I appreciate the candor that Bruce Gordon displays in his telling post above. I too, have struggled for years trying to maintain a high end bike shop where the majority of the frames were custom built for the clients. Through the years I sold some of the finest american frames, including Bruce Gordon, Brian Baylis, Jim Merz, Columbine, Jim Redcay, Tom Kellogg, Chris Pauley, Dave Tesch, Greg Diamond, Bill Holland, Dave Moulton to mention a few, plus a wide variety of high end frames from Europe and the UK. Some years after doing over $300,000 in sales I barely made a profit. Passion drives truly high end shops, not money. The ever increasing competition from mail order outfits like Colorado Cyclist, Nashbar, Excel Sports and others take the margin out of group and component part sales. There are many parts sold mail-order that are cheaper for a shop to purchase than from a independent wholesaler. If one charges what's necessary to keep the business running, in the light of the highly discounted prices from mail order houses, it's perceived as "gouging". Profit isn't a dirty word, but I always felt it was, somehow. In 1997 fed up with working 85+ hours a week and barely keeping up with the credit card payments I had one of those odd epiphanies. I had gotten in a tri bike to prep for the world championships in Switzerland. The rider was leaving 6 am Saturday morning...his dad brought up the frame on Tuesday afternoon. The bike had a rare two piece ultralight fabricated steel crarnkset from Sweet Parts. The crank bearings were rough and an odd size. The local bearing shop didn't have replacements. I called the manufacturer and ordered a new pair of bearings 2nd day air so I'd have them on Thursday. I had the usual full schedule that week and spent Wednesday clearing the deck so I could spend the time necessary on Thursday to do my best when the bearings arrived. Thursday morning came and went...no UPS. Finally about 4 pm I heard the UPS truck coming down the street. I went out to the curb to wait for the driver and save him the trouble of getting out of his truck. He waved and drove on by...no packages! I flagged him down and went over his load manifest with him....nothing for me. Seriously bummed, I called back the supplier and asked him if the bearings had been sent as ordered.:"Yes, he said and gave me the tracking number. He assured me that they'd be delivered on Friday. I asked him "what if they're not". No answer. Friday was a nervous day, no bearings delivered meant that bike was down for the BIG race unless I fitted a different crankset and BB which meant more sourcing or taking something apart. UPS came again in the late afternoon...no bearings again. They were lost in transit. ( They ping-ponged all over the midwest before being delivered the following Tuesday.) I called back the manufacturer and asked if he had sold any of the carnksets to anyone else in the SF bay area. He had sold one to Bike Odessey in Sausalito. I called Tony Tom, the owner, explained my dilemma, and asked if I could borrow the bearings out of his crankset,. "Yes, said he. Great, I said....... by now, it was 3:30 pm with.everyone is leaving work early to try and miss the traffic .It would be fine if the freeway had 8 lanes in each direction, but alas, ours only has two lanes. Did I say a crawl? I think you've got the picture. It was also 59 miles from my shop to Sausalito. one way. I raced back into the shop to get my car keys and for the first time ever saw my shop as someone else might have seen it.... bikes and frames hanging missing this or that in various states of repair, wheels hanging everywhere, tools and parts strewn all over and more stacks of bikes leaning up against the walls. I looked around and thought: " whoever's doing this has to be nuts!" then I realized I was referring to myself. For the first time ever in over 40 years of working in a bike shop the stress overcame the fun. I could finally begin to realize what my wife, friends and family had been trying to tell me for years...that the shop was killing me. It was a revelation. I called my wife and told her that it finally hit me and when I finally finished up the custom bikes and projects that were on order, I was going to do something else. "Finally," she said. The drive to Sausalito took almost three hours that Friday night, the return drive home about 2.5 hours. Tony stayed late to accomodate me. Super guy and great shop! I got back to the shop at 9 pm, and now racing against the clock: set up the BB, re-installed the cranks and chain, checked out the gears and brakes, touched up the wheels, race lubed the drivetrain and completed the checkover. I test rode it at 1 am, re checked everything on the stand, re-rode it then had it boxed for shipping by about 2:45am. The client's dad picked it up at 3 am, headed back home to pick up his son and continue to the airport. I went home to bed..... Finished. One more day down. 1997 is when I started my carpet cleaning business. I sold my beautiful old 1978 Ducati 900SS to buy my first carpet cleaning machine. I bought an old Chevy "discovery" van, re- painted it myself and started learning a new trade. ( the Chevy was a discovery van as in the next two years I discovered lots of things it needed, but fortunately not everything broke at once.) I was still active in the bike shop about 4 days a week at first. When I had my revelation in July 1997, I still had deposits on 13 new custom bikes, plus about 7-8 paint jobs out for accurate paint restoration and rebuilds. It took almost three years to finish up all of those. I thought the feeling for the shop would re-emerge but it didn't. I'd rather be out riding these days. I still take a couple orders a year to keep my hand in, but I don't depend on the bike shop to feed me anymore. It's amazing to me that I can make more profit in one night cleaning a big commercial building (60,000 sq ft) with my crew than working 2 months 80 plus hours a week. It's hard to justify spending 15-20 hours in assembling a new custom bike these days for $300-500 labor charge when in the same time and with way less stress I can make $1500-$2500 with my cleaning business and still make people happy. I'm not telling this with and malice or desire for pity. That's just the way things turned out. Your local shop is up against the wall with ever increasing costs of doing business, inventories that become rapidly obselete and difficult to restock, aggresive competition from catalogues. There's been a major paradigm shift in marketing in the last ten years for shops to remain solvent. Statistically, bike shops usually don't make it for very long. The margins are small, the repair inventory needs to be diverse and constantly updated, and the sales are seasonal. If you hAve a shop you like near you, take care of them.
My two cents,
Paul Brown
Cycle Dynamics
Santa Rosa, CA