Verge Motorcycles’ Post

Transcript

My name is Alan Foster, officially I'm the Chief Operating Officer, so I cover everything to do with the manufacturing of the bike. In terms of joining VERGE, so as I say, having retired and just run my own consultancy, or was running my own consultancy, and just really just keeping the brain ticking over, and the meeting with Marko. I didn't go into that expecting to come out with a job, I was just going to go and talk to a guy about how you start a business up. And we were talking, he said "I really like you" and I went "yeah I really like you" and he's like "can you come and help me build motorbikes?" I was like "yeah okay" and at that point I hadn't even like looked at a picture at Verge because I wasn't looking for a job. And he opened his phone and he showed me the picture and I was like "oh my god that is that's just like mind expanding" and I was like "yeah of course I want to come and make that" and it took me back in my mind to you know great design, coupled with amazing technology like cutting edge technology on a luxury product is almost the perfect trinity. And the ability, having done it with McLaren and from scratch, to do something in a different format was like wow there's not often in your life you get to do something that you really love doing twice and I was like yeah I gotta do this, this is a no-brainer. I met Marco and then subsequently when I met Tuomo, They are two individuals very different but such visionary leaders and it's like wow two visionary leaders Great communicators Amazing products and then it's a lot come over come over to Tallin come and see the guys in a factory you walk in the door and you meet this here and it's like wow like the whole team they're all the same and it's like the energy that's in here and I kind of personally my deep philosophy is I feed off the energy for that that keeps me stimulated and going and it's like yeah this is a slam dunk this just has to happen so and the nice thing about where we are at Verge is the first project is off and going now so TS Pro but we've got others in a pipeline so you know we're not going to talk about those but you know the team behind me and behind the engineering team so people like Ville in the R&D team they're already thinking about like next month next year two years three years four years five years and and they're off developing things so there's this gain in momentum if you think of as a bow wave so we've got Ville way out in the front creating a bow wave and I'm kind of following through behind it and this continuous momentum just means that we'll be able to react to the market demands very quickly we'll continue to stimulate and we'll respond to the feedback that we get and we'll come up with some great ideas and you know I was in a meeting with Marco a couple of weeks ago and we were just talking about a system and he went funny I was thinking about that three years ago and he's like and he drops this system on the table like you dreamt that up three years ago I wasn't even here and it's like yeah well I was just thinking so. The people in this company their ability to think forward into the future is is really quite stimulating and I'm not sure where the journey's got to go but do you want to be part of it 100% you need to be you need to be on board with this because it's it's a hell of a journey that we're going to go on I mentioned before one of my colleagues you know we've got bikes out now at a proving ground and I checked the figures yesterday we've been out there for just over a couple of months now and we've already accumulated more than two and a half years of annual mileage and we've not found anything wrong with the bike We found a few niggles but we we know what they are and they they've already been fixing the factory but there's there's nothing I'm not looking at that bike thinking wow I'm looking at my going oh my god that is just such an amazing product so we're way out in front of the curve and as long as we have that mentality I think the products that we produce out of this factory and and whatever else we made these bikes just stands in such a good stead you know totally reliable groundbreaking technology with a whole list of things that we're going to do in the future that just keep moving the ball forward it's a couple of weeks since I've been in the factory and I was saying to the guys before I kind of walked in and I was just blown away and I've dropped a few seeds with people on things that we need to do and I've walked back in and they're all done and they've gone further and and it's just I just breathtaking the change over the last six months has been unbelievable slow start in the first couple of months but the last six months we're just accelerating away now so real stable platform great systems and and just a perfect position for the future for for VERGE.