Doing the business

How do you make a small fortune in the bike trade? Start with a big one.

Okay, so it’s an old joke but it’s also not that far from the truth, especially if you’re thinking of trying to make a living from the bike trade.

It is possible to make it in this industry, just don’t expect to get rich doing it. How can I claim to know this? I’ve been there, done the job and got the T-shirt. Shop monkey, mechanic, shop manager, magazine staffer and importer/retailer are all job titles that have found their way on to my CV. So let me enlighten you as to what the ‘lifestyle’ is all about should you choose to live it.

The easiest way to get into the bike trade is, like everything else, at the bottom, and that means working in a bike shop. Now don’t go thinking that just because you’ve built your own bike from a pile of parts you’ll be able to walk straight into a mechanic’s job. It simply doesn’t work that way. Once upon a time maybe, but not any more. You see, these days the industry is becoming more professional and people expect qualifications. Do you have a Cytech accredited qualification? Thought not. So it’s the shop floor for you, which, incidentally, is where I started.
Going down this route you’ve got a couple of choices; Saturday boy or full-time. Now if you’re not sure if you really want to become a full-time bikie then the first option is the better choice. Don’t simply dismiss it just because you’re not a spotty teenager. I once worked in a shop where a guy in his late-twenties worked Saturdays only. He was a serious Sports class racer and got paid in parts! It was a simple way for him to afford to race on a regular basis.

Obviously, I took the other option and took a full-time job. Having just left university it was that or sign on, and my then girlfriend wasn’t going to let me spend my days watching daytime TV.

The most important thing to know about working in a bike shop is the money, or rather lack of it. You’ll make enough to get by and you’ll get bike parts at trade prices, but that’s it. However, on the positive side you will get to talk bikes all day, though on the flip side of that some of the people you talk with (the customers, the people that will ultimately pay your wages) like to think they know more than you do because they once read a feature in a magazine. At the other end of the scale you’ve got people who know nothing and just want to ask lots of questions and waste your time before going away to buy a bike over the Internet.
One piece of advice if you think the shop floor seems like a good option – learn how to make a really good cup of tea. Bike shops survive on tea and if you can’t brew up you’ll get nowhere.

A lot of people who start on the shop floor naturally gravitate towards the workshop and go on to become mechanics. It’s an obvious career path. Not me though. I chose the somewhat contentious route of leaving the independent trade to go and work for Halfords. Now before you start writing hate mail, it was done as a career move. By going to work for ‘the man’ I got a whole bunch of benefits; a decent wage, lots of holiday, a generous discount scheme and useful professional training.

Unfortunately, Halfords and me had different ideas about how to do things, a hangover from my time in the independent bike trade. So back there I went, this time as a mechanic. If you can stick the corporate attitude then Halfords is a good place to work and you can easily ascend the management ladder if that’s your thing.

Just like working on the shop floor, being a mechanic can be the best of times and the worst of times. The good stuff is doing full custom builds with the latest must have parts. The bad is fixing punctures on rusty old Shoppers with enclosed chain guards and Sturmey Archer three-speed hubs first thing on a Monday morning while suffering with a hangover. I now like to think of it as character building.

A lot of people are more than happy to spend their days in the workshop and simply stay there, but not me. My next step was going on to manage a shop. Big mistake! Okay, you get to please yourself to a certain extent; you want time off? Well as you’re the one who makes up the staff rota you get that time. Fancy a new bike from a manufacturer you don’t stock? You get to talk to the rep for that company and get some in stock. Sounds good? Well it is to a point and then the job comes and bites you on the ass. A customer has an accident on a bike that he bought from your shop, who’s he going to blame? You. A member of staff caught stealing? Yes, it’s you that’s got to sack them. I could go on and on but I’m sure you get the idea. It was certainly not what I signed on the dotted line for.

So what next? Well there are always bike magazines. Doesn’t everyone want to get paid to ride bikes all day long and get free kit? My idea to get into that scene was to follow the example of other wannabes and start my own ‘zine. At the same time there was Blazing Saddles, Shred or Dead, which is still going as Shred, and Bad New.

Broken Spoke was my idea of what a mountain bike magazine should be. The first issue was hand written, cut and pasted and then photocopied (this was in a time before cheap laptops, desktop publishing packages and blogs). Copies got sent to all the usual suspects – Chipps, Tym Manley, Brant (this was when he was still editing MBR), Steve Worland, whoever was in charge at MBI back then and anyone else I could get the contact details for who was involved in cycling magazine publishing.

Bizarrely, the plan worked when I got a call out of the blue from Roger St Pierre, the editor of the long since gone Cycling Today. The conversation went along the lines of, “Can you write two bike reviews, a group test on cycling shoes and another on tyres by this time next week?” I had no idea if I could or not but I wasn’t going to let that get in my way. I said yes and then panicked.
I must have done something right with those first pieces of copy as I spent the next year as a freelance contributor testing bikes and parts, going on launches and generally having a good time. Of course, there was a downside and like everything else in the bike trade it was the money. In order to get by each month I took to working part-time in various bike shops.

So now you’ve gone through the most obvious options for getting into the bike trade what’s left? Having your own shop perhaps? A conventional bike shop was out of the question for me, too much capital required. So how to start? I’ve always been a fan of high-end steel frames and in the past I’d bought plenty of parts from the States. Hmm, now an idea was starting to form. Much web surfing later a hit list of boutique US frame builders had been created and the hard work began: convincing them to supply frames to a couple of chancers in the UK who claimed to have an online business called Sorted Cycles.

Fortunately, as my partner has good IT skills, getting a website together was easy enough so we had something to show suppliers and once we got one on board the rest took us seriously. Suddenly I was a partner in a high-end import business with thoughts of one day expanding to open a regular shop.

Isn’t the Internet a wonderful place, all those forums you can log onto and talk about yourself…? It no doubt helped that we launched the site with a front page that spoofed the promo poster for Train Spotting. Swearing might not be big or clever but it does seem to attract a lot of attention.

As with working on a shop floor, if you’re going to sell on line you need to be happy to talk bikes a lot; just do it by typing rather than face-to-face. Due to holding down a full-time job at the same time as running Sorted, e-mails had to be answered in the evenings, along with telephone calls to our US contacts. It was okay, I didn’t really want a social life.

The thing is, though, the deeper you get into the trade the more your life changes. Taking a holiday wasn’t just thinking of somewhere sunny and then booking a cheap flight. It was a case of registering for InterBike and then arranging to visit as many Californian-based frame builds in one week as possible, trying to line up more suppliers. That was my new social life.

The idea for Sorted Cycles was a good one but it never quite panned out. While we never lost money, we didn’t really make any either. To be honest it was not worth giving up all my spare time, time that could be spent riding, just to try and sell some bikes and follow an elusive dream.

Looking back on it now it seems like we got out at just the right time; the collapse of the pound against the dollar and the credit crunch would have killed the business if we’d still been trading.

So what next for me? Well I’ve built a frame from scratch in the past, so perhaps I should try setting up my own micro brand. Whatever happens, after all this I know I’ll get involved again somehow. In the meantime, remember - you can’t make a mint in the bike trade but you can make a living. And I still like to go out riding which is a strange thing because I’ve met so many people along the way who’ve been in the trade so long they no longer want to go riding.

So if I can give you only one piece of advice. Go for it, try the bike trade, have a laugh and then get out while you still like bikes...

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