Let me say that I will accept your slings and arrows with understanding.
Other than exprience and strong spelling what are LBS’s looking for in a new hire? I am in the no where land of careers right now and am focusing on get my wife through school so figure why not try to make a living at what I love the most.
Ideas and thoughts on the subject?
They probably care more about selling skills than spelling skills.
Probably looking for someone that doesn’t move to another job in 3 months.
Never owned a bike shop, but here’s my thoughts.
Depends where they want you to work I’ll guess. If you’re in the front on sales you must be personable and have a very good knowlege of bikes, particularly the products sold in the shop.
If you’re in the back wrenching, who cares about personality, just be a damn good mechanic.
You’ll need to know how to wrench on all types of bikes, not just high end tri bikes. Customers with dept store bikes are like gold because you know they’ll be back again and again. Working on POS bikes is not sexy but it’s part of the job.
“Probably looking for someone that doesn’t move to another job in 3 months.”
Not a problem there. Let me ask another question and really get this confusing. Fit gurus, where do you start to become one?
"Fit gurus, where do you start to become one? "
Take Dan’s FIST course or the Serrotta course and you’ve upped your qualifications considerably. There are also a number of bike mechanic courses available that are fairly short duration. You won’t have the years of experience, but starting off with a fit course and mechanics course is what I’d do if looking for a job in the bike industry.
I think going to a course like Barnett’s is a start for a lot of serious employees.
as an entry level position, say sales you’d want to be…
-social & able to interact with customers cheerfully and helpfully
-have a pretty good knowledge base on bikes and if you don’t know the answer, be willing to ask versus making something up (this is totally huge with some employees I’ve met or worked with)
-be a fairly quick learner
-be a great salesperson, suggest accessories when appropriate, be able to figure out what will meet the customer’s needs based on his/her budget, goals, style, etc
-trustworthy
-upbeat
and stuff like that. chances of getting hired at a mechanic or even having to do major mechanical work at most shops are pretty low if you don’t have much training. Selling you just gotta be a cool person who customers will like and who knows his sh*t enough to help them out in a way that benefits BOTH them and the shop.