More Customers Won't Fix It: Find the nail before you pump up the tire.

Before you read this, grab a pen. Write down the last thing you did to grow revenue: the ad, the new brand, the sale. One line. Hang on to it. You'll need it at the end.

Every bike shop owner already knows the four kinds of problems. You learned them at the repair stand, not from a management book.

A simple problem: the tire is low. Pump it up. The answer is obvious, and anyone on staff can handle it.

A complicated problem: the tire keeps going flat. It could be a nail in the casing, a burr on the rim, a bad valve, or pinch flats from low pressure. The answer exists, but it takes someone who knows where to look.

A complex problem: a customer is back for the fourth flat this month. You've replaced the tube and the rim tape, added sealant, and gone tubeless. It keeps happening. The cause turns out to be several things at once: goathead season on a new commute route, pressure that never gets checked because the pump sits behind the car, and the same curb hop every morning. Fix one and the others shift. No single repair solves it. You try something, watch what happens, and adjust. The cause only makes sense looking back.

A chaotic problem: you're descending at 35 mph and the front tire blows. You don't diagnose. You get the bike stopped. Figuring out why comes later.

These four categories come from Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, a way of matching your response to the kind of problem in front of you. The labels matter less than the response each one demands, because the wrong response makes things worse. Pumping up a tire with a nail in it buys you a few miles. Running experiments at 35 mph with a blown front tire is a bad plan.

At the repair stand, nobody mixes these up. In the business, almost everyone does.

Look at how the industry handles an overstock. Brands go direct for plenty of reasons, but this one is familiar. A brand has too many bikes in a warehouse, and the diagnosis feels simple: we need to sell more. So someone pulls the lever. Mark it down, open another channel, ship to anyone with a checkout page. Units move. Problem solved.

Except the problem just moved. That bike used to leave the warehouse on a pallet with dozens of others, all headed to one address. Now it gets boxed, labeled, and shipped one at a time. Nobody fit the rider to the bike or explained what they were buying, so the questions go straight to the brand's phone line. Wrong size, confusing setup, a noise nobody can identify. Some of those bikes come back. Nobody knows the exact rate for bikes, but nobody expects it to be zero. Across all online retail, nearly one in five sales, an estimated 19.3%, will be returned this year. Every bike that comes back is open-box inventory the brand already discounted once, and the only way to move it is a deeper markdown.

The bikes that stay out there don't fare much better. Some shops won't touch a bike they didn't sell. Others charge enough for assembly that the discount disappears. Some customers build it themselves: brakes rub, the headset is loose, the front wheel isn't seated right. That bike ends up on your repair stand, or on a neighborhood street where it isn't safe to ride. The brand solved what looked like a simple problem and created two complex ones, one for itself and one for a shop somewhere.

It's easy to spot when someone else does it.

There's a line usually credited to Einstein: given an hour to solve a problem, spend 55 minutes defining it and five minutes on the solution. Most bad fixes aren't bad solutions. They're good solutions to the wrong problem. "Sell more" is a five-minute definition. It points straight at the easiest lever, whether that's a markdown, an ad, or a new brand, and skips the question of what's actually broken. A simple fix aimed at a complex problem doesn't fail right away. It fails later, somewhere else, usually on someone else's desk.

Now look at your own last move. Revenue was down, or flat, or just not where it needed to be. The fix seemed obvious: more customers. So you ran the ad, picked up the new brand, or put something on sale.

Each of those assumes the problem is simple. Not enough people are coming through the door, so bring more of them in. If the shop makes good money on every customer it already has, that works. If it doesn't, more customers just means more of whatever isn't working.

Pouring more customers into a broken business doesn't make it profitable. Neither does more inventory, a different brand, or a markdown.

Here's how it plays out. The ad works, and people show up. The service department was already two weeks out, and now it's three. Rushed work comes back, the comebacks jump the line, and everyone else waits longer. Staff who were stretched in March are worn out by May. The sale works too, and now customers know you run sales, so next year they wait for one. The new brand fills a wall, but it brings a minimum order, another rep, and product knowledge the staff doesn't have yet, while last year's inventory is still sitting there. Revenue goes up. The bank balance doesn't follow.

None of those levers were wrong on their own. They were simple fixes aimed at a problem that isn't simple.

Most of what's actually broken in a shop falls into the other two categories, and each needs a different response.

The complicated part is the math. What does the shop actually make on a tune-up once you count real tech time instead of the time on the menu? What's the margin on accessories compared to bikes and service? How long does inventory sit before it sells? These questions have answers. They take someone willing to dig into the numbers. You can't experiment your way to a labor rate.

The complex part is people. Why a customer bought once and never came back. Why one tech is fast and consistent and another isn't. How your customers shop now, and what they expect when they walk in. No expert has that answer, because the cause is several things interacting at once, like the commuter with the fourth flat. You change one thing, watch it for a few weeks, and adjust. You can't analyze your way to a loyal customer.

That doesn't mean an ad can't be one of those tests. The difference is size. A probe is small, measured, and cheap to walk back: a few hundred dollars aimed at one kind of customer, tracked for 30 days. A $5,000 campaign or a new brand with a minimum order is a bet. Bets belong on problems you've already defined.

Owners get stuck when they mix these up. They build a spreadsheet for a people problem, or they try a new idea every week on a math problem that has one right answer.

Snowden's framework has a fifth state that gets less attention than the other four: confusion. It's where you are when you don't know which kind of problem you have. Nobody likes being there, so we leave fast, usually by reaching for whatever feels familiar. The owner who came up through sales reaches for more sales. The one who came up through the service department reaches for a better workflow. The familiar lever feels like progress because it's something to do. The real risk is a fast decision made before anyone defined the problem.

At the repair stand, you'd never pump up a tire with a nail in the casing and send the customer out the door. You'd find the nail. The business deserves the same 55 minutes.

Now think about the last lever you pulled. If you wrote it down, look at it.

What problem did you tell yourself that lever would fix?

Write that problem in one sentence. Then decide which of the four types it is. If you can't tell, you're in confusion, and that's the first thing to fix.

Then send it to me at chad@ratchetco.com The lever and the one-sentence problem, nothing else. I won't diagnose your business from one sentence. That would break every rule in this piece. I'll send back the three questions I'd ask before deciding which type it is. If the answers need a real conversation, we'll set up a 20-minute call.

Do it before you plan a holiday sale or sign a pre-season order. Both of those are levers too.

Source: National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, 2025 Retail Returns Landscape. https://nrf.com/research/2025-retail-returns-landscape