Kevin Johnson

Hi Joel,

Two people told me there was another "Kevin Johnson" thread and that I should respond to it.

Joel, I am sorry that I did not hold to the two week promise and failed to let you know about the delay. I cut your entire kit out by plasma cutter. Following this I placed an order with a water jet cutting shop for several other 928 kits. I did not feel it was fair to you to get the cosmetically inferior item since they were being made at the same time so I paid to have your kit cut by waterjet too and scrapped the other parts. Unfortunately this delay pushed me quite a bit back and as I explained to you via email, I try to run the 928 kits together since they are so complicated. They are the most complicated aftermarket windage control kit in the world -- I suspect, ever.

You had wanted me to ship to an address in New York. When I had the time again to run the kits I asked for the address but you were on vacation and did not reply for two weeks. In the meantime I have dozens and dozens of other customers asking for their scrapers and kits.

I left for California for a week and came back with some sort of respiratory illness (which I gave to Samantha and she is just getting over). This kept me from work for another week. I have to be very careful with respiratory illnesses. I almost died twice in my life from them. The last time was only six years ago and I picked that up from visiting a sick customer to borrow a block. I do not have health insurance. My family keeps telling me to charge more for the work that I do.

I will be working on your setup and several others this weekend.

linderpat

Wow - you got *****! Didn't see a genuine apology in any of that, just annoyance that anybody would have the nerve to call you out!

Kevin Johnson

Yes, and they were paid three months in advance of us. We billed your kit when it shipped.

Kevin Johnson

I am sorry but it gets old when people have selective memory.

I freely admit numerous faults.

Kevin Johnson

Erkka,

You have ordered from us in years past and been put through long waits and inadvertendly missing parts.

The ordered (and made) kit was for a standard stroke -- I realize that is not how you placed the order but that is how I received it. I only realized this mistake when you mentioned in another thread that you were waiting for a GTS scraper. I placed another order with the waterjet shop for GTS components at my own expense. This involved another two week delay in receiving back the parts.

I have not billed your order yet, by the way.

Tampa 928s

Seems you need a business manager, I'm avaliable and live a few miles from you.

James Bailey

Being a one man shop is very difficult. You are often too slow or swamped depending on just a few orders. Then if you farm out part of it you no longer have control of when THEY do the work and must carefully inspect to maintain quality. Seems Kevin has very high standards about what he sells and I respect him for that. It is always best to remember that even though you might have 50 orders in process each equally important to you , the customer only cares about HIS order and may have planned a complete project around the expected delivery time. Some only drive their 928 maybe 3-4 months a year so a delay might mean a year lost. If you treat customers they way you would like to be treated when you order something that usually works out just fine.

algie928s4

So lets see if I get this right, the guy makes a superb product however delivery can be very erratic, seems better than superb delivery and erratic performance.
Just seems a bit OTT, for $900 I would have done my homework on the supplier, the fault goes both ways.................................

Lizard928

I agree with this as well.

And there was NO instructions attached to the email. And it took a LONG time to recieve the package. 3 weeks iirc but I could be slightly off on that, but I seem to remember it was in February that I finally recieved the parts.

and August to feb is more than 4 months. Lets count, sept, oct, nov, dec, Jan, feb.

I do admit that the product is pretty nice, I was worried about fitment after I had recieved a few msgs on problems others had with fitment.

I would have been a much happier camper had Kevin emailed and said that he was extremely sorry for the delay and ask if I needed it right away, and that if I did he would overnight it to me. That was what was missing.

I still feel like Ed though. You take the project, and give a time frame. You stick to it, and if you cant contact the customer and give them a more accurate time frame, and offer to refund their money if the new time frame is unacceptable.

We all have faults Kevin, simply admitting to them is not enough to fix the issue. If you cannot fix it on your own then bring someone on to your team to do it for you. I will not dispute that you have spent a lot of time thinking about what you are building etc. But after I placed my order and then decided to post up about it you would not believe how many people contacted me (not just on this board either) saying they had the same issues. This is why I will keep bringing this info up. So that the buyer can make an educated purchase. So that their expetations are not falsely set.

I dont think that Joel has much to complain about though as I had talked to him and he had asked me about mine and I told him I liked it but explained the wait. So he should have been more than prepaired for this to have occoured.

But again, if you fix the problems that you have maybe you will not have people like me who are willing to openly tell people what they can realistically expect from you.

Lizard928

I do not know what transpired in Kevin's shop. But I had read reviews of a great product and prior to placing my order I exchanged a few emails with him and he was prompt to respond. Gave me a good/reasonable timeframe.
After a long time of emails not being responded to at all. I posted up on here and was contacted immediately after, through on of my old emails to them.

I was not aggressive, or gruff in my emails either. I gave him every chance to make up for the delay, heck offering overnight shipping to compensate for this would have been all it would have taken to tip the balance. I probably wouldnt have even taken it as I didnt need it the next day. But there was no feeling that he was sorry for his actions and that he felt that the lack of communication, and the rediculous timeframe should have already been known about.

But as stated in my last post, Joel did know about my ordeal prior to placing his order.

Kevin Johnson

There were, in fact, two sets of instructions attached to that email: 1) A MSWord document on suggestions for silicone gasket maker usage (26.6kb); 2) MSWord document on instructions for the 928 (1.08mb).

It may be that you have an antivirus program or spam filter of some sort that blocks access to MSWord documents. Regardless, the attachment was referenced in the email and if you did not find it then it would have been a simple matter to ask about it. Correct?


Canadian Customs usually has had a two to three week processing delay on International Priority Mail for our packages -- they receive the items in 2 to 3 days. I am sure someone will have different experiences with this but we have shipped hundreds of packages to Canada and that has been our experience.

Most Canadian customers beg us not to send via FedEx or UPS because of high associated fees. USPS EMS service to Canada has typically required 10 days.

The customs declaration number given allows you to track the progress of the package. This number is no longer available for information on the USPS site or I would have copied it and posted the details. Many people are unaware that these numbers are reused by the government.

However, the tracking data is still available from Canada Post. Your item was delivered in seven days which was remarkable.

http://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/ap...execution=e1s1

Tracking Numbers: cp906745585us

Track History
Date Time Location Description Retail Location Signatory Name
2009/01/12 13:41 ABBOTSFORD Item successfully delivered
11:35 ABBOTSFORD Item out for delivery
2009/01/09 14:53 RICHMOND Item processed at postal facility
09:54 International item released from Customs for processing by Canada Post
2009/01/08 14:38 VANCOUVER International item arrived in Canada and will be reviewed by Customs
2009/01/07 08:42 International item has left the origin country and is en route to Canada
2009/01/05 22:21 International item mailed in origin country


This is what I mean about selective memory. I don't mean to imply that it is deliberate.

I understand the association of your posting on Rennlist and the shipping and arrival of the package. I think I explained that I was unaware of the thread -- you certainly do not need to believe that if you do not want to.

Edit: You should note from the acceptance time that Samantha and I drove your package to the main post office in Tampa at the airport (10:30 PM). That is a two hour round trip.

Larry Velk

I might note that Rog shipped my stuff as he prepared for eye surgurey and didn't bill me until after I got the stuff.

GlenL

I thought this would be appropriate:

http://www.faithmouse.com/hand_of_Go...ny_pancake.jpg

Kevin Johnson

Back in 2002 to 2004 we shipped a very large number of parts prior to being paid. Numerous people remarked about how very unusual this was.

Then we started getting burned for some very expensive parts and for us every dime was critical. Samantha and I were both students at the time.

If you go to our eBay listing for the Renault scraper -- we keep it up so people know we are still around -- you might be able to see that we shipped that order to the customer in the Netherlands four days before he paid for it.

Earlier this month we received notification of a chargeback attempt from one of our vendors. We billed him after we had made and shipped four sets. In the meantime he had gone on strike and his income dropped drastically -- parts selling was a part-time thing for him. Our merchant account requires a response so we sent them copies of the email where he ordered the parts explicitly and even asked us for any additional ones we might have. He denied all this in his chargeback attempt.

At the beginning of the month I wrote to another one of our vendors who had been shipped multiple sets back in December prior to payment. When we tried to run his company card it was declined. We knew then that he was suffering as many other people are from the decline in the economy. He was nice enough to pay us, now seven months late. I had figured that was a write-off.

Kevin Johnson

Ah, the non-sequitor.

To which I reply, "El Dorado."
[Listen to the Beatles' Revolution Number 9 -- also ELO has some very nice reverse work on the lead track of the album by the same phrase.]

Someone -- we need that tractor band again.