Who we are
Kimberley Motorcycle Centre opened in Broome in 2008 and has traded from the same town ever since. We are the local Kawasaki dealer, and we sell, service and supply parts for motorcycles, scooters, quads and buggies across the Kimberley and into the Pilbara.
The business is small enough that the person who answers the phone is usually the person who will be working on your bike. That is not a marketing line, it is a consequence of the size of the town.
What distance actually changes
In Perth, a dealership that does not have a part orders it and the customer has it the next morning. Here, the same order puts a bike off the road for the best part of a week, and in the wet season sometimes longer.
So we hold stock a city dealership our size would consider excessive, particularly in consumables. It ties up money that would otherwise sit in the bank, and it is the single most useful thing we do. We would rather carry the cost than tell somebody their only transport is unavailable until Thursday week.
| The problem | What we do about it |
|---|---|
| Freight takes days, not hours | Deep stock on chains, sprockets, filters, tubes, pads and tyres |
| Roads close in the wet | We tell customers to order critical parts before December, not during |
| Nearest alternative workshop is far | We service makes we do not franchise, including farm and station machines |
| Heat degrades everything faster | Shorter recommended service intervals than the manufacturer schedule |
| Customers drive hours to get here | Ring ahead and we hold a workshop slot and pre-order likely parts |
Who we look after
Our customers are not one group. They are commuters riding twelve minutes to work, tourists whose bike has developed a problem 1,800 kilometres from home, station hands whose quad is a work tool rather than a toy, mine and civil crews running fleets, and juniors racing at the local track on a Sunday.
- Broome locals — road bikes, scooters and commuters
- Stations and pastoral properties — quads, side by sides and farm bikes
- Mine and civil contractors — fleet servicing and compliance checks
- Travellers — breakdowns, tyres and repairs mid-trip
- Junior and club racers — pit bikes, motocross machines and parts
- Derby, Fitzroy, Halls Creek, Kununurra, Hedland and Karratha — freight and booked visits
The workshop
Our technicians are factory trained and the workshop is air conditioned. In a town where October afternoons sit around forty degrees, the second point is not a comfort feature — it is the difference between work being done carefully and work being rushed.
We issue log book stamps that manufacturers accept, which means a warranty can be maintained without freighting a bike south. For a customer in Kununurra that saves a fortnight and several hundred dollars in transport every service interval.
We service what we do not sell. If you ride something we have never stocked, ring us anyway. The odds are good that we can help, and if we genuinely cannot we will say so rather than experiment on your bike.
Motocross and the local club
We sponsor the local motocross club, and have for years. The reasoning is not complicated. Junior classes need machines that start reliably, parts that arrive before the next meeting, and somebody willing to look at a bike on a Saturday morning. Without that, families give up and a generation stops riding.
It also keeps us honest. A bike we sold turning up broken at a club day in front of forty people is a fairly direct form of quality control.
How we sell
We would rather sell you the right machine than the expensive one. A 650 adventure bike is a wonderful thing and completely wrong for somebody who will only ever ride to work and back on sealed road. Equally, a road-focused bike bought by somebody living forty kilometres up a gravel track will be miserable within a month.
Tell us what the riding actually looks like, honestly, including the parts you are slightly embarrassed about. The recommendation is only as good as the information behind it.