RCU Forums - Byron Original

Below appears an excerpt from a relevant thread. The initiator if the thread was pissed at Iron Bay for their long turn-around times (lack of communication) and wrote a less than friendly letter to John, the proprietor of Iron Bay. John responded with a letter of his own. John (from Iron Bay) agreed that Vernon (the angry customer) could post John's response letter on RCU, so I think it's OK for me to copy and paste so that his letter appears in this thread, too.

I think it's worth a read. There's always two sides to every story!

Here it is:

"This an e-mail that I sent in frustration to Iron Bay Model Co. and the reply that was sent back. It sheds a lot of light
on the situation at this company, I thought it appropriate to post it here:

My e-mail:
Dear Sirs,I recently submitted an order for parts for the Byron RV-4 and asked that a Pay Pal invoice be sent for payment. I realize that it has been the Christmas & New Year Holiday time, so I have been trying to be patient, but I feel that you guys are really "Missing the Boat", so to speak, by not being concerned with the current image that you have in the model market place. It is a shame that someone that has spent a great deal of money to purchase the molds, tooling and other remnants of the Byron aircraft line of models to have them wasting awayin a building somewhere in Wheeling, West Virginia. The image portrayed on RC Universe is one filled with so much negativity that it seems to be impossible to get anything from your company in a timely manner or possibly maybe ever. I thought that getting a response in couple of days was a good sign, but I guess my hopes that Iron Bay Model Co. was on the way back to be an credible source for those great creations that were once available from Byron, was only a flicker as I have had no response. I know being a former hobby shop owner both here in the US and also in the UK, that you will never get rich being a manufacturer, distributor, or shop owner in this business. if you have no intentions of furthering your business as the holder of the former Byron products, please for the sake of all of us that would love to buy and build any one of the great war-bird creations of Mr Byron, either do something with the company or put it up for sale, maybe someone that really cares will buy it and do something constructive with it. Just my 2 cents worth........... Vernon W. Diedrich Ventress, Louisiana

And here is john's response:

Hi Vernon ,

I appreciate your comments, but feel that they are possibly a little bit uninformed. For some reason a few folks out there seem to like to conjecture that there is a groundswell of people interested in acquiring the molds/tooling and going in to production of the Byron products. Yet I have never had a single serious inquiry from a person with either the resources or knowledge to achieve this. Second, the model aircraft division of Byron Originals was up for sale for over 5 years prior to our acquisition, so any other interested parties had full access and opportunity to make an offer to them and take on the challenge of producing the product. Seeing as Byron Originals only had one serious offer during the half a decade of time that it was up for sale, it is pretty evident that interest in manufacturing these kits is not as great as you and others may presume. However, most importantly is the bottom line; the Byron folks realized that it was very difficult to competitively manufacture the product here in the U.S. with the labor rates, government restrictions, and material costs; and to ship production overseas would eliminate much of the uniqueness of the product not to mention increase the level of foreign competitors who would copy the product.

So it would seem to be a good question to ask: “why would one take on such a challenge realizing that it will be a difficult task while not be a money-making endeavor”? The reason was simple at the time…if we did not acquire the company then it was going to be scrapped. Yes, scrapped! Every mold, tool, piece of inventory, etc. As a matter of fact, the handful of small items that we did not feel that we needed to take with us when our tractor trailers pulled out was put in the dumpster the very next day! Even though they told us that they had no intention of continuing with any part of the model business, we didn’t think that they would actually do it. After all, surely the items would have both historical and sentimental value for the family. Nevertheless, for the Byron folks it was a simple business decision to replace the existing square footage of manufacturing space with equipment and products that were profitable, and the tradition/heritage/investment of the model aircraft would be relegated to history. Indian Motorcycles comes to mind as another U.S. Company that is no longer in existence. The Byron family does have a beautiful display of static aircraft and the airport facilities to keep the memory of Byron alive, but the manufacturing items just held little value from a business point of view. I heard a number in excess of 10 million dollars mentioned when we discussed the investment that Byron Godbersen made to build the company from scratch. He was quite a unique person and what he did for the modeling industry was out of his passion for the product, not for the bottom line of profit. Talk about a great sacrifice and a truly remarkable guy!

We looked on the opportunity with the realization that the project would not necessarily make a significant amount of money, but would at least be a way to maintain some form of continuance of the Byron model aircraft products that we enjoyed. So we jumped in with both feet and have brought as much of the product back into production as we could afford from both a monetary and time point of view. As a business, Byron Model Aircraft is a very labor intensive entity in both production and customer service. This is one of the primary reasons that the Byron folks got out of it. For instance, we have one full-time person dedicated to just handling orders for obsolete and older kit replacement parts of which most orders are for $20 or less. Needless to say that this person does not generate enough revenue to pay their own paycheck let alone cover company overhead and G&A expenses. This is not because the person is a poor employee, but simply because many of the items they are producing/packaging/shipping can only be economically produced in high quantities. Yet it is impossible to justify doing a high volume production run if we are only going to sell a dozen pieces a year of a given replacement part.

Most other companies simply call these parts obsolete and stop servicing the product. My Dell laptop comes to mind here; it is less than 5 years old, yet there are already parts that I cannot obtain because they are obsolete. Nevertheless, we continue to take heat from customers that complain about our production time, not realizing that we are doing them quite a service by simply continuing to offer a product that other companies would typically have discontinued two decades ago. We’re not perfect, but the alternative is far worse.

We consider ourselves extremely blessed because we have invented several new products that have garnered significant contracts with the Department of Defense. Our company has grown tremendously over the past two years, and will more than quadruple in sales volume in the next 18 months from these contracts, so we must be doing something right. It is this Defense side of the business that makes it possible to even operate the recreational model aircraft side of the business. We had a few high paid guys from the modeling industry running the recreational side of the business for a while, but things didn’t work out and they are no longer with the company. For a while, customer service was timelier for the model aircraft customers, but their occasional involvement with the defense side of the business resulted in some intentional sabotage and neglect (performed by them) which almost cost us the Defense side of the business. Nevertheless, diligent effort and creative ideas prevailed and we are well over double the annual revenue as when they worked here. We have not replaced them yet because our goal is to make the Defense side of the company as solvent and durable as possible first so that we may ride out any tough financial times. The way that we chose to accomplish this was to temporarily reduce the level of customer service in the recreational division and concentrate labor on the defense side of the business.

We have every indication that in the long run our choice was the correct one and is yielding a very solid Defense company that will allow us to apply some of the profit gained therein to subsidize the higher costs of the recreational division. From a strict business point of view the company (as a whole) makes less profit this way, but not every business is entirely about the bottom line. Byron set a great example in this, and it is one that we choose to emulate as much as we can. So I would propose to you that I am indeed somebody who “really cares”, and remind you that if not for us then there would be no Byron Originals products in existence to even be discussing.

What this means to the modeler on the street is that for a while longer we will be running the recreational side at reduced levels however in the following couple of years they will see a renewed customer service level and additional products released.

We don’t like to take money up front from our customers until their order is ready to ship, so this is the reason that you have not yet received a request for payment. We would like to still have you as a customer, but for a while our turn-around time for orders big and small will tend to be slow. This is a reality of trying to maintain the goal of keeping production alive here in the U.S. If you can live with that to keep your older Byron kits alive then we’ll probably continue to do business in the future. If not, then we still thank you for your consideration.

Regards,

John"