NORTON’S STUART GARNER INTERVIEWED: Comeback Commando
NORTON’S STUART GARNER INTERVIEWED: Comeback Commando
Norton’s comeback is gathering pace, with Stuart Garner, the Derby-based British businessman who in 2008 purchased Great Britain’s most historic sporting motorcycle brand from its American then-owners, bringing the marque back to the street just 18 months later with the range of born-again Commando 961 models launched at the NEC Birmingham show last November. These have been in production since April in the 7,500sq/ft Norton factory within the Donington Park GP circuit, which is already being expanded as production ramps steeply upwards to meet the unprecedented demand from all over the world for the new bikes.
Garner, 41, has an established business empire including Britain’s largest firework wholesaler, an engineering business, a childrens goods distributor, and a commercial game farm in South Africa where he breeds wild animals for sale to Safari parks, as well as springbok for meat. Born and based near Derby, just five miles from Donington Park, he’s been a biker since his teens, owning a succession of streetbikes ranging from an RG250 Suzuki, though RD250/350LC Yamahas and an RGV500 Suzuki, to a ZX-6R Kawasaki. In 2006 Garner acquired a stake in local frame specialist Spondon, which built the chassis for the Norton Rotary racers he recalls watching beat their Japanese rivals to win the British Superbike title 20 years ago. Then, in April 2008 he signed a deal to lease the Norton name for a new generation of rotaries – an arrangement which led to his outright purchase of the Norton brand in October that year.
Yet in spite of the improbably fast speed with which Garner and the team he’s assembled at Norton – several of them former key employees from Triumph, just 20 miles up the road – have brought the Commando 961 to production, and the rapturous approval the bikes have earned from those fortunate enough to have ridden them, Garner has already attracted his fair share of tall poppie criticism from web warriors about the slow delivery of Commandos, with the blogger brigade openly querying whether he’s run out of capital in financing Norton’s comeback. The recent rumours about Garner’s intentions to go MotoGP racing with Norton in 2012 have likewise duly yielded a response from some quarters that, if true, the company was seeking to run before it could walk. The chance to interview Stuart Garner in a Norton factory bustling with a workforce cranking out further examples of the new Commando, gave him the chance to respond to those criticisms, and reveal his exciting plans for new Norton models in the immediate future.
AC: Stuart, Norton’s come a long way in a short time. You’re now in full production with the Commando 961, but as a man with the best of all problems, that you’re unable to keep pace with demand for your products, how many bikes has Norton built so far?
SG: We’ve delivered around 100 bikes to date, and are now producing around 10 a week, which is a couple of months behind where we wanted to be in building up production. That’s because some of our suppliers have been slow in establishing a consistent delivery schedule for key parts. But we’re picking up the pace, and we’ll be back on schedule by the end of the year.
AC: Is it fair to say you were overwhelmed by the response to the Commando 961 after you launched it at the NEC show last November?
SG: Yes, it was incredible to see people five or six deep around the bikes throughout the ten days of the show, and we sold a lot of Commandos both there and since. We now have a global order book of around 700-800 bikes, mainly from UK customers, but in the case of the orders we have taken, we’ve taken care to tell them that there’s going to be a delay in delivering their bike while we get up to speed in producing them. We tell them up front that the expected delivery date is backing into 2011, but this doesn’t seem to deter them, and we appreciate that. We’re doing our best to speed up deliveries.
AC: So if I as a UK customer wanted to buy a Café Racer, how long will I have to wait to get it if I put down a deposit today?
SG: Next February at the earliest. That’s based on our increasing production to 30-40 bikes per week by the start of 2011 – we’re looking to deliver approximately 2000 units next calendar year.
AC: Is it true that the engine supply has been the main problem in ramping up production?
SG: It’s been one of the main problems, especially of late as the production numbers have increased, and our order book has grown to the point that the original agreement we had for engine supply has been overtaken by demand. But even if we’d had the engine delivered in the volume we wanted, we’d probably have had other issues – we’ve had two or three key suppliers who’ve taken several months to get themselves up and running, but now that they are, we’re able to consistently deliver ten bikes a week, moving up to 20 per week by October, then to 40 a week by the New Year. At present, all these are the limited edition SE version with carbon wheels, that’s 200 bikes in total, and then we’ll shortly move to the volume production wire-wheeled Sport. We first plan to satisfy the UK customers who’ve been waiting longest, and then we can start shipping abroad in volume. All we’ve done so far is drip-feed a few bikes out to overseas markets to provide some of the distributors there with some product they can use to generate orders, so that next year when the volume starts to grow properly, we’ve got some distribution to sell into. I don’t want to sound too sorry for myself, but Norton has essentially been a victim of its own success, which I must admit is even greater than I’d hoped – the demand for the product is way beyond expectations. I just hope people will understand that we’re doing our best to step up production to satisfy that demand, without in any way sacrificing quality.
AC: Will the Commando engines continue to be supplied by an outside company?
SG: Given the problems with supply that we’ve had, and the need for as many engines as we can obtain to satisfy demand, we’ll be bringing engine manufacture in-house within the coming weeks. Norton needs to control the supply of this key component in the motorcycle, although we may well run the two sources in parallel – we’ll assemble them ourselves, as well as having some out-sourced, because right now we can’t have too many engines. We’re in the process of attaching a new standalone building to the side of the present factory, we’re recruiting staff and have parts and equipment on order, and from October onwards we expect to start manufacturing our own engines in house as part of lifting production to 40 bikes per week. Yet all that’s without yet tapping several major potential markets for Norton, as we will do next year, like the USA, Australasia, South Africa and key European countries like Germany, Italy and Spain, plus we’ve already sent some bikes to Japan and France, which have promptly asked for more.
AC: This means you’re looking at a significant demand for the bikes in 2011. Will you really be able to satisfy that?
SG: Yes, it’s true that we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of market coverage. But if we were to have set up the factory to make 5,000 or 10,000 units a year from the outset, the cost of doing so, and the negative cash flow this would have generated, are the kind of things that kill startup engineering projects like this. So our first build week was one bike several months ago. The second week was two bikes, and now we’re at ten a week. Starting slowly has enabled us to survive some of the delays the suppliers have caused us, because the volumes are small. If we’d tried to build 100 bikes a week from the start, we probably wouldn’t be here today. So while we know there's a big global demand for the Commando, we’re building the Norton company for 10 or 20 years from now. It will take time – and I hope the people around the world who want to buy a Commando will understand that, and be patient.
AC: How about America, though? That’s likely to be Norton’s biggest single market of all outside the UK, so when do you anticipate satisfying the demand that’s built up there after you launched the bikes at the Long Beach Show last December?
SG: We’ll be in the States with bikes early in 2011, and in good numbers. Our EPA and CARB approval is now on track. We expect that by year’s end we’ll have that done, though of course you have to allow for slippage when dealing with government agencies. But we’re on schedule to start delivering 49-state bikes in the USA from January onwards, with February or March for California bikes.
AC: For 2011, you’ll have stopped making the SE, since that was only a limited edition 200-off run, so does this mean the Norton range will only consist of the Café Racer and Sport?
SG: No, there’ll be a third Commando model which we plan to launch at the NEC Show in November this year. It’ll be a tight push to get it ready in time, but we’re hoping we can do that, because it’ll give us a quite different Commando variant on the same engine and chassis platform, and we’ll run with those three models for 2011-2012 onwards. We call it the Urban within the business, although that may not be the final choice of name. It’s a more modern-looking version of the Commando without the retro look, with a new styling package including a different fuel tank, airbox, seat etc., new plastics, a little bit of carbon fibre, and so on. It has a fresh feel that’s aimed at everyday, real-world usage, so you’ll be able to commute to work on it through city traffic in weekdays, then take it out on a Sunday morning to scratch around the lanes. It’s a true all-rounder with more upright handlebars, a dual seat as standard, and there’ll be luggage as an option for you to carry a briefcase or overnight clothing inside. But it’ll still be a twin-shocker, with the same Öhlins suspension as the other models.
AC: Is Norton also thinking of offering an even more multi-purpose version of the Commando – a modern Street Scrambler like the one your Swiss importer Fritz Egli plans to make?
SG: I think the Urban will go as far as we want to down that road. There are issues that we’ve looked at to do with front end wheel travel, room to fit a bigger wheel, and changing the suspension, that pretty well rule it out at this stage. By the time you’ve done all this, you’ve actually got a brand new bike with a new chassis, different head angle etc., which adds to the cost and complication that we can’t afford at this stage. The Urban will go as far as we can with that chassis platform, and anyway, more than three iterations of the same essential engine and chassis package would risk cannibalising sales from each other. We think that the Café, Sport and Urban will be complimentary to each other, rather than robbing sales from one another.
AC: When you bought the company two years ago, I remember you telling me you always envisaged Norton would be more than just a retro brand. So, now that you have the Commando up and running, and with the security of it being a marketplace hit, are you ready to take the next step forward to design a range of modern Norton motorcycles using your own dedicated engines?
SG: Yes, we are. As you know, the lead times involved in engine development are quite long, though quicker for a smaller, more agile company like Norton than for a major company producing tens of thousands of bikes a year. A Norton year is probably worth two years for most other manufacturers, because I have a great team of guys here, and we’re working seven days a week at the present time while we’re getting the company established. Even then, it’ll still take us 18 months or to produce such an all-new platform and bring it to market, so we need to be looking at developing that now, in order to have a new model available for 2012. It’s our expectation that the Commando will continue to sell very well in 2011 and 2012, and hopefully onwards from that - but as I said to you back then when you first broke the news of what we were doing, Norton indeed won’t be just a retro brand. So we need to make it front-facing, to move it forwards with new technology, and innovative product design and styling. We now feel qualified to start doing this, with a full order book for the Commando and sustainable volume, so we’ve already begun developing the all-new next generation Nortons that we’ll start manufacturing around 18 months from now.
AC: What engine platform will you be using for these?
SG: It’ll be a V4 1000cc engine, which will be developed to power different models and styling packages to maximise development value and the return on investment from that design, in ways that other European manufacturers like Ducati, MV Agusta and KTM already do.
AC: Can it be taken out to 1200cc, to maximise the range of different models on offer – just as MV Agusta’s four-cylinder motor has various iterations from 910cc to 1078cc?
SG: We’re considering that, but we’ve not yet taken a view on it - but as we develop the one-litre engine for the first model application, we’ll decide quite what the architecture of the hardware will let us do. I’ve had this discussion with our engineers, and it seems with a V4 as opposed to a V-twin, if you alter the bore to go from 1000cc to 1200cc, pretty well everything changes, so that by the time you’ve done it, 80-90% of the engine is brand new. So we’d probably have to stroke the engine to do so, but it depends if we leave ourselves space for that in the 1000cc package, which is the one that really matters. We haven’t decided on a cylinder angle yet, but it’ll be something in the low 70s, probably either a 72-degree or 75-degree V4.
AC: Will your first four-cylinder Norton model be a Superbike?
SG: We don’t need to take that decision for a few months yet, but it’ll be either that or a streetfighter. But Norton is the most famous and historic British sporting brand, so whatever new generation Norton models we develop will recognise that fact. We see racing as a complete central core to our business plan, so you can expect to see the model range, as it matures, reflect that we have a racing core, and have done so for over 100 years, even before winning the very first Isle of Man TT in 1907. Whether in the road bike R&D programme, or our own future racing activities, Norton has a glorious competition history that must come to the top again.
AC: If you’re going to develop a V4 1000cc sportbike, does this mean Norton will go racing in the Superbike category?
SG: Well, we had the discussion within the business that as a low volume manufacturer with pretty well zero ambition to be a large one, going Production-class racing as a factory is mainly an advertisement for the motorcycle that you’re racing. So if we go and race a Norton customer model powered by the new V4 engine, I see it as only an advertising platform for that bike and that engine specifically. If we’re only looking to sell a small volume of that model globally, is the investment in a race team for World Championship racing worthwhile and/or necessary to sell the numbers of that motorcycle that Norton requires to validate it and make it profitable, and to get a return on our investment in the engine development? And, the answer is no – quite apart from the fact that Superbike rules stipulate you must first build 3,000 examples of that bike before you can actually race it, which we won’t do for quite a long time, by which stage there’s no longer any point in your going racing with it as a promotional exercise. So if the rule book is fixed in stone for a small company like Norton, the bike won’t be eligible to compete anyway, therefore it’s not a question that we need ask ourselves. But even if it was 1,000 units or 500 units, does Norton really need to go to the expense of establishing a World Championship race team, in order to advertise that bike to a global audience in order to attain the volume of sales that we want to achieve? And the answer is – no, we don’t think that we do.
So if we’re saying that Norton must go racing because it’s in the company’s blood, in its heritage, that leaves only two forms of racing, and that’s MotoGP, and public roads racing, essentially the Isle of Man TT, and the Irish races plus the Macau GP. And whilst road racing doesn’t have as big a global coverage as World Superbike and Moto GP, it’s certainly been at the core of Norton since Rembrandt Fowler won the first Isle of Man TT in 1907 on a Norton, and we fully intend to compete with a full Norton factory effort for years to come, and be winning TT races again.
AC: Will that be with the NRV588 Rotary which Michael Dunlop tried unsuccessfully to race for you last year, or with the new sportbike V4?
SG: Neither. We’ve made a brand new Norton Rotary engine, a completely new design owing nothing to the previous motor which was pretty ancient, designed in-house by Paul Hunt, which we’ve machined up here in the Norton Technology Centre in our state-of-the-art Hardinge machine room. It’ll be dyno tested in the coming weeks, and it’s a twin-rotor 700cc design, under the FIM’s 1.7:1 rotary engine equivalency formula, because the twin-cylinder reciprocating engines we’re up against are now allowed to measure 1200cc, whereas when the old 588cc motor raced it was against 1000cc twins. If that new engine has the performance we expect, we’ll be competing with it in the 2011 road race events, with the TT as the centrepiece of the year. Subject to Michael Dunlop being happy with the bike, he’s agreed to race it – we already have the Spondon chassis for the bike built, so as soon as it’s ready for testing later this year, he’ll ride it, and if he likes it, we’ll go racing together. We have a great relationship with him, and we’ve got an open agreement that if the bike’s up for it, he’ll lead a factory Norton team at the TT in 2011.
AC: How about MotoGP, where it’s been rumoured in the press that Norton is going GP racing in 2012? Can you comment on that?
SG: Sure – it’s called forward planning. As I said earlier, Norton is a racing brand, so Norton has to race. Today, it’s far too early for Norton to be racing at World Championship level. We’re only two years old as a company, we only started manufacture of our first range of models four months ago, we’re only just getting consistent delivery volumes into our roadbikes, we have a queue of customers waiting for product, and our focus has to be delivering those bikes to the customers who have supported us and the brand by ordering a motorcycle and paying a deposit on it. It has to be that way, and no other. But, we now know for sure that Norton has a future as a company, and given the lead time of developing an engine and a racebike, we have to start thinking about where we’re going to be in two years from now. Then, we will indeed want to be in World Championship racing – it’s where Norton belongs, as a brand, and we have to start the ball rolling now, so as to be there in two years’ time. So firstly we took a look at World Superbike – but there we have the problem with homologation numbers, we have the barriers of cost against the quantities of bikes that we’d like to sell, and for a company the size of Norton, World Superbike doesn’t add sufficient value to Norton as a brand, so it doesn’t make commercial sense.
AC: Did the reduced free-to-air TV coverage versus MotoGP make a difference?
SG: Actually, our researches uncovered that MotoGP and World Superbike have a reasonably similar level of awareness among the people we’re targeting, and whereas some people insisted we’d get more penetration from Superbike, others believe we’d get more exposure from MotoGP. So, we took a reasonably neutral view of the potential advantages of going to either class in terms of customer awareness for a company the size of Norton, other than that one is focused on brand, and the other on product, which meant that World Superbike probably didn’t fit Norton. Road racing in the Isle of Man and Ireland, working with Michael Dunlop, certainly fits right in the heart of Norton’s racing aspirations, but what does that really do for our dealer network in Italy, Spain or France, or Japan, the USA or Australia. We know the TT is globally recognized, but it’s not enough to quench the thirst of our global dealer network for Norton’s presence in racing. All of that then leaves you just with MotoGP, and now we asked ourselves, should we go Moto2 or Moto3 racing, that are more affordable? But we’re not a small bike manufacturer, so they’re really not where we are as a brand – and anyway, no way would we put another manufacturer’s engine into a Norton chassis, especially not a Japanese engine into our British bike. So the only one that left us with was MotoGP, which is a completely daunting task. To say that Norton as a brand needs to race on a global platform in a big bike championship, and that the only way that commercially makes sense is to do so in Moto GP, fills you with fear for a while, when you look at the giant budgets of Honda and Yamaha, and top riders like Valentino and Lorenzo. But then we did our homework, and realised it can make sense for Norton – it’s entirely feasible.
In fact, we approached Dorna several months ago – we needed to learn what running a Moto GP team was all about, to know basics like how many trucks you need, what sort of staff do you want for a team, what budget do you need to take the team around the world with 18 championship rounds in 12-14 countries? So I’ve attended several races this year, spoken to people in the Paddock, and got inside some of the teams to have a look around, and learn what it’s about.
AC: Incognito though, because nobody’s photographed you or seen you doing that!
SG: Exactly, I’d got an old cap on, and not a Norton one, I might add! So as we learned all about it, the fear started to fade and we realised we could do it. We’ve got such fantastic design talent in the UK - we can make the chassis, we can make the engines, because we have a wealth of racing skills and experience here in the UK, especially with the Formula 1 industry. We own Spondon, so that's the chassis taken care of, and the engine will be a four-cylinder four-stroke engine that we’ll develop ourselves. It won’t be a rotary and it wouldn’t be a twin or a triple, but we’re appraising a V4 that would be quite different from our road bike engine, and that technically looks the way to go, because of the small, compact packaging it offers.
AC: Will you design that in house, or would you go to an engine supplier like Ilmor or Cosworth?
SG: We’ll probably bring in one or two British engine specialists to work at Norton. It’s reasonably important that this project, if we go forward with it, stays in house. And it’s important to me that we don’t just become a collection of other people’s jigsaw parts, plus the knowledge, design, innovation and know-how has to remain under the Norton roof. Otherwise, as you wheel your bike out, it’s not your bike - if it’s an Ilmor engine in a Suter chassis, which bit is Norton apart from the tank badge? So, it needs to be an authentic Norton, and to do that you need to make your own engine, in your own chassis. It’s so specialist a sector that we will need to bring in outsourced talent, but we’re pretty well committed that that talent will only be British.
AC: Have you been given guaranteed places on the grid by Dorna for 2012?
SG: Yes, we’ve spoken to Carmelo Ezpeleta, and he’s offered us grid places for two riders for five years from 2012 onwards, as a works team not a claiming rights team, and that's what we’re looking to put together. But I must emphasise that it’s incredibly early days, and I normally wouldn’t be talking about this on the record even to you, if it wasn’t for our hand being forced by the leakage of all this to an Austrian journalist who apparently is a favourite of Dorna’s! I understand why they’ve done this, and there are no hard feelings, but I’d much rather we’d got ourselves further along the road towards making a decision before addressing it in public.
AC: If you’ve not yet taken a firm decision about MotoGP, what’s your deadline to do so to be ready in time for the first race in 2012?
SG: We have to make a decision by the end of this year. If we’re not done by then, we physically wouldn’t have left ourselves enough time to develop the bike.
AC: Will you have British riders, if it’s an all-British motorcycle?
SG: Interesting question! It’s a question that you naturally ask yourself, but we’ve not got the bike developed or the team, and we’re not even on the grid. But, Norton will be a very British team. Does it need a British rider to tell everybody that it’s a British team? No, it doesn’t, because the Norton brand tells you it’s a British team. Would we like British riders? Of course, because that just makes the thing complete. Is it a necessity? No. Having said which, there's a plethora of top British riders in World Superbike who could be contenders – and don’t forget that the ones that went there left some bloody good other ones behind in BSB. But what we’ve not got yet is a British Moto GP superstar - and what drives me to some extent is, imagine finding the next Barry Sheene! Just imagine finding that sort of character to stick on a Norton to go and do the business on a Sunday afternoon. It would be just unbelievable…..
AC: Going racing in MotoGP is an extremely expensive operation. The profits from building even 40 Norton Commandos a week wouldn’t pay the fuel bill for the trucks, so how are you going to fund the Norton MotoGP team?
SG: That’s not actually quite true, because from 2012 onwards we’ll have other models to market, so our volumes will have grown and we’ll start to have a reasonable income from our roadgoing motorcycles. However, we’re not going to bet the ranch on MotoGP racing, or indeed any other kind of racing. So unless we can see going racing on a neutral budget, or even a cash positive budget for Norton the company, we will not do it.
AC: So this implies getting an appropriate outside sponsor.
SG: Well, that’s true in its generic form, but when you break that down, are there any companies out there anymore ready to give you a substantial amount of money to put a sticker on the bike and their name on the race truck? No, there aren’t. Sponsors and brands today want a great deal more back for their investment in your team than brand identification on the vehicles. So what we’re looking at, and are working with a couple of agencies to achieve, is some intelligent business-to-business models, where Norton plus a partner equals a revenue raising opportunity for the content and awareness that they produce. So ‘sponsor’ in old language, plus team, equals a whole new company that's able to derive income from the sponsor’s type of business and the awareness and positioning that Norton will bring and give. We’re actively talking to several such companies now, so that they don’t have to repeatedly put cash in year on year. We can generate income from the activity of racing and the brand awareness of the team, coupled with their knowledge of how to extract value from their product. From our company’s perspective, Norton the factory is happy to go racing and to make a contribution to doing so, as obviously our brand gets the benefits of the awareness and everything that World Championship racing brings. But we would want to partner that out, and thereby offset some of that cost.
AC: Do you envisage building customer-lease Nortons, or even selling Norton Moto GP bikes?
SG: No, it will be strictly a factory operation. We’ll leave it to others to help Dorna build the grid.
AC: Even if Norton won’t have a factory team in World Superbike, would you be interested in supporting a Norton Superbike team at national level, especially in the UK at BSB, or in the AMA?
SG: Potentially, yes - but only with the right people. We’ll be taking applications!
AC: A new generation of modern Norton motorcycles by definition requires a designer to create them using the mechanical package that you’re developing. Have you got anybody identified that you’d want to take that on, and have you had any discussions with them?
SG: We are indeed talking to such people, but it’s too early and too delicate a stage to be mentioning names. It’s critical that the next generation of Nortons presents a coherent image consistent with the Norton brand, and that each model has a distinct personality, so that you know it’s a Norton before seeing the name on the tank. Realistically, if we have a global brand on our hands and we need to put a model range together, we need an incredibly talented individual able to bring the style and flair back to the Norton brand and range. We’re pursuing such individuals at this very moment – we will have to start the design process by the end of the year, so you can expect further announcements by then.
AC: Building a new model range of modern Nortons implies a much bigger factory than the 7,500 sq.ft. one you already have here, so what are your plans for expansion, or will you move elsewhere?
SG: Norton will stay at Donington Park. We’re already in discussions with Kevin Wheatcroft, our landlord, about doubling the size of the factory which needs to be done by early next year. We have two further long-term plans that we’re in discussion with Kevin about, so we’ve got the capability to put the space on as we need it over the next several years. We have the outline of an agreement with Kevin to have a home at Donington Park pretty well forever, there’s 1000 acres of room here, with several tens of acres with development zone planning, so that within the area that Norton is located, we can put more factory space in as and when needed. Donington Park has been through a tough time lately, but it’s now been saved, and has plans for expansion to bring it back even better than before. Norton re-opened the track with our sales manager Chris Walker riding the NRV588 at the huge CRMC Historic meeting, and it was fabulous to see full grids of bikes, with many of them Nortons. So yes, Donington’s back, and it’s good!
AC: You’re now two years along the road since you acquired Norton. Do you feel you’re on track in rebuilding the company?
SG: In the big picture, we’re a long way ahead of where we thought we’d be with the business plan that we put together 18 months ago, and that’s partly thanks to the incredible team we’ve assembled who have covered more ground than we ever thought possible in building the business, and partly because of the brand strength and the goodwill that Norton has retained globally. In the small picture, we’re maybe a bit behind because of that delay in shipping the first batch of UK bikes, but we think within two or three months that will be long behind us, and as we look into 2011 we’re well on target and even ahead of the game. We have 35 people or so working here at the moment, and we’re expecting 50 by the year’s end, then a surge again with the new building in the first half of 2011.
AC: You’ve restarted Norton in a recession, so has this impacted in anyway on the financing of the company? How do you respond to the bloggers who say you’ve run out of cash?
SG: There have been some strong positives and some strong negatives to bringing the Norton brand back right now. The strong positives are that suppliers want to supply, and prices are a little cheaper because factories are empty and need work. In terms of building our workforce, I’ve been able to get people who normally would never have been available, either because there was uncertainty about their previous job, or else they’ve been made redundant. So this has allowed us to build a great team of guys, and get a pool of talent into the business, coupled with quality suppliers who have idle capacity. So they’ve been wonderful positives. The strong negatives? Nobody has any money, and the banks won’t lend any. So looking for investment capital for Norton is like a needle in a haystack. At the moment we have one investor, Steve Murray, who’s come forward to put some money in, and now works with us as a director in the business. It’s true to say that we don’t have a business line of credit with any bank – but again, there's a positive and a negative there. The positive is that we don’t dance to anybody else’s tune - but the negative is that it’s pretty well all my money that’s funding Norton, and some of Steve’s. But that again comes with a positive and a negative - so overall, in my opinion that’s been a positive to Norton, because we’ve not had any easy money. It’s taken me 20 years to make mine, so I'm going to look after it, Steve’s earned his own money, and he looks after his. So as we revive Norton, we have to be resourceful, and use incredibly good discipline. People keep asking how much we’ve spent in relaunching Norton. I’ve never answered that question, and I won’t now before you ask me - but it doesn’t matter if you have £1 million, £10 million or £100 million, if you don’t have strict financial discipline, it’s never enough. If you have strict financial discipline, it is enough. And that’s what we have.
AC: So your response to the bloggers who say that Norton is not delivering product because it’s run out of money, is that you have sufficient money and Norton is sufficiently well-funded.
SG: Yes, that’s all complete nonsense. You can’t deliver a bike without the parts to assemble a bike, and if your supplier doesn’t deliver the parts on-time, you cannot build the bike. You can have all the money in the world, but if you haven’t got your number plate brackets, you can’t deliver the bike, and no amount of money can ‘magic’ a number plate bracket out of thin air. I have a good example of how stupid things you have no control over can affect production as you’re building stock and building inventory levels within the limits of what you can afford. We source our carbon fibre parts from BST in South Africa. A few months ago we were just starting to build and deliver the bikes, so as the stock came in, we were ramping up production nicely. Then the Icelandic volcano erupted, and while everybody was worrying about their holidays being cancelled, for three weeks we had no carbon fibre shipments from BST because all the parts are flown in. So now you have to go to a customer to say, I'm sorry we can’t deliver your bike, but it’s because there’s a dust cloud from a volcano, and we can’t truck them in from Johannesburg. If any one of the several hundred components needed to make a motorcycle is missing, there’s non-delivery – and as we build up the company from scratch, it takes a period of time for us to build inventory levels to survive a week or two of non-supply. This just-in-time delivery system that everybody talks about – it’s rubbish! If you have no beer, you’re not a pub! If you have no components, you’re not a motorcycle manufacturer. So in quite the reverse of the internet chatter, we’ve spent the last few months and a great deal of capital putting inventory in our stores to make sure we won’t have to stop production again. It’s part of Norton’s growing pains, but we’re building momentum all the time. We’ve never had a stronger balance sheet than today; we’ve never had more stock and inventory in the business than today; and we’ve never delivered more bikes than we delivered last week – 12 in total, en route to 40 a week by year’s end, so we’re now in a position to satisfy the orders we have already received, and accept more. Norton is adequately funded, and the key performance indicators of the business are getting stronger each week. So, keyboard warriors beware - we’re fine and dandy, and growing all the time!
Alan, a couple of years ago when we first spoke, I told you then and I’ll it say again - I can’t quite believe being the lucky person that when Norton came around, it fell into my lap, not someone else’s. And the timing’s ended up working so well, in that we acquired the Commando in its Kenny Dreer prototype stage, then were able to re-engineer it for homologation and production without losing the trademark Norton styling that he got right first time. It’s slotted into the market place perfectly, as our order book confirms – really, to acquire Norton the brand; to include that prototype motorcycle with that design as part of the deal; to be able to base ourselves at Donington Park; to attract the high quality and experienced staff that we’ve got – talk about right time, right place. The potential now is that if we go to MotoGP with Norton, it could be another question of being in the right place at the right time……