My Experience
During my 20 plus years as the NZ’s “Mr Shimano guru”, I have spent many hours helping NZ stores with fixing Shimano or other bikes related problems, with a very wide range of issues. This contact often resulted in finding more and often non-related store issues, which all added to my knowledge.
Most of the stores I dealt with were privately owned, which means there were always private opinions to be worked through. All of these experiences resulted in a huge skill set to fix problems.
Then during the years at Bikes International, I spent a lot of time trying to make the company-owned Bike Barn stores work in tune with their wholesale supplier, being Bikes International. This gave me a whole new skill set, for retailing in company-owned stores.
Throughout these years I have also been very involved in supplying product support for the B2B and B2C sides of the businesses, because of my product and training roles.
In 2019 I also spent a month in a more online orientated chain-store, learning all about how a more online orientated business works.
My experience will help any store, in regards to how it works and performs. I will cover front of store and the workshop, I have always been very customer centric, have dealt with many customer warranty cases, so learned how to understand customers, which is Step-1 to a successful business.
Practical Solutions
So whatever advice you would like, I have seen it all before and have seen many occasions where stores/people could be doing much better. I have seen, and understand, the problems facing bike stores from many sources (product range, store layout, staff, workshop) enabling me to work with you to provide practical solutions which will help you to become more efficient and profitable in your operations.
Customised Advice
As an independent consultant, I will assist you to make the most of your staff and facilities, getting staff more in tune with the store, smoothing out procedures, sorting issues and improving the efficiency of both sales and workshop staff.
As every business has unique circumstances my advice is customised for your store and situation.
The changes are worked out collaboratively with you, and your team, always remaining strictly confidential.
The fee structure will be based on store size, staff quantity, any training required and the required level of involvement such as follow up visits. If you are parts of a chain of stores, additional charges might apply. As part of the consultancy advice, you will also be able to have me incorporate training of your store staff, which is highly recommended.
This enables the suggested changes to be implemented much faster and the buy-in from staff is greatly enhanced when they are included and understand how the changes will improve the work environment and customer satisfaction.
To date I have consulted individually owned bike stores, multiple bike rental businesses, a franchise chain, and several bicycle part importers.
Each and every one of these were very satisfied with my services. In most cases my support is ongoing, to keep improving their business. But I aim for my involvement to become less over time, as staff learns to act for themselves
Get in touch!
Please contact me to discuss options for this consulting service.
