Dr. Tim Bailey was the Director of Pro Tuning at Cobb Tuning when he joined host Kevin Dubois for episode 048, recorded in early 2016. Tim holds a PhD in pharmacology and spent years in academic research before he moved into cars full time in 2007. By the time of this interview he oversaw the hundreds of shops that wrote custom calibrations with Cobb's tools.
At the time, Cobb had about 1,000 dealers around the world and about 500 pro tuners, with corporate headquarters and engineering in Austin, Texas, and a few company-run retail stores. Tim had helped build that retail side, starting with his own shop in Portland, Oregon.
The heart of the episode is how a manufacturer controls and protects its dealer network, including who gets in, how pricing is policed, why Cobb stopped selling pro tuning software outright, and how it chose which products to build or drop. Tim also shared a customer lesson every tuning shop should hear.
From the research lab to the dyno
Tim didn't grow up around cars. He worked in bike shops through college and grad school, finished his PhD at 30 and moved to Portland, which had a strong track racing scene.
In 2001 he bought a Subaru WRX. A science conference in Australia and New Zealand that year showed him how far the aftermarket had gone there, and he came home wanting to know why that stuff wasn't in America. By 2002 he and a group of local enthusiasts were tuning cars. Five partners, all with day jobs, formed PDX Tuning, partly because they needed a company structure to buy the tuning software they wanted.
His research skills in data analysis, experiment design and control systems transferred directly to calibration. PDX Tuning grew fast, and once real money was flowing through a company with five partners, it got hard to control. Tim gave his share back to the primary owners and started his own company, Surge Line Tuning.
How Surge Line became part of Cobb
Around 2007 Tim left science and worked for Cobb as a contractor, flying around the country to custom tune cars and using that data to build off-the-shelf maps for the Accessport. Late that year, Trey Cobb told him he would be more effective with his own dyno. The PDX Tuning lease was coming up, so Tim bought that company's assets.
He wrote a business plan and asked Trey for a business loan. Trey made a different offer. Cobb would buy the business and Tim would run it as an employee. Tim saw the logic, since Trey was taking on a dyno shop doing mechanical work outside his own company. After a year with no blown engines, no angry customers and good profits, the shop moved under the Cobb name. Tim later managed Cobb's whole retail side.
The customer who burned a piston
Tim's worst business lesson came from a full Subaru engine build. The shop ran out of fuel capacity before the tune was finished, and the customer needed the car that day. Tim told him to take it but not drive it hard and keep the boost down. To the customer, fifth gear at full throttle wasn't driving hard. He burned a hole in a piston.
The shop covered it. Trey told Tim the mistake was his, because he had assumed the customer understood him. Looking back, Tim said he should have set a rev limit and a boost limit so the car couldn't hurt itself no matter how the customer read "don't drive it hard."
You made an assumption that he understood you, and you're wrong.
Tim called this his biggest personal struggle. He tended to expect people to react the way he would, and had to work to see things through the other person's eyes.
Who gets to be a Cobb dealer
Tim said Cobb ran its dealer network with the customer experience in mind first, and with the goal of protecting a margin that lets a shop keep its doors open. Up until about two or three years before the interview, Cobb had one person taking orders for distributors and dealers and almost no direct-to-consumer business. By 2016 it had separate teams for dealer support and customer support.
Shops applied through an online form. Cobb wanted brick-and-mortar businesses that kept stock on the shelf, had a dyno on site and could do installs. Pro tuners, the shops that install parts and write custom calibrations to match, got preference over shops that only sold parts. New dealers also made an opening product purchase to show they were committed to the brand, which they could resell at a margin. When the episode was recorded, 34 shops were waiting in the queue.
Cobb checked new shops through photos and Google Earth. The bar moved with the market. A new dealer in New Jersey, with plenty of dealers nearby, faced a higher standard than one in Anchorage or North Dakota, because the goal was to put a good dealer within reach of customers everywhere.
Minimum advertised price and self-policing
Cobb used a minimum advertised price policy and required sellers to be authorized dealers. Even a large distributor would not sell Cobb products to a business until Cobb approved it. Tim was clear about what the policy could and couldn't do. Cobb couldn't set what a shop charged a customer across the counter. It could control advertised prices, especially on Amazon and eBay, where sellers compete on price alone.
We want people to generate sales through customer support and through product knowledge, because we believe the product is worth what we're asking for it.
Dealers helped police it by reporting violations on a dealer forum. Cobb also set aside a budget every month to buy its own Accessports from discount sellers. Serial numbers showed where each one came from. A shop that didn't represent the brand well was simply dropped, with no need to explain why.
Why Cobb stopped selling pro tuning software
For years, any shop that became a dealer could buy pro tuning software outright, about $5,000 for the GTR and $2,500 for Subaru. When Tim took over pro tuning, he decided that having the money to buy the tool said nothing about whether a shop could deliver the service. He stopped selling it, vetted shops more closely, gave the software to qualified tuners as a courtesy and spent two years working out a pay-as-you-go model.
In 2016 Cobb moved to a subscription. There was a low base fee and a small charge for each added platform. Tim's reasoning was that a shop doing real tuning volume would barely notice the cost, and a shop tuning one car a month couldn't stay on top of the platform anyway. Long-time tuners who had bought software years earlier, some more than ten years before, got credit and six months to a year to adjust. The recurring revenue also paid for engineers dedicated to the pro tuning tools. The same year, Cobb was trimming the network back to shops still doing the work.
Picking platforms to build, and when to drop them
Tim chose new platforms with a basic business model covering vehicle sales, likely buyers, price, cost, margin and whether dealers could make money on it. A platform also had to be one Cobb could support with ongoing map and firmware updates.
Cobb dropped the Evo 8 and 9 because the open-source tuning tools had taken over that community and Cobb couldn't build a better product. It dropped the 350Z because, at $650 for an Accessport, an owner with full bolt-ons might gain 10 horsepower at best. Cobb's specialists were limited, and the GTR was the better use of their time. The GTR turned Cobb into an international company.
Against open source, Tim's case was a complete, tested product with a manual and someone to call. Pro tuners' maps were locked to their own security key, so other dealers couldn't open them.
His action item was a pre-dyno mechanical inspection on every car. Cobb's shops used smoke machines to find leaks. When a customer saw smoke pouring out of the engine, they understood right away that something had to be fixed first. If a customer won't pay to get the car ready, Tim's advice was to choose your customers carefully and not take the job.
Key takeaways
- Vet dealers on their ability to deliver the service, since a big buy-in only proves they had the money.
- A minimum advertised price policy only works if you police it, and your dealers can help.
- Set limits on a customer's car so a misunderstanding can't destroy it.
- Recurring fees can fund the ongoing development that a one-time sale can't.
- Pick products with a written business case, and drop ones you can't support or improve.
- Inspect every car before it goes on the dyno, and turn away customers who won't fix what you find.
Running a manufacturing business on one system
Tim described Cobb outgrowing basic accounting software around 2014, when a single file filled up in about six months. A smaller manufacturer runs into the same problem sooner or later, with parts, orders and customer history spread across too many places. My Shop Assist keeps parts, purchase orders and jobs together, tracks time against each task, runs build steps through checklists and forms, and exports to QuickBooks. It also handles progress billing, text messaging and payments.
Learn more about how My Shop Assist works for aftermarket parts manufacturers, or start a free 30-day trial.
