In reply to Patrick :
It'd be great if that's the kind of money they got but I suspect it was nowhere near that.
In reply to Patrick :
It'd be great if that's the kind of money they got but I suspect it was nowhere near that.
Heyo. Explains why the site was down for a bit...
So who does this leave for US sellers of new OEM BMW parts...FCP and....dealers? Occasional sellers on eBay?
I'm still surprised ECS has kept up the Turner and Pelican websites and just hasn't absorbed them in to ECS.
I have been through more than one private equity buyout, and each time it is the exact same pattern.
1. Owner of company wants to retire rich, so they position themselves for a buyout.
2. Private Equity that owns a quasi-similar business shows up and offers bags of cash.
3. Equity firm releases statements about how great the people, service, and products of the acquired company are and that's why we bought them.
4. Equity firm immediately fires all of the good people, moves production to China/India/Mexico or one of their other facilities that can't handle the work. Service plummets because people are gone or scared or angry at their pay cuts.
5. Equity firm has slashed costs and invested nothing outside of the purchase, so things look good on paper for a short while. Which is the plan.
6. Equity firm bundles company with a few others that they similarly screwed and made look good on paper and sells it to a larger firm.
7. Equity firm partners are fat and rich and all companies involved are a shell of their former selves with crappy products.
And hopefully...
8. Equity firm partners get a horrible disease from Florida massage parlor hookers and die a painful death before rotting in hell for eternity.
FuzzWuzzy said:I'm still surprised ECS has kept up the Turner and Pelican websites and just hasn't absorbed them in to ECS.
Brand recognition. These former stand-alone companies have built up a lot of goodwill and brand recognition over the years that ECS is now profiting from. I'd expect that that's why they bought these companies in the first place.
In reply to pinchvalve :
So who's ECS planning on selling to?
FuzzWuzzy said:Heyo. Explains why the site was down for a bit...
So who does this leave for US sellers of new OEM BMW parts...FCP and....dealers? Occasional sellers on eBay?
There are still a few. FCP, AutohausAZ, BluntTech, BimmerWorld come to mind. I think eEuroparts is still independent too?
RM European is indy as well but really only deals in maintenance parts, not tuner parts the way Turner etc did.
JBasham said:This country has a romance about small business for the last ten years like it used to have about family farms in 1980. And we all know how that turned out.
They are capitalized and managed by an owner or a couple partners, as a way to earn a living during their working years. Once that owner wants to retire out, there's no way to convert that business strategy into something that meets the demands of investor capital.
Unless the employees can scrape together the money to buy the owner out, the owner can either drop dead some day on the shop floor, or sell to the sharks.
For the kinds of businesses in the next category up, with investor capital and employee management, the entire business strategy is to cut costs any and every way possible. The big business "private sector" isn't really efficient on a macro scale, and it doesn't competitively select "good" ideas and products over "bad" ones. It just makes the customer base learn to eat whatever food they plop in the bowl and think it's normal.
There's actually a fairly large push for employee owned business transitions in a number of places now. I know for a fact that Pennsylvania offers some pretty decent tax incentives to owners who change their companies over to employee owned upon retirement.
That prevents the kind of private equity issues commonly seen these days as well as incentivizes the newly employee owned company to stay in the state.
Not in Pennsylvania but Bob's Red Mill is an excellent example of this.
Wicked cool!
FuzzWuzzy said:
So who does this leave for US sellers of new OEM BMW parts...FCP and....dealers? Occasional sellers on eBay?
One would be https://www.blunttech.com/, I'm sure there are others.
Weird, I keep getting emails from Turner ...
Oh, oh. As of 060519, has Blunttech fallen too? Any others notice this? Has the website changed? No original style 2002 radiators offered any more, like www.wallothnesch.com offers (luckily). Can I still get their heater control valve repair kit someplace? Arghhh!
Blunttech is still there, the note on their front page seems to indicate they just updated the website.
If you're concerned about getting parts, why not just call them? They do answer the phone.
So sorry to be a doom-and-gloom alarmist.
stuart in mn -- You are so right . I am so wrong.
I just talked to Steve at Blunttech. Everything is good!
I'm picking up my radiators and heater valve control repair kits next week.
(I had no idea he was in my neck of the woods. )
I panicked when I couldn't find those items on their new website.
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