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Balance Bicycles: Striking The Perfect Balance
Posted by: Necci – Mar 25, 2011
When Greg Milefsky combined his love of two-wheel commuting with his business degree from VCU, the idea of the perfect neighborhood bike shop was born. “I didn’t want to graduate and have a regular job. I wanted to make a business,” he shares as he sits surrounded by walls of bikes and parts in his downtown neighborhood shop, Balance Bicycles. An Arlington native who fell in love with commuter transportation during his teenage employment at a local sandwich shop, Greg reminisces on his first commuter bike, a department-store special that kept his wages in his pocket. “It was a cheap way to get to work. I kept that Pacific Python up through college.”
When Greg enrolled in VCU’s business school, bike commuting became a necessity on his student budget. Along the way, he began buying bikes and improving them, then reselling them. “I started flipping bikes more and more as a side thing. Then, as I made more money, I could buy better bikes, fix them, flip them, and around my junior year I realized that I could take this to the next level and start a bike shop.”
With a great business mind behind his idea, he started his research during his junior year, speaking in depth on the idea to his mentors in his biking circles. By his graduation, he had the business components in place, and just needed a location. When the zoning on what seemed like the perfect business location in the Museum District fell through, Greg continued his search for a space that was not only affordable but also closer to VCU. With the general idea of operating east of Belvidere, he found a space on Franklin Street that again left him searching for a location, after zoning ordinances halted the lease signing.
Greg’s search led him to a small storefront resting on the corner of Brook Road and Adams Street, in the Jackson Ward neighborhood. What Greg didn’t realize was that he was joining the legacy of small community businesses that had resided in the exact location. His business’s home had first been established in the neighborhood’s pioneering days, prior to the gentrification of Jackson Ward, by a dedicated tailor. Then later, it was a small gallery, and most recently, a neighborhood yoga studio. What Greg was bringing with his bike shop was a new legacy of service to the Downtown community.
The shop serves much of the VCU student community, as well as a large demographic of the working class commuter community. Here commuters find respite in keeping their primary mode of transportation reliable, as well as professional workmanship at a reasonable price. For the working class commuter, time is of the essence if they are on their way to work, and Greg’s attention to his walk-in customers has helped establish this loyal clientele.
As he sits at his bicycle repair stand working on a customer’s bike, a local commuter brings his bike into the shop seeking help. Greg immediately begins to remove his current project from the stand and, after speaking with the customer for a few minutes, has the bike up in the stand and is working on the repair. A few minutes later, as the cash register rings up the $11.62, the patron smiles with satisfaction. He leaves the store singing praises of the good vibe of the shop, and of what Greg is doing for the community.
The business name truly proved to be a summary of its first year of operations. Being very pragmatic about the business, Greg acknowledges his many mistakes, which gained him extensive business wisdom to allow further balance in his daily operations. He describes it lightly as “tons of paperwork, hours of establishing vendor relationships, and endless compatibility issues.” He is still working on striking the perfect balance between his own riding and developing the business, and sees the upcoming year as one of opportunity and expansion.
With a specific inventory line in the forefront of his plans, combined with the goal of hiring a mechanic, Greg will be able to focus on specialized wheel building and further growth of the business. With daily hours of 10am-7pm weekdays and 11am-4pm on Saturdays, Balance is the perfect place to go for a quick fix, an upgrade, or a new ride.
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Balance Bicycles
312 Brook Road
(804) 918-1175
www.balance-bicycles.com
By Jaime Turko
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