VOL. 56 ISSUE 4 JANUARY 29, 2019 P91
WPS is heavily into
off-road and off-road
racing. Andrew Short,
who is racing the
WORCS Championship
this year, is a member
of the WPS/Fly
Racing family.
buy it. But we want to earn that business. If you
have great guys earning it, that's good. Then on
the flip side, the same thing in the office. Be-
tween just the great people that are answering
our phones and doing customer service and the
product managers and the purchasing team and
the IT staff and the sales, everybody.
Ten years ago, you had to pull teeth to get
people to move to Idaho and go to work for you,
to come out of California or come out of Texas
or Florida, wherever the motorcycle hubs were.
Now people are calling us and going, "Hey, I'm
moving to Idaho and I heard you guys are there.
Are you interested?" Or we talk to someone
and they go, "Oh yeah, I have friends that live in
Idaho and they tell me how great it is." So now
all of a sudden, it's getting a lot easier to recruit
really good people.
Over the past five years or so, Fly has
become one of the key apparel brands. A few
years ago, you had some riders. Now you
guys have some of the top riders winning
championships. How does that evolution feel
as a company?
Obviously, it feels great. Championships are
special. They're fun. For the individual, they're
super special. I understand that. I think for
companies, for myself, I'm not all that worried
really whether we win a championship, or we get
fifth place. It's fun to win, but we're in racing with
very legitimate fast guys. It's part of what we do.
It's part of supporting the industry. We all have
our guys and the reality is only one guy can win
each time. So you can't all have the winners.
So we just look at having quality—and I like the
word quality—guys. I won't hire the type of person
that will win but he can't date my daughter, or I
wouldn't want him to hang out with my parents.
We'll let those guys go someplace else. It's not
that important to me. Just like I want to have
quality employees, I want to have quality racers.
There're good, fast quality racers out there. It's
really about helping us test, helping us promote
and being legitimate. CN
