TrekFurthur is right on… “I see myself as an ambassador to the sport, and anything I can do to further that cause is important.” A good mechanic is more than a service, it is shop “good will” and it’s what draws in the repeat customers.

I’ve done a decade in network administration where the “grunt work” was doing “end user trouble tickets”. We had two types of administrators:

Those who would go out on the shop floor and yank the user’s PC, bring it back to the “secure” server room, fix whatever difficulty and return the unit. Their mindset was they could do the repair quicker without a constant stream of annoying questions as to what went wrong and what were they doing. They tended to be junior in status.

The second type of administrators would go out on the shop floor and have the end user share with them all the issues that lead up to the failure, then they would endeavor to accelerate user’s learning curve on appropriate counter measures to avoid a reoccurrence. Needless to say, those “ambassadors” were far better received and much more effective in the long run. Oh, those ambassador Admins were typically the senior tenured staff.

“Good will” created by an ambassador is invaluable to a shops credibility and perceived worth. It is appears that the lion’s share of LBS’s main profit’s come from the margin they make on the sale of bicycles and parts, not on service fees.

I took up mastering the art and science of bicycle mechanics years ago after I had a wheel (poorly done by a LBS) fail and left me stranded many miles out on a bike path. Needless to say, I didn’t take the wheel back, but I did determine the shop owners name and wrote a polite but concerned letter sharing the reason he lost a customer. Until I learned to do my own work I would drive two hours round trip to a top tier trusted shop referred to me by my fellow riders.