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Time is a precious commodity and Lou Kozar can help you save some. A bicycle enthusiast since he was five years old, Lou's business is a way, he says, of doing what he loves to do and getting paid for it.
Kozar's two year-old Stamford-based bicycle repair shop, Cycles on Call, is a sprawling 1,600 square-foot jungle of tires, gears and chassis. It is also the realization of a life-long dream, which he said, was to "take an extremely seasonal business and find a profitable, cost-efficient way to make it work year-round." He's done that by offering a unique service not unlike your local dry cleaner's full-service approach to dirty shirts: "I pick up bikes from clients in the morning, repair them in my shop and then return them, usually within 48 hours, in the afternoon."
Without the expensive overhead of running a retail store, which he did for more than 10 years at Better Bike Center in Norwalk, Cycles on Call instead focuses on a critical detail: keeping those already purchased wheels on the road -- or off it. He took the model of the "mobile bike shop" and slightly modified it so that he is mobile but the shop remains in a fixed location. This provides him ample space to work on multiple bikes. And to further streamline the system, clients can make appointments for pickups and repair from his website.
But just because his door-to-door service is topnotch, it doesn't mean he only fixes high-end bikes. In fact it was during his own early childhood that the bike bug bit him: "I started riding when I was five years-old and fell in love with it, so I understand the importance of maintaining and repairing every person's bike, from that of a beginner to that of a tri-athlete," he says.
Hardcore biker and longtime client Andrea Williamson-Hughes couldn't keep riding without Lou: "The fact that you can make arrangements online and he picks up and delivers to your home is a godsend for people like me who work long hours, have limited free time and who want to spend their weekends riding and not dragging their bikes to and from a shop," she said.
Lou, who lives in New Canaan with his bicycle-riding wife, Ann, and four year-old son, Jacob (who rides a two-wheeler without training wheels), is unsurprisingly passionate about two-wheeling. "Bicycling gives you an incredible feeling of liberty," he says. "It's a symbol of freedom that dovetails into my independent personality."
He likes to take weekends off from work to spend time with his family. Any guesses as to what they all do together?
Lou Kozar can be reached at (203) 274-2560. Or, go to cyclesoncall.com http://cyclesoncall.com/index.php
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