Originally Posted by JHouse

Speaking from the baby boomer set perspective. Picking up a cool toy bike for a reasonable price is pretty attractive. If it looks macho and finished enough, like that black beauty, it would sell. And I think price is key, you need a broad range of prices, with quite a few below $5K. If you can buy wrecks for cheap and do a really cost effective job (mostly paint and throwing parts out) you would also get a lot of word of mouth about some of the bargains you have. Then you can upsell to the ego crowd.

What would help would be a showroom with a selection located to find browsers and get people excited. I think the service and custom work would just flow from creating a local market for good looking bikes. And a business can always get more because it is easier and you have the feeling that they will stand behind the bike so it is less like pot luck.

The key in today's market (total crap economy getting even worse) is going to be value. There are still a lot of folks out there with money to spend, and they aren't buying great big stuff any more, but a reasonable toy that will generate stories and attention and be like a new hobby, that might work if you were visible. And the commercial real estate market sucks so badly now, that you might be able to get good space on good terms.

I like the idea, but it's hard to do it without staying power. Maybe you would get lucky and have a lot of service and custom business right away. We have a tiny local shop here that is almost too booked to do service. Cool looking bikes are a great attention getter, and that would fuel the whole enterprise from a traffic standpoint, plus show off your wares.

Financing is cheap but amazingly hard to get. Another way to get steady income might be to finance the sales yourself. That also lets you charge more. You just need to be able to collect and repossess and repair, the latter of which should be pretty economical on this kind of product, especially given your kind of business.

Brand yourself with a Logo and some stickers and T-Shirts (all are easy to make happen these days). Create an Aura around the place.

Put a social corner in the place and encourage people to hang out and socialize. Have beverages available and a TV showing the Speed Channel.

Free advice. Maybe worth nothing. Oh, and that bike, somebody would fall in love with it. That looks like your $6K bike. You are fighting decent new bikes for $6K to $9K, so the niche is more powerful, tougher, unique and a bargain.

Originally Posted by JHouse

Sheesh. Thanks.