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Monday Q&A: Hate BP, buy a scooter?
Scooter thefts on the rise in Richmond
No free rides: Overhauling a scooter biz

Monday Q&A: Hate BP, buy a scooter?

June 14, 2010 by Aaron Kremer
Other than walking or riding a bike, riding a scooter/moped is the most fuel efficient way to commute around town. For Scoot Richmond, a scooter retailer in the Manchester section of Richmond, a spike in gas prices led to a boom in sales in 2008. But then sales shrank.

Now owner Chelsea Lahmers is wondering if hatred of big oil on account of the BP disaster will lead to a noticeable spike. Plus she’s a few years more experienced. And after getting past a thieving employee, she has expanded the lineup of bikes by adding the classic Italian make Vespa, and hopes to ride a new wave of scooter enthusiasm.

Late last week BizSense chatted with Lahmers about entrepreneurship and the challenge of trying to time changes in consumer tastes.

Below is an edited transcript.

Richmond BizSense: What’s new?

Cheslea Lahmers: Well, we became the Vespa and Piaggio dealer for Central Virginia.

We had vintage and occasionally used Vespas, and we serviced Vespas, but now having Vespa / Piaggio adds a whole new dimension to the show room. That brings a lot of folks in who may not have known we exist. Vespa is the “Xerox” what people think of when they think of scooters. A lot of customers coming in now who searched online for Vespas and hadn’t heard of us.

RBS: Vespa is one of the best-known names. How long did you work on getting that?

CL: Five years. There were three dealers in Central Virginia. At the end of 2009, all three of those shops told Vespa it wasn’t working out. But it was challenging getting a hold of someone at Vespa.

RBS: How is business?

CL: Definitely better than 2009. We also had a pretty decent May and sold 19 or 20 bikes.

RBS: I seemed to see more scooters and hear more about them when gas prices spiked. Was that true?

CL: Yes. We would be super happy to see higher gas. It makes people come in.

But Gas prices are lower now and that means folks that got a scooter in 2008 aren’t riding it as much. But they are coming in for service.

Another thing we’re seeing is that some of the people who bought bikes in 2008 are selling them, and that means there are some cheap bikes available. We then service those bikes.

RBS: Scooters strike me as the kind of product that could become wildly popular out of the blue, kind of like in the book “The Tipping Point”. How do you create demand?

CL: The more people that ride, the more people see them riding and see them enjoying scooters. We’re also fostering a local scooter club. And we are still working on ways to do it.

This has been a hard business from day one, but now more people have reasonable expectations of the joy and savings of scooters.

RBS: Do you think the BP oil leak will lead to sales?

CL: What happens to oil always brings a few folks in. People say, “Screw this, I don’t want to be part of this.” So yes, I think it will. It makes people sick to their stomachs. Seeing that happen, and then spending $50 on a tank of gas, it makes you ill.

RBS: You had a bookkeeper who stole from you. Have you recovered?

CL: Well, 2009 was not a good year for power sports. A lot of dealerships around the country found that they needed to make some really tough decisions how to spend their money.

The theft issue on our specific case made it so we have those decisions ahead of time. We were watching every number that came through the door so as not to bleed cash flow in any place. A lot of places didn’t realize they needed to make adjustments and used up their whole cushioning. In a way, that almost made us more ready to handle challenges by 2009 and the world’s worst winter in 2010.

Aaron Kremer is the BizSense editor. Please send news tips to Editor@richmondbizsense.com.

Original Link:http://www.richmondbizsense.com/2010/06/14/monday-qa-hate-bp-buy-a-scooter/

Scooter thefts on the rise in Richmond

Posted: Apr 23, 2010 6:24 PM EDT
Updated: Apr 23, 2010 6:24 PM EDT

By Rachel DePompa

RICHMOND, VA (WWBT) – A crime alert out of Richmond tonight. If you own a scooter in the city beware. Thefts of the light weight vehicles are on the rise.

They navigate city streets pretty easily and are growing in popularity. But scooters are also popular targets of thieves, especially in Richmond’s Church hill and Fan districts.

Richmond police says in Church Hill alone 11 scooters have been stolen in the last two months. Last year at this time, there were only 3 scooter thefts in the Hill.

“We’ve had a few reports where people actually see who’s stealing them and they are mostly young adults, teenagers mostly,” said Richmond Police Lt. James Laino

Chelsea Lahmer owns Scoot Richmond and gets phone calls almost daily about stolen scooters.

“The folks that are stealing them are generally stealing them with the purpose of resale. They will paint the bikes, they will take any defining features off,” said Lahmer.

You should still take a picture of your bike and know the year, make and model. Police say, don’t park it in front of your house, hide it in the back if possible and always lock it to a stationary object.

“They don’t weigh very much, about 200 pounds. So 2 or 3 people can just grab it and walk away with it. And if it’s not locked up they can just push it away,” Laino said.

Never lock the front tire, it can be removed.

“Anywhere that you can lock to the frame of the scooter is something that is going to be the safest way to lock it,” said Lahmer.

And the best place to secure the lock is actually the back tire.

“Now this looks a lot like what you did with the front wheel except its very challenging to take the back wheel off,” she said.

And most thieves it’s a crime of opportunity. Again, always record your VIN number for police, just in case

Original link: http://www.nbc12.com/Global/story.asp?S=12366136

No free rides: Overhauling a scooter biz

Our Makeover experts help a Virginia scooter shop find more clients and better staffers.

By Phaedra Hise
Last Updated: October 6, 2009: 6:13 PM ET

RICHMOND (Fortune Small Business) — Outside a brick building in a drab industrial neighborhood at the edge of town, a kaleidoscope of color flashes in the early sun. It’s the lineup of scooters that marks the location of Scoot Richmond. Inside, owner Chelsea Lahmers bounds around the store’s large, open loft space answering questions and adjusting displays. Her short red hair is tousled from her scooter ride to work.

Before opening Scoot Richmond in mid-2007, Lahmers, 32, ran a mail-order business that specialized in vintage scooter parts. “It was nearly impossible to make a profit in mail order,” she says. “All my money went into inventory.”

She phased out that business when she opened Scoot Richmond. Today the retail store sells two brands of new scooters, Genuine Scooter and SYM Scooters, as well as stylish scooter accessories and vintage scooters dating from the 1960s through the 1980s. The company’s repair shop handles mostly new scooter maintenance, although each year it makes use of Lahmers’s remaining vintage parts inventory to perform about five time-consuming restorations of engines and bodies on old scooters.

For the complete article, follow this link: http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/05/smallbusiness/scoot_richmond_scooters.fsb/index.htm