Kee: Surviving turmoil is one of the reasons why the NPDA was built

By Bob Kee

Destination Cycle  

I remember Ed Lemco years ago comparing running an automotive dealership with operating a powersports store. He said that car stores, despite their much larger sales volumes, were much simpler businesses, because customers would always need to replace older vehicles with new cars and trucks. He pointed out that our businesses had two additional challenges: we are selling a highly discretionary product, and we operate a very seasonal business (think selling motorcycles in Minnesota in January). When your business is built around products that people want, but don’t necessarily need, consumer confidence becomes a critical barometer for our success.

Bob Kee

Since the start of 2025, there have been plenty of things to shake consumer confidence: tariffs, a stock-market correction, and political discord to name just a few. As dealers, we worry about the ultimate impact of tariffs on our products that have either Asian origin or components or that are assembled in Mexico or Canada. These pressures are on top of  struggling to maintain appropriate inventory levels, paying flooring rates that have risen to sky high levels, and the routine challenges of staffing our dealerships with quality, well-trained personnel. As we’re dealing with these concerns, our finance managers are struggling to get our credit tapped out customers qualified for financing.

I’m old enough to remember using a slide rule in physics class, so I’ve weathered a few previous periods of uncertainty and disruptive change. The tech crash in the stock market in the early 2000s, the trying times of the 2008-2010 downturn, the vaporizing of the metric cruiser market that followed, the challenges of fitting the larger UTV’s through doorways that never imagined such machines, and of course, most recently, the fear and uncertainty of COVID lockdowns and the resulting supply chain interruptions.

The point of my missive is that we’ve always had challenges and concerns about the future health of our dealerships. And by and large, we’ve always survived. I attribute this survival success to the entrepreneurial nature of most dealer principals and good GM’s. Our DNA excludes failure as an option, and our brains are hard-wired to think outside the box and find innovative solutions to our problems.

Remember that the NPDA was founded to support powersports dealers. We are here as a resource to help you with an industry voice, tangible benefits to save money, education for your staff, and a community of folks who care. By locking arms and marching forward together, our futures will assuredly be brighter.

Bob Kee is a Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of the NPDA. Contact Bob at bobkeefjr@gmail.com.