to claim their redundancy money from the government which can take months and weren't really given any explanation on how to do this and basically told to leave.

[00:09:01]And again, I can't independently verify this, but apparently the CEO was sat there grinning at them whilst this happened.

[00:09:08]There's a lot of animosity towards him.

[00:09:10]Again, that's just what I've heard. So, all this happened before SuperBike Factory made any kind of official statement giving any kind of guidance or any heads-up to any of its 200 plus employees. Now, I don't have any personal vendetta against SuperBike Factory. It just wasn't right for me as a place to work. I was even considering buying a bike from there very soon.

[00:09:27]Obviously, I can't now.

[00:09:29]But I don't enjoy seeing businesses fail.

[00:09:32]And I certainly don't take any pleasure in hundreds of staff losing their jobs.

[00:09:36]I left the company years ago, but I still know people that work there. Good people.

[00:09:41]People who basically went to work every day, did their jobs well, and formed their life around a company that just basically disappeared from under their feet. And for those people, I am really genuinely sorry.

[00:09:51]I hope that you land on your feet and find something really soon. Get some stability back in your life because the way this has been handled has been absolutely diabolical.

[00:10:01]Once again, I'm I'm just sorry for you guys, the staff. I don't care about the company, but I am very sorry for you guys. None of us outside the boardroom know exactly what it was that caused Superbike Factory to disappear.

[00:10:12]Nobody outside the administrators, anyway. I'm sure that will come to light in due course.

[00:10:16]Maybe it was poor leadership. Maybe it was an obsession with metrics. Maybe it was an unsustainable business model.

[00:10:22]Maybe it was all of them. What I do know is that the mechanics, the sales staff, the valeters, the warehouse workers, the delivery drivers, the customer service teams weren't responsible for it, but they were the ones to pay the price. I think history will decide whether this was simply a business that expanded too quickly or whether there were deeper problems that had been there from the very beginning.

[00:10:41]Either way, I don't think this story's over yet.