What Dealerships Should Know About Motorcycle Sharing - Austin Rothbard of Twisted Road is my guest - Episode 30

Motorcycle sharing is rentals. Why would normal powersports dealerships be interested in understanding motorcycle "sharing" when they want to sell more motorcycles? I think they should learn about it as, like most other tools available to you - they are also available to your competitors. This is why I asked Austin to speak with me about what he is doing, so powersports dealerships can understand how the landscape is changing and the options of an UBER-esque population begin to hit where we live. Know the change so you can be decisive in how you deal with that change. That's my opinion anyway.

Austin Rothbard is Founder and CEO at Twisted Road, a motorcycle sharing community that empowers riders (possibly future owners) to try different motorcycles where they live or while traveling elsewhere in the US. Like an AirBnB in homes or TURO in automobiles, TwistedRoad.com allows rental of others bikes or you can be the owner who lets others use your motorcycle when you aren't. A potentially nice financial offset to your ownership cost when you were going to have it sitting still anyway...

Check them out here: https://www.twistedroad.com/

Austin admits that not everyone wants someone else to ride their motorcycle - and he says that's ok! He says the majority of people he has surveyed would like to rent someone else's motorcycle while the minority of people are initially interested in letting some "stranger" ride theirs. Sounds like sound logic to me. LOL. We are all likely to fear an unknown like this... I know I did. 

Listeners to this podcast are likely to have in the past or do currently work in a powersports dealership, so the idea of getting (or letting) a potential buyer pay to try a motorcycle rather than just become an owner may have you feeling skeptical at first. Trust me, I am not an investor in his company and he has not paid me anything to speak on his behalf but I can tell you I see some reasons to be optimistic about this business model in relation to dealership business.

Demo framework. Could dealers who shy away from doing motorcycle test rides be more confident in letting consumers demo their bikes? I'm talking a day or two day, get-to-know the bike. Do you think a consumer/renter would fall in love with a bike if given a bit more time to romance it? I think they might.  Austin and Twisted Road seem to have a framework that may let a dealership put a unit or some into rental listing, get paid for the "demo" while being covered by their insurance and then offer up an offsetting amount of the rental incurred, if the renter buys the bike. Sounds like a less commitment/more attractive rent to own program. A customer would start to have some skin in the game that way. And as he mentioned, the owner gets to determine if the renter is actually qualified to be on that bike, baed on their riding experience. 

Parts and Accessory sales.  According to Austin, a renter would already be licensed and insured or they wouldn't be able to rent from Twisted Road. If the owner (a dealer) chooses, they could have a certain availability of gear or they could obviously just be there to sell the renter gear, if needed. Could be an opportunity at a bit of a captive audience in front of your well stocked accessory walls.

If the shift to sharing model becomes more reality as some studies say it will be - are you, as a selling dealer prepared to stay in play with that consumer? It's my belief that the vast majority of the dealers I have worked with in my 20 years in powersports, nationwide, may not be.

The understanding of this process as I've written above is just my opinion. I don't work for Twisted Road so please form your own opinion by checking them out. Here is the FAQ page for answers to some FAQs: https://www.twistedroad.com/faq