Pat Cunnane has grown his bicycle business from $8 million to $107 million per year since 2001. He’s the President and part owner of Advanced Sports International, whose brands include Fuji, Breezer, SE, Kestral and Oval and whose Australian distributor is Oceania Bicycles.
This is one half of a two part interview with Pat that Bicycling Trade conducted at the Taipei Cycle show. In the other half, which you’ll find in our Sep/Oct/Nov print edition of Bicycling Trade due out this week, you can read more detail about his company’s amazing growth trajectory and reasons behind this success.
Meanwhile the article below focuses on some of Pat’s other cycling involvements that are certainly no less impressive than his business growth.
Pat Cunnane lives and works in Philadelphia on the east coast of the USA where ASI has its global headquarters. The USA may be where he drew examples for this interview, but many of his comments are equally relevant to Australia.
Mention the words ‘bicycle advocacy’ to many Australian bicycle industry members and their response if often underwhelming. Some simply don’t see its relevance to their business.
But this attitude is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, from Pat’s viewpoint.
“Bike advocacy is important work,” he stated strongly. “I don’t even excuse anybody in the bike business for not being involved in it, because it’s the future of their livelihood.
“You’re not doing it because you’re nice. You’re doing it because you want to survive!
“Kids are not riding bikes and they’re our future,” Pat continued.
“In the US and many, many countries it’s a complete disaster, the physical activity part of health. I don’t want to get on my soap box, but what I’ve learned in this world is this… There’s a term called the ‘built environment’, but a lot of people don’t pay attention to it.
With cars a lot of the time we’ve changed the built environment.”
Pat then gave examples of how the built environment, which in Australia might more commonly be referred to in terms of ‘town planning’, ‘Council zoning’ or ‘urban design’ has directly impacted upon the level of cycling activity.
“I rode my bike to school,” Pat recalled. “I got a job in the bike business because I parked my bike in front of the school (across from a bike shop). Now we’ve moved schools out of the centre of towns far away because the land was cheaper but the unintended consequences of that move were we now bus the kids. We didn’t connect them with sidewalks (footpaths).
They’re not, not walking to school because they don’t want to walk to school, they’re not walking to school because it’s not convenient to walk to school.
Until we reverse that and change the zoning laws and where we put schools and everything else, we’re never really going to fix the problem. Because people by nature do what’s easier.
But now planners understand that (urban population) density is great. People like density and the tax base with density is better. The infrastructure cost to upkeep high density areas is better. So it makes sense that that shift happens in places like the US and I would imagine Australia it’s no different. It’s sprawl!”
Bike Mode Share and the Bottom Line
“In Europe they understood this back in the 1970’s,” Pat continued. “They decided through their policies what they wanted. They have high gas (petrol) taxes.
“Mode share is totally different. Germany has 15% bike mode share, and here’s why this matters to the bike trade…
“In the US, 1% or less of trips are by bike and 20% of bikes are sold through specialty bicycle retailers.
“In Germany 15% of trips are by bike and 50% of bikes are sold by specialty retailers.
“In the Netherlands 25% of trips are by bike and 80% of bikes are sold through bicycle specialty retailers.
“There’s not more bikes being sold, but they’re being sold at a higher level because people use them. The more people rely on their bikes, the more they value it and the more they value the retailer that offers it to them. It’s not being magnanimous, it’s being realistic!
“Let’s get people to ride bikes. They’ll buy better bikes and we’ll have a better industry.”
Pat’s logic is hard to dispute, but many bike industry members reading this article might say, ‘I’d love to do more in bike advocacy, but I’m too busy working’. How has Pat managed to do both?
“I make it a priority,” he said. “I think you could say that about eating. If you want to nourish your business, do bike advocacy!
“You won’t survive unless you do the work or help others do it for you. The main reason people don’t ride bikes is because they’re concerned and afraid.
“The people that we already have as customers in the specialty part of the market, we don’t have to worry about them. They love bikes. What we have to worry about if we want to grow this business is the people that don’t ride. We understand why they don’t. There’s been ample research done. They don’t because they’re concerned.
“What are they concerned about? They’re concerned about getting killed by a car, getting hit by a car. We have to deal with that.
“I think that the other things are lined up, if consumers, people, and voters want safe places to walk and ride they’ll get it, but they have to be able to see it. It’s like the movie Field of Dreams. If you build it they will ride on it.
“You can see that in New York City. There’s no place that was more scary to think about riding a bike than New York City, pre bikeshare,” said Pat, referring to the hugely successful Citibike scheme, which has had over 11 million hires in its first 15 months of operation.
“Now it’s not intimidating to ride a bike in New York City. I don’t know what the numbers are off the top of my head but that’s what’s going to move this needle. It’s people looking at cycling and thinking, ‘It’s not an unsafe activity for people that look ridiculous in lycra. It’s something I can do!’ Once we get that, then our business will really be on stable ground.”
When Pat says that he’s made cycling advocacy a priority, he can point to a long list of directorships, event participation and sponsorships to back up his statement. We’ll now look at just a few of these.
Pat Cunnane has been a director of People for Bikes, as it’s now called, for over 10 years. This is the equivalent of Australia’s Cycling Promotion Fund, only far larger. In that time and including the People for Bikes Foundation, which has a separate board of directors, not including Pat, it’s grown from US$1 million to about US$9 million annual turnover and has developed highly effective strategies to get more people on bikes. What lessons could the Australian bike industry learn from People for Bikes?
“Advocacy is a combination of competitors cooperating, money and momentum,” summarised Pat. “You need the money and the people to create any sort of momentum.”
Advocacy does not have to be all dour and serious. Pat’s also the six times winner of Philadelphia Commuter Race.
“It’s a race with a bicycle against a taxi and a train or trolley (tram) or a subway, depending on what year it is, and a bus,” Pat explained. “You all leave at the same spot and you all have to follow all the traffic rules to get to the finish line and I’ve won! (laughs) Normally by a pretty big margin.
“One year it was a three mile straight shot which started at a subway stop and the person got onto the subway right away and I barely beat her.
“It gets good media. I’d like to see it go a bit longer and finish up in an office because of the whole parking thing lets you take advantage of parking a bike.”
Another Philadelphia initiative that could work equally well in Australia is the Cadence Cycling Foundation.
“The Cadence Cycling Foundation was the brainchild of Ryan Oelkers,” Pat explained, “who is a former professional cyclist and Jay Snider who owns the Cadence Cycling shop in Philadelphia. Jay’s father owns the Philadelphia Flyers (professional ice hockey team) and his father started an organisation for ice hockey that exposed ice hockey to under privileged children.
“Cadence’s original idea was to find the next Olympian, the next American champion from the inner city (poor areas).
“They came to me at a trade show and said we’re doing this and we’re based in Philadelphia and I said, ‘Okay, we’re in!’ and I ended up getting on their board.
“What quickly happened was when they started working with the schools, they realised that they were getting some decent cyclists out of it, but what they were really getting was transformational stories about children.
“They had kids lose 70 pounds (31 kg) and go from pre diabetic, not doing well at school to graduating and going onto college and being fit. So the focus shifted from trying to find the next Mark Gorski (Fuji Bicycles sponsored former USA Olympic Gold Medal Track Cyclist) to trying to figure out how to expand this thing into and expose cycling to more inner city kids.”
Through the Cadence Cycling Foundation, Pat has even more closely linked his business with the cause of growing cycling.
“We work with the City of Philadelphia as frequently as we can,” he said. “We got involved with a summer program with them where we would bring kids up to our office with the idea we would show them the different jobs that are available in the bicycle industry
“We have a very diverse workforce and our people would say what their life story was and how they got the job they had, to put into these kids heads the types of opportunities that are in the bike business.
“We were also then going to teach them how to fix a flat and what occurred to me was to ask them, ‘How many of you ride bikes?’ which I thought was a natural question. Or, ‘What kind of bike do you have?’ Out of 17 or 19 kids or whatever it was, only one of them knew how to ride a bike! So I realised for the first time in my life that there is population that bikes are just not part of their growing up.
“In suburban USA whether kids ride it or not, they own a bike. In urban America, (the inner city, which unlike Australia, is where the poor, rundown houses are in the case of dysfunctional USA cities) many kids don’t own and are not exposed to a bike.
“That was amazing. It struck me. I thought it was a problem because so much of my life was transformed by the independence that riding a bike gave me.
“So Cadence was different. In 2013 it merged with the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia, which has a greater mission. It’s a program that they can help but they can also get it into more schools.
“I hope that it can now be a model that can be given to other cities that have a good local advocacy group. To get kids exposed to cycling and to hear their stories, it’s transformative!
“What I am more convinced has the most legs is Active Schools and Safe Routes to School, which actually gets people thinking about getting more physical activity into their lives.”
It’s Not Just About the Bike
“My passion for cycling advocacy has morphed into a real awareness of physical activity,” Pat continued. “Mostly with kids, because you can influence them and they can influence their parents. We have to get them exposed to think active.
“Because of what I noticed about inner city kids, you have to say, ‘If they didn’t ever get exposed to it, or if they are just unhealthy, it doesn’t work. We’ve got to start with kids and get them walking. If they ride a bike great! But if they walk, at least they are going to be more interested in riding a bike.
“So I’m involved in the World Federation of Sporting Goods. I’m on their Physical Activity Committee and that crosses over with the big sports brands like Nike, Adidas, Puma. They all have their own huge programs where they’re spending big money.
“The US Congress created a foundation called the National Foundation for Fitness, Sport and Nutrition. That was created three years ago and I was a founding board member of that. The foundation was created to support the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and they added nutrition to that at the same time.
“At that level of advocacy it’s very interesting because there’s real money from companies like the General Mills Foundation who granted $10 million over six years to our foundation in order to implement a program that puts fitness into schools and nutrition into schools.
The goal is to get 90% of all schools in the US to put this component into the schools.”
Speaking about the USA President, there’s a photo on the People for Bikes website showing Pat shaking hands with Barack Obama at a fundraiser in 2008 just before he became President. But Obama hasn’t said one public word about cycling in the past six years let alone done anything supportive. How does that make Pat feel?
“He may not have said any public words, but he’s been photographed riding his bike,” Pat defended.
“But the most important reason I’m still thrilled with him is his wife’s ‘Let’s Move!’ campaign. Safe routes to school was folded into that campaign. But yes, I would love it if he was a cyclist.
“George Bush was a cyclist and is an avid mountain bike rider. I think that is fantastic and he did a lot for cycling. I think that considering what’s been going on with our economy and everything else, the attention to public health that President Obama has stayed true to is also important to our overall business. But sure, I’d love it if he was riding bikes all the time. His Chief of Staff when he was hired, because of security and everything else, an avid cyclist, regular commuter when he’d worked at the White House before, is not allowed to ride his bike.”
Clearly, anecdotes such as this show that acceptance of cycling at all levels has a long way to go, both in Australia and the USA. But people like Pat Cunnane and his bike industry colleagues have made remarkable progress over the past decade in particular, which will not only make the bicycle industry more profitable at all levels, but contribute to the greater health and wellbeing of our nations.
