#YoungProfessional: Mere Audacity—The Founding of Kelly’s Bike Repair

by Bryan Kelly

I AM ATTEMPTING every conservative’s dream: starting my own small business. However, unlike other businesses that are imagined, pitched, incubated, funded and realized by “young professionals” of my breed and disposition, it is not a business that will excite the venture capitalists.

My business is bicycle repair, and sales. I call it “Kelly’s Bike Repair.” It is set up on a strip of concrete driveway running between my house and the neighbors’ house.

I purchased an entry-level repair stand, the bare minimum of tools, and set about trying to drum up business.

But that’s not quite where the story of “Kelly’s Bike Repair” begins. It begins about a year ago, when I took a job at Great Lakes Cycling on Stadium Boulevard. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Great Lakes was in the process of moving from their old location in front of Wolverine Brewing Company to a new location, the former Discount Tire Shop next to Uncle Ed’s.

Unfamiliar with bikes, and unacquainted with even the least demanding of repairs, I was put to work quickly at Great Lakes—and it was gritty work. Every night I went home with dirt under my fingernails. I learned a good deal, and carry the experience I gained in those days everywhere I go.

Unfortunately, I don’t mean I learned bike repair. I mean I literally learned to move. Day after day, I loaded endless boxes of tires and frames and bolts and tools and wheels and helmets and nails and chains and bikes, and more bikes, and stone slabs, and gloves and lights, and display mounts, and sure, throw in the empty beer bottles, too—loaded it all into a U-Haul, drove it two thousand feet down Stadium Boulevard, unloaded it, and tried to find a place to store it so that it wouldn’t get in the way of the next twenty U-Haul loads.

And when I say I’ll carry the experience forever, I’m referring to the two slipped discs in my back. It was an impossible assignment, unless you’re a naturally strong individual—and I, by nature, am physically fickle. I appear to be in better shape than I really am.

By the time my shifts ended, and the last pile of disorganized bike detritus had been unloaded and kicked into a corner, I was too exhausted to learn about bike repair. Fortunately, no one was interested in teaching me. I discovered that even in the best of times, there is something withholding in the average bike mechanic’s character, a tendency to treat the trade with a haughty mysticism, as though what is involved in fixing a bike takes too long to explain to the average listener.

Since then, I’ve learned that the bike mechanic’s impatient, arrogant facade masks the real truth: that bike repair is a simple undertaking. Forty-five percent of the time, something needs to be sprayed with WD-40, and 45 percent of the time, you just gotta replace the housing. (The housing is that black, or blue, or pink, line that runs down the length of your bike and shelters your cables, which shift your derailleurs or engage your brakes.)

Of course, inhaling that WD-40, and taking the time to replace the housing, and putting the bike into a proper mount, and chewing tobacco and spitting it, and bullshitting customers, and getting parts that will fix bikes, and spending hours doing all the above, are part of bike repair, too.

Chief among them, of course, is time, and solitude, to look at a bike, study it, figure out how it works, where it went wrong, and find a way to amend it.

I quit Great Lakes and as soon as spring hit, I set about acquiring the necessary tools and experience. I purchased the aforementioned stand, and fixed my own bike, and some friends’ bikes that had been left for dead, and by and by started volunteering at Common Cycle, a non-profit “community” bike repair service offered at the Artisan Market on Sundays. That got me acquainted with the tougher repair jobs, and connected me to the wonderful, welcoming lay-biking community in Ann Arbor.

“Kelly’s Bike Repair” opened the day I wrote “Kelly’s Bike Repair: Now Open” on a two-sided sign I acquired from, of all places, Great Lakes Cycling. It came down to summoning the audacity to write the words, “Kelly’s Bike Repair,” on that sign, for my business to be born.

Developing the business, however, will involve more than mere audacity. I’ll report back on the fortunes of “Kelly’s Bike Repair” in future installments. In the meantime, I’d like to pay compliment to my community. A good number of my neighbors have engaged me positively on this endeavor and entrusted me with their bikes, and I’ve gained a lot of great experience. My repairs come with a promise: I always take repaired bikes on a ride before I return them. Because if anyone deserves to ride into incoming traffic with poorly-jiggered brakes, it is your local bike mechanic.

If I manage to die, remember : 90 percent of the time, it’s either spraying something with WD-40, or fixing the housing.