We’re thrilled that the man who brought Indian Motorcycle back
to life, Gilroy resident and former Indian chairman Ray Sotelo, is
submitting a bid to try to revive the company yet again.
”
We figure if anyone can make it happen, we have the management
team to do it,
”
Sotelo told The Dispatch.
We heartily agree
– and hope his bid is successful.
We’re thrilled that the man who brought Indian Motorcycle back to life, Gilroy resident and former Indian chairman Ray Sotelo, is submitting a bid to try to revive the company yet again.
“We figure if anyone can make it happen, we have the management team to do it,” Sotelo told The Dispatch.
We heartily agree – and hope his bid is successful.
Although it’s clear that any revitalization of Indian will, at least in the first several years, be a much smaller version of the company’s latest incarnation, it gives us hope that at least some of the 380 jobs might return to Gilroy and neighboring San Benito County.
We expect that city officials have talked with Sotelo to do whatever they can to sweeten his bid.
Indian Motorcycle remains a viable, attractive brand and we’re unabashedly rooting for the local team to keep the renown company in Gilroy.
To do that, whoever ultimately wins the bidding for Indian’s assets will have to heed the lesson learned from Indian’s failure: The dot-com model doesn’t work.
We live in a capitalistic economy and that means profit does matter.
You can’t expect that having the “best and brightest” minds on staff will overcome the inability to sell enough product to cover costs.
Selling 4,500 bikes a year doesn’t support 380 employees – especially when many of those employees are high-salaried executives.
“I think they had something like 11 vice presidents,” Sotelo told The Dispatch. “I knew the salaries these guys were making and there was absolutely no way that they could support that company paying those salaries. Having too many chiefs was definitely a problem there.”
The other lesson is that growth must be planned and controlled. Rapid growth means rapidly increasing costs. Without a sound plan in place to cover those costs, uncontrolled growth spells failure.
Finally, we hope the city has learned a thing or two from the Indian closure. It’s clear that city officials need to be in closer contact with Gilroy’s top employers. We don’t like the idea of the city being stunned by the closure of a top five employer – especially one outside of the retail industry.
The city, with its nonstop wooing of big-box retailers, has a woefully homogenous employer base.
Gilroy and the entire South Valley area can’t afford to lose any jobs that help to diversify the positions available to its citizens.
While we fully expect that any rebirth for Indian will bring few jobs and a more modest – and realistic – plan for the storied company, we’re rooting for it to happen. And we’re hoping for it to happen here.
Indian Motorcycle belongs in Gilroy.
