We recently connected with David Neal and have shared our conversation below.

Hi David, thanks for joining us today. So, let’s start with trends – what are some of the largest or more impactful trends you are seeing in the industry?

The bike industry is currently undergoing it’s most painful growth period in it long history. As increasingly more customers order items on-line. Price structures have eroded, margins are below sustainable business practices & customers use bike shops as “libraries” to test products, only to order them from on-line businesses that have little overhead, put nothing back into local or national bike scenes, often sell customers the wrong bike for its intended purpose & are hard to deal with when there are returns or warranties. It’s become a huge bone of contention for local IBDs (Independent Bike Shops).

Rather than throwing in the towel, Mojo provides customers with premier services that can’t be mimicked by on-line retailers. We spend personal time with each customer asking questions to learn what they need & how the product they seek will be used. We sell customers what they need, rather than what’s on our sales floor or what makes the most profit for the shop. My salespeople are not on commission. We forgo quick margin for the trust of our customers. They see this & always come back.

We have loads of custom products that we use & are excited about. We know they’ll work for our area, because we test them ALL before putting them on our sales floor. Thus, our customers trust us & buy products when we recommend them.

over the last 16yrs, our customers return, because they know us & trust that we truly look out for their needs. We knew that we’d succeeded when a shop in a near-by city advertised themselves as: “A Mojo style shop.” No joke.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I live in Bentonville, AR. Home of WalMart. For years, I was involved in the sales/marketing circles surrounding WalMart’s Toy/Bicycle department. I’ve even developed & sold Tonka items that sold millions of units there. Before that, I earned a PhD in Ethnology, where I studied the culture surrounding extreme sport. My research focused on the motorsport known as Rock Crawling. I also borrowed parallel themes for the mountain biking world.

I used the data from my PhD research in crafting both the aesthetics & the knowledge-base of Mojo Cycling’s look, “vibe,” product selecting, marketing outreach & service dept. Nearly every aspect of the shop is anchored theory derived through my studies. Because of this, customers “feel” the difference in the store from the minute that they enter. We regularly see new customers step into the shop, stop & say: “Wow, this is the coolest shop I’ve ever seen,” or “We come here every time we visit Bentonville because shops at home don’t have the stuff that you do.”

It takes a lot of work to stay current. To respect the wants & needs of our customers. There’s never a point where we can say that we’ve “made it” because there’s always something new around the corner. Because of that, all of my employees are excited about what they do; they push their knowledge base so that they can be part of “the best team” in a town that seems to grow a new shop on every corner on a regular basis.

We find that respecting the cutomers’ wants, needs & budget by providing them with trustworthy info (often this means that we DO NOT sell customers the most expensive or margin-heavy product) helps us stay true to our client-base during trying times in the bike industry. This, in turn, keeps them coming back to Mojo Cycling.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Mojo has been in business for almost 16yrs. For the duration of this time we’ve relied on a sku-heavy sales floor that provided customers with a huge array of parts with a wide variety of choices for each of those parts. This has been the shop’s bread & butter. However, following Covid, we quickly realized that shopping dynamics were changing…& fast. Fewer riders were buying big-ticket items, like bikes. Our sales began to slump. So, we immediately began ordering fewer items in areas that we were seeing sales slumps.

To make-up for losses in sales, we pivoted & focus on serving riders who order bikes on-line & need a local shop to build, service or modify what they own. Many customers end up buying the wrong size of bike (probably as high as 50% of on-line customers buy the wrong size of bike)…or even the wrong bike for the riding they want to do. Our mechanics work hard with these customers to modify their bike to fit their needs, or to help them get a bike from Mojo that’ll do the job. Rather than looking down our noses at customers who buy on-line (like many bike shops do), we welcome these riders & do all we can to help them along. Often, we can earn a customer away from on-line locations because they realize that purchasing the wrong item — or buying a product twice — does not end-up saving them money.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

It was just before Thanksgiving, when Mojo was about 4yrs old, I got a call early one morning from the Bentonville Police. The shop had been robbed. I got there to find windows broken out, bikes missing & our cash box was gone. To make matters worse, our then insurer said it was the insurance from our leases who must pay for the thousands of dollars in broken glass, while their company pointed at mine. Both refused to pay. Then, just days later (& totally unrelated to our recent break-in) a foreign group hacked my identity & liquidated nearly $20k of the shop’s checking account. We were going into the busiest part of the year with most of our products stolen & no way to buy more. I couldn’t eat. My stomach was a tight knot. I told my wife & kids that our Christmas present was if we could keep the house & have heat. We couldn’t afford a $20 Christmas tree from WalMart, so I took our kids in the woods & secretly cut a small tree down there.

The bank was working to get our money back, but it was taking time. They were amazing & actually bought my family our Thanksgiving food. By the time we got our funds back, we’d missed Black Friday. The shop was skimming by on fumes. I was horrified that if I lost the shop, it’d also pull down family members who had lent us money to start the business. I had to sell my bike. This may sound like a small problem, but I own a bike shop. Riding my bike is a necessary part of the business! Every day, I’d talk to customers & wonder if I’d be able to open my doors the next day. I felt like a fraud & a failure. But, we never gave in. We survived.

I didn’t pay myself for 6mos. We held-out on my wife’s part time work. We lived LEAN. We put every nickel back into the shop & worked twice as hard. I attended every event, ride, party, trade show that I could. We leaned-in hard with FaceBook marketing & we printed flyers that my boys put under windshield wipers at trail heads.

It was scary, but by May, we were clawing back from the brink. Business began to take off for the Summer & we were back in the game. Since then, I’ve always known that we could make it, no matter how scary things get. True, I’m a high stress guy, but I know what we can do to keep the shop going. This has also served us when we are considering taking a leap of faith. The unknown does not scare us as much anymore.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://MojoCycling.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/mojobicycles/
• Facebook: Mojo Cycling
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@mojocyclingbentonville

Image Credits

All images are owned by me, J. David Neal.