A Visit From Andy
One of the coffee shops I own is nestled inside the aisles of the awesome Piermont Bicycle Connection, a shop that carries bikes from Cervelo, Cannondale, Scott and others. At Interbike this year Piermont and BMC got together and now the shop is carrying the full range of BMC bikes again.
It’s not uncommon for the sales reps to show up for meetings (and we’ve got a nice large community table for them to use) but imagine my surprise when a visit from the BMC reps this week yielded not only the local sales guys but the owners of BMC, including Andy Rihs.
Now it might not seem surprising for the owner of a company to pop into a dealer, but in the case of Rihs, I found it particularly impressive. After all, some media outlets report his net worth at more than 6.5 billion (US) and he runs a handful of large corporations. This, to some degree, would be like Bill Gates stopping by a Best Buy to see how Windows 8 was doing.
Okay, BMC dealerships aren’t as common as big box computer stores, but you’d think (or I would have up until he walked in) that someone with so much to do would delegate shop visits to someone at a lower pay grade.
Also impressive to me was how he (and the whole staff) took the time to say hello to everyone working in the store and shaking everyone’s hand.
But then again you don’t make a lot of money running companies by letting the little details slide by.
(Note: Despite the grumy look on his face, Rihs was actually jovial, funny and smiling from ear-to-ear.)