operated out of a small workshop in Wollongong. Kencevski Senior began by building engines for customers as a hobby, which has now grown to include selling, assembling, manufacturing and racing high performance engine parts. Growing from a one-man bricks and mortar business, today Sydney-based Speedmaster is a global supply chain with manufacturing facilities in China, a 70,000 square foot distribution centre in Los Angeles with a loyal US customer base, and over 400 employees. Speedmaster sells B2B and B2C. Justin Grey: How long have you been involved in the business for? Jason Kencevski: I’ve been involved since I could walk, I guess. I’ve got photos of me spending every weekend with my father around car parts – lifting car parts from when I could walk. So I’ve been around it since I can remember. But I’ve always been IT-orientated. I used to build computers for a living. So I created the first part number system [for Speedmaster] when I was 16. Some people were studying for their HSC; I was creating part numbers that were future proof almost for the next 20 years. I’ve always been involved, always knew the product line, always knew what was coming next, and I future-proofed it in that sense. JG: How do you think things gone for Speedmaster, in terms of growing into the digital and e-commerce era, if you hadn’t got involved and pushed it from an IT perspective? JK: We didn’t really need IT. [But] being a brand, when you go to America, you just can’t give them any skew. So I created a product series so the Americans would comfortably understand what was what. If we hadn’t, it would’ve been a lot more difficult to understand what we had for sale. So that definitely helped. I opened up my first eBay store in 1998 or 1999, selling computers. And I saw the potential for online [for Speedmaster]. At that time I was working for the Commonwealth Bank, so I opened up an eBay store for V8 car spare parts in 2003, and I was just managing second-hand stock for Speedmaster. I’d be updating the sales records and what not before and after work. Then in 2005 I officially took over Speedmaster in Sydney, and by a year later, I’d listed pretty much everything we had for sale [on eBay]. And we pretty much became number one seller – not only second hand, but new items – on eBay. This was under the shop front name AT Racing. My brother started in the business three years ago. He studied IT at uni, and he came on and helped us to upgrade our IT infrastructure. So we created a global ecosystem – he got that up and running and has done an amazing job. Without his help, what we achieved in two years may have taken us five. And that’s if we got it right. When you’ve got your brother and a close team, you’ve got the ability to be agile and get things done faster. JG: Where are Speedmaster parts sourced from? JK: We started manufacturing in Sydney. We had three full manufacturing facilities and over 200 CNC machines, and we had no problem servicing the Australian demand. When we started launching in America and the demand grew in America, there was physically no way in hell that we could produce such quantities here in Australia. So we then moved to China, in 2003/2004, so we were early starters on the Chinese bandwagon. We saw the potential there, and moved ahead straight away. We work with [Chinese] factories, and our own factories over there. So we’ve been ahead of the game in Chinese manufacturing, but we’ve also been ahead of the Chinese manufacturing good versus bad. It’s not about going to China; it’s about how you go to China. A lot of our stuff is aftermarket – more of a muscle car and restoration market. For example, now you might to go to GM and buy a part that’s 20 years old – a brand new part for a 20-year-old car – and be paying $300 for it. But we have the ability to mass-produce them, and on top of that, we actually innovate them. So something that you’d paying $300 from GM, would probably be $225 or $250 – very close to a GM price, but you’d get current technology. Not technology that could potentially be 20 or 25 years old. JG: Your market isn’t dying, but it’s certainly a niche market. What challenges does that present? JK: You could say it’s a dying market, but the reality is, everyone still wants to do up their V8. So I think the market is just as strong as it’s ever been. People who sell low risk items – a lawn mower or an office chair – they don’t really need repeat business. But with this sort of thing, you do need to be confident in the brand. So we definitely need to have very, very strong credibility. It’s niche, but what we forget is that there’s people growing up every day. Everyday a kid is growing up and they’ve seen their father do up a V8 car and they want the same car as their father. And that is why it continues to be strong, and grow. It is a niche market. JG: Was there always plans to break into the US market? JK: It was my father’s aim to break the American market. He’s pretty good at defying odds and doing things that people say you can’t do. No matter who you are, to say that you’ve broken the American market and that you’re a household name in American and people know you and you’re a threat to well-established American brands, is pretty much the biggest feather in the cap. And that’s what he set out to do. And he nailed it. Our facility has been there now for almost 11 years. When we started, my father would ship the parts to a reseller of ours, and then from there he’d ship them. From there, we moved to a small facility that was only 5000 square feet. From 5000 we move to 20,000 square feet, then from 20,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet, and then from 40,000 to 75,000 square feet. It’s a beautiful, brand new facility in Rialto. JG: How has growth in the US tracked over the last decade? JK: It’s grown steadily. Our growth year on year has always been strong. Not only has it been steady, we can definitely increase our growth. The hardest part is we want to over deliver and under promise, so we try to pull the handbrake up on growth. So that we make sure that as we’re growing, so does our customer service and our delivery times. To make sure we deliver a consistent product and a consistent message, you just can’t turn and burn relationships overnight. JG: Is it hard to focus your time and commitment on the Australian market when the potential in US is so much greater? JK: It definitely is. I’ve got to be honest, we don’t give Australia a fair run at all. Australia is a playground to create a structure and an infrastructure, to then take to the US. To be honest, if I had it my way, I’d actually run my whole infrastructure from LA and have Australia as being a shipping agent. But the Australian market has had the ability to be a part of what we’ve established and grown. Since 2005 we’ve been delivering niche market V8 parts to people’s doors, which still isn’t very common. So they’ve been on the journey with us, so it makes it very, very hard to split the time. But it’s good because we can simply replicate what we do in Australia in America. JG: What other overseas markets does Speedmaster have a presence in? JK: Last time I checked, between 11 and 14 per cent of our online business is European. We don’t really push cross-border trading through our website – mainly through eBay and Amazon, because of their subsidy with shipping. Offline, we have a huge presence overseas. We’ve got storefronts in Brazil, for crying out load, and huge resellers. Brazil, New Zealand, over 35 countries last time I checked. JG: There must be a sense of pride in seeing your family business grow into a global entity and being handed down from father to sons… JK: It is, and I never forget that. I don’t always agree with my Dad’s decisions, but the reality is that we are where we are today and I always take his opinion on board and make sure we always work as a team to come up with something that he’s happy with. But the good thing is that he’s happy with how far we’ve come in the last 10 years. And he can see the business model that we’ve created in Australia is now working in America and that we’ve replicated it very simply. My father really has never had much interest in running the operation; his passion is creating fun, exciting and innovative products. So he is very comfortable in going, ‘You know what you’re doing’. I do have the hands on the reins, but he’s the one that puts the horseshoes on, so I’ve got to be careful.