Michael DeVisser, one of the key people behind Ohm cycles stopped by a few weeks ago. Michael was mainly in town to visit Motor Excellence, our homegrown electric motor company, where he was spending time looking at their new motor systems and hanging out with Pete Prebus of both Motor Excellence and Electic Bike Report. It was also a good opportunity for Michael to check in on us to see how we were doing with the Ohms and electric bikes in general.

Michael helped us tune up a few parts on the Ohm that we were are currently review in the JOYBAG project at commutebybike.com. We had to reinstall the battery cap which required dismantling the battery. We also had to route the wiring for the regenerative braking system. As we dive deeper into getting to know electric bikes, it’s been great getting to know folks like Michael and learning from them all the ins and outs of the cutting edge equipment that they are working hard to make widely available.

Michael Seating The Battery

Looking at the Ohm Battery Internals

This weekend, we had our 2nd appearance at the Flagstaff Farmer’s Market. For this go around, I had the inspiration to bring out my rollers. People were first perplexed and then entertained to see me balancing on the rollers, not pedaling at all (Ted should have some video up over at Commute By Bike in not too long). We had another bike setup on a trainer. This was a nice way to coax people into getting the feel for the bike without actually having to balance it. From there, quite a few folks were interested in taking a real spin. It also worked well to demonstrate the different power modes of the BionX Electric Bike Kit of the Ohm XU700 that we had hooked up to it. In the photo below, this guy was struggling before Ted turned up the power setting.

Ted Demonstrating an Ohm XU700 Urban - Kid Struggling Before Ted Turns Up the Juice

Josh Riding an A2B Velociti on Rollers

Good Show, Packed Up & Heading Home

Here is our ragtag setup at the Flagstaff Farmer’s Market a few weekends ago. Art Babbot, a Flagstaff city council member and organizer extraordinaire welcomed us to set up a booth under the auspice of educating people about Electric Bikes. We were instructed to be low key on the marketing and focus on the educational aspect. This approach resulted in us looking like a table surrounded by a bunch of bikes. The crates full of Bike Shop Hub T-Shirts didn’t really look that great either. Despite or perhaps because of the casual nature of our booth, we got 20 or 30 people to take demo rides and sign up for our newsletter.

We do have 3 more opportunities to figure this one out this summer. Round 2 will be next weekend. We will be bringing the tent this time (with the sandbags that we forgot last time thus not being able to set it up). I’ve also had the inspiration to bring my rollers as a sort of spectacle to draw people in. Does riding an ebike on rollers count as exercise?

It’s been a summer of maturing as far as the business philosophy and approach is concerned. We launched our show room and our ebike sales. And while we’ve had more people coming in the door, I can’t say it has been a huge success. Online sales have been continuing to ramp up tremendously with bike bags and bike trailers flying out the door. Even with this growing volume of sales, we are struggling to be profitable. I’ve realized that we need to continue to grow sales to an even higher level while reducing costs to transition back to being a profitable company with the larger profile and overhead that we’ve taken on. As with many growing business, we are cycling (no pun intended) between focuses on growth and profitability. The current transition back to focusing on profitability is perhaps the hardest one to knuckle down into, but also one of the most essential ingredients to developing a strong healthy business.

Our main focuses are now circling back to continued growth within our profit centers and cost reduction. Growth for us means continuing our strong online marketing efforts and adding in more product lines. Our biggest pushes for new product lines will be in launching the new BikeTechShop.com by the Fall and adding in 2 or 3 brands to our most successful shop, BikeBagShop.com. Reducing costs mainly means that we will be updating and improving our accounting, inventory management, order fulfillment and other customer service related operations so that we can efficiently and effectively handle our expected continued increase in volume without adding more employees to our payroll. I know this sounds like the problem behind the high jobless rate in the US with corporations trying to find every efficiency and not hire. For a small business like ours, this strategy is essential for shifting back towards being profitable. I question this type of strategy for corporations that are already raking in the profits as it seems shortsighted. But hey, that’s Capitalism. (I think I’m going to start ending every post where I wander off into business strategy with this easy way out line)

Last week our friend Brent rolled up on his business’s Fratelli Pizza’s new electric delivery bike. This is one slick setup and we were quite excited that they took the plunge with getting it. The bike incorporate what looks like a Madsen Cargo Bike frame into an overall package which includes a large sectioned area for food and drinks. This same area also houses the two lithium ion battery and protects the electric motor.

This bike, put together by a company called Thrust, is really quite impressive with a very powerful acceleration to 20 MPH in 5 seconds. I caught a shot of the bike in the wild turning off RT. 66. This looks like a cost effective and eco-freindly way for Fratelli’s to do pizza delivery by bike and we are excited to hear about how it progresses.