WORKSHOP
‘NO MATTER YOUR SIZE OR SCALE, YOU’RE USING OUR PLATFORM TO RUN THE WORKSHOP ELEMENT AND YOU’RE SAVING A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF TIME DOING THAT.’
Officially unveiled at the Rapha Store in London by Ned Boulting and David Millar in April, Workshop has been built as a user-friendly system, tailored exclusively for bike mechanics, to cater for those who lack the resources and time for complicated software and extensive training. “Many still rely on Excel spreadsheets, paper diaries,
Facebook pages or websites for bookings, which is a very inefficient way to run their business,” explains Fieldsend. “We initially built a booking system beta in 2022. It lacked a lot of features and didn’t really solve the pain points that we needed for these guys to really get a lot of benefit from it. “We used that as a baseline to really understand how these businesses were working.” Workshop is designed to professionalise any bike repair business by offering an end-to-end solution for business management. It eliminates paper booking systems and other archaic processes for invoicing and payment processing, whilst keeping tabs on inventory and stock taking. It also includes detailed service reporting to customers, to
keep them informed and up to date with the progress of their bike’s service. “Traditionally, you agree the service fee and obviously there’s parts to be added,” says Fieldsend “Usually a bike shop will ring the customer up and say ‘these are the options and this is how much it’ll cost’ or they might send a WhatsApp message or an email. “We have built a way so that the bike shop doesn’t have to
go to that length and spend a load of time on the phone with in-app part authorisations.”
These authorisations see the mechanic load the necessary
part into the system and the cost incurred. The customer gets a notification and can choose to approve or decline the repair. Throughout a testing period of 5,150 jobs it is estimated that, on a major service, the system can save a mechanic an average of 10 to 15 minutes. Fieldsend adds: “After the service is done, the mechanic sends the invoice directly generated from our system and it can be paid through there. “So rather than having to stitch together a load of different things, it streamlines the whole process.”
Additional features According to Fieldsend, around 60% of the businesses on Bikebook are mobile in some sense.
www.bikebiz.com
This includes offering a collection or drop-off service or a fully mobile mechanic that will servicing at the house of a client “Obviously, they need to be super careful when they’re doing that because they could waste a lot of time driving around,” he says.
“That means spending more money on petrol or fuel, and increased downtime. So we have inbuilt travel planners in our system. “For the job that they’ve got planned for that day, they can quickly find the most efficient route, send it to their phone, and know how much time they’re actually driving around so they can use that in their reporting.” Another of the biggest features is the automated CRM built
to encourage customer retention and repeat business. Within the aforementioned testing period, businesses using
Workshop increased customer retention by 22%. “Everything is in one place,” says Fieldsend. “You can access it wherever you are, know the customer database and track all the service history.” Bikebook currently has around 1,100 traders on its platform, of all different sizes and utilising the system in a variety of ways.
It’s this diversity in business type that has helped inform much of the software built into Workshop. “It’s only when you start speaking to them and you ask questions about what they’re doing and how they’re operating that you really find out how these businesses are run,” explains Fieldsend. “It’s pretty simple. It’s not a drastic change. It’s just a case of organisation, managing some for them that they should do but don’t, and then automating some of the stuff that they’re trying to do manually already.” Fieldsend recalls one conversation with a Scotland-based client who had been utilising a much more manual set-up for reporting and invoicing, prior to switching over to Workshop. “Essentially, he had a Google sheet form, where he broke down everything that he’d done, and then for each customer he would build out exactly what it was with comments in each box.
“He’d share access to the customer so they could see it and then it’d be an invoice at the bottom with the price. “Then he would hope they’d pay and then delete it and do the next one.” Bikebook has also been working with Lee Niven, owner of Otec Bikes and director of Spokes People Cytech, to support
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