HAS MB GONE BUST? by MB Developments UK Ltd on Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 9:54am THE QUESTION ON EVERYONES LIPS THIS YEAR, HAS MB GONE BUST?
Rumors and forums have been rife lately about MB in the last few days. Is there any truth in them? Well yes and no, it depends on how you want to look at it.
Some announced I (Mark) had died! Well thanks for that one. According to some rumors this was in a car crash in Derby! Do some people have no feelings for anyone? Luckily none of my family read Scooter forums nor do their friends. Seeing as my family all knew the facts before they happened I think these viscous rumors were the least of my worries.
Others said we have gone bust and the usual hand full of anti MB non-customers have come out with their usual below the belt comments. What’s wrong with these people and their constant derogatory and unfounded comments? The problem is they affect business, as some people believe them to be true. Once it’s published on the internet it’s hard to un-publish it. I’ve also seen a large amount of people voicing their opinions with respect and support for all things MB. And to those people thank you very much.
So what has happened? It would be very easy to cut the story to a sentence and try to move on, it would not explain very much and it would not show why we have got to where we are now.
It’s well documented all the hard work we have done in the last year, I’ve written on facebook about stock level problems and my opinions of some people who spoil forums and Scootering in general. I feel like I’ve worked non stop, every day for over a year.
MB Developments have come on leaps and bounds over a 10 year period as planned. Each year we increased turnover from 10 – 35% to where we are now, we had expanded and increased the workforce from 2 to 9 plus 5 subcontractors! In an unemployment hotspot like South Yorkshire I was proud to have built up such a business.
Now I’m not a business man, I don’t claim to be, I’m a grease monkey mechanic who is good with his hands and uses common sense to design quality products and run a business.
I was put onto the dole by a well known Scooter shop in Grimsby, we had been negotiating the purchase of our new house for 3 months, with the full knowledge of my employer - he even backed up the wages for the mortgage. The day I moved in, before I even picked up the keys he walked in the workshop and told two of us we were redundant. He knew for 3 months this would happen! How things could have been different, these things happen for a reason and you deal with them.
I left a well paid job to go to Grimsby, to be put on the dole within a year. I was stuck there with no job to pay the bills so ended up starting my own business. It wasn’t choice I was forced into it in the middle of the Thatcher years, not a great time but it worked. When I went to see my accountant after the first year, I still remember his face when he said ‘I can not believe you are sat opposite me, I never expected you to succeed and I cannot believe you’ve made a profit!’ He was over the moon, here was a young guy who had taken himself off the dole to make a successful business. I’m proud of myself - sometimes I forget what I’ve had to go through to get where I am now.
A month later vandals set fire to my business and burnt it to the ground and I lost everything. Now this is not a sob story, it tells you I’m accustomed to major things happening to me that are out of my control. And as my family said at the time ‘something good will come of this’. It did, I moved in with my Nanna and traded from her garage to try to pick myself up. My Nan and Grandad had been in business most of their life, she wasn’t over the moon when I went into business; she knew all the hard work and heart ache that I would have to go through. For many years later I would visit her weekly and discuss business and problems, she was my brick and always listened, some time she would rant and rave at me but always supported me until she died at 95. The moral of the story is; people close by know all about me and the hard work I have put into my business, my life and the fun things I’ve got up to over the years!
That’s how I started, the hard way! I was sweeping up in workshops up at Grandads when I was 11 earning 50p a day, I had a paper round, washed cars and cleaned windows. I’ve never been given anything, I’ve worked hard all my life with good hard working morals. Growing up in a pit village I didn’t want to go down the mines and wanted to do something different and became an apprentice.
Over the last few years, we were growing quickly. Looking back we were growing at an unsustainable rate, we were seemingly doing everything right, employing more people and expanding into more units. The more employees we had the more we had to work at turning over enough money to keep them. I worked at more exclusive deals and new products, advertising constantly. I was advertising executive, boss and business man through the day. When everyone went home I was in the workshops as tuner, engine builder and designer. At home I would work until 2am most nights catching up on the computer to start it all again the next day.
This worked well for a good 3 years, it allowed me to travel, visit other dealers and suppliers and tour Europe to see how things were done. It allowed me to expand my product range and generally grow. I had worked at the old place for 20 years, same road, same buildings day in day out. We had 6 units and needed a 7th and needed a new employee. The bills were mounting up. We were imploding, bumping into each other and becoming less efficient due to lack of space. Lambretta sales were becoming harder, fly by night dealers were popping up left right and centre, dealing from home with no overheads. They were blitzing EBay and the weekend parts fairs. The Vietnamese and Indians were flooding the market with shiny inferior products. There were more rallies and functions, spreading what a customer could do over the year, something on every weekend. The forums had taken over allowing any Tom Dick and Harry to slate a dealer rightly or wrongly.
We saw Lambrettas being spread over a much larger sales arena so we needed to branch out and spread our wings. I have been working with Lambrettas for 30 years, taken the knocks and carried on. I was in hospital at 31 with stress and told by two experts I would be dead in a year if I didn’t do something about it. I had to change my life. My Grandad and Dad both had heart attacks young. I consider that stress time as “my” heart attack. I found out who friends really were when it came to money and paying back bills. I moved forward and got on with it, but with a change to life and a change in business attitude.
I’ve been asked lately ‘Did I expand too fast’ ‘Did I bite off more than I could chew?’ Well it depends on how you look at it. If we stayed in Edlington we needed more units and more people to do what we firmly believed was a way forward. I have always had interests other than Scooters. By going to the same Industrial Estate for 20 years with all that had gone on through the ups and downs I could feel my self starting to get stressed again. We really needed to make some forward decisions and move into one unit to get rid of the problems from split units.
After the stress break down and with all the illnesses it had brought on for years, I was told to get away from the pressure, lift the weight off my shoulders and do something to improve my life. I went back to White Water Slalom Kayak racing. I shut the shop on Saturdays and I got out into the country and buried my head into that at weekends and became UK National Champion 4 years running. That’s what I do - I get my teeth into something and strive to be the best. It doesn’t matter if it’s in business, sports, racing, tuning, designing products or walking vast distances I work hard at the end goal.
For the last few years people were coming in saying they had lost their job, the news was full of the recession, the honest open dealers would say how quiet it was. We never saw any of it we were so busy and looking to expand into the Touring, Travelling and Trekking market all still to do with Scootering/Biking, Rallies and Euro Rallies. I had been traveling Europe on my BMW and saw potential with a similar age group to Scooterists. Me being me saw the BMW wasn’t perfect and so I started making parts for them. As with Kayaks you don’t just walk into BMW and make money. Like other people trying to jump on the bandwagon with Scooter products, some people just fail for unknown reasons.
Everything’s not a bed of roses even when doing well, we made Kayaks and spent a fortune developing a Kayak to suit me. Research and projected sales looked great as a sideline. We had a manufacturer making them. But as we did, the sporting body changed the international rules and suddenly it was an old design not worth anything. But without it I wouldn’t have won four championships, so it was worth every penny to have had the title ‘British National Champion’ in a hard tough sport aimed at lightweight kids when I was 40! Some you win, some you lose, I just moved on.
It’s the same with BMW parts, my ideas were thought to be brilliant, I looked at some of BMW’s faults and cured them, and BMW showed customers who said the same but expected them free if BMW had a known fault, so I couldn’t win. To be honest I’ve not had time to develop or market our BMW parts. And then Scooterists being Scooterists started to critisise me for riding a BMW! Why is it such a problem? I really don’t have to prove anything. The real Scooterists who have seen me ride thousands of miles at the speeds I do have respect for me! I have always developed my own products and tested them every time I’ve gone somewhere. I was doing this on every rally before I was even in business. Fair enough, people like the re-assurance that a part is tested by the designer and it has helped my business for years. I just like riding anything with 2 wheels - pushbikes, scooters or motorbikes. I like to travel and see parts of the world you don’t see at a Scooter Rally, what’s wrong with that? To me the journey is the adventure, not so much the destination.
A year ago we saw something changing, we weren’t sure what. A slight down turn in business, engineering was drying up, we blamed the forums for knocking us and sticking up for the dealers working out of their garages – “Fred in a shed” as one supplier calls them.
Money started to get tight and as a company we had to make some decisions to save money……….. what’s the biggest bill? Wages were. We took legal advice and went through a period of interviews and letters and all the Politically Correct hoops you have to jump through to let people go when a company runs out of money! Everyone was at risk, it was out of our hands we had to go with the flow and work it out on a points system. Reality had struck; I wasn’t in business for this. Ian used to be a nurse and often had to tell people their family members had died; with tears in his eyes he told me making people redundant was the hardest thing he had ever had to do! It wasn’t a great place to be.
We made two redundant. I took over the hard engineering and tuning; we got on top of the cash flow and got us back to where we should have been in two months, ready for the big move, which we thought was the way forward. We were committed and went for it, it was the biggest gamble of my life and I’m not a gambling man. It was hard, we had no spare cash to restore the new unit. The outlook was going to be better, even though the unit was bigger than we wanted. We had planned the move months before with nine employees and we were now down to seven. That made the move harder but we did it. We moved in April, which turned out to be our biggest April – with highest takings in 3 years. When we hit May it was the worst in 3 years! Just like a light switch being turned off. Then we hit June, July, August and September the same. We thought the down turn was down to moving and lack of advertising. We would have meetings and it always came up it will be better tomorrow, next week, next month, there’s a Rally coming up, the open weekends coming up etc. As much as we worked at it, doing every trick in the book, all we were doing was prolonging serious decisions we didn’t want to have to make.
I felt like I was on a merry go round or roller coaster going backwards getting faster and I couldn’t get off! I needed a break, a long one, so in October after doing everything in the building to the date, I headed off to the other side of Europe on the bike with Alice. It wasn’t until we got into France the next day I realized how ill I was, I was felt I was cracking up, my mind was spinning, my body was shouting at me to stop. What a joy it was to be away from work with 5000 miles of unknown in front of us! As we headed across to Turkey and back in a big loop I had calmed down, I really didn’t want to go home. As I got closer to the UK Alice said ‘you’re not right’. I knew I wasn’t, a black cloud was coming over me called depression, I didn’t want to get home and face what I needed to do. I had hoped the 3 weeks away would have generated just enough money to keep the wolves at bay and move forward.
And this is what happened. I made a phone call to my accountant. Reality struck, we could not sustain the amount of bills coming in and bills that were sat there because of a drop in takings! He pointed out I had invested a lot of my own money already in the business over the last 18 months. Part of going away was to decide if me, Alice or the house was going to be investing into the business to save it…….. ‘Just how much more can you keep investing in a company to basically just keep people in a job and potentially lose it all’?
I was asked what Mark wanted to do? All I could think of was drop the keys in the drain and go walking in the hills with no phone to get away from the rat race that I had been swept along in for many years. I’d said I’m not going back to hospital again, why should I end up on the slab for being in business and employing people! The banks would only help if I put my house up, which was part Alice’s so that was out of the question! We’d tried every trick, like I say I had nothing up my sleeve.
The building had done it, the money we spent added up to pretty much what we thought we’d end up spending.
This was fine based on the last three years takings but we couldn’t have seen the collapse in the market. All I wanted to do was employ a few people to take the pressure off. Pay the bills, wages and invest any extra money back into new products and ideas, which we had been doing for years. All the employees had known the score, they had been saying ‘what are you going to do if it doesn’t pick up’? For them it wasn’t a bolt from the blue. Every customer who we talked to was down in the dumps, scared to spend because they were scared they might be losing their jobs, fed up with the recession and the government. Every sales rep told me stories of bike shops, scooter shops and outdoor shops saying it felt like a plug was pulled around May the same as us, they all questioned what happened. It was just like turning a light switch off.
We had done as much as we could and had run out of options. After a very real conversation with the accountant I was left in a daze, I wanted to walk away, throw the keys away and go straight back to Europe where it all seems normal without the Capitalist rat race I was stuck in and getting dragged along with. I wanted to pack in and climb mountains! That’s all I could think - fresh air and nothing to worry about but bad weather.
We got ready to lose everything, I walked around the building, I must have looked a picture staring at walls and ceilings and all the hard effort we had put into our future to potentially have it taken from us over night. The next day we had internal meetings and all employees knew the decision I was going to have to make. Ian didn’t want to go down without a fight and suggested another sale, which did help and allowed us to pay off as many suppliers as we could. The consensus of everyone was what did Mark want to do? It was down to me and only me, me being the MD and 100% share holder and I’m the Mark Broadhurst of MB. I had to make serious decisions. I didn’t know what to do, I’m no hard businessman, I’m a made up businessman, muddling through and making it up as I go along! Internally we all knew we all had to go through it and we all expected the doubting Thomas’s and web forum warriors would have a field day, to be honest it was the least of my worries!
The next few days and weeks we carried on, did our best and things moved forward to a point where we’d got out of trouble or so we thought but then as one month carried to the next month the usual happened. It’s that time of year all companies chase you to the day. Some were chasing a day early to get their month endings right, it wasn’t just us having problems every supplier was in the same boat. An invoice goes 1 day overdue and they started phoning, emailing, faxing and threatening legal action. I’ve loved being in business, I really loved project managing the building restoration. I just don’t like the money side of it. I live comfortably but I’m not rich, any money I had spare went back into the business, looking back I’ve had no wages for two years! That is no word of a lie, I have put more money back in that I took out. As a good friend used to say “its only paper, shuffle it around the desk and it will go away”, just before he killed himself! And of course you cannot bury your head in the sand for too long.
It was our year end and employees were using up holidays. How do you think I felt, waiting for people to return to be told we were thinking of losing jobs again, it’s not easy to do. They all seemed to accept that if it had to happen then it had to happen. Internally we prepared to do what we had to do. I was given 5 days to make my mind up. We turned it around a bit with the sale and other things, which gave us a few more weeks to try and pay more people off. In these weeks I was constantly on the phone with emails and meetings. I didn’t leave my office. I would turn up at work and not leave the office till late. It’s draining, it wears you down. I did what I could but I felt like I was surfing on a tidal wave and being swept along out of control. The next I knew we had people from USA asking if all was well, the death rumors started which came from a letter sent to some of the direct debits set up from the bank.
The letter from the bank said “Account holder deceased”, nice one Co-op bank!
We had suppliers phoning and visits from the Inland Revenue, I was now on a ride I couldn’t do anything about. Rumors started and some UK dealers went straight to Schwalbe and Scooter Center to beg for my exclusive distributorships. These valued partners had been warned and stood by me and told the other dealers where to go. No friends in business hey! All that work and the sharks thought they could just step in and take over. We had other suppliers and dealers phoning and telling everyone we had gone bust and laughing about it, then the same dealer from the Midlands phoned a week later wanting parts saying “it wasn’t me honest!”.
Why whenever MB gets mentioned do people try to spoil a good thing? It’s alright having a laugh between friends down the pub but when it’s in public and there for everyone to read people don’t realise how damaging it can be to a hard working company because lives and jobs do get damaged and yes I do blame forums for not helping our industry over the years!
So what really happened? Well Mark and the accountant took advice from a couple of insolvency companies, it was decided it was the only way out of the problems we were in. I had no idea how any of this worked, yes you can make one company bankrupt and set up the next day like nothing has happened. I questioned if my morals and sanity could have dealt with the decisions and the later repercussions! In the end it comes down to survival, sanity and keeping your health! You cannot win every fight, but you can do something to fight another day, so we did it.
We already had two other companies set up to protect our web sites, it wasn’t a case of setting up a new company we had them already, so the MB Developments company had taken the big hit on the move. We were told by the experts we didn’t do it wrong, it wasn’t the lack of advertising that we thought as another well known company had done the same as us a week earlier and not one word has been said about him. I’m amazed at the amount of interest in the whole MB thing from around the world.
So after 23 years I had to go with the flow and make MB Developments insolvent, with regret I had to make all our employees redundant. Yes some suppliers did lose money, as much as I tried I just couldn’t find enough to keep everyone happy, there was too much to find. The person who has lost the most money out of everyone is me!
We’ve had a few weeks where just me and my son ran the business, that was hard. Even with rumors we were working from 9am till 6.30pm picking and packing parts, we couldn’t get through the normal demand. I needed to re- employ and had to make decisions, these are not easy to do. I had to let my go of my ex brother in law and friend for over 30 years, my best friend for over 8 years and a good friend for over 10 years. I’ve brought back Phil and Ian who both have young families and have been with me for many years and know my business inside out. The hardest part for everyone is the moralistic side, getting rid of people and setting up the next day like nothing has happened. I was advised to go down this route, I didn’t even know you could do this until a few weeks ago. If you don’t like it then have a go at the bankers and governments who have ruined the worlds economy and made these cop out rules where big businesses use it to make money over and over and over again. All the time I’ve been trading I’ve always paid tax, national insurance, VAT etc – how many of these “Fred in a shed” characters are doing everything by the book?
The reality is: We’re still here but under a different trading name! I worked hard to get little or no business interruption, a lot has happened out of my control in the last few weeks, I’m not proud of having to do what I did after 23 years of good business, in that time I have never made a loss in any one year at my year end.
We trade under the title of The MB Group which we were already using as our main landing page for MB Developments, this is where we made our microsites stand out. We were trying these out to get as many fingers in pies to pull us through the last few years. Obviously it didn’t work after hundreds of hours of work. We’ve reduced these to our main specialist sites - Lambretta spares - BGM Spares and Schwalbe Scooter tyres. Then the main business trading name is Serious Outdoors Ltd which we have the web site and shop to see if that works. We live in hope that Serious Outdoors is a much better name to potentially sell in the future! It’s much better than MB Developments! Anyway I’m living in total reality world, I’m never going to be paid millions for a company I own. Just imagine ‘Serious Outdoors’ above a shop in any high street! It works, does MB Developments?…….. No! I hope you see where I’m coming from.
So that’s where we are at, business is still hard, we do need support, we’re still aiming at doing what we do best and leaving my side lines for another day. We’re keeping our heads down as much as we can and plodding on until things pick up. On a positive note Scooter Center Koln are backing me by putting some of my ideas into production under the MRB BGM brand, we’ve got cylinder kits and exhausts due soon, so fingers crossed. Tyres are finally coming through again and I have lots of new ideas will be coming in the next few months.
I’d like to say through all this, there have been no customers affected by any decisions I’ve had to take, no customer has lost any money or parts, we are still here building on what we think is one of the best Scooter shops ever!
We hope the future is bright. I’m small fry there’s plenty of bigger clever people gone bust in the last year and I’m sure there will be others. I know of two other scooter shops that have done exactly the same as me this year!
Did we do it wrong with the move? Did we make bad decisions? Should we have done something different? People are quick to point a finger, as usual everyone’s an expert looking in from the outside. People have demanded I make this statement, well here it is, you’ve had it, pick it to bits, pick me to pieces, I’m only human. I’m not going to look back and say ‘I wish………..’ Hindsight is great when you have the knowledge of history. Of course if I knew now what I knew a year ago I wouldn’t have moved. Knowing what I know now my business would have survived the first round of cuts and I would have paid back the money owed to me and I would have paid off my mortgage but that never happened. I’m not looking back, I’m very proud of the work we have done in the building and we can only look to the future. Looking ahead, December is always hard as is January, we just have to keep our chins up, knuckle down and see what the future holds.
Mark Broadhurst MB Group (Serious Outdoors Ltd)
Rumors and forums have been rife lately about MB in the last few days. Is there any truth in them? Well yes and no, it depends on how you want to look at it.
Some announced I (Mark) had died! Well thanks for that one. According to some rumors this was in a car crash in Derby! Do some people have no feelings for anyone? Luckily none of my family read Scooter forums nor do their friends. Seeing as my family all knew the facts before they happened I think these viscous rumors were the least of my worries.
Others said we have gone bust and the usual hand full of anti MB non-customers have come out with their usual below the belt comments. What’s wrong with these people and their constant derogatory and unfounded comments? The problem is they affect business, as some people believe them to be true. Once it’s published on the internet it’s hard to un-publish it. I’ve also seen a large amount of people voicing their opinions with respect and support for all things MB. And to those people thank you very much.
So what has happened? It would be very easy to cut the story to a sentence and try to move on, it would not explain very much and it would not show why we have got to where we are now.
It’s well documented all the hard work we have done in the last year, I’ve written on facebook about stock level problems and my opinions of some people who spoil forums and Scootering in general. I feel like I’ve worked non stop, every day for over a year.
MB Developments have come on leaps and bounds over a 10 year period as planned. Each year we increased turnover from 10 – 35% to where we are now, we had expanded and increased the workforce from 2 to 9 plus 5 subcontractors! In an unemployment hotspot like South Yorkshire I was proud to have built up such a business.
Now I’m not a business man, I don’t claim to be, I’m a grease monkey mechanic who is good with his hands and uses common sense to design quality products and run a business.
I was put onto the dole by a well known Scooter shop in Grimsby, we had been negotiating the purchase of our new house for 3 months, with the full knowledge of my employer - he even backed up the wages for the mortgage. The day I moved in, before I even picked up the keys he walked in the workshop and told two of us we were redundant. He knew for 3 months this would happen! How things could have been different, these things happen for a reason and you deal with them.
I left a well paid job to go to Grimsby, to be put on the dole within a year. I was stuck there with no job to pay the bills so ended up starting my own business. It wasn’t choice I was forced into it in the middle of the Thatcher years, not a great time but it worked. When I went to see my accountant after the first year, I still remember his face when he said ‘I can not believe you are sat opposite me, I never expected you to succeed and I cannot believe you’ve made a profit!’ He was over the moon, here was a young guy who had taken himself off the dole to make a successful business. I’m proud of myself - sometimes I forget what I’ve had to go through to get where I am now.
A month later vandals set fire to my business and burnt it to the ground and I lost everything. Now this is not a sob story, it tells you I’m accustomed to major things happening to me that are out of my control. And as my family said at the time ‘something good will come of this’. It did, I moved in with my Nanna and traded from her garage to try to pick myself up. My Nan and Grandad had been in business most of their life, she wasn’t over the moon when I went into business; she knew all the hard work and heart ache that I would have to go through. For many years later I would visit her weekly and discuss business and problems, she was my brick and always listened, some time she would rant and rave at me but always supported me until she died at 95. The moral of the story is; people close by know all about me and the hard work I have put into my business, my life and the fun things I’ve got up to over the years!
That’s how I started, the hard way! I was sweeping up in workshops up at Grandads when I was 11 earning 50p a day, I had a paper round, washed cars and cleaned windows. I’ve never been given anything, I’ve worked hard all my life with good hard working morals. Growing up in a pit village I didn’t want to go down the mines and wanted to do something different and became an apprentice.
Over the last few years, we were growing quickly. Looking back we were growing at an unsustainable rate, we were seemingly doing everything right, employing more people and expanding into more units. The more employees we had the more we had to work at turning over enough money to keep them. I worked at more exclusive deals and new products, advertising constantly. I was advertising executive, boss and business man through the day. When everyone went home I was in the workshops as tuner, engine builder and designer. At home I would work until 2am most nights catching up on the computer to start it all again the next day.
This worked well for a good 3 years, it allowed me to travel, visit other dealers and suppliers and tour Europe to see how things were done. It allowed me to expand my product range and generally grow. I had worked at the old place for 20 years, same road, same buildings day in day out. We had 6 units and needed a 7th and needed a new employee. The bills were mounting up. We were imploding, bumping into each other and becoming less efficient due to lack of space. Lambretta sales were becoming harder, fly by night dealers were popping up left right and centre, dealing from home with no overheads. They were blitzing EBay and the weekend parts fairs. The Vietnamese and Indians were flooding the market with shiny inferior products. There were more rallies and functions, spreading what a customer could do over the year, something on every weekend. The forums had taken over allowing any Tom Dick and Harry to slate a dealer rightly or wrongly.
We saw Lambrettas being spread over a much larger sales arena so we needed to branch out and spread our wings. I have been working with Lambrettas for 30 years, taken the knocks and carried on. I was in hospital at 31 with stress and told by two experts I would be dead in a year if I didn’t do something about it. I had to change my life. My Grandad and Dad both had heart attacks young. I consider that stress time as “my” heart attack. I found out who friends really were when it came to money and paying back bills. I moved forward and got on with it, but with a change to life and a change in business attitude.
I’ve been asked lately ‘Did I expand too fast’ ‘Did I bite off more than I could chew?’ Well it depends on how you look at it. If we stayed in Edlington we needed more units and more people to do what we firmly believed was a way forward. I have always had interests other than Scooters. By going to the same Industrial Estate for 20 years with all that had gone on through the ups and downs I could feel my self starting to get stressed again. We really needed to make some forward decisions and move into one unit to get rid of the problems from split units.
After the stress break down and with all the illnesses it had brought on for years, I was told to get away from the pressure, lift the weight off my shoulders and do something to improve my life. I went back to White Water Slalom Kayak racing. I shut the shop on Saturdays and I got out into the country and buried my head into that at weekends and became UK National Champion 4 years running. That’s what I do - I get my teeth into something and strive to be the best. It doesn’t matter if it’s in business, sports, racing, tuning, designing products or walking vast distances I work hard at the end goal.
For the last few years people were coming in saying they had lost their job, the news was full of the recession, the honest open dealers would say how quiet it was. We never saw any of it we were so busy and looking to expand into the Touring, Travelling and Trekking market all still to do with Scootering/Biking, Rallies and Euro Rallies. I had been traveling Europe on my BMW and saw potential with a similar age group to Scooterists. Me being me saw the BMW wasn’t perfect and so I started making parts for them. As with Kayaks you don’t just walk into BMW and make money. Like other people trying to jump on the bandwagon with Scooter products, some people just fail for unknown reasons.
Everything’s not a bed of roses even when doing well, we made Kayaks and spent a fortune developing a Kayak to suit me. Research and projected sales looked great as a sideline. We had a manufacturer making them. But as we did, the sporting body changed the international rules and suddenly it was an old design not worth anything. But without it I wouldn’t have won four championships, so it was worth every penny to have had the title ‘British National Champion’ in a hard tough sport aimed at lightweight kids when I was 40! Some you win, some you lose, I just moved on.
It’s the same with BMW parts, my ideas were thought to be brilliant, I looked at some of BMW’s faults and cured them, and BMW showed customers who said the same but expected them free if BMW had a known fault, so I couldn’t win. To be honest I’ve not had time to develop or market our BMW parts. And then Scooterists being Scooterists started to critisise me for riding a BMW! Why is it such a problem? I really don’t have to prove anything. The real Scooterists who have seen me ride thousands of miles at the speeds I do have respect for me! I have always developed my own products and tested them every time I’ve gone somewhere. I was doing this on every rally before I was even in business. Fair enough, people like the re-assurance that a part is tested by the designer and it has helped my business for years. I just like riding anything with 2 wheels - pushbikes, scooters or motorbikes. I like to travel and see parts of the world you don’t see at a Scooter Rally, what’s wrong with that? To me the journey is the adventure, not so much the destination.
A year ago we saw something changing, we weren’t sure what. A slight down turn in business, engineering was drying up, we blamed the forums for knocking us and sticking up for the dealers working out of their garages – “Fred in a shed” as one supplier calls them.
Money started to get tight and as a company we had to make some decisions to save money……….. what’s the biggest bill? Wages were. We took legal advice and went through a period of interviews and letters and all the Politically Correct hoops you have to jump through to let people go when a company runs out of money! Everyone was at risk, it was out of our hands we had to go with the flow and work it out on a points system. Reality had struck; I wasn’t in business for this. Ian used to be a nurse and often had to tell people their family members had died; with tears in his eyes he told me making people redundant was the hardest thing he had ever had to do! It wasn’t a great place to be.
We made two redundant. I took over the hard engineering and tuning; we got on top of the cash flow and got us back to where we should have been in two months, ready for the big move, which we thought was the way forward. We were committed and went for it, it was the biggest gamble of my life and I’m not a gambling man. It was hard, we had no spare cash to restore the new unit. The outlook was going to be better, even though the unit was bigger than we wanted. We had planned the move months before with nine employees and we were now down to seven. That made the move harder but we did it. We moved in April, which turned out to be our biggest April – with highest takings in 3 years. When we hit May it was the worst in 3 years! Just like a light switch being turned off. Then we hit June, July, August and September the same. We thought the down turn was down to moving and lack of advertising. We would have meetings and it always came up it will be better tomorrow, next week, next month, there’s a Rally coming up, the open weekends coming up etc. As much as we worked at it, doing every trick in the book, all we were doing was prolonging serious decisions we didn’t want to have to make.
I felt like I was on a merry go round or roller coaster going backwards getting faster and I couldn’t get off! I needed a break, a long one, so in October after doing everything in the building to the date, I headed off to the other side of Europe on the bike with Alice. It wasn’t until we got into France the next day I realized how ill I was, I was felt I was cracking up, my mind was spinning, my body was shouting at me to stop. What a joy it was to be away from work with 5000 miles of unknown in front of us! As we headed across to Turkey and back in a big loop I had calmed down, I really didn’t want to go home. As I got closer to the UK Alice said ‘you’re not right’. I knew I wasn’t, a black cloud was coming over me called depression, I didn’t want to get home and face what I needed to do. I had hoped the 3 weeks away would have generated just enough money to keep the wolves at bay and move forward.
And this is what happened. I made a phone call to my accountant. Reality struck, we could not sustain the amount of bills coming in and bills that were sat there because of a drop in takings! He pointed out I had invested a lot of my own money already in the business over the last 18 months. Part of going away was to decide if me, Alice or the house was going to be investing into the business to save it…….. ‘Just how much more can you keep investing in a company to basically just keep people in a job and potentially lose it all’?
I was asked what Mark wanted to do? All I could think of was drop the keys in the drain and go walking in the hills with no phone to get away from the rat race that I had been swept along in for many years. I’d said I’m not going back to hospital again, why should I end up on the slab for being in business and employing people! The banks would only help if I put my house up, which was part Alice’s so that was out of the question! We’d tried every trick, like I say I had nothing up my sleeve.
The building had done it, the money we spent added up to pretty much what we thought we’d end up spending.
This was fine based on the last three years takings but we couldn’t have seen the collapse in the market. All I wanted to do was employ a few people to take the pressure off. Pay the bills, wages and invest any extra money back into new products and ideas, which we had been doing for years. All the employees had known the score, they had been saying ‘what are you going to do if it doesn’t pick up’? For them it wasn’t a bolt from the blue. Every customer who we talked to was down in the dumps, scared to spend because they were scared they might be losing their jobs, fed up with the recession and the government. Every sales rep told me stories of bike shops, scooter shops and outdoor shops saying it felt like a plug was pulled around May the same as us, they all questioned what happened. It was just like turning a light switch off.
We had done as much as we could and had run out of options. After a very real conversation with the accountant I was left in a daze, I wanted to walk away, throw the keys away and go straight back to Europe where it all seems normal without the Capitalist rat race I was stuck in and getting dragged along with. I wanted to pack in and climb mountains! That’s all I could think - fresh air and nothing to worry about but bad weather.
We got ready to lose everything, I walked around the building, I must have looked a picture staring at walls and ceilings and all the hard effort we had put into our future to potentially have it taken from us over night. The next day we had internal meetings and all employees knew the decision I was going to have to make. Ian didn’t want to go down without a fight and suggested another sale, which did help and allowed us to pay off as many suppliers as we could. The consensus of everyone was what did Mark want to do? It was down to me and only me, me being the MD and 100% share holder and I’m the Mark Broadhurst of MB. I had to make serious decisions. I didn’t know what to do, I’m no hard businessman, I’m a made up businessman, muddling through and making it up as I go along! Internally we all knew we all had to go through it and we all expected the doubting Thomas’s and web forum warriors would have a field day, to be honest it was the least of my worries!
The next few days and weeks we carried on, did our best and things moved forward to a point where we’d got out of trouble or so we thought but then as one month carried to the next month the usual happened. It’s that time of year all companies chase you to the day. Some were chasing a day early to get their month endings right, it wasn’t just us having problems every supplier was in the same boat. An invoice goes 1 day overdue and they started phoning, emailing, faxing and threatening legal action. I’ve loved being in business, I really loved project managing the building restoration. I just don’t like the money side of it. I live comfortably but I’m not rich, any money I had spare went back into the business, looking back I’ve had no wages for two years! That is no word of a lie, I have put more money back in that I took out. As a good friend used to say “its only paper, shuffle it around the desk and it will go away”, just before he killed himself! And of course you cannot bury your head in the sand for too long.
It was our year end and employees were using up holidays. How do you think I felt, waiting for people to return to be told we were thinking of losing jobs again, it’s not easy to do. They all seemed to accept that if it had to happen then it had to happen. Internally we prepared to do what we had to do. I was given 5 days to make my mind up. We turned it around a bit with the sale and other things, which gave us a few more weeks to try and pay more people off. In these weeks I was constantly on the phone with emails and meetings. I didn’t leave my office. I would turn up at work and not leave the office till late. It’s draining, it wears you down. I did what I could but I felt like I was surfing on a tidal wave and being swept along out of control. The next I knew we had people from USA asking if all was well, the death rumors started which came from a letter sent to some of the direct debits set up from the bank.
The letter from the bank said “Account holder deceased”, nice one Co-op bank!
We had suppliers phoning and visits from the Inland Revenue, I was now on a ride I couldn’t do anything about. Rumors started and some UK dealers went straight to Schwalbe and Scooter Center to beg for my exclusive distributorships. These valued partners had been warned and stood by me and told the other dealers where to go. No friends in business hey! All that work and the sharks thought they could just step in and take over. We had other suppliers and dealers phoning and telling everyone we had gone bust and laughing about it, then the same dealer from the Midlands phoned a week later wanting parts saying “it wasn’t me honest!”.
Why whenever MB gets mentioned do people try to spoil a good thing? It’s alright having a laugh between friends down the pub but when it’s in public and there for everyone to read people don’t realise how damaging it can be to a hard working company because lives and jobs do get damaged and yes I do blame forums for not helping our industry over the years!
So what really happened? Well Mark and the accountant took advice from a couple of insolvency companies, it was decided it was the only way out of the problems we were in. I had no idea how any of this worked, yes you can make one company bankrupt and set up the next day like nothing has happened. I questioned if my morals and sanity could have dealt with the decisions and the later repercussions! In the end it comes down to survival, sanity and keeping your health! You cannot win every fight, but you can do something to fight another day, so we did it.
We already had two other companies set up to protect our web sites, it wasn’t a case of setting up a new company we had them already, so the MB Developments company had taken the big hit on the move. We were told by the experts we didn’t do it wrong, it wasn’t the lack of advertising that we thought as another well known company had done the same as us a week earlier and not one word has been said about him. I’m amazed at the amount of interest in the whole MB thing from around the world.
So after 23 years I had to go with the flow and make MB Developments insolvent, with regret I had to make all our employees redundant. Yes some suppliers did lose money, as much as I tried I just couldn’t find enough to keep everyone happy, there was too much to find. The person who has lost the most money out of everyone is me!
We’ve had a few weeks where just me and my son ran the business, that was hard. Even with rumors we were working from 9am till 6.30pm picking and packing parts, we couldn’t get through the normal demand. I needed to re- employ and had to make decisions, these are not easy to do. I had to let my go of my ex brother in law and friend for over 30 years, my best friend for over 8 years and a good friend for over 10 years. I’ve brought back Phil and Ian who both have young families and have been with me for many years and know my business inside out. The hardest part for everyone is the moralistic side, getting rid of people and setting up the next day like nothing has happened. I was advised to go down this route, I didn’t even know you could do this until a few weeks ago. If you don’t like it then have a go at the bankers and governments who have ruined the worlds economy and made these cop out rules where big businesses use it to make money over and over and over again. All the time I’ve been trading I’ve always paid tax, national insurance, VAT etc – how many of these “Fred in a shed” characters are doing everything by the book?
The reality is: We’re still here but under a different trading name! I worked hard to get little or no business interruption, a lot has happened out of my control in the last few weeks, I’m not proud of having to do what I did after 23 years of good business, in that time I have never made a loss in any one year at my year end.
We trade under the title of The MB Group which we were already using as our main landing page for MB Developments, this is where we made our microsites stand out. We were trying these out to get as many fingers in pies to pull us through the last few years. Obviously it didn’t work after hundreds of hours of work. We’ve reduced these to our main specialist sites - Lambretta spares - BGM Spares and Schwalbe Scooter tyres. Then the main business trading name is Serious Outdoors Ltd which we have the web site and shop to see if that works. We live in hope that Serious Outdoors is a much better name to potentially sell in the future! It’s much better than MB Developments! Anyway I’m living in total reality world, I’m never going to be paid millions for a company I own. Just imagine ‘Serious Outdoors’ above a shop in any high street! It works, does MB Developments?…….. No! I hope you see where I’m coming from.
So that’s where we are at, business is still hard, we do need support, we’re still aiming at doing what we do best and leaving my side lines for another day. We’re keeping our heads down as much as we can and plodding on until things pick up. On a positive note Scooter Center Koln are backing me by putting some of my ideas into production under the MRB BGM brand, we’ve got cylinder kits and exhausts due soon, so fingers crossed. Tyres are finally coming through again and I have lots of new ideas will be coming in the next few months.
I’d like to say through all this, there have been no customers affected by any decisions I’ve had to take, no customer has lost any money or parts, we are still here building on what we think is one of the best Scooter shops ever!
We hope the future is bright. I’m small fry there’s plenty of bigger clever people gone bust in the last year and I’m sure there will be others. I know of two other scooter shops that have done exactly the same as me this year!
Did we do it wrong with the move? Did we make bad decisions? Should we have done something different? People are quick to point a finger, as usual everyone’s an expert looking in from the outside. People have demanded I make this statement, well here it is, you’ve had it, pick it to bits, pick me to pieces, I’m only human. I’m not going to look back and say ‘I wish………..’ Hindsight is great when you have the knowledge of history. Of course if I knew now what I knew a year ago I wouldn’t have moved. Knowing what I know now my business would have survived the first round of cuts and I would have paid back the money owed to me and I would have paid off my mortgage but that never happened. I’m not looking back, I’m very proud of the work we have done in the building and we can only look to the future. Looking ahead, December is always hard as is January, we just have to keep our chins up, knuckle down and see what the future holds.
Mark Broadhurst MB Group (Serious Outdoors Ltd)