Question 9: I don?t understand or believe the Ben Gore situation.
Some of you get the Ben Gore situation some of you just sit back and speculate that there is more to the story. We?ll you are right there is more to this story and l hope this gives you all a clear picture of how big Dekline is and why the decisions like this have to eventually be made. Dekline is two people, myself and Kevin Furtado. Since we have more team riders and 1099 workers IE Filmer, designer etc than employees, I?m sure you can imagine budgets are very tight and like I said before every sale, every supporting shop and every rider counts. Do you know of any other skater owned shoe brands that are this small? I?m sure there are a few but do the ones you know of advertise in the magazines each month, travel, pay their team riders on time every month, send out promo anytime it?s needed and so on? I handle all of the marketing, team, ads, team selection, team kick offs and travel. Kevin handles all of the budgeting, catalogs, visiting the shoe factories and making sure the company stays in the positive. Swank allows us to use Tum Yeto?s sales and shipping since Dekline is under the Tum Yeto umbrella, the company would probably only have 1 rider if we were not able to partner up with Tum Yeto. Ben was someone I personally chose for Dekline. Why did it take so long for him to get let go? Since I picked Ben personally I wanted to make it work as long as I possibly could. In the end there just wasn?t enough support to float Ben a monthly salary any longer. A lot of companies are big enough to do this for many more years, not Dekline. If we had a large budget and could do these type of things it would be nice, I want Ben on Dekline like I said I personally asked him to be on the team and I love and respect his skating no question there at all. Plain and simple, one of our riders just went Pro and we just added a new am this year so the budgets get very very tight when these things happen. Dakota is the am that just went Pro and Active the shop he rides for has asked Dekline for a exclusive color way for their stores to support Dakota and Dekline. This is one example of the support that helps keep us going and we can?t thank Active enough. Blake Carpenter is the am we just added, he is from Florida and the shop he rides for kills it with Dekline. We more than appreciate this type of support and it?s the support we must have to survive. When our team grows our budget does not grow with it, would be nice if it did. Ben Gore was unfortunately one of our Pro riders with the least support so it puts him and I and now all of us in a crappy situation. End of story?..