Presenting at winter NAMM, who's going?

[Chuck H]

About six weeks ago I got a call from Dean Markley. He is getting back into the amp game. He heard one of my amps and asked me if I could do something for winter NAMM. So in the last six weeks I've been developing a scratch product right down to proprietary Heyboer transformers and custom chassis. Just re-sourcing backorders has been a major chore. Meeting criteria for myself and Dean while maintaining a day job has been a serious push. But I have two working chassis (finished today but STILL fine tuning), a plane ticket and hotel reservations (courtesy of Dean Markley ), and I'm presenting at NAMM this year. Woo Hoo.

I want to say thanks to everyone here. If it weren't for a community forum like this and the generous advice I've recieved over the last twelve years on this forum I never could have pulled this off. My amps sound better than average but hell, the group here has been building amps better than what you can buy for many years. And I have the privilege of taking some of that magic into the public domain. I'll be doing my best not let us down.

Special thanks to T-boy, Enzo, Bruce Collins, Steve Connor, Wild Bill and Ken Gilbert. I don't see Wild Bill or KG here much anymore. But they were there when I was still learning (still am, and I hope I never stop).

The amp I built is the Challenger 20. There will be another amp in the UltraSound/Dean Markley booth called the AT-30 or SuperBlues 30, which is a more mainstream PCB amp that I revoiced to make it a proprietary design. But the Challenger 20 is all mine. And I'm proud as hell.

The Challenger 20 is going to be an eyelet board construction "boutique" type amp that should be priced very reasonably to target working musicians. Maybe the first eyelet board "production" amp to come along in decades. And it sounds seriously fantastic. In whole or part because of all the great advice I've gotten right here over the years.

I do have a Q for anyone already "in" the industry. Dean and I have discussed "profit sharing" as compensation for my work and involvement. What kind of % would be appropriate? I know that I'll see the smallest piece of the pie even though I designed the thing, and of course the investor and MFG will get the lions share. But how much should I ask for? Any advice appreciated.

And come try out the amps. I play like an amp builder. So I would love to see anyone with chops stop by the UltraSound/Dean Markley booth. FWIW Dean will be at the show this year. He's an absolutely GREAT guy.

Chuck

[Enzo]

WHAT!!?!?!!? You sold out and went commercial? Well, no more FREE help for you, buddy.


Seriously, good luck with it.

I have no idea about compensation. A lot depends on who is bargaining with whom. Profit sharing is great if the product sails. You don;t get so much if it flops. We talking profit share on top of some other fees?

[Chuck H]

Thanks Enzo (as always).

I am not taking fees at this time. I may if things go well and Dean commissions another amp or guitar project. I've been dating the guy (buisiness wise) for over a year to get this opportunity. Mostly on my own dime. Maybe I should have talked turkey with him some time BEFORE the show, but I think he wants to see how my creations do before making a financial arrangement and I'm not coming from a position of any reputation. The rub is that once I get to the show, he has these amps, and therefore the designs... What the hell does he need me for at that point?

He probably won't rook me but he surely will be aware of everyones position when considering any $$$ arrangements.

I'm still glad for the opportunity.

Chuck

[Bruce / Mission Amps]

Tread Carefully

Thanks Enzo (as always).

I am not taking fees at this time. I may if things go well and Dean commissions another amp or guitar project. I've been dating the guy (buisiness wise) for over a year to get this opportunity. Mostly on my own dime. Maybe I should have talked turkey with him some time BEFORE the show, but I think he wants to see how my creations do before making a financial arrangement and I'm not coming from a position of any reputation. The rub is that once I get to the show, he has these amps, and therefore the designs... What the hell does he need me for at that point?

He probably won't rook me but he surely will be aware of everyones position when considering any $$$ arrangements.

I'm still glad for the opportunity.

Chuck

For what it's worth, with respect to doing a very similar thing, I had a very large offer from a well know pickup maker who builds amps too.
After all the weeks of talk and hearing what the compensation was going to be for my end of the deal, I brought the proposal to our family business lawyer, to which he said ... and more
... that, plus the fact that slavery is illegal in this country, ... well, we politely told them to pound sand and suck eggs. I never regretted dumping the offer.
I am omitting the nasty details to protect the guilty....

In another venture with an small but "known" indie, recording studio.... designing and building "studio quality amps" with them... nearly the same thing happened. Unbelievable, but I could see through it fairly quickly.
Over the years, others in this biz (you probably all know them and sometimes I think they're all working with Satan) have knocked on my door with proposals to get in with some cooperative arrangement, you know, where "we both can make some real money".. Ha ha ha. What a crock.
I've learned the hard way over the last 5 or 6 years now that the only partner a builder should want in this business is God or maybe your legal and loving wife/husband.

Regardless, if you choose to do this, make sure you hire a real attorney to review your decisions FIRST to make sure you don't give away the farm, your hard work and more importantly, your sanity when they think they own you, your work, your ideas and everything you've done to date.... including the free ones in the beginning ... ha-ha-ha, they always called these "testing the waters" amps.
I always feared that's probably so they can steal your ideas in case it doesn't work out right away or you smell a rat and bail.
If your potential "partner" refuses to go along with any "hard looking" third party scrutiny and written agreements before any reveals, you know right then and there, it's going to be a bad or crooked deal for you and you could have been a major chump.

[Chuck H]

Thanks Bruce (as usual).

I kinda figured your description for the nature of things. Fortunately, while this is a great amp, it's not my "A" game. So I can somewhat accept these as "test the waters" designs. I don't expect alot. But it is Dean Markley. The amps will have a Dean Markley logo and be sold multi national. Since I'm not going to be building them myself, if I get even three bucks a piece off 'em and he sells 10,000 units that would more than cover the effort this has taken (though not by as much as I'd like ). Still, as a house painter in the PNW I need prospects right now to keep my sanity. I may even be able to afford some luxuries like heat and food.

Overall the experience has been a kick. Learning how the profit figures and production end of things work on a bigger scale has been invaluable if I ever decide to go independant. And hey, now I can say that I designed for Dean Markley. These things and ANY profits at all are about a mile ahead of where I was.

I do have a shoe in. Since I met Dean through a mutual friend, just to save face he probably won't rob me blind.

Thanks for the advice. I will see about council and count no chickens.

Chuck

[Robert M. Martinelli]

Well Chuck,

I don't do this for a living, so I just want to say a heart-felt "good luck"!

I think you already got all the good advice you need from Bruce/Enzo, I'd just add that it could be good for you to deal on a "twofold basis" - if you only take a percentage on each unit being sold, and the thing doesn't sell well enough, that won't compensate you for your efforts, so what I would do is to set for a certain amount of $$ to compensate you for your efforts, PLUS a small percentage on each unit sold. This way you will be sure that some profit will come out of it and you won't end up wasting your time.

As to what happened to Bruce, I've had a similar experience with an Italian firm, they have seen some of my works and they were pretty impressed, so the owner came out with an unfeasible proposal, and I had to spend a lot of time to find words polite enough to tell him to..... - well, you know what I mean - without insulting him and his lawyer and end up as a defendant in a court

Again, Best of Luck!

Bob

[Don Moose]

That's a really cool thing. I have a couple of thoughts here.

1) Profit sharing? No farking way. REVENUE shares. You get a bit of every unit sold, not a piece of the profit therefrom. More modest, less risky. There would probably be some terms in the deal about warrantee costs from design flaws - as distinguished from production flaws - but that's probably manageable.

2) Does your deal grant Dean any special rights to your future designs? I'm thinking that this may make sufficient 'name' for you that you can maybe do a Rivera and launch your own brand. OTOH, Dean's contacts and investors give you a lot of insulation.

Best of luck!

[loudthud]

Chuck, congratulations but a bit of a warning. Once the lawyers, safety engineers and manufacturing types have their way with your amp (and they will), you might not recognize it. If you participate in bringing the amp to market, you will spend more time dealing with those people than it took to do the original design. If you are out of the loop at that point, changes will be made (right and wrong) that you would never consider. One day you'll see what they did and say, "This isn't what I designed". It's not all doom and gloom though. You'll learn alot and your next amp will be better for it.

Checkout the following:

http://www.traynoramps.com/products....&cat=63&id=409

Retail price point is said to be $1200 Canadian. It does have an eyelet board! Wow, how do they do it for that price?

[Bruce / Mission Amps]

Thanks Bruce (as usual).
I do have a shoe in. Since I met Dean through a mutual friend, just to save face he probably won't rob me blind.

Thanks for the advice. I will see about council and count no chickens.

Chuck

If I was to do any of that over again I would do it only:
1 under a legal and binding contract...
2 as a paid, PROJECT consultant, not a partner...
3 insist an additional small fee for using my name on any product associated with me and my name...
4 demand a small percentage of revenue, not profit...on any product associated with me and my name
5 allow me to disclose and publish the product is a special design by me
6 and make no contracts of non-competence, except for that exact model(s), exactly as the final product will be presented to the public and only "after" all things are said and done...

that would include the UL & CE testing... which takes a long time, compromises how you think things should be built and cost some serious cash... so they'd have to pay for all the CE and UL testing, retooling and compliance.

Hey, all I'm saying is that I've been doing this since 1986.
Some of my older friends and previously very good business relationships have turned extremely sour due to lopsided expectations, greed or heavy handed business practices, none of which could I go along with any further.

[Chuck H]

Thanks for all the advice. One thing I hadn't thought about was the UL and CE. I see amps all over being sold by the likes of Ceriatone and others that seem to be just as un-ammended as they can be. Dean Markley is not as big as you may think. They've just been around a long time. I don't know squat about how the codes and restrictions work but it seems that smaller companies get under the radar a bit easier.

some great points to consider. I DO want to have control over my designs. But if I get an offer I can't refuse that involves making these designs the property of DMS it won't break my heart as long as I can get credits as the designer. What I really want out of this is clout. I may or may not charge fees on later projects. This is something I'm doing for free anyway, if I can see my creations go out into the world and take a piece of each one thats great. This is sweat equity. Hopefully it pays off.

Bruce points out:

3 insist an additional small fee for using my name on any product associated with me and my name...
4 demand a small percentage of revenue, not profit...on any product associated with me and my name...

Great point. Who knows where this is going. Dean's been around a long time and will probably continue to be. If I were ever lucky enough that my name had product selling draw he would be certain to take advantage of that.

Also from Bruce:

6 and make no contracts of non-competence, except for that exact model(s), exactly as the final product will be presented to the public and only "after" all things are said and done...

Which also raises the question of whether or not any final version of the amp could still be considered "my" design. Thats a good heads up.

I didn't know that Traynor re-issued the Guitarmate. And in true eyelet board fasion. The Challenger amp should be about a hundred bucks more and uses an effects loop and no reverb. I should buy a Guitarmate

As far as "profit" sharing vs "revenue" sharing, revenue sharing is what I meant. Profit sharing is just such a common term. But I'll need to be watching the semantics all the way on this one, so thanks for the reinforcement. As a company I'd be surprised if DMS actually SHOWS any more profit than they have to. That would bite into my share real fast.

I don't want to go too long. No one will read it. Thanks guys. I'm printing this thread and memorizing it.

Chuck

[ETR]

Congratulations! These are great things to be worrying about.

[R.G.]

Scars are the diplomas from on-the-job training. Education is what you have left when you've forgotten how the scar came to be.

Here's another issue: liability. If you get a written agreement - and whether or not one of these exists is what we used to call an on-the-job IQ test - insist that the actual manufacturer accept all liability of any kind whatsoever arising out of the manufacture, shipping, sale, use and disposal of the actual amplifiers, and that he indemnify, protect, and hold you harmless in the case of any and all claims arising from the manufacture...yada, yada, and that the agreement is binding on the manufacturer, his successors, assigns, and heirs.

Yep, that looks like legalese. Every single word in there is the result of someone getting a fresh scar in the courts. Think about it.

[Chuck H]

Holy hell, R.G., I can't belive I neglected you in the "special thanks" on the original post. All your stuff on GEO is chapter and verse for what we do here and I think we have all referenced it at one time or another. Personally, I have printed and studied many chapters from the Geo site written by you.

And as for your most rescent advice...Point taken. Nothing eats into revenues faster that obligations to bu!!$!t claims. I'll be sure that gets 'claused' in somewhere.

For now, because I'm going in without a leg to stand on, on the advice of an attorney I'm composing a "letter of intent". Which says no more than "It is recognized that these designs belong to "my name here" and in the event of their use by our company we intend to compensate in a manner consistent with this service."

This would allow that negotiations can happen some time other than NOW and I will still at least get the same bad deal as anyone else I can live with that. I think I have proven my worth to this investor already and the amps sound so good that the NAMM show will only add cred. As long as I have this letter of intent I think a negotiation AFTER the show will be Ok, and maybe even to my benefit. I will submit the letter for his signature before he has his hands on any designs.

As I said, thank you for all the advice. I am printing this post and I'm sure it will prove useful as advice here always has. Beer and cookies for all if it goes well

Chuck

[jrfrond]

I used to build custom amps.

Now I build custom drums. FAR less hassle! Dealing with UL and CE is a joke.

[Chris / CMW amps]

Chuck: cool & great news but PLEASE BE CAREFULL!!!!!

Besides very passionated guys designing and making great amps there are a lot of guys don't caring about the energy you did put in your knowledge & sounds and only thinking about $$$, this happens on all levels (amature wannabees and very big & well known amp-companies).

Bruce did post some very good points about this.