TopSpeed will be open VERY soon!

Hey everybody, the building is fantastic and everything's coming together quickly. Fresh paint on the walls, lots of trips to Home Depot, and things are shaping up.

The lifts should be installed tomorrow or Friday morning. The dyno will be in the ground and operational by the end of the month. We also have cornerbalancing scales on the way. We will be doing complete chassis preparation, suspension tuning, power upgrades, dyno services, and expert engine management solutions.

We're not actually open yet but we're assembling pre-orders so we can make sure we get your parts in immediately once the doors do open in a few weeks.

If anyone wants to say hello, feel free to stop by and see us if you're in the area! Give us a ring first if you're thinking of stopping by. We're just off of exit 12.


TopSpeed
2130 Brandon Trail
Alpharetta, GA 30004
678-297-7770

:bigthumb: :bigthumb:

 

Porter,
Will you guys be carrying a back stock so people can just come in and buy parts, or will it be the traditional come in and you'll order it for us. I still need some endlinks. What brands will you be carrying (in general, not just endlinks)? Also, if you guys need any help with anything I (and I imagine most of the rest of the people on this board) would be more than happy to help you guys get set up. Also, is this going to be a subbie dedicated shop (ala R speed for the miata's) or general automotive aftermarket type place like knowledge? Good luck with everything!

 

Sounds awesome Porter! Congrats on the shop. Can't wait to come check it out. Will you do Prodrive stuff?

 

This is good stuff. Glad to see you striking it out on your own. BTW, what dyno?

 

Yes, we will be carrying parts in stock, but not a huge inventory right at first. It will grow over the first few months, but we will always have common items in stock.

We will of course be carrying Whiteline and Kartboy, so I should have your endlinks covered pretty quickly.

This shop is not Subaru-specific, though I guess I am the Subaru specialist. We will be catering to the Subaru and Evo crowds heavily, and also Mazda, Nissan, Toyota, BMW, Acura, etc etc. If it drives, we can make it go faster.

 

We will probably not be doing Prodrive stuff (though I would love to!) due to Subaru of Gwinnett's exclusivity contract with them. SoG's contract gives them exclusivity over the whole state of Georgia. I guess it sucks for the people in Savannah.

 

DynoJet in-ground. The big one. It'll be fully flush with the ground, too. :bigthumb:


[edit]Gack... brain fry. It's a DynoJet.[/edit]

 

Sounds great! Can't wait to spend some money there! Thanks for the info too.

 

Awesome! So much easier than others. One of these days I'm gonna get a dyno...

 

nice nice... everything should be up and running by the time i get back from vacation... can't wait to check it out...

 

Right in time for me to get my car fixed and get lots of $$ over the break for some good mods!

 

What about ECUTEK tuning?

 

We can sell you Prodrive stuff at the Jobber prices... you know that we are happy to work with you. We actually have worked with a number of people in Savanah, the T67 car is here right now from Savanah. Same thing with Ecutek... If people really want to buy through you, we can deal you Ecutek. I'm happy to come tune on your new DD. We can all be one big happy family

 

Ooof, sorry I didn't mean to stir anything up over here...I just saw other posts on nasioc. My bad.

 

Ah, no problem. Doug is going down to Savannah this weekend to tune three cars.

I think we have all the tuning experience here we're going to need, but thanks for the offer.

One big happy family would be nice, i.e. a family where members don't try to undermine each other or create barriers to doing business with vendors in the marketplace. Friendly competition and collaboration is good for everyone, I wish that you could see that. No business has a right to "own" a metropolitan area, or the customers within it. It simply doesn't work towards the goal of giving our customers options in the marketplace, and therefore the best possible customer experience.

We'll always be in touch, please let us know if we can assist you at SoG in any way. I understand you've done some business with Balanced in the past, if we can help fill that role and extend some capabilities to you that you don't have in house, we'd be glad to help.

 

Huh? "TRY" to create barriers??? They called ME.

So you're saying that when Ecutek *CALLED ME*, I should have said, "Thank you for asking but no, I'd love for you to sell Ecutek to a shop 40 miles away, that would do wonders for our business I'm sure."

Undermine? How? Should I give you my maps too?

Most high-quality vendors have one retail location in each area. MANY manufacturers only have one master distributor per state.

To explain to everybody what Porter is talking about, I spoke with Giovani, the primary owner of TopSpeed about 4 weeks ago. I contacted him to try and hook him up with an advertising deal with a radio station that our dealership didn't want. It was the "Pimp my Sleigh" deal with 95.5 the beat that I hooked Batlground up with because Giovani didn't want it. Anyway, we spoke at length about not being competitors, he was mostly going to do Evo's and we were mostly going to do Subaru's. He talked all about not being competitors. It seemed good to him not to have to buy the $12,000 Ecutek software...

About a week later I *RECEIVED* a call *FROM* Ecutek with them saying that they had received a call from somebody in our area interested in Ecutek. I said "That wouldn't be Giovani from TopSpeed would it?" He said, yes that it was.

I waited to see what he had to say. He then said, "They're pretty close to you aren't they."

I said yes.

He said, "you have a pretty good rep with all the customers in the area, most people go to you to be tuned even if they don't use your dealership right?"

I said yes.

He said, "They'd be direct competition for you wouldn't they."

I said yes.

He said "I don't know that your area really needs another Ecutek tuner does it?"

I said I agree, I don't think we need to split the people getting Ecutek'd any further.

He said he agreed and that was that.

What needs to be said here is the same thing that I said elsewhere; the more Ecutek's each tuner does the better service they can provide ALL their customers. Why on earth would it be good to split those Ecutek's between more tuners?

For those that don't know, Ecutek has a mandatory price minimum, so it's not like more people with it are going to drive down the price. Plus it's a good deal. Nobody complains about the price.

If you want to give our customers options in the market place you can offer a different engine management.

I haven't had any complaints about my tuning and I've tuned everything from the SCCA STX National Champion's car to drag cars to road race cars to Doctor's that just want them to run well. If people really want Ecutek but from a different tuner, Shiv flies in a few times a year...

Anyway, I think it's rediculous to be mad because I didn't try to CHANGE Ecutek's mind and create more competition for myself.

Beyond all of this I have already agreed to deal Ecutek to you if you'd like.

Seriously, what would you like for me to do?

 

Wow.

How unbelievably unprofessional.

 

What's unprofesional about it?

 

*grabs popcorn* I'm just subscribing



Nah, you guys are both my friends and I know that you have good history together. There are plenty of options and customers out there for everyone to get a piece.

E-mail and other forms of e-communication are the best way for miscommunications to happen. Tone and sincerity is left up to the reader and their perspective, not good. Trust me, my wife and I date for 2 years long distance, keeping in touch mostly with e-mails. It got hairy at times.

Business can get ugly but lets keep it in perspective here, we are all big kids still playing with cars

 

*grabs popcorn* too. Good thing we have a big Christmas bucket at work.

I for one like competition and despise having only one place to get something done or purchase something. I can understand a company wanting to maximize profit by keeping availability low and only through authorized dealers (ie: prodrive, etc). However, that tactic is somewhat antiquated in this era of "E-Commerce". This is why I choose with my wallet to purchase other goods and services that afford me the opportunity to shop around for best service and price.

 

I fully agree that people should be able to shop. Which is why we offer ANY shop the opportunity to buy things from us at jobber prices. This includes Classic and TopSpeed. So understand that SoG and I are fully willing to deal Ecutek and Prodrive and JIC and PDE and a number of the others that we are distributors for. So as far as we are concerned you could go to TopSpeed and buy Ecutek. We'll sell it to them at the level that they could make some money and we make some money.

To let you know, companies, like APS has one dealer in Florida, one in Georgia (they don't do Subaru) and one in North Carolina. To become a dealer requires a $50,000 buy in and $10,000 per month. Everybody else in each of those states that sells APS is buying it through that distributor.

Same thing with almost EVERYTHING else all the exhaust, brake, intake, injector, engine management etc companies have these HUGE buy-ins and monthly requirements to become a dealer. The VAST majority of manufacturers, even companies like Sparco have 1 distributor per state, many have one PER COUNTRY. Whiteline for instantce is now only imported through one place in the country. ALL of us HAVE to buy from them.

For us to have set ourselves up this way, making the $10,000+++ buyins from companies like Prodrive, Ecutek, Injen, soon to be Stromung, and have an exclusive distributor region is how this world goes round.

My dad has been into watches for the last 15 years, the high-end watches may have as few as one distributor per region or at MOST one per city.

Almost EVERY company that we are distributors for has minimum pricing for retail and minimum for jobbers (other stores that are going to sell them).

Anyway, in all honesty, I'd love to work with you (Porter). We often send fabrication work to Balanced, are y'all going to have any kind of fabricating capability? Tube-bending, welding, custom mounts for things, etc. If y'all have a good welder or fabricator I'd be happy to work with you on some stuff, I've got some stuff now that I'd love to bring over and see what we can do.

Siegel