537 replies to this topic

[KTM300]

This worldwide audience that you are speaking to is not getting any positive vibes from you.

If I were trying to make money off this hobby I would not be on this section of the blog tearing down my own livelihood. I would put every keystroke towards something that might help turn a profit as much as PdL will allow.

[jimht]

Much whining here about the impracticality of trying to sell buggy whips to Eskimos.

Slot car racing (the Hobby/fetish) has been around since slot car playing (the toy) died in the Sixties.
During its heyday, the fun was in the toys available & playing with them, not racing.
It became about racing AFTER the big toy companies bailed.

Showing racing to consumers will not get them involved, I know.
However, there's no doubt that an emphasis on toys & playing is more attractive to those who aren't "looking for a new Hobby".
The only thing that seems to be making Raceways even more impractical nowadays is the insistence that big fast tracks & exotic cars to match are needed to race &/or have a good time playing.
Not true of course, & the rising cost of floor space in high traffic locations is a killer.
It's also silly to expect consumers to buy into something that is blatantly aimed at separating them from their hard-earned gas money:
bendo-matic chassis & unrealistic one race bodies to be specific.
Racers, of course, have no issue with spending, but before they can become racers, they must be attracted by the toy itself...the racing is not the attraction.

Don't blame the consumer for not buying into racing, it never was the main appeal.
Don't blame the manufacturers for only promoting within the industry...they're not trying to attract new customers, they're trying to keep the ones they've got.
Finally, if promotion were the answer, it wouldn't have been unsuccessful at the local level, as it has many , many times over the past 45 years.

[jimht]

Again, you and I do not agree on much.

Not so sure, there.
You've made your business work by not following the "Industry Path", eh?
Welcome to the Club.
However, if serious promotion worked at the local level, it would work nationally...so? Where has it worked locally?
(let's disregard the bucks I've thrown down the drain on TV, newspapers, coupons, radio, etc., maybe I'm not a good example)
Point is, success, sort of, in this business is supposedly based not in providing toys & a fun place to play with them, but in attracting racing hobbyists who will then spend large amounts of money to go fast & win.
Does that work for you?
How will you promote that nationally?
Is the format you use to make money in your business going to attract people in droves if they know about it?

[redbackspyder]

MadMax,

Why does 1/32 scale then seem to survive and thrive? Not only do their manufacturers promote new product, they are releasing it on an ongoing, increasing scale.

Maybe it is just the particular scale, as 1/32 seems to have not only grown, it is prospering. I would like to know your comments on this.

[Tim Neja]

Mill/KTM,

Mad Max seems only to know how to tear down, not build up.

That's part of the problem, incompetent business people that do not care about their customer base. Just open the door and everyone is supposed to rush in and spend money for them to make a profit. Don't care what kind of racing is working, don't care what kind of products you need to stock.

Let someone else do the promotion or complain about it.

There is a nice club in LA - OTHG that races 1/32 scale and its membership has enjoyed steady growth for the last five years. There is only ONE hobby shop that will cater to them and does a very nice job stocking parts - Victory Station in Burbank. Bob LISTENS to his customers and brings in the products they want - and HEAVEN FORBID, even offers small discounts to large purchasing customers and club members!! OH MY GOD, WHY WOULD HE DO THAT!! Because he IS making a profit from the extra business the club brings in and he's found a way to say "thank you" without giving up his profits. He's benefiting from the simplest form of marketing.

BPR continues to be able to make a profit, because Chris LISTENS to his customers. We have gone through all kinds of different racing at BP in the last ten years. None have lasted forever, and his customer base has changed, evolved, and grown over the years. Yes, we have a LOT of old racers still having fun, but D3 is a NEW phenomenon! And it's WORKING, but Chris has allowed and helped lots of different racing. Flexi cars, wing cars, NASCARs, Nastrucks, Can-Am, F1, Coupes - it's a constantly changing and evolving enterprise. And the only way to keep up is to LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS.

I spend a lot of money at BP - building cars is fun - and Chris offers me a variety of small incentives/discounts. It's part of the business. You can't just charge full pop and expect people to love to plunk down their money. BP has had BBQs - fun events, etc., to promote. It all works, except bitching never will!

FWIW

Tim

[idare2bdul]

First I applaud anybody who tries to open a track and even more those that persist at it. My experience has been that few are good businessmen, most are underfunded. The majority of tracks are in bad locations. Advertising is minimal. When business is slow the owner is often doing little or nothing to offset it, like making RTRs or going out and doing promotions to get people in the door. What matters is the total amount of money in your pocket at the end of the month after paying all bills. $20 net sales five times adds up to the same $100 as a one-shot net sale.

Do you sell a car or do you sell all the related accessories with it? Some people are better salesmen than others but sales can be a learned skill. There are books and classes. Lastly this business is kind of like a bar. What is your atmosphere like? Is the shop nicely painted and decorated? Does it look good from the outside as well as the inside? Is it in a safe neighborhood? Like it or not you are competing with a lot of other ways people can spend money.

I love Buena Park. They are racer-centered. They will order anything for me that I've ever asked for but you could drive right by without noticing they were there. The outside is drab and the interior is functional at best. A competitor about 30 miles away had a well-decorated shop, multiple nice tracks. they even had multiple TV monitors playing race themed videos. Virtually no parking, located in an industrial area, poorly-stocked counters, and they let their best salesman go to be replaced by people who would work for less but sold less. You get the idea.

Even when a shop is doing well I've seen tham fall prey to drug use and employee theft. To us it's a hobby but, like KC says, you have to pay the bills, and track owners need to remember the rules of business apply to them, too.

[68Caddy]

Jim,

I'm totally with you - BPR is a time capsule and I love it.

Sucks because where I grew up in Sweden we did not have a great place like this. (Sorry, big Toremeister. )

Let's face it, BPR's a living museum and I love it.

Nesta aka 68Caddy

[Tim Neja]

Hi KC,

Saying we need more customers is stating the obvious, not the solution.

I only read that you're complaining about manufacturers not promoting, racers not spending enough, nothing about what you the owner can be doing. As Mike pointed out, and others, BP is successful because they do listen to their customers, and provide a very friendly environment to race in. They do not race in their own facility, and they support any kind of racing that the customers ask for. I've been to other raceways, in the past, that did none of that. They said they would, but then would not bring in stock to support it, and raced themselves trying to "win" against their own customers. While personally, I love the competition and it didn't bother me - the owner could get his "parts", but I had to bring mine from BP to compete??!! THAT was interesting!

Promotion starts from within, and begins with trying to support the customer you have, and then grow that customer base. Local newspapers, news shows, flyers in the neighborhood promoting the facility. You could even go to some of the local middle and high schools to promote the hobby. How about setting up your own portable track at a local car show? There are a lot of them out there, and your customer base could be interested in cars? I'd concentrate on the muscle car market and the nostalgia racing markets - I've seen successful promos work there.

Now those are ideas for promotion, not complaints that no one is doing anything. That's working towards a solution, I personally funded a "club project" to help promote D3 racing at my local SD racing club! We provided several D3 "kits" - complete project builds with all the parts necessary to build D3 cars for the racers. This was to help D3 racing in SD grow, and some of those racers will go to BPR to compete as well! All the parts came from BPR so it benefited them as well. Anyone can do that - so what are you doing to help grow our little hobby?

FWIW,

Tim

[Cheater]

Saying we need more customers is stating the obvious, not the solution.

Correct, but there is no concerted effort by the various groups with stakes in commercial slot racing to discover solutions to the lack of growth and profitability.

All who have posted that slot car raceway owners are typically poor businessmen are dead-on accurate and that is certainly part of the problem. But it isn't the whole story, as there have been more than a few well-capitalized, sharp businessmen who have not succeeded in running profitable commercials raceways.

I don't believe that growth and stability for the commercial raceway industry can be achieved by raceway owners working alone at the raceway level. In virtually every other stable leisure-time activity (hobby, if you prefer), one major component has been an active industry association devoted to that hobby. Such associations generally perform functions that benefit the entire hobby, such as conducting surveys of relevance to the hobby, performing market research, and disseminating information to its membership.

Wouldn't it be great to have a long-term study investigating why slot car racing is largely uanble to retain participants? Or to have a series of new, space-efficient track designs for reference by potential raceway owners? Or to have access to the results of a well-designed survey determining what factors are most important to slot car raceway customers? Or a canned, tested marketing program for maximizing birthday party sales and revenues? Or...

Besides a long history of non-cooperation in the slot car "industry", one of the chief impediments to the existence of such an association today is that commercial slot racing has shrunk to the point where it probably lacks the "critical mass" to support such an association, even were it to be acknowledged that it would be bring benefits.

There is one general hobby association, the Hobby Manufacturers Association, and its website can be found HERE. Please click on the link and notice the blue navigation bar just below the top image. Notice anything about it? It lists General Hobby, Model Railroad, Plastic/Die Cast, and Radio Control. I see no reference to slot racing anywhere on this website. Wonder why? Wonder what could be done to have slot racing appear along with the other hobbies?

What I do see at the bottom of the HMA's homepage is a free publication created by the HMA's Marketing & Promotion Committee entitled "Opening a Hobby Store - Important Information You Need to Know!" I have downloaded this handbook for perusal, but why isn't there a raceway industry association producing a version of such a handbook regarding the opening of a commercial raceway?

FWIW, industry associations like this usually help in making investors more comfortable investing in hobby businesses.

Greg's opinion is that if we want to grow the commercial slot racing industry, it will take this sort of approach. But I fear the commercial raceway industry is too short-sighted, too uncooperative, and too small ever to make it happen.

[don.siegel]

Greg, as you know, there was one a couple years ago, in the form of TOA, especially when it was headed by the very dynamic Ray Gardner. That helped, but I'm not sure it really changed anything on a basic level, and when he retired, so did the TOA...

Ironically enough, I was just reading an old issue of Model Car & Track, in which there's a large excerpt from a Bank of American report on commercial model car raceways, and one of the comments is that all track owners seem to go it alone, and there's no real national industry association, even though a couple were trying to establish themselves (Aug '65, height of the boom).

Don

[Cheater]

Don,

As you know, Ray Gardner lived in Atlanta for many years and I know him pretty well.

While the TOA was a noble effort, it certainly did not receive much support from the raceway owner community. And, to be honest, I don't believe the TOA's activities were in sync with the kind of efforts I've observed effective industry associations perform in other arenas.

[jimht]

Some thoughts to do with why promotion of slot car racing doesn’t work.
The Slot Car Hobby currently has 3 branches..exemplified by the USRA, 1/32 Plasti-cars & Retro.
The USRA & the manufacturers that support it are all about racing.
The equipment rules are very restrictive & there’s no easy or inexpensive transition between classes.
The equipment used is expensive, unrealistic, unreliable & fast, and essentially the racer is not allowed to do much but race.

1/32 Plasti-cars are toys that can be raced. It’s obvious from the way the manufacturers keep pumping out cars that the segment is healthy, which means that the devotees stick with it or the market is expanding, one or the other or both.
Plasti-cars are not about no-holds-barred serious competition.
The major manufacturers refuse to compromise the realistic nature of the cars to get more speed.
They know it’s the appearance that’s appealing.

Finally we have Retro, which to me is simply a return to simpler times.
Scratchbuilding was the mainstay of the Hobby from the start…converting static models into motorized cars to play with & race.
That was never so much about speed, though, or they would have been running doorstops from the beginning.
Retro keeps the speed under control like Plasti-cars & allows the players to devote their energy to something besides speed for speed’s sake.

And the point is?
The healthier segments seem to make racing & speed less important than realism & tinkering.
The reason why promotion of the Hobby by emphasizing racing won’t work is because the focus is too narrow.
My experience is that most participants are attracted to the tracks & the cars, not the racing.
Any promotion that emphasizes racing & speed is not going to be appealing.

We’re constantly seeing old boxes of slot car stuff from the Sixties:
Boxes of cars, primarily…much variety, realistic & not so much about speed.
We don’t offer that sort of product in Raceways now, if we did we'd be making more money.
Raceways will be successful when the customers own boxes full of cars instead of boxes full of used parts.
I’ve said before & I’ll say it again, the consumer thinks they’re buying a little car toy to play with, they’re not buying into racing.
We sell racing don’t we? No wonder it doesn't work. Racing should be just part of it, not the point of it.

[Tim Neja]

I believe both you and Greg make excellent points, Jim. Slot racing needs to be promoted around "having fun" racing toy cars. NOT just racing in itself because that is too small a segment of customer base we want to attract. And without an organized effort, this will continue to remain a "cottage industry" instead of a healthy growing one.

Take a look at the Scale Auto Racing magazines available that speak to the "plastic car" industry - and show a LOT about racing--but the focus is on cool looking cars that can be raced.
D3 is soo popular BECAUSE it's about racing, but keeps the SPEED to a minimum. That's what the guys that wanted immediately to change motors DON'T GET!! It's NOT ABOUT SPEED, it IS ABOUT RACING, and you don't need unlimited speed to race. What is fun, and why it's growing, is both building cars, but COMPETING with reliably equal horsepower!!!

Promotion needs to be doneby ALL IN THE HOBBY - not just the track owner, but the manufacturers as well. Does anyone in our industry know how to publish a simple magazine?? And NOT a print version, but an online one to start? Then perhaps we can get LINKED to the other hobby sites. Check out RCGROUPS.COM, you will see a very large association for R/C products of all types. Boats/cars/airplanes/helicopter/etc. That's more of what we need to start.

Good ideas, now who's going to take the ball and run with it??

Tim

[jimht]

KC, it's not like this hasn't been discussed before, with much the same results.
We had over a thousand Raceways during the heyday of the TOA. Now we're back down to what we had in the Seventies.
What happened to all those Raceways?
We're all good at figuring out why we're not making any money...no customers.
Figure out why we went from a couple of hundred to over a thousand & you'll really know something.

Instead of whining about how others will be affected by the impending doom, how about just explaining why you've decided to bring the subject up again?
Not saying anything new or just asking who's going to solve the problem is fruitless.
Business dropped off or what?

[jimht]

I'm sorry. You've missed the point.
Before this business can be promoted it has to offer something better than what the public hasn't been interested in since the Sixties.

Business dropped off or what?

[redbackspyder]

I'm sorry. You've missed the point.
Before this business can be promoted it has to offer something better than what the public hasn't been interested in since the Sixties.

Business dropped off or what?

Jim, I agree with you completely. This is a cottage industry now, in the sixties there were no video games and cell phones with text messaging that now occupy the time of young people who would be getting into the hobby. Just like stamp or coin collecting, the hobby is facing stiff competition from other more popular alternatives like "Guitar Hero 3" and the like, and "Grand Theft Auto 4" . Young people are not learning to use their motor skills in the same way that you developed in the sixties , and the failure of manufacturers to realize who their core customer base is, along with raceway owners, has been a part of the decline of the hobby. A more interesting question is Can this hobby be brought back to life? Can younger people be brought in to keep it alive, or will it die out altogether when the D3 crowd passes away? Does Mike Steube, Tore Anderson, PDL,Bryan Warmack,..... have more than another 20 years left to enjoy and try to promote the sport that they love? MadMax, these people are trying in their way to keep the hobby alive, and their will not be another 60's resurgence of slot car racing just due to the overall structure of available new hobbies. OPEN WHEEL racing in the United States was BIGGER than Nascar ever dreamed, but you have seen the way that it has floundered in the last 15 years, and make no mistake, they do not think it will ever approach the success that it once had. I have been contemplating opening a new slot car facility, but when I mentioned it to a few people, they criticized me for thinking I might tread on established businesses. How many damn people are in Southern California?????????? And we have trouble supporting one established raceway, Buena Park, and one popular San Diego Club Raceway.....Too many small minds apparently in this hobby, maybe Rodney King was right, maybe we should all learn to just get along. In Southern California , we are learning to share the knowledge that in the 60's was so well guarded. EGO gets in the way of too many that wish to keep this a small hobby. Thank god for people like Bryan Warmack developing the D3 kit, Mike Steube and Keith Tanaka for the unbelievable assembly video, and others who try to support this hobby. Just my own humble opinion, but if I listened to some of the negative comments posted on this thread, I should just give up the pursuit of a new slot car raceway and just go vintage racing.....

[Tim Neja]

Open the raceway Mills--- I'll come race there too!!! At least--if you'll LISTEN to your customers, you may very well have a chance to not only survive, but thrive!! MANY business's fail because the owner is too busy with the wrong agenda, self promotion works best--because even IF the manufacturer's get involved, slot racing IS a LOCAL industry. Wherever you open your shop--you'll be drawing the bulk of your customer's from a 20 mile radius. I don't think national promo's are going to help you there!!! I would be thinking about both forms of racing-- a smaller 1/32 style routed track for the plastic car crowd---and the larger hill climbs and flat tracks for the 1/24 crowd. I would NOT necessarily put in a King track, unless it was older flatter style. The really FAST cars are all being run by sponsored drivers or people buying products direct from the manufacturer, so they will not help pay for your electric bill, let alone help make you profitable.
The GROWING segment of slot cars is Classic plastic cars -- and D3 style retro racing-- along with the simple Flexi type cars. Then the racer's will come and look into faster cars-- but I wouldn't plan on starting there.
Then--- PROMOTE around the race track--- adds in the Model Car Magazine for plastic cars etc. They will attract attention from the people you're trying to reach. The OTHG club in LA has 50 active members and a lot more that come around to see what we are up to. REAL looking cars on a racetrack are cool too!!
FWIW
Tim

[KTM300]

"a smaller 1/32 style routed track for the plastic car crowd"

Everytime I read lines like this one my skin crawls.Small cars do not need to be sent to a small track.People have small tracks at home and will not pay to run on one even if it is wood.Just because the track is small that does not mean the cars will work any better.The San Diego hillclimb is as small as the track needs to be.
Stop treating 1/32 scale like it's for kids and it may be better recieved.Kids are not the ones buying the cars anyway.I always bring at least six plastic cars with me when I go tto Mike G's track and I'll be happy to show anyone that is interested how to set them up.I plan on going there on the next Saturday race and I'll have a good selection with me to run after the main races are over.