10 Years of EuroRC

EuroRC is already 10 years old. A lot has happened during those years.

First, I must thank each and every one of you. All our partners, our team drivers, our customers and friends. Without out you we would not be here today! I know it sounds cheesy and used, but it is the truth. And you all deserve our graditute! 

In this article we will focus mostly on my view of things and only scratching the surface by giving you guys some view on how we have grew as a company. I think I will have to do a totally different article about all the racing, friends and fun stuff later. :) 

Now.. Where to begin? 

I think we must start from Axel's fathers basement in Espoo. That would be the place where EuroRC was when I somehow ended up working here. The year was 2011. Axel and his friend Juha had founded EuroRC about 6 months earlier and they had been gathering some amount of stuff in the basement from Tekin, Gens Ace and TeamC mostly, but most of them were not even in the web shop yet. So my job was to get them all in the shop for people to buy them. I did that as a part time just to cover some of my racing budget. I was never good enough RC racer to get real sponsors so I had to work for my cars and gadgets. :) 

It did not take long 'till Juha parted away from EuroRC and Axel took over the whole shop. That time I got involved more and we started to grow out from the small basement and started looking for the first real warehouse for EuroRC. In 2012 We found one from Tervakoski, near to where I lived. We also started to sell Yokomo at that time. 

Now we faced another problem. We needed someone to run the warehouse since me and Axel both had our own day jobs and we only did EuroRC as part time (mostly at nights). It took me a while, but I managed to talk my friend Timo to work for us in the warehouse and Timo has been working with us ever since. He used to manage just about everything that happened in the warehouse back then. Now he knows just about everything about anything and he uses his knowledge to solve our daily problems with deliveries and warranty issues etc. He's gold. :) 

We grew out from our first warehouse in just 1 year and found a bigger place just across the yard and moved there in 2013. Now we had room to grow and we could start growing our shop a lot faster. In that point we also got Xray/Hudy distribution that really opened a lot of doors for us. 

We grew and stayed in that warehouse for nearly 3 years. I also became a partner in the company at that time and started to act as a CEO. In 2016 we were in front of a new era again. We had grew so big that Timo could not handle the warehouse all by himself anymore and we had to figure out how to continue. We did not want to stop growing so we started to look for some other option than just hiring more people. (It is not cheap to have workers in Finland and you need to be pretty big before you can actually grow while hiring more staff).

In 2016 we moved our warehouse to Vantaa, where it was handled by another company. And I got myself and Timo an office from Tervakoski, where we handled all the daily actions while Axel kept handling business development and another company took care of our daily operations at warehouse. At that time I also took a big leap and left my job at the military and started doing EuroRC as a fulltime job. 

This was a big move and we started to grow very rapidly again, almost doubling our sales in a year. We felt good and now we could pay salaries for 2 workers. Me and Timo. Our goal was to grow enough to be able to get back in our own warehouse and have office under the same roof. I think we got really lucky that year, since one of our competitors here in Finalnd went out of business and we managed to buy their old stock. But what was even more gold, was their old worker Pete, who we hired instantly to be our customer servicer.  We also got a third owner for EuroRC when Nicolas joined us and brought a lot of knowledge on ecommerce and advertising with him. 

In 2017 we found our current warehouse with office space from Tervakoski. Now we started to feel like a real company and we hired my wife Heidi as our warehouse manager and moved our warehouse back from Vantaa to Tervakoski.  Soon Kenneth joined us for a year and helped us out a lot with getting a good footstep for us in Sweden also.

Fast forwarding to this day, We now employ 6 people fulltime here in our warehouse and office plus 2 part time helpers and Axel and Nicolas doing us marketing and development stuff part time. It is starting to get crowded here and we are already looking for a bigger space, once again. Hopefully the next one will be the one we don't need to move away from anymore. :) 
 
-Niko, CEO