How to become a home based bicycle mechanic – get paid to perform bicycle servicing and services
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase.
Bicycle Mechanic Part 1 - The Business Concept
Part 1 of a three part series about starting up a home based bicycle mechanic business. In the series I will explain how exactly I have set up the business and how it will start trading. This article is aimed at those who are wanting to setup their own business within the bicycle maintenance industry
Part 1 is all about how I came up with the business concept and what exactly will Big Beardy Bikes do.
How It All Began - Bicycle Mechanic Child's Roleplay
In the beginning there was a bike, a child and a father with a big beard. We were playing bicycle repair shops and pretending to fix the bikes for customers with ever increasing complexity of pretend problems. It got to a point when the pretend problem was that the bike had been sat on by a rhino and then left in the sea for a 100 years only to be then dragged up and used as a toy for an angry superman. I had to admit, that one had me stumped as how to fix it.
I got one of the bikes with a front brake issue and we sat down and fixed it for real, I said “what shall we call our bike repair business?” and there was a few interesting names such as “Bikes with beards” “Mega Mechanics” etc. then my son came out with “Big Bearded Laser Bikes” so with a bit of fine tuning Big Beardy Bikes was born.
That night in bed, the name of the play business was tumbling around in my head. I enjoyed the play and the concept of a home based bike mechanic shop was fast setting in my head like concrete.
I started fleshing out the business concept in my head, needless to say my mind was like a ferocious small dog with a bone that night and come morning time with a grand total of two hours sleep I had a plan!
Let’s do this!
I Love It When A Plan Comes Together
So, what’s the plan? What will the business look like? Well in short the business is going to be designed to fit around my day job so it will operate a few hours a week. With this in mind, purely relying on bicycle mechanic services to the public might not be that profitable and so multiple revenue streams will be used to generate income.
Okay, but how exactly? The business will have two main parts that will generate income, there will be a physical part where I will work on bikes and generate income directly from customers. Then there is the virtual side where I aim to generate passive income online to supplement that from paying customers. The theory is that the passive income can smoothen the quiet periods that will inevitably happen during the startup phase.
The Hard Graft Bit
The physical part of the business will have three main parts to it, check out my services page on my website for a full list of what we can do.
For the short and medium term I intend to operate at home and will offer a local pickup and drop off service with possibly a call out service to do work at the clients location of choice, this means clients will not need to come to my premises.
The three main service areas I will offer are:
- General bike servicing, diagnostics and repairs. Just like your typical bike shop will offer. The aim will be to advertise this service once the business is fully established and functional.
- Bicycle restorations, this service will focus on vintage/retro bikes or those bikes that have been left in the garage for a few years and need some work to get them road worthy again.
- Bicycle up-cycling, otherwise known as flipping, will actually be the first workshop based revenue stream. Bikes for sale on the second hand markets will be bought at reasonably low prices, restored and sold on for profit. This is the quickest and easiest way to start earning profit from the get go as you are not reliant on customers coming to you.
Making money online? Seriously
Making money online is not as easy as people think and will require an equal amount of effort to make it happen, the only difference being the tools will be the keyboard rather than the adjustable spanner.
I will initially be creating an online shop area, which will contain affiliate links to products that I use or recommend
The virtual part of the business will, again, have three sections to it.
- Writing blogs with affiliate links. Yep, I’m not shy about it, the majority of my blogs will contain links for me to earn commissions at no costs to you should you click on them then buy something. Such as this link to an updated book an gentleman’s guide to beard care 2022. Don’t worry though, the blogs will be useful and interesting articles, reviews and tutorials on bicycle related subjects aimed at DIY enthusiasts.
- Producing content videos on YouTube with an aim to monetise them and again use affiliate links. The videos will be to complement the blogs providing demonstrations for tutorials and hands on reviews. Once the popularity of the channel grows I will also look to attract companies wanting unbiased reviews of their products
- Merchandise! Yeah, your going to be able to buy a whole raft load of things with my logo on it so you can look and feel as great as me and share the big beardy love.
Here are some great affiliate links to some books about setting up online businesses. Shameless, I know!