Received an email from Chris at Fulcrum. Sharing for all.
Dear Customer
Thank you for previously supporting me with Fulcrum. This isn’t an easy email to write even though I am excited about being able to share some good news with you. It is actually really intimidating to publicly post things when you have faced public criticism and abuse after messing up as badly as I did with Fulcrum. Initially I just wanted to hide away from everything. This post will also be made on the AVSIM forum.
As you know from my previous email, Fulcrum Simulator Controls ran into difficulty and ceased trading. In that email I went through some of the reasons why the company went down and left us all out of work and left some customers with outstanding orders.
One of the complaints I have seen is that I am a crook and ran the company into the ground knowing it was going down. This is simply not true. At the time that orders were being taken, we were expecting a start up company assistance loan from the Government to help with costs etc that we had faced and to allow us to jump to higher production throughput. At the time this was applied for things were going well. 6 months later we were still waiting for this. I did close new orders and issued some refunds that were placed at the end. I did not take peoples money and run. However, I know that many people were angry and felt cheated or scammed.
During all this there were things outside of the company to deal with and that were of a personal nature and made life very difficult, including facing the criticism here. No excuses for that but sometimes life is what it is and things don’t always go as you wanted.
Now, as stated in the previous email to you, I aim to stand by outstanding orders, even though Fulcrum was a limited company, and I could walk away from it. It would not be right to do anything else as I am a longstanding member of the flight sim community and not just a faceless company in China.
I also don’t want to walk away because I believe in my designs, my principles in delivering what I promised and the tens of thousands of pounds of my own money I started the company with. That investment in product design, development and knowledge allows me to start production and deliver the same quality and future products.
The way this will work is this. I am currently working another job to pay my wages. I will not be taking wagers from Fulcrum until it is built back up.
Throttles are being produced first. This is because there are some parts already available to me. Orders have been placed for the remaining parts. Over the coming weeks throttles will be assembled and once ready, customers who ordered a throttle and were not able to claim a refund will have their orders fulfilled and remaining throttles will be available for purchase via the website.
This is not an ideal approach and involves even more long waits. I understand the frustration in that but there is no alternative. I do not have a large cash pool I can issue refunds from, All I have is the ability to work and build up what is needed to start producing again.
For clarity, all profits from sales will be going back into buying more parts to produce more products. This means that customers who lost out will get their order eventually and there will be off the shelf Fulcrum products for new customers. I will not be taking a wage from Fulcrum until this point is reached and everything owed is repaid.
I hope this shows that I am trying to do the right thing and Fulcrum will be run in a customer focused way.
There will be changes to the forum to clean up a lot of ‘where are you?’ threads. User to user support threads may get edited and moved around to make it less of a mess. I will not be deleting any threads – even those that make me feel bad. I will move them into an archive folder, but I do not wish to delete history.
Thanks again for the hundreds of messages and emails of support, it is quite honestly staggering to me.
Chris
FULCRUM SIMULATOR CONTROLS