What’s Past Is Prologue

This isn’t the kind of thing we normally do here at Motorcycle.com, but then again, our friend Shahin Alvandi isn’t your normal kind of guy. When Alvandi decided to make the move back to Southern California to become General Manager of Pro Italia, it was a big deal. At one point in time, Pro Italia was the West Coast’s dealership of choice if you wanted a Ducati, and especially if you wanted to make your Ducati faster. Coming back to Pro Italia is a full circle moment for Alvandi, and he asked us at Motorcycle.com to publish this love letter to motorcycling as not just his announcement of his new position, but also as a token of appreciation of his homecoming. We were happy to oblige.  

Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy who sees all cars and motorcycles as colorful candy on the road. As a 13-year-old new to this country, my mom and stepdad would take me to various dealerships so I could collect catalogs adorned with glossy photographs of Mercedes, Lexus, BMWs, Porsches – all the usual suspects. I would spend hours poring over these fascinating brochures, memorizing each detail of every make and model and what options were available. If you are reading this, you can probably relate. Your neighbor had a car, a family member had a motorcycle, you walked to school as a 5.0 Mustang rolled by, catching you drooling and thinking to yourself, “I want to be that person.” At the age of 14, I lived in Boca Raton, Florida, and if you’ve ever been to South Florida, you know the cornucopia of cars and motorcycles and the automotive culture that comes along with it.

Our neighbors four houses down were a husband, wife, and toddler. Instead of a minivan or family wagon, they had a Porsche 911 3.6 Turbo and a Porsche 911 Cabriolet with a baby seat in the back. The husband owned a Honda CBR900RR. I would watch him ride that thing almost daily and he would wave at me as I practiced tricks on my chrome-on-chrome Redline Proline BMX bike outside my house. In a world of casual Harley owners, this man was always fully geared up and he looked, to me, like a jet fighter pilot going off on a mission, waving at a teenager who stared at him longingly.

My love of motorcycles didn’t start with him, though. It goes way back to the 1980s in Iran, being regaled with stories of my father and mother riding 2-up on dirt bikes, jumping sand dunes and doing wheelies together, way before the vision of me ever entered their heads and hearts. There was always this fantasy of being there with them and partaking in the act. Having access to a bicycle from a young age scratched the itch for a long time. My motorcycling career didn’t start as a young kid on a dirt bike; rather, it was a fantasy that was held back by the overly protective nature of Middle Eastern parents who would rather see their son become a doctor than a motorcycle hooligan (Boy, were they wrong).

Fast forward to Montrose, California. The year is 1994 and I’m visiting my father, with whom I spent my summers while I resided on the east coast. I looked forward to these visits because it meant play time with siblings and cousins, and being surrounded by the California car and moto scene. Part of these visits included stopping at a motorcycle shop in an unlikely spot. Pro Italia, located in Glendale, California, opened its doors in 1987 and it was synonymous with the European motorcycle lifestyle. This was the place you walked in to have your senses overwhelmed with the sights, sounds, and smells of beautiful two-wheeled machinery.

It was the first time I saw a Ducati 916 superbike. It stopped me dead in my tracks (still does). The appeal of the shiny bikes only takes you so far, and it’s the people who were at Pro Italia who took the fantasy to the next level. As a 15-year old, I wasn’t even close to being in the position of buying a motorcycle, but the kind folks at the shop never acted like I was an inconvenience or a pest; instead they greeted me warmly, answered every single one of my questions, and let me gaze at and even sit on the bikes to my heart’s content, as though they knew I would never be so careless as to harm any of these beauties.

Then life happened. Nearly a decade later, I found myself once again knocking on the doors of the motorcycle industry, as a green employee instead of a seasoned consumer. One thing had led to another and I thought I wanted to be a motorcycle mechanic, and was swayed instead to try my hand at front of house retail. I quickly found myself in the position of salesperson at a “big box” powersports shop that sold everything including motorcycles, watercraft, and generators. The attitude in this place was all about the numbers and as a young new salesperson, I found myself looking for guidance on how to balance meeting numbers and giving customers the same welcoming experience I had received as a teenager in Pro Italia all those years ago. The shop was full of young 20-somethings that kind of winged it, while being ruled from above by management to stay within the boundaries they created, so the required numbers could be met. There’s truly a line and it’s hard to define what that line is between client experience, and profit and loss statements.

I knew nothing about P&Ls (profit and loss) or management at the time; all I knew was that I was excited to be selling, riding, and immersed in motorcycling, and the work seemed to fit my extroverted personality. My early perception indicated that the motorcycle shop was a place that felt as though it exploited passion in favor of labor. There are other industries in which this is apparent, such as food, art, and other consumable labors of love. We often see young people step into these careers with exuberance and enthusiasm, led by dealer principals who are pressed under the burden of the almighty bottom line. It is an industry run under tight margins and more often than not, here in the United States anyway, motorcycles are accessories that are bought by those who want to enjoy the freedom of the open road once a week, once a month, or whenever it is afforded to them.

As the years went on and I progressed from salesperson to management, I found myself daydreaming about the experiences I had as a teenager in that small shop in California. I asked myself, did they worry about the minutiae of running the business while answering the questions of an earnest 15-year old? The answer is likely yes, but it was never something that came to the surface or was visible to me. This became (and remains) my primary focus and I found myself chasing down that one word: experience. In a world where the goods that you sell are synonymous with emotion and passion, experience is key.

Typically, experience at a powersport retail establishment is expected to come from sales, parts and accessories, and service. A shortsighted occurrence can happen when that “experience” is doled out on first contact and the staff feels too inundated with their daily tasks to follow up on touch points. A customer walks into a dealership, peruses the wares, makes the purchase, and says, “see you later.” The overall client encounter is based on the individual interaction, which may be good, bad, or otherwise. The striving point is when the retail establishment is a unified front who identifies “experience” as a full circle, ongoing mission that requires constant and consistent attention and focus. This requires daily communication between leadership and staff, where the metrics are not only about numbers, but also about measurable client satisfaction. A lot of OEMs have customer satisfaction analytic measuring tools, but what does that really mean if it’s not properly defined so staff can understand and embody the idea? The overarching belief is that with consistent actions and positive engagements will come profitability. At the risk of oversimplifying, happy customers spend more money and will encourage more customers to come to your store.

A sobering component of being a business principal is coming to terms with the idea of spending money on marketing and engagement points, with the hopes of exceeding these expenses in sales. I often go back to those days as a teenager when I would fantasize in that little motorcycle shop and be greeted by people who felt like dream makers to me. The experiences that I received there, along with my own life experiences, leads me to ask these questions as a manager. There is no silver bullet, magic trick, or secret sauce.

Alternatively, the goal is to honor the teenager who was waved at by a neighbor on his CBR900RR and received kindly by the staff of a small dealership in California who likely cared deeply about numbers, while never letting on to the customers. For me, this has been achieved by treating every interaction as an experience and not a transaction. Transactions are short and to the point, whereas experiences can be lifelong and often facilitate additional action. At the end of the day, I’m just a person selling motorcycles, and my favorite part of this is the engagements that create my own personal stories, and if I can share that outwardly, then maybe I can create opportunities for other enthusiasts to fall in love just like I did. Call me motorcycling Cupid.

What does “what’s past is prologue” got to do with all of this? I find myself at the doorsteps of that same little shop in Glendale, Calif., this time as both the general manager AND the starry-eyed kid. If you find yourself in the neighborhood, let’s talk bikes, rides, and future plans. Let’s create an experience together.

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