B5M Factory Team ?
 

Whilst I am not questioning the quality of the Team B5M, do people think that a 'Factory Team' version will be coming out shortly ?

Seeing as I am not in a rush to order one is it worth waiting ?

regs

no official word has been said about an FT version although there has been a steady stream of FT parts being released since the B5(M) came along.

Will have to wait and see I'm afraid unless you just wanted to buy the sexy FT parts and put them onto the Team kit. :)

hubs
steering
hexes
shock mounts
rear arm mounts
turnbuckles
motor mount
carbon battery strap

am I missing anything or anything not released yet ?

Anti-Roll bar
Geared diff
Alloy front brace

:thumbsup:

I put the geared diff in mine at the weekend. Has anyone tried the anti roll bar yet? At £28 I want to hear some opinions first ;)

I buy most my associated upgrades from the USA as it so much cheaper. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-Associ...item5b00dafaa1

and then all the UK model shops shut because we're all buying from the USA...

then they should match there prices better, why should we pay more for the same item from the UK?

its not just rc parts its pretty much everything.

That's why they call the UK, treasure Island!

Because the UK prices will already include the 20% VAT in them enforced by our government that your "import" price will not have until it reaches our shores....

Nothing like blaming the UK shops without knowing the details.... :mad:

The internet has a lot to answer for where local business in concerned.

How about reducing margins so you sell more simples. Since the economy went down hill people look for the chespest option which in some cases it's shopping abroad.

It's better shifting parts and kits in quantities rather than score on the margin selling less. Even worse not reducing prices so you have a kit or spares less than you paid for it.

think you will find there is tiny margin is rc car gear

If only you knew the sizes of the margins in this industry........

Just out of interest and curiosity, how much do you suspect a model shop makes on a spare or option part priced at say £9.99 for example?

(This is BEFORE the shop itself is paid for (rent etc), plus - lighting, electric, phone/internet, website costs, rates, staff wages, insurance, advertising, heating/cooling etc are all taken out or discounts of any type are offered to the customers) please have a guess, I will be surprised if you are close...........

And I chose "spares or parts" deliberately since this is the element of our trade that is "supposed" to carry the largest margins for us, so they say, kits and larger parts are MUCH lower!!

Their maybe on certain manufacturers but not all. In which case it's the UK distributor at fault and unfortunately CML could do more to help shops. Yes the government doesn't help (I hate the two faced b******ds) but they are only part of the issue.

A good example of greed but not on the shops behalf. I used to have a B44 and it was £7 for crown gears before shipping. I bought the same gears £5 delivered to my door from Losi parts warehouse.

Am I a bad person for it? No. I was sick of being taken for a mug by greedy people. The worst thing about all of this is the shops suffer a lot more compared to distributors.

Don't just blame the government it's down to greed. No wonder the economic growth is so piss poor because greedy companies try and take as much as they can of what little money we have.

Rant over I'm going to have my dinner and look into getting into politics. :woot:

I had a big sensible post about this but scrapped it :lol:

To answer the question (a bit) about the ft version, yes its worth the wait as the hop ups definetly improve the car one way or another, my guess is by the time its available and on sale LOCALLY, you could of purchased a one now and upgraded to ft later thus supporting shops twice and continueously until then and after in spares.

I'm guessing about 33%. Some people hardly spend a penny on their cars, then you get the hardcore few who throw some big $$$ into it. It's probably the bashers that keep model shops going.

Try around £2.49 (24%) to a maximum of just over £3 (30%) if we are lucky. As I mentioned before kits and higher priced items are even less.

Take your running cost's out of that (approx 10%) and staff wages etc and you can easily work out for yourself how much a model shop needs to take to make ends meet, let alone make a profit......

having worked in a sales environment before i know that the biggest margins come from the largest consumables.
in the case of RC racing its tires

The margins on tires must be huge! it cant possibly cost that much for a set of small thin rubber tires with bumps on.
and for the most popular tires there is no middle man to deal with as they are ordered direct from source and ordered in bulk.
Not saying its wrong that the margins on tires are so high, keeps people in jobs
but i don't have to like it.
because as a racer with a very small budget. £30(ish) every month to 2 months for new tires for 2 cars is effectively eating up my racing budget

Margin on tyres is the same as spares as I have detailed..... This is the largest margin.....

All resale/distribution businesses are basically all doing the same 3 things.

Buy it, Stock it and Sell it. Whatever the "it" is doesn't matter.

As Darren says profit is often seen as a dirty word because people concentrate on the mark up, or how much extra is being added to the price. They should look at the amount of money which is left when the related costs are taken from the sale.

The distribution business I work in, our SDA (sales, distribution and admin) costs run around 26%. I believe the industry average is around 25%, (Darren will need to tell me how he's got his down to 10% because I'm impressed if that's the case.)

So for us to make the return we want, 8%, we need to add 34% to the cost of an item. And lets say the cost is £10, the sum isn't +34% which makes the sales price £13.40, its £10 /0.66 which gives a gross profit of 34% and would make the price £15.15. Or in other words, 34% of the sales price is profit, from which we pay the costs and end with our 8% return.

Not massive is it? Using Darren's £9.99 example its means we've gone to the trouble to set up a business and all the work related to that to make 80p. Or scale it up to our actual 2013 number, we turned over £640 million and achieved a profit of £34 million. Great you might think but because larger deals happen at smaller margins we ended up with 5.4% return.

UK businesses face many challenges, mostly as someone said government imposed taxes and charges. Complaining at the shops isn't going to help because these guys aren't in it to get rich, of course they hope to make a living but we need to remember most shops have a hand in our clubs and keep the racing alive. Without them we don't have a hobby.

This has gone a little off topic but since it has let me ask a question with a view to making a point.

"How many RC clubs are setup WITHOUT significant input from somebody in the RC retail trade and/or a team driver?"

If you buy from abroad to the point that the shops decide not to concentrate on racing equipment and the distributors decided they can't justify assisting their sponsored drivers as the returns aren't there who will run the clubs?

Putting an order in abroad to get a few spares is little hassle these days with the internet ....

Getting that emergency spare / tire you need for a meeting in 1 / 2 days time is much more grief ....

Having to fly to another country to go racing will be somewhat more annoying I feel.

Just a thought :)

Melodramatic I hear you cry, afraid not ..... the reason I now have to travel 50+miles each way if I want to do any club racing of an evening (and yes that does involve entering a different country too)!

Having seen several REALLY GOOD model shops close there doors for the last time over the years, DC Racing, Microtech and many others too, I can assure you that their support to the local racing scene was greatly missed.

Well done Darren for keeping overheads to 10%, that is probably how you've hung on!

Very well said....

The only way we (and indeed any other model shop) can get down to around 10% running costs is in the following ways as a few examples...

• Smaller/cheaper premises than comparable business in other business sectors (Most model shops are small out of town affairs) very few (good ones) are in shopping centres or high profile high street locations compared to say sports shops and/or computer games stores fro instance
• Less staff - walk in a sports shop or GAME etc there will be 10-15 staff on average at all times, your average model shop with have just one or two on hand
• Less or no corporate advertising - you don't see many model shops advertising on TV or the national press, it is far more low key in this business

There are others, but these are all good examples....

I know exactly how it all works and the industry I work in is similar. I had a large Motocross shop with 5 full time members of staff until March last year. I had to find £150k a year just to open the doors. The lease on the building came up for renewal and I decided to Take a step backwards to move forwards. I moved to a smaller family owned premises, work on my own and concentrate solely on hard parts and the business is now stronger than it has been in years. The internet can be brilliant but there's always some idiot who wants to sell everything at cost price. Even with low overheads there's always something eating into your margins.

Couldn't have put it better myself Andy :)

With any RC brand or product brought into the UK as well as the duties imposed there is also the exchange rate to consider, and also the cost passed over by the manufacturer to ship the product to the distributor.

Most if not all businesses in the UK that retail RC products are owned and run by enthusiasts at the end of the day.

From my perspective any profits I make go towards putting fuel in the van to get to meetings and race fees, and towards my rent/rates/utilities/insurances etc. Anything I have left over goes towards our mortgage and household bills which would leave me enough for a pint and a packet of crisps - And with that said I'm more than a happy chap :)

Hi mike, didn't see you with crisps on Sunday, but you've not sent me that invoice yet, so now I feel bad :thumbsup:
Let me know what I owe for those wheels on sunday

Another long established shop is to close its doors announced this week, Morley models in Leeds....internet sales taking its toll.

Its sad but if they dont start using the internet its gonna happen

very true but its also quite expensive I belive to have a nice website with live stock level

Take away all the costs of premises and sorry to say staff.

It is sad - my first car 30 years ago was from morley models (when it was in morley!!) but I have to say their website was very poor and difficult to navigate so I'm not entirely surprised.
I've never run a website, but then I've never needed to, but it think that any shop that wants to supply "specialised" products will struggle without one.
I called approx 4 weeks ago as I needed a rattle can of white and a can of orange - they had neither so I had to buy elsewhere

That is really sad..:( Tony and Gary Marsden go way back...always used to be very friendly and knowledgeable....very nice guys...wish them luck for the future...