Greg, thanks for posting this. Too often we see complaint threads with no resolution or any indication of how things turn out. Sometimes all we see is the guy posting the gun he complained about on the Classifieds as “Excellent gun with only 1 tin of pellets through it”.
I think you have nailed the issue dead on. EGW either needs to grow, or go back to being a small 1-2 person shop. The middle ground is like the No Mans Land of World War 1. Nothing survives there for long.
When I purchased my L2 from Brian 11 months ago he could not have been more helpful. I even spoke with him multiple times on the July 4th weekend as he helped me make up my mind on the caliber and length gun. I haven’t had any issues with the gun so far and so had no need to contact him since, but I have read many complaints as sales grew. Right now he is trying to run a growing retail. Business at the same time as being a distributor to other dealers and, I believe, trying to sort out some possible manufacturing/distribution for Edgun here in the US. All this with essentially the same 2 person shop he has had for a while.
Many people, especially those who have not worked in either big, or rapidly growing, companies really don’t appreciate the extent to which complexity increases as your size goes up. What worked when you were at 1X doesn’t do so well at 2X and can fall apart completely at 3 or 4X. Its even worse when the growth is rapid and suddenly one goes from being a one man shop with direct contact to customers to having to handle multiple issues and types of vendor/dealer/customer relationships at the same time.
I recently retired from being a senior executive with a multinational Pharma company, where I had to deal with lots of complexity, and had staff in the US, Europe and Japan. I then started what I expected to be a small consulting business, with 1 employee - me. Should be easy, right? NOPE. Fortunately (or unfortunately) demand for my services/expertise was high, then very high. Pretty soon it was unmanageable and, since I had no admin staff (my wife made it VERY clear that she was NOT taking on that role
) I was missing answering phone calls, or getting back to messages that were left. I was struggling to meet my commitments, much less deal with new customers. My solution was to dial things back. To decline new opportunities and stabilize my customer base around a smaller number of customers. It was either that, hire staff (been there, done that, and didn’t want to do it again) or drown/die.
I think Brian needs to either step up or step back.
Chris