When I joined EO New York in December 2014, Ryan Zagata was one of the first people I got to know. I met him at the group’s holiday party, and we hit it off instantly.
Ryan was a high-performing software sales guy, living in Manhattan, when he and his wife, Thea, faced the fact that raising a family in Manhattan just wasn’t going to make economic sense. For the kind of home they wanted, they were going to have to relocate over the East River to Brooklyn. Ryan loved the energy and vibrancy of life in Manhattan and says he left kicking and screaming.
But then something interesting happened. Within a week of moving to Brooklyn, he had fallen in love. Brooklyn had all the energy, the culture, the restaurants, everything he’d loved about Manhattan, but it also had a small-city, close-knit-community feel that reminded him of the neighborhoods of Syracuse, in upstate New York, where he grew up.
He spent his first few months there walking an eighteen-block radius around his home, getting the feel for his new neighborhood, checking out every nook and cranny. When he wanted to extend that reach, he bought a bike, which enabled him to expand his explorations to a thirty-block and then forty-block radius.
“That bicycle became a way to meet new people,” he says, “to find new restaurants, scout out new parks where we would take our children as our family grew—to get around, see things, experience things, connect with more people and more neighborhoods.”
This was 2008. Over the next few years, as the country plunged into recession, Ryan found himself enjoying his software business less and less. When Thea, a publicist by profession, started her own baking business, Ryan was intrigued. He’d always had an engineering bent; when he was a kid, he loved to take things apart and see how they worked. In college, that morphed into an interest in business; he would read copies of business magazines cover to cover, seeing if he could take companies apart to see what made them work or, if they were not successful, what made them fail to work. Now that interest surfaced again. Soon Thea told him, “Ryan, you’re way more interested in this business than I am. You need to start your own company!”
Ryan liked the idea. The question was, his own business doing what?
In January 2011, he and Thea took a little time off to do some traveling overseas. While in Vietnam, he saw people getting around on simple, no-frills bikes, and he commented to Thea, “See, that’s the bike I really wanted. No bells and whistles, just something simple and serviceable—not for racing, not for cross-country biking, just for getting around town and seeing neighborhoods.”
A month later, back in the States, he incorporated his bicycle business, and it took off like a shot.
His first year, asked by his insurance agent to make a sales projection for insurance purposes, he said, “I don’t know. Seventy-five thousand dollars?” It seemed an enormous goal. They finished out the year at over $200,000 and have been growing ever since. Brooklyn Bicycle Company has become a very cool brand, with its products showcased as fashion accessories in Vogue (in a 2012 issue, Ryan’s “Willow blue” bike was touted as the ideal match for a Thakoon Panichgul dress; go figure), written up in the New York Times, featured in the Museum of Modern Art, and spotted with various New York celebrities astride them.
But what’s interesting to me—and the reason I picked Ryan to write about in this chapter—is how his core values have shaped the evolution of the company.
At first, his plan was to sell bikes online, direct to consumer. But bicycles are not like furniture, where it’s no big deal if the consumer messes it up a little. If you don’t assemble a bicycle properly, there can be serious consequences. There were already plenty of companies selling bikes online for customer assembly, and Ryan saw bikes on the street that had been put together with the front wheel on backward so the fork was pointing the wrong way. It made him cringe. “You don’t want someone rolling out into traffic on a bike that hasn’t been put together correctly,” he says.
So rather than the direct-to-consumer model, he focused on building a network of dealers. When you bought a Brooklyn bike, Ryan would look for the nearest dealer to you, ship it there, and pay that shop to assemble it for you, to make sure you got a good experience. Which meant that Brooklyn Bicycle Company began developing a whole web of relationships—partnerships, really—with bicycle dealers all over the region, and soon all over the country. Beyond simply selling bicycles, Ryan’s business became a vehicle to help all these dealers build their businesses.
At the same time, he found that what he loved most about his company was watching the people he hired grow in their roles, professionally and personally as well as financially. He tended to hire people who were young, one or two years out of college—very green, very hungry, and very eager.
“I couldn’t throw lavish amounts of money or big chunks of equity at someone,” he says, “or feed them the story that we were going to be the next Bloomberg. What I told them was that they would have the opportunity to grow here—to be involved in the decision-making process and play a broad role in the direction of the company, not just come in and do a job.”
For example, he hired a young woman named Emily Rose to work in operations. She was passionate, enthusiastic, and crackerjack smart. Ryan was looking around to hire an experienced marketing person. Instead, one day he turned to Emily and said, “Hey, are you interested in marketing?” She was. “Cool,” said Ryan. “You are now doing marketing. Let’s get you some courses so you can learn more about it. We’ll figure it out together.”
Ryan didn’t know much more about marketing than she did, but he encouraged her to find a mentor, a director of marketing at a bigger company they admired, and she took some courses, too. She has flourished in that role, and Ryan says it was one of the best business decisions he’s ever made.
Ryan’s company plowed along for more than two years without having a clearly defined mission. Not that he hadn’t tried to pin one down. He knew as well as anyone that every business needs a compelling mission, and he’d tried many times to articulate one, but each attempt fizzled. He came up with statements that looked good on paper but just didn’t resonate.
One day an entrepreneur friend started quizzing him as to what had led him to start the company. What made him want a bicycle in the first place? Suddenly it clicked—and Ryan had his company’s mission. Just six words: “We connect people with their neighborhoods.”
Those six words transformed his business. Suddenly aspects of the operation that he had wrestled with for months sorted themselves out, guided by the clarity that statement provided. Lingering brand ambiguities cleared up, new approaches to marketing suggested themselves, and he saw new strategies for how to engage with his company’s dealers.
“I realized that our company wasn’t about bicycles,” he says. “It was about helping people build relationships with the other people around them—their neighborhoods.”
Of course, you could drive around. But in a car, as Ryan points out, you tend to hop in and flip on the radio, and before you know it, you’ve arrived at your destination, without a thought to anything you passed by in the process. You could also walk, as he did in his first few months in Brooklyn. But walking limits your reach. Riding a bike provides the ability to interact (like walking) as well as extend and vary your routes (like a car), which adds up to a unique experience you can’t get any other way. It lets you connect with your neighborhood.
Ryan did not come from a family of businesspeople; his father was a public school teacher and basketball coach, and his mother, a pediatric nurse. I mention that I detect the DNA of both in his business model: the coach shows up in how he builds up and roots for everyone on his team—employees, dealers, and customers—and there’s that nurse’s genuine sense of nurturing underlying everything he does.
“I guess that’s true,” he says. “The world has become very transactional: you click a few buttons; the next day a T-shirt shows up at your door.” Ryan says one of his goals at Brooklyn Bicycle Company is to create more experiences that are transformational and not simply transactional.
“When someone calls our office,” he adds, “there’s no chance they’ll go to another brand. They will never buy another bicycle from anyone else, because of the experience they had with us. And that’s not ‘brand loyalty’; it’s the sense they get that we genuinely care about them, that someone’s got their back. That if something goes wrong, we’ll be there to pick them up—and whenever something goes right, we’ll be there to high-five them.”