Hey Guys,
I just got alerted to this link. I had zero idea what was going on here or would have chimed in much, much sooner.
A few things at the moment that (I hope) speak to the value/quality of our company as I engage here:
Motoalliance Reputation/Partners
1. We have over 400 dealers of our products and we don't use distributors. We have almost zero marketing budget. Dealers have found us on their own and we are growing daily by word-of-mouth. The only way we grow this way is if we have good products and satisfied customers. In a world where companies have so often gone crappy and cheap, we've tried to go the other way.
Motoalliance Sales
We sell nearly 8,000 VIPER winches a year, over 1500 DENALI plows, and about 500 cab heaters this past year with the VIKING being the most popular -- this despite not getting them out until November/December. We have tens of thousands of products in the field over nine years. I know I hate getting crap from the internet and I've made it a personal mission to make sure we aren't sending out crap.
Motoalliance Customer Service Philosophy
With that many products in the field, we will (like all companies) not be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we will ALWAYS stand behind our products. I don't know of any other owners/presidents of off-road companies that are regularly on the boards and willing to stand up to any "heat" given. I am that confident in our products that I know we can make it right.
Motoalliance Shipping/Packing Mistakes
We experienced about 3 months of significant shipping problems this past year. Why?
Not because we are in shambles. 
It's EXACTLY the opposite....it's because our business doubled from about $3,000,000 annually to $6,000,000 in just 9-12 months and still growing like crazy. We were thrilled but it put a major strain on operations....as such crazy growth often does. So we did make some shipping mistakes as described in this forum thread -- missing parts, packaging issues, etc. This is because we were temporarily understaffed, and new employees didn't understand all the systems. But we've made the necessary hires over the past month to rectify this and things are back to normal.
Motoalliance Inventory
We struggled to keep inventory available for about 4 months. We needed to have about $1,500,000 in inventory but the bank only extended us a $200,000 line of credit for purchase. To make matters worse, logistics companies were a disaster the past six months. You can do a simple Google search to see this. Shipments delayed for weeks/months.
But the bank just extended our line of credit to $500,000 for purchases since they finally acknowledge or growth. At the end of the day, we don't want to use any bank money, but we will and we are close to normalizing our inventory again.
Motoalliance Loyalty
Why do so many people brag about our products here? Because they historically have just really been that good.....not perfect....but really good. We get so many repeat customers and referrals and I am SO grateful for that. In a difficult economy, I'm incredibly grateful for our growth and I DO NOT take that lightly or for granted.
Okay, so all that said, I'm accountable here and I understand that. So here we go:
Problem #1: Packaging
The first problem, as I understand above, is that there were missing parts and poor packaging. Again, the issue was new employees. This has been sorted and is unacceptable. It's not the way we do business. I tell our team all the time that when the customer opens the box, they should have a ton of pride. We just spent considerable cost upgrading all our plow packaging for next season and will not be passing along that cost to you.
Problem #2: Winch Performance
Sounds like one winch did not perform well. Not sure what would have happened here. There can be different issues -- some related to the winch, some not. Did anyone talk with our technical support? I've heard more stories than I can count about how our VIPERS outperformed anything else out there. But we have had VIPERS that needed warranty too, over the years. I would say we are about 1 out of every 250 that are described above -- or a 99.75% success rate. While I want 100%, I am happy with that too....and we will take care of you.
Problem #3: Mount Issue
I am putting the winch mount issue to DEFCON 1. I have not heard of this issue since we started selling the EMP mount. I'm off site but am contacting our lead engineer and tech support today to get answers on this. We've sold so many VIKING winches, I'm amazed I haven't seen this before. So we'll see what I find.
Problem #4: Product Inventory
Mentioned above with additional cash available and normalization of ocean freight. We are fully stocked again on winches except for EX4500-SE and MX5000-SE. We have nearly $1,000,000 in winch orders coming or on order.
Okay, I hope some of that helps. To reiterate.
1. I apologize for any issues......I will always stand behind our stuff. No excuses....I will give explanations, but no excuses.
2. Our rapid growth has been digested and packaging.shipping issues should be resolved.
3. Our products are incredibly popular. We've grown through word-of-mouth which is only possible if products are good. Offroad is a tight world. Our products HAVE to perform well.
Hope that helps. We have a ton of great VIKING products here or coming. And out of goodwill,
I am offering 15% off anything we carry to those who read this forum between now and May 15. Just PM me if you want anything from us.
I will be monitoring this thread now too and will continue chiming in.
Best regards.
