"where are my off road parts"

"Why are my off road parts taking so long?"
While I'm not speaking for others in the industry, these experiences are not unique to our shop based off conversations I've had with others in my field.
I know the common and simple answer is "Covid19", Which is a simple way of explaining it, it's fairly accurate but let me break down to what that really means, or at least attempt to.
About this time last year we were neck deep in a pandemic, didn't matter if you thought it was fake and went about your life as normal, or have been in your bunker till last week. The world as a whole shut down for the most part.
Normal dinner, entertainment, travel was all put on hold. BUT aside from those industries the people still working weren't ready to stop spending money. They refocused their attention to camping, home improvements and off-road related adventures to name a few.
From the few off-road based companies I've talked to, the result across the board was a huge surge in purchases and with that a huge uptick in lead times and customer frustration for orders not being filled in a timely manor.
Most of us operate on a fairly small scale, Most of us rely on a series of other small scale suppliers, it could be bolt hardware, box makers, wood, metal, laser cutters, powder coaters the list is endless. All of those companies as a result saw large increase in sales as well. These small business have their own employees with their own issues to work through with the pandemic.
To date we had only one employee get sick and he was a healthy young man and pulled through just fine. We took the precautions and made him stay home for two weeks. We have a responsibility to our customers so we had everyone tested to make sure it didn't spread beyond him. Other companies we dealt with weren't so lucky and they had covid19 run through their work force and even if it wasn't a serious case they lost that production of that employee for two weeks minim.
This increased demand for other companies product saw an increase in equipment break down and a increase in their lead times as well. Furthering our lead times.
This combo of being way more busy with increased production time with increased lead times is hard to stay ahead of. Most of our customers are patient and understood the longer than average lead times.
Some may say, "you are more busy, just hire more people" I really wish it was that simple. I know we are not alone here, you can read between the lines of every off road company we follow on social media constant post about "hiring" including our own.
It's also not as simple as hiring an "accountant" where the header on the paper may change but they are still counting numbers. Hiring a welder for us is like hiring an artist site unseen. So hiring one of those from a temp agency would be like you wanting a family portrait painted of your family with out seeing their work. that's why for any welders we hire we do a weld test first.
I can tell you from our own experience at one point we had employed twice as many employees as we had this time last year. BUT and this is a big BUTT ( ( ), in an industry that requires a certain skill set and a certain level of experience one that we often take years to perfect it's not that easy to "just hire more" We tried, we've hired and fired more people in the last year than we have in the past 5 years. Some simply don't want to work and some simply don't have the skills or quality we require. We don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity. Case in point, we've thrown away an entire batch of sliders because they didn't meet or exceed or standards.
You can blame this on the unemployment being so high you can blame it on people scared to get back to work. I really don't know what the answer is. We pay well above minim wage and I don't think anyone would make what we pay sitting at home. (could be wrong)
We can't even get guys to respond to a "help wanted" ad. In the past we'd post up a job of say a welder and we would have 20-40 e-mails to sift through. Most weren't qualified but we had a huge pool to pick from. The last 5 ad's I've placed for the same job has maybe netted 20 total applicants. This lack of people has really trickled down to longer lead times. Longer wait times.
Some also say well pay people more, I agree. that's why every single candidate we interview, we ask them. "what would it take to make you happy to work for us" doesn't mean they will get that dollar amount but at least I know what it will take to keep them coming to work everyday.
The most recent hurdle we are all overcoming right now is the cost of steel has hit an all time high, along with wood! It varies from state to state but it's a significant increase that unfortunately will be reflected in higher product prices by the end of this month. This combined with higher wages that it may take to get people to come to work again are all factors that will effect prices in the near future as well.
I hope this puts a little finer point on "why your off road parts aren't here yet" it's not meant as an excuse or complaining, I for one am very thankful and happy for the influx of work all while staying healthy.
I take the new increase as a challenge to raise our goals and our standards to continue to put out a quality product. It's just going to have a little growing pains till we get these new hurdles behind us.
Thank you for reading and again thank you for the continued support!
Jason DeMello

 

Thank you for posting this. Very information. I really enjoy the one product I have from your company and appreciate the craftmanship. I hope that at some point you are all able to return to "normal", whatever that means nowadays.

 

We are making efforts to do so now. Ordering many things ahead of schedule and trying to stock as much as possible.

 

How's that working out for ya?

I've ordered a bumper 25 weeks ago, with an original lead time of 16 weeks. To date, no materials on hand, nor an ETA and the vendor wants to charge a restocking fee for something the don't have. Quite baffling and I've come to hate this practice that some armor companies get a pass on here.

 

Who did you order through/from?

 

ordered a @JDEMELLO bumper back in beginning of August 2021.

he’s been on here and posting, but he’s not replying to my post nor are they returning my calls. Oh well, what do you do. Armor game is in their favor right? Leads times are lined up with credit card charge back time lines, which is now well and past. Again, I hate this pass that some of us have allowed with armor fabricators.

 

I believe I have spoken with you and told you your bumper is on our build schedule for this week. if not you can always e-mail me directly, jason@demello-offroad.com I rechecked all our voicemails and still see no voicemails. I also believe I responded to you last night on Instagram. If you have anymore questions we can be reached at 951-735-4417 or e-mailed with the email above.

 

Yes, we've exchanged messages via IG, so thank you. I didn't need to leave a VM, someone picked up the phone and said they would have Chow call me back, but he never did. Phone call was made on 1/14/2022 @10:05am PST and I was told I'd have an update when you guys returned to the office after MLK day.

Thanks for digging into this, but that does not take away from the frustration with this situation and how its been handled until I got your attention.

 

I understand, thank you for bringing it to my attention.

 

I’ve ran into this issue with RST.