Chad Pickard has worked in the bicycle industry since 1988 — as a mechanic, store manager, and eventually owner of a three-store specialty bike retailer. In 2019, he built a five-year plan to that gave him the option to exit. In 2023, the right buyer appeared. He took it as a signal and sold a year early.

Most of the retailers he works with are good operators dealing with a broken system: fragmented data, unclear roles, service departments that leak revenue, and a channel that rewards inventory over execution. Chad's job is to name what's actually broken and help fix it — without turning the shop into a consulting dependency.

Since joining the NBDA board in 2018, he has worked directly with more than 100 specialty retailers across the USA and Canada. He holds a Retul Master Fitter certification and has spent enough time on both sides of the service counter to know the difference between a training problem and a systems problem.

If your shop is underperforming and you're not sure why, that's usually where to start.