Goodwill isn’t always just a place that you take your old Armani pants to donate and get a write-off for your tax returns. Goodwill can be a line item on the Purchase and Sale Agreement when you sell a business that is hard to define but doesn’t count, versus the capital gains of said sale. Goodwill, at its best, is somewhat of an intangible that companies thrive on. It is the positive energy that they build for being good to their clients or good to the community or environment. Goodwill can be lost easily, yet isn’t earned anywhere near at the same rapid rate. Goodwill, when earned with a customer, can enthusiastically power them to be return clients who never even think about why they are so loyal to you.
A good friend of mine owns a modern Porsche. I owned three air-cooled ones from the 1993-era, aka air-cooled ones, including a C2 and a C4S, as well as a “I should have never sold it because it was going to go up $500,000 in value as a USED CAR, 1997 Twin Turbo 911.” My friend Linda drives basically nowhere at 67 years old, but when she does drive somewhere, she does it in style in a convertible Porsche 911. One of the places that she frequents in her native San Fernando Valley is the local Porsche dealer. Note: I didn’t say the Maserati or Fiat dealer, because those service department visits are for different, much more expensive and frustrating reasons (just ask my Dad as he’s got two out-of-warranty Maseratis now – God help him on the service front, which hasn’t been too bad, but …), but for the best of reasons. Get this … Linda’s local Porsche dealer encourages her to come in every week for a free car wash. They actually like to see her. They also want her car looking tip-top but, most importantly, they want her always feeling the positive vibes about her badass German race car. Porsche goes even deeper with their efforts to build goodwill, as anybody who’s driven past the Goodyear Blimp in Carson, California (at the intersection of the 110 and notorious 405 freeways) knows, as Porsche bought and tore out a crappy, three-par golf course on the west side of the 405 and installed an incredible Porsche Experience Center race track and ancillary goodies. I have not partaken of this very tempting user experience, because I know that would buy another Porsche within days. I know me and I can’t be trusted on this front, and that’s the last thing I need right this second. However, our Porsche-racing Generation Z reviewer Nasim Abu-Dagga flew all the way to Los Angeles to drive the some of the brand’s most insane cars in a controlled environment. This might be the coolest place EVER for a corporate event or a 51st birthday party (I fear my wife doesn’t read my articles, but just in case – here’s a STRONG HINT) … Needless to say, Porsche knows that once they have a client, they have them forever if they keep them happy. They accomplish this task like few others.
Manufacturer Examples of Goodwill in the Audiophile Space …
Audio Research is one of my all-time favorite electronics brands in the audiophile world. Val Acora, of audiophile and imported stone fame, was able to buy the brand and stabilize it after it was bought and sold by the McIntosh Group and others in recent years. Thankfully, it feels like the patient is stabilized these days, which is nothing but good. What’s even better is the fact that Audio Research will do factory repairs on any product that they’ve ever made in 50-plus years of making world-class audiophile amplifiers, stereo preamplifiers, DAC, super-cool source components and beyond. Ferrari will do this with some of their more important vintage cars in terms of restoration, which is another key part of what makes them one of the most well-respected brands in the world.
Wilson Audio, one of my favorite speaker brands of all time, and one that I have sold dozens of pairs of back in my early career, has taken on the same client-first concept, in that a Wilson-owning audiophile can send their Wilson speakers back to their birthplace of Provo, Utah (insert Fletch joke here … “It’s all about ball bearings, nowadays”), which is a yet another example from the audiophile world of building goodwill. The folks at Wilson know that Magico, Focal, Bowers & Wilkins, YG Acoustics, Stenheim, Vandersteen, Estelon and the other more respected brands are not the competition for a Wilson Audio sale – a used pair of Wilson speakers are. Why not make sure that the people who want to buy those used speakers get some of that insanely attentive and addictive over-the-top customer service that new Wilson clients get? Well, they did just that, thus making each Wilson client less likely to stray from the brand and, God knows, our friends in Provo have speakers that speak to any big-dollar budget that you might have or aspire to.
When I worked for Mark Levinson and Joe Cali at Cello Music and Film Los Angeles when I was in college, at our showroom perched above Geffen Records on the West Hollywood Sunset Strip, we had a policy that was pure genius. If you bought a Cello product, we would give you what you paid for it in full towards a newer, more expensive Cello component within the first year or two. While this doesn’t seem like as big a deal today with the advent of Audiogon.com, eBay, USAudioMart.com and so on – back then, used audiophile gear was sold to brokers who then often shipped them overseas. There were no guarantees that you’d be able to convince Sennie or Joel Hazen (local Los Angeles audiophile brokers from 30 years ago) to buy your client’s trade-in. Today, any blue-chip audiophile component will sell at a fair price in a global online marketplace. Back then, that was no guarantee, so being able to show your client that his investment was safe when they went big for Cello (Cello was the most expensive gear in the world, along with Goldmund – unlike today, when there are 36 to 48 brands that sell cost-no-object audiophile electronics worldwide) that they would get their value back. This built incredible goodwill and loyalty with our clients. It also planted a seed for either me (as the salesman) or the client (as an uber-high-end audio junkie) to consider upgrade opportunities more often. Nobody lost here. This is how good business works.
Audiophile Dealers Can Play in the Goodwill Game Too …
FutureAudiophile.com senior reviewer Paul Wilson has a relationship with a nearby audiophile salon called Big Kid Toys. We’ve all become friends with everyone there. I’ve written about Big Kid Toys’ brilliance in creating a college scholarship that has yielded it a young audiophile salesman making deep six figures (read the story here), selling audio while still in his 20s (this was me when I was that age, before the Internet came calling for an online publication). But this isn’t the only brilliant move that Mike Twomey does with his now-audiophile-only store (he stopped selling home theater systems due to their complexity, and his sales went up significantly). At the time, Paul had Class-AB Accuphase power amplifiers which are over-the-top cool Japanese audiophile power amps. Sadly, he had a service problem with them that required a return trip to Japan (“Sex Farm is on the charts in Japan,” as we learned when Spinal Tap reunited atop the Riot House in Hollywood back in 1984), and Mike gave Paul a suitable loaner amp right from his showroom floor. Why? Because a) it is the right thing to do, b) it keeps your big-dollar client from shopping at other stores for other amps to replace the one being repaired, and c) it builds incredible amounts of goodwill. Paul can buy gear at dealer cost or even sometimes below that today, but he still buys a few items from Big Kid Toys just to support his friend. For example, it wouldn’t have been hard to get a good price for Paul’s former reference audiophile turntable, a Luxman PD-151 MKII, from Big Kid Toys. He could have saved himself a few hundred dollars by purchasing this really solid record spinner, but he wanted to help Mike get his wholesale numbers up with Luxman, which at the time was a new brand for Big Kid Toys. Most clients don’t think selflessly like this, but Paul does, and goodwill as we’ve been describing inspires such thoughtful actions.
Some Final Thoughts on Goodwill in the Audiophile World …
This article is being written from my new “office” down here in Laguna Beach, 62 miles south of our home because of the recent Pacific Palisades fire. Said fire is the largest natural disaster in United States history and could top $1,000,000,000,000 (that’s a TRILLION DOLLARS), as nine out of 10 homes/structures in 90272 burned literally to the ground. And I am not kidding … my last home (we’ve used images from that house with my old Focal Sopra 2s over and over again here at FutureAudiophile.com) was one of the unlucky ones, and what people don’t get if they haven’t seen the destruction is that nobody tried to put the homes out. The LAFD and all the other firemen moved on. They lost the battle. They literally ran out of water (wait until you see the pending suit against the family who privately owns the reservoir that was down 117,000,000 gallons of water while being “repaired” for a mere 11 months). Our former home burned for hours and hours with nobody squirting water on the property at all. What you ended up with, when the flames finally fizzled out, was charred steel, piles of brick, cement and mostly toxic ash. You can see my bent and melted Middle Atlantic equipment racks, as well as my former Wolf and Sub-Zero kitchen appliances, because they were made of steel, which can sustain such heat. What you can’t see a hint of includes the gear in the Middle Atlantic Rack or the Focal speakers or the copper wires or any aluminum. Why? It all melted at these reportedly 2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures. Get this: people with, say, $100,000 in cash, some guns or watches or gold bars in their safes, ran back as soon as they could (thankfully, the National Guard is still on patrol there as I type) to recover their goods. When they opened the safe, nothing was in fact safe. At 2,000 degrees for hours upon hours of heat, there was nothing left. It was insane, and insurance often doesn’t cover the contents of your safe. The local Bank of America location burned to the ground but, thankfully, their vault protected people’s goods with far less damage. Most people’s deposit boxes were thankfully still okay. You can trade “smokey” money in for new dollars. You can’t replace incinerated ones as easily.
Within a week, retailers all around the area opened up their hearts and made generous gestures to the people of Pacific Palisades. I wasn’t able to experience the “retail therapy,” as I was recovering from my third abdominal surgery in three years (I am fixed now and I am pretty sure that I am officially BIONIC after 8.5 hours of additional surgery, as I feel pretty damn good right now physically), but my wife wasn’t going to miss such an incredible opportunity. While I was high as a kite listening to Pink Floyd Animals on Dilaudid (OMG, by the way …), she was in the trendy part of Venice Beach known as Abbot Kinney trying to get basic items that our family needed. When I tell you we needed pretty much everything, I am not being hyperbolic. Places like Marine Layer and Faherty hooked her up with clothes for all of us and we were in bad need at that time. EasyPlant.com, which I mentioned in another recent article, sent us new pre-grown plants via UPS for our Air BnB in San Diego (we lived near the old Qualcomm Stadium near downtown for a month after the fire in early 2025) and wouldn’t consider accepting payment. Restaurants, like the tasty local Cuban place, comped us meals, and pretty much everybody was beyond generous to us. In a divided world with a lot of hate in the DNA of our leaders in this country, it was reassuring that people were doing good.
What they were doing was building more and more goodwill. Not only was treating people who had just been crushed by outrageous circumstances the right thing to do, but it is also very smart business. Thank you again, on both fronts!
We will literally never forget the brands, companies and, most importantly, the people who took such good care of us in our time of need. We will remember this when the next disaster happens, and we will absolutely pay it forward, too, be it with our future actions and/or donations. These are win-win outcomes that I describe. This is the benefit of building goodwill, and this is something that the audiophile business does well, which is well worth reporting on.
How do good faith and thoughtful business practices impact your buying decisions? Do you have a story of good faith business from the audiophile world or elsewhere? Please share them here and we will post your comment ASAP. People and companies who choose unity over division should be rewarded, even if starting with some online positive vibes here. We can’t wait to hear from you.
