Christmas, opinion and the bass boat business…

We have been relatively silent on the topic of our competitions bankruptcies, though we felt time was to say a few things. And we apologize for the length of this, though we often get stretched out. We wanted to get this out before the Christmas Holiday engulfed the read, while we are still thinking fishing. Over the course of time, each of you has allowed us to continue and do what we love, enjoy, and do to supply many families in our area with jobs, and financial support. Many of the staff have been here for 15, 20 or 25 years and they do a wonderful job. We rebuilt this present staff after the demise of the late 1970s and early 1980s, since the 1982 re-emergence. These folks were trained to build Bass Cat boats the way we intend for them to be built. Sure some are newer and have less tenure, though many have been here since their teens and we have watched their families grow into their own families. The product line has evolved and continues to do so as we add and change models. The benefits are many, and the detriments are few. We all love what we do! Times like this we have managed to continue and survive, as we have for those 38+ years, since 1971. Back not many years ago the rumor mill would say BCB was going out of business, often spun by a competitor who was. Now we no longer hear or see those rumors and we continue to just do it our way. Over the course of time we have watched many competitors come and go to the point where we now only have a few in this business. And none of those are original competitors and several have suffered multiple bankruptcies. Still we just keep chugging along building boats when we need to. Blessed every day we see the sunrise. We have good dealers and will loose very few in this turmoil, most are stronger than others, as they depend on service for existence and we planned it that way. We did not go for many major volume dealers and based our production mostly around those smaller numbers and lower volume dealers, obviously by design. Plus they give great service as a whole! In a few weeks 2010 will be here and we will spring into the boat show season, and we will soon be active making every show and open house we can. We have watched with patience the developments of our competition. We feel the pains of people we know who work there and we understand they are in a position. Though we also know we have seen this there before, and with the other sister companies in Genmar also. Unfortunately it ties up our market, it is unknown knowledge of who will own a company and who will be your major competition. Vendors are in a lurch as they continue to grasp for air in a sea of loss. Of course we know changes will be made and if you bought a house, you too would repaint it. If you bought a failed business, you too would try to change what failed, or your destiny is pre written only to follow an already charted path, in this case twice failed. Thus we expect the course of the management to change. We have anxiously awaited an outcome, and there will be none soon. We have heard the comments of everything is going to be fine. There may be a buyer for part of Genmar or all of this, though things must change title and hands. Any decisions are on hold and all transactions for almost half of our competition are in the control of the creditors and filings in the court till then. We have reviewed document on top of documents of the court proceedings, some to learn for ourselves and some to understand the outcome. One of you even posted a link to a few of the documents of the each of those individual filings for bankruptcy, and these are separate in their filing as each company failed. The quagmire is not ours and we again remain blessed. Though it definitely effects us in many ways, none of which are positive overall. We are just going to keep doing it our way, and Decembers program is drawing to a close as we enter Januarys and move on through the spring season. Continuing to keep building new stuff, working in areas of designing new boats and revolving around the market in areas we need to tweak the boats we have. And we will keep tweaking those boats and trying to do more with what we have. It has come full circle to a time we love to fish and fishing appears to be cooperating here. Christmas is around the corner and we soon will be on the water in spring watching the flowers bloom. By then this quagmire will hopefully have a bottom, the companies of Genmar will hopefully have a fate decided, some type of auction completed and we will know who our competition is, as well as if or what they will be building. If not, then soon after that and almost a year after this mess all started. Though till then, and after that we are going to keep “chugging” along, building boats at the pace we need to. Keeping our heads and our overheads as low as we can, so that when these times come we dont end up like most of our competitors have. It might seem a bit frugal, though it has been successful. And no matter how you paint any press release or corporate statement, those lines in between scripted statements no one wrote on are what tells the real story. Last winter it was about retail financing they were near securing and soon after it everything fell apart. Still, we just want to keep doing it our way. We have no corporate board rooms, no other businesses to run. No entities that distract us from what we do. We just build boats and this is our life. And with your help we have been doing it our way for along time, and we hope to be doing so when my sons are my age in about 30 or more years. Really in todays world the age is not a stretch, though the business life expectancy is. Companies come and go, though we all remain till we pass on. At BCB we have managed to beat the odds to this point and we plan to keep doing it. As we look at this Holiday season, we want each and every one of you to know how much your support and decisions of a Bass Cat mean to us. We hope you and your families really have a joyous Holiday and the God looks over us and our world with glee. Bringing much joy and recovery to the needs of our world this season. Bringing Hope and Salvation with an understanding of the message which Christ is. God Bless and Merry Christmas! Rick Pierce, the Pierce Family and the staff of Bass Cat Boats! PS: Now go fishing and finish shopping! Gotta cover both ends of the family ya know! Last edited by Bass Cat Boats on December 17th, 2009, 7:47 am, edited 4 times in total.