Last week I attended the Bicycle Leadership Conference in Dana Point, California. Run by non-profit People for Bikes, the event brings together not only bike business people but non-profits, vendor businesses and international brands. As someone who is relatively new to the bike business, this is just my third BLC…

Now that I’m well into my 50s, I’ve come to appreciate the value of mentorship. At this point in life, you — and I mean any of you — have so much wisdom to offer to someone younger. You can share any kind of learning, and I don’t see mentoring…

What is a brand? It’s not the logo, or the latest ad, or just the product itself. A brand is EVERYTHING; it’s the sum total of hundreds (or more) touch points. All of these things add up to something that a customer, or employee, or partner, or retailer thinks of…

It was Elon Musk’s tweet sharing homophobic misinformation about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband. That was the last straw. Just two days after he purchased Twitter for $44 billion and one day after he assured advertisers publicly that the platform would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” under his leadership. …

Last weekend the governing body of competitive cycling, the UCI, put on the first Gravel World Championships. And this is not to be confused with the original Gravel Worlds race held in Nebraska each year. In late 2019 and early 2020 I spent a few months (along with my friend…

I’m up in Sun Valley, Idaho for the Rebecca’s Private Idaho gravel race. Started 10 years ago by Rebecca Rusch, RPI is a four-day stage race that people travel to from all over North America. This is my second year in a row at the event; last year I worked…

This summer our family went to Prague to visit our daughter Sadie, who’s graduated from college and moved to Europe to work as an English teacher. I decided to bring my bike, since I was tacking on a bike business-related work trip to London afterwards. I’d ridden bikes once before…

I grew up in the era of ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Back in the late ’70s there were only three network channels, and any televised sport happened only on ABC, NBC or CBS. That was it — no streaming, YouTube or cable TV. As a result, you could only…

Televised bike racing has been static for the last 50 years — what can be done to change it up and make race coverage more engaging? — Along with my colleague Steve Maxwell from The Outer Line, I wrote this last week for VeloNews: The Giro d’Italia’s mostly boring stage 3 painfully reminded fans of pro cycling’s lackluster and unimaginative television format. Inspiring scenery of Budapest, the Danube, and medieval castles may generate new tourism, and some…