By Chris Officer | Associate Editor
Nault’s Powersports in New Hampshire has an 118-year history that began with selling Schwinn bicycles, and has since grown into a four-rooftop dealership that is a top-10 seller of some of powersports’ biggest brands, including Honda, Suzuki, and Kawasaki.
Nault’s started in 1908 selling Schwinn bicycles delivered from Chicago and was one of the original importers of Raleigh Bicycles from the UK. By the 1940s, the dealership started putting Whizzer gas motors on pedal bikes. A few years later, in 1953, third-generation owner Dick Nault wanted to take his business to the next level, so he mailed a letter to a then-unknown manufacturer, Honda.
Nault didn’t get a letter back from Honda, at least not right away. It wasn’t until 1958 — five years after the original letter — that Dick heard back from the Japanese manufacturer.
“Five years, think about that,” says Curt Grenier, CEO and shareholder of Nault’s Powersports. “And it’s been history ever since.”
Nault’s would become an official Honda dealer — one of the first in the U.S. — and received its first bike in 1960.
The dealership didn’t stop at Honda; it now has 10 powersports brands and has been named the No. 1 Suzuki and No. 1 Beta dealer in the country several years in a row and recognized as a top-10 Honda and Kawasaki dealer. The dealership has expanded to four locations and is part of the original 10 Honda dealerships in the U.S.
Grenier, who currently runs all four of Nault’s dealerships throughout New Hampshire, was a GM on the automotive side before transitioning to powersports. He recalls running into Dick at his auto dealership, who for years tried to recruit him to come over to powersports.
“I would tell him, ‘Yeah, yeah… I want to, but I’m making a ton of money,’” Grenier says.
But Dick’s recruitment was consistent, and there was one thing he told Grenier about what separates auto from powersports that really resonated.
“He said we sell fun. We don’t sell anything anybody needs; we sell what people want. And eventually I told him, ‘I might take you up on that offer.’”
Grenier began working at Nault’s in 2014 and, by 2016, became a shareholder. He says after spending the first part of his career managing multi-rooftop car dealerships, his approach was to bring in some of the same principles from auto into powersports.
“The motorcycle business is 10 years behind the car business. And I would say once I learned how to take automotive models and apply them to this model, we’re probably now four to five years behind the automotive business and catching up.”
When Grenier first came over to Nault’s, he said he had tons of ideas to bring to the table. The automotive industry knows how to run a lean system, he says, with some dealership groups managing more than 1,000 rooftops. Grenier’s initial goal was to operate like an auto dealership, but instead of running 1,300 dealers, he just needed to do it with four.
But one major difference between auto and powersports, Grenier says he noticed immediately, was the dealer management systems. On the auto side, a DMS is applied to only one manufacturer. This simplifies use of the system and lets dealers take advantage of more software features. In powersports, however, DMS is designed for several different manufacturers — as well as thousands of distinct parts, apparel, and accessories. The complexity, Grenier says, makes it more challenging for dealers to operate the DMS at full scale.
Another change Grenier encountered was the different approaches to fixed operations.
“In the car business, fixed operations and back-end finance are what run a dealership.”
The powersports industry can become too focused on major-unit sales. Grenier compared it to a fire: unit sales are the logs that keep the fire going, but the heat is generated from fixed operations and finance.
“Anything that was done for the new and used departments was so discounted that you might as well be giving them away,” he says. “Parts were also discounted. And when you look at that model — which fits about 90% of all powersports — the money is in the metal. It’s always in the front end, and fixed operations always suffered.”
Grenier says when he first got to Nault’s, his No. 1 goal was to fix the dealership’s fixed ops, which were almost non-existent.
“The first thing I did was change that. Now, we get honest labor rates. We get markup on parts. We get full retail in parts and labor for warranty,” he says. “But we also value our technicians. We have techs who are making six figures — $50- or $60-an-hour technicians at a $189 labor rate and 72% gross profit. That’s what it takes to run an effective powersports business today.”
Grenier describes Nault’s four-dealership network as a motorcycle dealership where you can also buy everything else. It generates $42 million in annual revenue and accounts for roughly 24% of all powersports sales in the New England area.
Now in the business for more than a decade and managing the sale of around 4,000 units a year, Grenier has noticed certain trends coming and leaving the industry. ORVs are growing in popularity, with traditional touring models trending down. Even during the last quarter, Nault’s UTV sales were the only thing that went up. Everything else went down.
“The market has definitely shifted. Used ATVs, UTVs, or smaller bikes, like dirt bikes, small quads, you can’t keep those in stock,” he says. “But we’re still a biking community up here, and bikes are still our bread and butter. But we are trying to be passionate about UTVs, because that’s clearly the direction.”
And as the off-road market trends up, Grenier says he feels the Harley segment and $30,000-plus models have been trending down. As a stand-alone Indian dealer, He’s been seeing a lot of Harley-to-Indian trade-ins, whether that’s customers trying to get out from under a steep price tag or just abandoning the brand altogether.
“I have about 40 Harleys on the floor right now, and I can tell you about 28 to 30 of them are from Indian trade-ins,” he says. “A lot of these guys got buried in these Harleys between 2020 and 2023 — literally $10,000, $12,000 upside down. They’re beyond that now and can get out from under them and make that transition.”