Hi folks, Blake here. You know how sons are, never letting our dads get the last word.
First off, thanks to all who have supported us over the years and double thanks to those who saw the video and helped out how you could (also if you ordered a shirt, it should be shipping soon... just got them from the printer this morning!).
It's a bit tough to know how much to share about the business situation but the long and short of it is that my wife and I took out a loan to make the purchase. That loan is due every month whether we are making sales or not, so that's really the only thing that had us in a pinch.
As long as our sales numbers are hitting a reasonable percentage of what we expect based on historical sales data, we should be able to keep up with everything and pay the loan with plenty of margin leftover.
If we had seen a few months of normal sales numbers before things started to slow down, our plan was to squirrel away a cash reserve of 3-6 months of loan payments so that we wouldn't have to sweat it if something bad happened (this is called "foreshadowing").
But to be frank we didn't have a few months of normal sales; we bought the business in June and in July... something bad happened. We started to see a pretty big downturn in our total sales. A lot of our business comes from builders buying tool kits around the same time that their airframe kits are shipping. So if airframe kits aren't shipping or shipping is slowed by other factors, we feel it!
Thanks to a big response to our video in November, we were able to get caught up to our A/P obligations and loan payments. We're on stable footing for now, and not planning on going anywhere.
Sounds like Van's will be resuming shipping on kit sales at a pretty fair clip very soon. I've got a lot of confidence that the team at Van's can get through this difficult time and we can get back to level flight soon!