This is the P.M. I just sent to Brent. Having reviewed it, I didn't see any indiscretions that would prevent me from posting it in public, as long as I sent it to Brent first. Reading it over, it is exactly what I would have posted here first, if we had no P.M. function.
"Dear Brent,
I want to personally express my sadness that you are leaving Colt.
The "reasons" are personal, and I am sure they are not something that should be dissected on this forum.
I have to say to you, as I have said before, you garnered this company a ton of good will, especially in a era of impersonal sales where customer satisfaction conflicts with balance sheets and profit/loss calculations.
You were Colt's ambassador to the buying public. You will be sorely missed as the face of Colt, to this forum, and I'm sure to many others.
Thanks for everything you have done to promote Colt to us, and to make sure that Colt customers are happy with the products. It's a shame to see a person who is obviously such an asset to the business lose his job.
I sincerely hope you land a great job somewhere else in the industry.
God bless you and your family,
Mike H."
Last year I bought a new in box Carbonia Blue WWI Mod O pistol. Unfortunately, the slide and the frame didn't match in color. This was not nit-picking. The color difference was glaring. Frankly, for a product that costed approx. $990-1K new (and probably worth around $1300 now), this is not acceptable. The charges for sending the piece to Colt or to Doug Turnbull for a complete refinish, was around $550.00 Brent charged me about 70% less than that figure to do the refinish. And, he apologized for having to charge me at all. After 7 months or so, I received the pistol back, and it looks beautiful;
the way it should have looked before it even left the factory to ship to a distributor.
This gentleman has a strong feeling about what is fair to a customer who's decided to spend a large amount of money on his company's product. I guess that makes him as obsolete as most of us are
.
Because of Colt's actions against Brent, I am going to seriously re-think whether I am going to buy the new Cobra I so enthusiastically pledged to buy here on this forum, a matter of weeks ago. Plainly, I do not like the way they treated Brent.
As I said in that post, I need another revolver like I need a tumor. If they can't see how great an asset Brent was to the company, they aren't getting any new sales from me.
Colt will get by without me. It won't cause even a ripple. But I can also do without them.
So I guess the only Colts I will continue to buy will be the fine old ones. Ones that don't put any money in Colt's pocket.
Out.