Fixing the floor

Any time you pull up flooring to expose hardwood underneath, you are taking a gamble. Our gamble payed off mostly, but there are definately some areas that needed some work. Because the floor is 80years old we were unable to match the wood exaxtly, so we improvised a little. Actually the end result turned out to be a lot cheaper than replacing flooring and will look okay in the end. We had long since given up the hope that the floor was in good enough condition to refinish, so we are simply going to paint it. The replacement wood for these repairs was salvaged from other parts of the building that we are taking out. The smaller patch was actually part of a windowsill in a wall that we removed. The larger plank was cut from a sturdier piece of subfloor.

Here is a picture for 12/20/07. You can see that the cealing has been painted but that there is still a lot of work to do. We took a week off of work for the holidays, but are back at it.

For consistancy, all of the images on this blog are from roughly the same angle. This way you can scroll down and see how things are progressing. This picture was taken a couple of days ago, so there has been more done since then. The ceiling has been primed in preparation for the paint that will go up tomorrow, so it is currently gray, but will probably be black the next time I put a photo up. The terrible wallpaper in the front room is now gone as well. Progress was slowed somewhat over the last couple of days because with this snow/rain we discovered 3 holes in the roof, and I was up there in the freezing rain patching them. The roof will eventually be replaced, but for now the priority is on fixing the broken water main and getting the shop open for business. The roof can be done at a later date. I will go up again and make sure the patches hold, but hopefully the roof can wait until spring.

Wouldn't you know it!!!!

Ok, so we finailly finished all the electrical, HVAC and plumbing issues, and it was looking like we were going to come in under budget, and then our water main broke. So much for staying on budget.

Other than the water issue, the place is starting to look good. Most of the Demo is out, and we have starting with painting the ceiling. Right now it is just primer up, but we should have the ceiling in the main room finished by the end of the weekend. The new ductwork is so shiney and new that I considered leaving it silver, but shiney doesn't last long, so it will go black with everything else. So while a Jan 1 open date may be a little ambitious, we will get pretty close to it I think, Taking Chrismas off will slow us down but we will get some work done between holidays.

This picture is the Same view as the pictures in the posts below. Although it looks a little more cluttered, there is progress being made. You will see that the drop ceiling is out, and what you don't see is that some of the floor has been pulled up to reveal the hardwood underneath.

The following is a photo update of our progress sorry some of the photos are low quality, many of them were taken from my phone.
Photo 1: This picture is looking from back to front when this was a Cricket Store. Notice that you can look through the little window and see a yellow wall that separates the front from the main part of the store.

Photo 2: This is the same view as of 12/2/07

photo 2 on top

Demo gets underway

Internal layout plans are finalized and demo sin underway. It looks like the next couple of weeks will be busy ones. Most of the walls in the place will be coming out and the the Drop ceiling will be removed. Unfortunatly all of the ductwork and electrical is just sitting on the drop, so we will have to put in all new ductwork and find a way to tidy of the wiring. So there is a lot to do, but once the plumbers, electricians and HVAC guys get in, we should be moving rather quickly.

And here is a picture of the shop if you are interested.

We Have Keys!!!

As of yesterday we have closed on our new building on main street in downtown LaGrange. The design team will be in next week and we are hoping that we can get the remodel of the building done by end of year. The shop should be complete and fully stocked by February and we will pull off some sort of real grand opening sometime in March. We will, however, have the doors open for those in the know much sooner than that. We will move current inventory and some new lines in as soon as the security system is functional. Internet operations will switch over as soon as the computer sytems and internet are in.
In case I have forgotten to say it before, thanks to all our customers, team riders and distributors who took a chance on us. The past two years have been a great ride. We started out as simply some guy hawking bike parts out of his "bike room". The inventory was stored in a couple of tupperware containers, and we sold $40 worth of product our first month. Since then our inventory has grown steadly and we have added brands monthly. Our additions of SRAM, Wheels Manufacturing, and Stan's no tubes have brought us to a competitive position in the online market. Brands like Spiuk and Viner rounded out our line and got us into some high end niche markets. Our racing team which was new for the 07 year helped us get some of the word out and start bringing some local business.
All of this is now coming together to a point where the inventory that was in two boxes in a small room in the house has taken over the dining room, office, and bedroom as well as the "bike room". So two years after putting up the sketchy initial version of our website we are moving into a brick and mortar shop.
All this is especially exciting because not only am I no longer wrenching on my front porch, the new building will allow us to further expand our line of products. Watch for an expanded Campagnolo line as well as the addition of Shimano, Thompson, KHS, Time, Crank Brothers and many more.
So again, Thanks to all of you who have helped make this possible. I think most people on this forum will understand how excting this is for me. Now when someone asks me what I do I can say "I play with bikes for a living."

Whats with the ad's

Ok, here is a question that has come up, and I suppose it is worth talking about. If you look at our site you will see that we actually sell ad space to our competitors (via google ads) So if you are looking at tires on our site, you may see ads for tires from other companies.

To understand this you must realize that we are well aware that our customers already know that they have options. As one of the smaller sellers, we realize that our customers have already checked out the big guns before they come to us. The beauty is that because we are so small, we have much less overhead than the big guns, so our prices are usually lower or at least on par with our competitors. So we allow these ads for two reasons.

1. We are not sending anyone anywhere that they didn't already know about. So in a sense we are just allowing comparison shopping between rivals. Since our prices are typically lower we are confidant that most customers will come back. In the event they find a beter deal somewhere else, we may lose the sale, but at least we made a little on the ad. This brings us to point two.

2. By putting a small proportion of our competitors advertising dollars in our pocket, we are able to keep our prices lower. The better our prices the more we sell and the better it is for everyone.

So until such a time that we get large enough that the general public will come to us first and not know about the smaller guys. We will continue to leave the ads on the site and take the extra revenue as a bonus.

Ever Closer

For those of you who follow such things, we are marching ever closer to opening the new shop. Most of the details with the building have been ironed out, and so we look to be on track for opening by the end of the year. KHS is now on board, so we will have some bikes to play with when we open the doors. Should be good fun for all....

Let the building begin

There are few things quite as hard as saying goodbye to an old bike, but the beauty is that this loss is always coupled with the excitement of building a new one. So sorry if I am a little distracted in the next week or so. I am focusing on building the new Cyclocross bike. This is an 2006 model that they were clearing out, but what the heck, how much have cyclocross frames really changed in the last year. Anyway, thought I would drop in a picture just to show off a little. Let the building begin.

What does your bike say about you.

I am a firm beleiver that you can tell a lot about a person by how their bike is set up, and the gear they use. Sometimes they will fool you if they just bought the bike second hand from someone and haven't had time to modify it to their own personality, but usually you can have a look and learn a lot about the person.



Sometimes this is easy. If you spend enough time at the races you know that single-speeders are a breed of their own. If you can count the number of gears on a bike on one finger, you know you have a special kind of nut on your hands. But there are often more subdle things that you can note, even on a brand new bike. Which accessories if any did the person go in for? Did they go for flashy looking bits on the bike (disc brakes on an entry level bike) or did they stay basic (entry level bike). Did they opt to get all the little safety bits (saddle bag, tube, tire iron, multi tool), or did they shell out for the upgrades that would increase the quality of the ride (clipless pedals). Or did they just walk out with the bike as is? All these things tell you a little about how a person goes about their life.



As the bike ages, you can see what parts get replaced when. Is the bike ridden into the ground or is is kept fresh. How clean in the drive train? How clean is the bike? (By the way I love seeing bikes that are all muddy and dinged up, and then you look at the drive train and it looks like it has been washed with a diaper and lubricated one link at a time) Did the person go in for the latest bit of technology or did they stay with the tried and true.



Most important is the frame material. Seeing a steel hardtail tells you almost as much as seeing only one gear. Ti riders have a similar mentality, but they either have more cash to throw around or they are obsessed with quality. Carbon riders tend to be techno-weenies. Aluminum is either a financial decision or a simple decision that all that other junk isn't worth it, and that aluminum can be made just as light and stiffer anyway. (You will know which from the other parts on the bike)



So what is my point here? Well I just had a scary realization. My son is a much more hard core rider that I will ever be. I checked out his rig the other day, and there were two glaring indicators. "Steel is real" and "No Brakes".

Whats with e-haggle lately?? (e-bay haggling tips)

e-bay is sort of a strange place to do business. As a young business starting out, it is a good place to bump up your sales a little. It is also a good place to determine pricing for online products. You can dump a couple of unknown products up there and see where the auctions come out. It is a good way to determine demand. It is also a good way to see where your markets are. For example, Californians are usually willing to pay more for a product because everything is so un-Godly expensive there that no matter what you throw out seems like a deal. Brazilians, will pay crazy amounts for shipping as long as the deal on the product is good. (both of these incidentally have to do with tax structure in those locations)

At any rate, while the fees associated with e-bay make your profits a little less, you do reach a large audience quickly. Sometimes I laugh about my e-bay store because to account for e-bay fees, many of my products sell for more than I have them listed at in my normal online store. I guess e-bay gives people the feeling of shopping around without actually having to shop around.

All of this is beside the point of this post. What I don't get is that it seems like e-bay is slowly turning into e-haggle. With the original auction format, there was no haggling, if you won, you won, if not you had to try again. The online stores and "buy it now" pricing made things a little easier for people who needed a part quickly, but removed the feeling of being able to "work the system" and get a good deal. So people have started haggling.

Haggling is fine, except that when you run a business that is focused on value and volume (that is selling with low margins at high volume) you don't have a lot of room to haggle, and in addition you don't have a lot of time to go back and forth with people who just don't get it. You would not believe the hours I have spent going back and forth with people over the prices on stuff, and the more time I spend on it, the more profit I would have to make to make it worth my while.

So if you want to haggle on e-bay here are some things to remember.
#1 You are more likely to have a successful "haggle" when the seller has their "accepts best offers" option on. Those are the sellers who are openly willing to haggle. All of the others probably will haggle, but don't really want to. They just want to take orders and go about their day.

#2 Don't be afraid to ask, but learn to take a hint. - My favorite e-mail to get, for whatever reason usually comes internationally, and looks something like this. "I see you have a screwdriver for sale... Can you quote me a price for a screwdriver, a hammer, a saw-zaw, and a jackhammer? I need it shipped to France". There have been times when I happen to have all of their list, so I quote them a price, and sometimes we go forward. Sometimes (usually) most of the stuff is special order. So here is the tip. If you are trying to get someone to special order stuff for you, don't haggle quite so hard, you are more apt to kill the whole deal. Someone who is ordering up something specifically for you will rarely have the same price as someone who has a bunch in stock and needs to blow them out. If they can get you stuff and save you some cash by combining shipping, its a good deal don't push them, because you are at a disadvantage that you may not know about... Your approach is the same as what a lot of scam artists use. They order a large volume of stuff that is not normal stock for you so they can draw you to a transaction that is outside of the e-bay system (which is illegal by the way) and then find a way to screw you. So if someone is willing to work with you a little an order stuff up, either take the prices they give you or don't. Don't come back at them with "well ScrewdriversRus has the driver for $2, and theJackMan has the jackhammer at $78, can't you come down a little on those items? No, go ahead and place three orders and get your deal that way.

#3 They are looking at your feedback - Don't try to haggle if you have a feedback score that is negative. No one wants to take that risk. Generally speaking, I don't negotiate at all with anyone who has a feedback score less than 10 who has negative feedback. If they have a feedback score over 5 and it is all positive, I might talk to you. Honestly though, it is hard to get negative feedback, you have something go really wrong with a transaction. Chances are if you have done 5 transactions of e-bay and two of them got you negative feedback, you are doing something wrong and no one wants to mess with you.

#4 The 3 e-mail rule - You should probably be able to work everything out in 3 e-mails or less. If you are sending your 4th e-mail because you aren't getting the deal you want, you aren't going to get the deal you want, try someone else or take whatever offer you have. The 4th e-mail is just ticking the seller off. The exception to this is if you are getting such a good deal that you want to increase your order. I recently worked a deal with a guy that went over the 3 e-mail rule because he worked a deal that he liked, and then went and got some of his friends in on it and came back at me with bigger numbers. I was okay with that and ended up shipping 20 sets of brake pads to Germany.

#5 Finally keep in mind that most online sellers don't want to haggle. They have essentially already done all of their haggling by comparing their prices to other online dealers and pricing their products accordingly. Be nice and they may hook you up, otherwise you are using more of their time so they can earn less money which will make them less apt to deal with a person who just doesn't get it.

Eco-Shipping

When I first got this thing going, I had two ideas that I thought would reduce the environmental impact of the shop as well as save my business and my customers some money. One has worked rather well but I am being forced to stray a little, and the other has done next to nothing and I am about to can it.

Idea #1 Courier Delivery via Bicycle: This was actually one of the things that I thought was going to set us apart from other business in the area, but it really has had limited effectiveness.
The idea was that if I was going to be riding every day anyway, why didn't I spend some of each ride dropping off packages to local customers. This would not only save the customers shipping costs, it would limit the amount of fuel that was burned in the process of getting parts to customers, and if would also be a selling point for the business. For whatever reason, probably lack of advertising, the idea never took off. In fact it is probably a good thing that it didn't because I spend so much of my time packing up and shipping the regular orders that I wouldn't have time to do all the riding I would have to if the idea had really taken off. In the end I will probably kill the whole idea, but as we move to our new shop, I may start it up again for a limited local market.

Idea #2 Use 100% reused packing material: This idea made sense from the start, and has led us to be remarkable cost effective when it comes to shipping. To date we still have not bought a box for the purposes of shipping something in it. We have devised some neat ways to turn a large box that we get from a distributor into a lot of small boxes that go out to our customers. While this sounds relatively simple, actually doing it can take some time, so we have been working on ways of becoming more efficient at it. We have also become rather adept at turning cereal or cracker boxes into shipping envelopes for small parts like brake pads.

In terms of environmental impact, a strong argument could be made that it would be just as well just to recycle all this stuff and let a professional turn it into boxes, but our other issue is that there is no local Recycling pick up where we are, so we have to pack up all our recycling and take it to the recycling center. On the other hand, the mailman will pick up at our location, so we actually save ourselves a lot of trips by shipping our "trash" around the world rather than taking it to the recycle center. As I am typing this I am sitting next to a Trisket's box that is heading to Brazil. The Triskets box is sitting on top of a Raisin Bran box that is headed to Germany.

Every time I ship a derailleur hanger, two pages of our phonebook go missing so that the hanger will be well packaged in its little box. While ordering pizza has gotten a little harder, we figure that by the time the new phonebook shows up we be about half way rid of this one.

Our 100% reused policy has of late hit a small snag in that we have discovered Flat Rate shipping. Some of the items that we ship around the world are quite heavy, so the cost of shipping them can be prohibitive. The wonderful solution we have found is flat rate shipping. Basically USPS has a box that they provide and will deliver for a set price no matter how much it weighs. By stuffing these full of heavy items (like Stans solution) we can get our customers a reasonable deal on shipping. The only problem, it that you have to use their box. And so, as easily as that, the 100% reused policy went by the wayside. We do however still ship about 95% of our orders in boxes that are reused and packed with reused packing material.

I guess it's true what they say about the "best laid plans", but we are trudging forward with our 95% reused policy.... At least until we hit the next snag.

Thinking like a rock

My brain works in geologic time. This is not always a good thing in the business world as it tends to prevent rapid growth, but it may also provide some stability. Most people tend to look at things and see how much money they can make on it over the course of a hour, day, month or year. I tend to live about ten to thirty years out from the present. Because of this I was very slow to do some of the things that will bring results quickly.

For example, as I started out I didn't really want to spend any money on internet advertising, because the end goal of an internet store in not to have someone click on an ad to find you. The goal is that someone searchs for a product and finds it at your store. This is a result of search engine ranking, not advertisements. So I set out to advertise the store basically by internet "word of mouth". Once the site was up, I submitted it to some search engines for review, and then promply began telling as many people online about it as possible. Everytime I published anything online, even a note on a forum, it had a link to the site worked in tastefully. I never Spammed anyone, but in the course of being online I managed to generate more and more links to my site from other sites. These links will eventually help the site rank higer in the search engines which is the eventual goal. What I failed to recognize is that this would take forever doing it myself.

When I finally did wake up to this truth and actually start spending money on advertising, my sales quadrupled overnight. Now it is not me trying to promote my site, but rather it is my customers promoting it for me. And while none of them are as active about it as I was, a lot of them do a little, and the effect is probably greater, and I have more time to focus on the site.

I also tend not to think about individual sales. If I did, I probably would have quit long ago. When you see a sale come through for a small part, and stop and calculate your profit after everything that goes into the sale, it hardly seems worth it, but my mind is always looking at what happens if I make that sale every day for the next year, and what if I find 10 more products that I can sell every day. Suddenly the numbers become a little better. And I start to focus not on individual sales, but on finding niche products that I can sell every day, even if it is at a small profit. Sure it is nice to get the big sales now and then, but it is the volume of the small ones that is keeping the shop alive.

I could go on giving examples, but suffice to say, through this first year and a half, it has been thinking in the long term that has kept me motivated. While sales have been increasing almost every month (this in not hard considering we sold $30 worth of product our first month) they are still not enough to feed the family on. Fortunately my wife works, and I have a part time job on the side, so we have been able to reinvest 100% of the profits into the shop, and it continues to grow. Not many people I know could spend two years working on a project and never see a penny, but I guess that is the beauty of thinking like a rock. I'm thinking 10 years out and it looks good out there.

Hello and welcome

This is a blog that should have been rolling since the day I started Goose Creek Cycle, but it was always on the "to do" list and never done. Part of me thinks I should keep all my business secrets to myself and not let the competition know what I am doing until it is done, but in reality, I usually don't know what I am doing until it is done, so this blog really won't work against or for me in any real fashion. On the other hand, by putting all of this out in the open, my customers, friends, and employees (when we eventually have them) will all kind of know what is going on at the store if they care to read about it. So, sit tight, we are about to explore all of the trials and tribulations of running and internet bicycle store.

Feel Free to visit the site at http://www.goosecreekcycle.com/