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About Me: BeemerMonkey : AKA Todd
This post is a little about yours truly…
I’ve been working here at A&S since Feb. of 2004. I currently run the websites (A&S BMW Motorcycles and A&S Powersports) run Marketing/Advertising, handle a lot of other little technical tasks, as well some other general business process analysis and design issues (especially as they relate to the internet operations and the parts and accessories department).
How I ended up here at A&S is kind of a wild story. Sort of a testament to you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes, you get what you need…
I had worked as a sales engineer for a number of interesting (yet doomed) internet related companies during the dotcom bubble years. (If you are insanely bored, or are looking to stalk me and want a head start on the leg work, check out my LinkedIn Profile). I was a moron in that I always seemed to be working at companies that had really cool technology, but were essentially run by monkeys; thus my options, bonuses, etc. always ended up being worthless and I never got to see what it was like to retire as a 30 something millionaire (I did however get to find out that the myth of lying around and sucking at the teat of unemployment insurance was complete and utter B.S. When you get it, it’s an insanely small amount, and then even then it runs out in like no time!). As opposed to some of my friends that worked at companies that essentially had totally lame or boring technology, but were run by (smart : lucky : shifty) folks that managed an IPO or other equity event and cashed out.
So fast forward to the middle of the dotbomb crash. I’m unemployed and living in the Bay Area surrounded by all these other dotcom refugees that were also out of work. My wife was a recruiter at Visa (which has its HQ on the peninsula (San Mateo, CA)) so I knew first hand that there were folks with stuff like an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton that were willing to take $50K a year jobs because they were out of work for over a year and were desperate. It was ugly. So I did what anyone else with any internet related technical skill did and start doing freelance work.
Once again, totally ugly. Like, standing on the exit ramp holding a sign that said, “Will create websites for food.” OK, not really, but it seemed like it.
My wife and I had been married for about a year at this point. We eventually both came to the conclusion that it was just not worth fighting the Bay Area fight any more. Houses were stupid expensive. The job market was dead. She was tired of working at her job. So we decided to just bail.
We thought about moving back to MI where I grew up, but one winter trip killed that idea. Nancy would never survive the winters there. So we started looking at the Sacramento area (considering it’s 104+ outside right now, I’m not sure I’m going to survive many more summers here). It was still close to her family and the houses had not yet gone through the roof (as was later the case because of the exodus of the aforementioned well-heeled Bay Area refugees). Sold her condo, took that money, as well as the money from the sale of my condo that I sold when we got enganged, and bought a place in the Sacramento area. We moved with no jobs, and no real plan beyond just making a change. Total blind leap. We always relied on the back up position that in the worse case scenario we would just work at Home Depot or In & Out Burger. Thankfully she landed a pretty decent recruiting job at a local phone and communication company (Surewest) soon after landing.
I started doing the freelance marketing, design, advertising, and web thing. I started a little firm called FoxDot Marketing and Design and managed to get some decent work. But as anyone that does freelance stuff knows, it’s very feast or famine. You have a great gig, then that gig goes away and you need to find the next gig. I decided I didn’t like that anymore.
So I started kind of poking around for something else to do. For one reason or another my wife and I ended up at a sportsman’s/boat/RV show in Sac. One of the vendors there was A&S BMW Motorcycles with their big trailer and a bunch of bikes. Now it had been a number of years since my last riding days (more on that some other day) but I was still really into motorcycles. I figured, “what the hell, maybe there’s something there I could do?” As fate would have it a few days later I happened to see a post on craigslist that A&S was looking for a parts counter person.
Now as I had since passed the days of caring about becoming millionare by the time I was 30, and had decide that quality of life (lack of stress, etc.) was more important than money as long as I made enough to get by and worked doing something I liked, I figured I go in and see what happened (which is an important consideration as there is apparently very little money to be made at the retail level of the motorcycle industry). It was quite a leap… I had not worked at, let alone considered, a retail job since Junior High School. This was going to be an interesting experiment.
So I get hired on the parts counter. Jeff Hanrahan, then the Parts Manager, notices that my resume sort of indicated that I could probably be more valuable doing something a little different that sitting on the parts counter.
A&S was batting around the idea of redoing their website. The platform they had built on was totally not designed for the volume of products, volume of business, nor the way that that our business needs to be organized. They had already plunked down the cash on their next platform so I was essentially tasked with rebuilding their new site. This involved a pretty comprehensive review of the way that the system should work, and the equal and opposite fact that this new platform pretty much was horrible and not only didn’t do what I needed it to, but the stuff that it was supposed to do typically didn’t work very well, if at all.
So fast forward through a lot of blood, sweat, tears, as well as copious deleted expletives, and now A&S is the proud owner of the single largest BMW Motorcycle focused e-commerce website on the planet. We’ve managed to more than double business every year since the new site came online. We’ve been at the top of Google for pretty much every BMW Motorcycle related search for years. We’re the phenomenally large fish in a very small pond. But hey, success depends in large part on how you measure it!
An interesting by-product of my work here, as well as my past experience, is that I have the opportunity to write a monthly column on e-commerce for DealerNews which is the leading trade publication for the motorcycle and powersports industries. I’ve got all of my past articles, along with extra commentary and the occasional rant on my personal blog located over at The Wholesale Monkey Farm. Pretty interesting because this is one industry that the internet, as well as most modern information technologies seems to have forgotten! More on that some other day I suppose.
So that’s a little blather about me, what I do, how I came to be here, etc.
Stay tuned for more riveting information and insight!
Topics: Ramblings & Rants |
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