What Fixing Bicycles at Nineteen Taught Me About Selling Software

When I was nineteen I worked two summers in a bicycle repair shop near the station in Utrecht. The owner, a quiet man in his sixties called Henk, had run the shop for thirty years. It was small, it smelled of rubber and chain oil, and it was one of the most profitable businesses per square meter I have ever seen.

I now run a software company that sells to warehouses, and I keep catching myself using things I learned from Henk. None of them came from a business book.

Tell people what is wrong before you tell them the price

When a customer brought in a bike, Henk did something that seemed slow at first. He would turn it upside down on the stand, spin the wheels, and point out every problem to the customer while they stood there. "Your back brake pad is almost gone. This spoke is loose. The chain is fine for another year."

Only after that would he give a price. People almost never argued. They had seen the problems with their own eyes, and they had also heard him say the chain was fine, which meant he was not inventing work.

In software sales, we often do the opposite. We lead with features and pricing, then try to discover the problem. These days our first meeting with a new warehouse is almost entirely a walkthrough of their floor. We point out what we see before we pitch anything. Our close rate on first meetings that include a site walk is around 45 percent, compared with about 20 percent for video calls.

The small free fix

Henk would often fix tiny things for free: a loose bell, a squeaky saddle, air in the tires. It took him thirty seconds. Customers remembered it for years. Many of them came back to buy their next bike from him, not from the big shop across town.

We do something similar now. During onboarding, our support team looks for one small annoyance in the customer's current setup that has nothing to do with our product, maybe a label printer setting or a spreadsheet formula, and fixes it. It costs us maybe twenty minutes. It buys a surprising amount of goodwill.

Say no to the wrong jobs

Henk refused to repair certain cheap bikes. He would explain, kindly, that the repair would cost more than the bike was worth, and send the person to a shop that sold secondhand frames. I thought this was crazy at first. Why turn down money?

He told me it was because those customers would be unhappy no matter what, and unhappy customers talk more than happy ones. We have a similar rule now. If a warehouse is too small for our software to make sense, we tell them, and we point them to simpler tools.

Be there at the same time every day

The shop opened at 8:30 every morning, without exception, for thirty years. People trusted it partly because it was predictable. Our support team now has fixed hours that we publish and keep, rather than promising round-the-clock help we cannot really deliver.

Henk retired years ago. The shop is now a coffee bar. I walked past it last month and could still smell, or imagined I could smell, the chain oil.