Anyone who has ever played Little League understands; the team name you play under is something you never forget. (I also remember that our team consistently put a beating on Foxon Auto Body, but the Harco Laboratories team always trounced us.) I still have no idea about what Harco Labs does or sells, even though they are located next to our headquarters, and I just never had the occasion to get my car fixed up by the guys at Foxon Auto Body. But, if I did have a chance to do business with either of them today, I know I would automatically be biased in their favor because of the connections I made with their brands way back when I was a kid. More important, as an adult, I look back in appreciation for what Phil’s did to make it possible for me to play some baseball. Sure, it was a bit of advertising for them, but they were also making stronger ties to their community in the process.

I guess you could say that by getting involved in sponsoring Little League, Phil’s Canteen, Foxon Auto Body, Harco Labs, and others planted the seeds of their brands with a whole generation of local schoolkids. That’s why we at Zane’s, on the model of Phil’s, have married the notion of doing good business with doing good deeds outside the walls of the business as a way to build our own lifetime relationship with our community.

The truth is, we could never achieve the same kind of goodwill through advertising in the local media that we get for what amounts to about $2.50 for each jersey. You know what I’m talking about—you pick up your Sunday paper to see pictures of all those young faces wearing jerseys with the Zane’s name on it. More recently, we have begun sponsoring local triathlons—a sport aimed at adults. We now sponsor three throughout the year, all of which are great opportunities to support local athletes competing in a challenging event that also happens to celebrate cycling. And that notion really gets to the core of what I want to bring to the community. Sure, I want to be the store my neighbors turn to when they want to purchase their next bike. But it’s just as important to me to champion the sport of cycling as a whole. The way I look at it, if everyone begins riding more often, either because of our efforts or because they want to emulate Lance Armstrong’s comeback at the Tour de France, Zane’s as an organization can’t help but benefit as a result.

When cycling gets headlines, we have to be ready to take advantage. One of my favorite stories related to this happened a few years ago when the state of Connecticut passed a mandatory helmet law for every child under the age of sixteen. There was more than a bit of controversy surrounding this law because it meant that parents would be forced to shell out a lot of extra money to buy helmets before their kids could hit the streets on their bikes. If the situation was bad in Branford, which is a relatively well-off town, it was going to be worse in the low-income, inner-city areas around the state. My competitors, not surprisingly, saw the whole scenario as a potential boon for their businesses. Kids’ helmets typically wholesale at about twenty dollars and then sell at retail for forty dollars—resulting in a healthy twenty-dollar profit on each sale that gets rung up. With the expectation that potentially thousands of kids and parents would be heading their way, my competitors got busy overstocking their shelves with helmets in every size and shape in anticipation of this great windfall. I decided to use a different tactic.

Of course, I would love to cash in by selling a bunch of helmets, just like the next guy. But rather than take the usual path, I saw a much larger opportunity unfolding by changing how the game would be played, as well as a golden opportunity to plant the seeds of the Zane’s brand in thousands of new lifetime customers. My first move was to call up the superintendents of each of the school districts in our area and lay out my plan. My proposal was this: I would sell helmets directly to the kids in their schools at the same wholesale price I paid to get them. That meant parents could save at least twenty dollars in getting their kids out riding again.

“What’s the catch?” the superintendents would ask. “None,” I would say in reply. “All I ask is for your help in administering the paperwork to pull it all off.” “Easy enough,” they would say. “Just contact the local PTA groups and we’ll support you 100 percent.”

And so I was off, placing another round of calls to the PTA groups to outline the plan. I would provide forms that the kids would fill out with their names and the circumference of their head to better determine their helmet size. The PTA would then help distribute those forms throughout the classrooms, make sure the kids brought the forms home to their parents, and then help collect the money or credit card numbers the parents sent back to school the next day. The PTA organizations even went so far as to subsidize the program to make sure that even kids from low-income families could sign up to get the same custom-fit helmets as their wealthier classmates. The last step, then, was for Zane’s employees to drop off the helmets with each kid’s name clearly printed on the box to each of the schools.

It was a beautifully executed plan and the local media absolutely ate the entire thing up. I still remember watching several Zane’s employees on the local TV news stations as they dropped off boxes to hundreds of smiling and cheering kids. “Zane’s helps kids get back on the road” was basically the gist of the news stories. The widespread coverage then sparked more interest in what we were doing back at the retail store. As soon as other school districts around the state heard what we were up to, they wanted in as well. The end result was that in just five weeks, we delivered more than 5,000 helmets (all with a Zane’s sticker on the back of them) and got a ton of good press in the bargain. Not only did we do a good deed, but we used the opportunity to cement the Zane’s name with a generation of kids.

Although we didn’t directly pocket any profit by doing this, we did benefit the business indirectly in another way: my competitors were left with shelves stocked with all the helmets they had ordered, which prevented them, at the very least, from stocking up on new inventory. You can bet that more than a few of my competitors spent more than a few hours shouting more than a few curses in my direction as they continued to be weighed down by those boxes of unsold helmets lining their walls. In the end, the whole thing played out as one of those rare win-win scenarios that pushed us further ahead of our competition. Please take a second to recall how close this now incredibly successful helmet salesman was to losing us as a customer in the previous chapter; a $20 questionable warranty credit then for a $100,000 order—now that’s a return on investment.

Just a few years after we introduced the helmet program, we found ourselves facing a similarly juicy opportunity to sow the seeds of the Zane’s brand in a new set of customers. I learned that one of our competitors, a shop that is based right near the Yale University campus in downtown New Haven, always stocked up his inventory levels for the start of the school year in the fall. Even kids who already had bikes would swing by his shop to pick up accessories like bike chains and locks that they may have forgotten to pack at home. When you walked into this guy’s shop each fall, his shelves would be overflowing with all this inventory: it was almost like he was already counting his profits just by looking at it. Unfortunately for him, this got me to thinking about how to change the rules on him. “Hey, these students are new members of our community, too,” I thought. “Matter of fact, many of them might end up spending more than just the next four years in the New Haven area. Let’s do something that they can remember us by.”

With that bit of inspiration, we sprang into action. I had a couple of Zane’s employees load up our delivery truck with about 1,000 bike locks custom-imprinted with the Zane’s logo. I told my guys to head over to where all the student housing was near campus. Once you get there, I told them, start handing those locks out. And hand them out they did—all 1,000 in less than five hours. The kids went nuts for us and really responded well to the giveaway. The end result was that we now had 1,000 really smart kids riding around with our locks on their bikes, talking about how great Zane’s was. (Meanwhile, as more than just a side benefit, my competitor was stuck with 1,000 locks gathering dust on his shelves.)

Although we still show up on campus to run a similar giveaway from time to time, it’s amazing how many new customers have walked in the door of our retail shop in Branford, which is about a fifteen-minute drive from New Haven, who tell us about how great it was that time they got a free lock from us. Step one toward building 1,000 new lifetime customer relationships—complete.

But Zane’s doesn’t stop there. Although The Zane Foundation is dedicated to creating opportunities for our community’s kids to go to college, we also make donations or sponsor charity events that aren’t funding a thinly disguised supplement to our marketing efforts but are truly aimed at cementing the Zane’s brand as a trusted member of the community. That’s why we continue to sell bikes and our service at cost to just about any charity that requests something from use—requests that add up to about 200 contributions from us every year. Zane’s the corporation, independent of the foundation, donates at least ten brand-new bicycles a month to local private schools and charities like the Leukemia Foundation. By donating $3,000 worth of bicycles to a good cause, we hope to show the members of our community that they can trust that we do care about them and the sport of cycling.

But we don’t stop there either. We also are active in sponsoring everything from the Boy Scouts to regional bike races and triathlons to ensure those organizations and events keep our residents on the path of an active lifestyle. And, as we start to roll out Zane’s locations throughout the country, The Zane Foundation, in combination with our other community-building outreach and charitable-giving programs, will continue to invest and spur new lifetime community relationships.

But, back to The Zane Foundation for a moment—it was something we started with the idea that, by investing in the educational foundation of the kids from our community, we would be making that foundation stronger by encouraging competition for our scholarship money. We started the organization back in 1989 as a registered nonprofit 501 (c) 3 organization. We originally started out donating the proceeds from stocking gumball-style candy machines, the kind where you slide in a quarter, twist a knob, and a bunch of candy slides down a chute and into your hand. We used peanut M&Ms because everyone loves them and they don’t melt in your hand. It cost about fifteen dollars a month to stock each of the thirty candy machines we had with a Zane Foundation sticker on them. We would then collect about thirty dollars in quarters at the end of every month, which meant that we were earning about fifteen dollars a month on each of the machines for the foundation.

Unlike some other not-for-profit organizations that only ask for a one-dollar donation each month for the use of their name on similar candy machines, I made the decision early on to donate 100 percent of whatever profit was collected toward the foundation, which represented the money we put toward the scholarships we handed out to the graduating seniors at the end of the school year.

Although I once had dreams of expanding our number of collection points, we quickly ran into a problem of manpower. The problem was that I had to dedicate a day of a Zane’s employee’s time each month to collect the money and roll the quarters so we could deposit them in the bank. After operating in the same way for about five years, I began adding up the pros and cons of what we were doing. I figured we had two choices: either we needed to scale up the operation to five thousand machines and dedicate two fulltime employees to operate them or, on the other hand, I could just start making direct contributions to the foundation from the company’s profits. I chose the latter because, although my enthusiasm for tackling new ventures can often get the better of me, I had to remember that Zane’s is in the business of selling experiences—not candy. Fortunately for Zane’s, coming to that realization opened the door to a whole new universe of opportunities.

Today, rather than stocking candy machines, The Zane Foundation has taken on a life of its own. As a whole, the foundation has given back almost $100,000 to the Branford community. We now make an annual $5,000 contribution to the foundation that goes toward funding individual $1,000 scholarships for the top five graduates of Branford High School. Each of these five students receives a check for $1,000 that they can use toward whatever they want: college tuition, a car, or even a bike if they need one.

We’re giving this money away for academic achievement because I believe it creates a sense of competition among kids to strive to get better grades or improve SAT scores—which means that the community as a whole benefits. Kids who want that scholarship are going to put more hours into studying, which means the schools will begin seeing better overall performance in national tests like the ACT or SAT. That, in turn, means the community will experience bumps in its academic reputation and property values with it.

When I think about how everything is connected, I truly feel a sense of pride in making a contribution to our community when I get to stand up each year at the awards ceremony in front of 300 students and their families. Each year, in fact, I receive several letters from family members in attendance who thank us for what we did for their son, daughter, niece, nephew, grandson, or granddaughter. We have not only reaped an enormous amount of goodwill within the community for the scholarship program, but we have earned the trust of our neighbors. Every August, we see a sizable bump in the number of sales made to kids headed to college. In fact, August has become our secondlargest sales month of the year. Many of them come to shop at Zane’s, they tell us, simply because one of their friends won a scholarship and they really thought highly of us for making that happen. Now that they needed a bike for themselves, they figured that they might as well buy it from us because of the good thing we had done for their friend. And that, in the end, is all we can ask. No matter what city we’re talking about, we want our customers to walk into the doors of our stores—either tomorrow or five years from now—because they know and trust us. Those are truly the seeds to starting a lifetime relationship.

Take, for instance, the lifetime trade-in program Tom started for our kid customers discussed back in chapter two. The key benefit of this program is that it creates an opportunity to create a lifetime relationship, not only with the parents but with the kids who receive the bikes. The more positive thoughts those kids have about Zane’s as they grow up, the better chance we have of counting them as lifetime customers. That’s why we have always encouraged our customers who are parents, or are planning to be parents, to bring their kids along to the shop. We now have a kids’ corner of sorts where we keep a bunch of toys, books, and a TV where kids can hang out while their parents shop around. The ironic thing is that we used to have a whole lot more entertainment available to our future customers, but we had to scale all this back. I have to admit, we have been too successful at times in our efforts to plant some seeds in the minds of our future customers.

Several years ago, we used to have a giant sandbox filled with Tonka trucks and toys inside the shop in Branford. This was in the era before play areas became common in fast-food restaurants like McDonalds and other kid-focused establishments. Other than a few public parks, there just weren’t any good recreational areas available to kids back then. That got me to thinking that if we had a sandbox, we could offer yet another reason for parents to come visit the shop because they could entertain their children at the same time. The kids loved it.

In fact, they loved it too much. We started hearing from parents that they would be driving by the store when cries of Waaahh! would come from the backseat if the kids figured out that mom or dad was headed to the grocery store and not the bike shop. I remember one customer who was cajoling me because her kids wouldn’t let her come anywhere near the shop without going into fits if they couldn’t visit the sandbox. She was driving miles out of her way each day to avoid us. Although I have to admit I kind of enjoyed the extra attention we were getting, I eventually got the picture and we removed the sandbox and replaced it with the TV. The funny thing is that I’ll bet those kids who visited us during those years we had that sandbox will remember the Zane’s name when they get old enough to make their own decisions about where they want to buy a bike.

Although we continue to think of ways to win new customers by making positive contributions to the communities that we operate in, we are also always looking for creative ways to get the Zane’s name in front of whole new sets of customers. Although most bike shops cater to their local communities, Zane’s is one of the few that actually has a national presence because we had the foresight to expand into the realm of corporate rewards programs, which have helped fuel our expansion. In the next chapter, I’ll talk about how we at Zane’s have embraced the notion of using creative new ideas to keep pushing the limits of who we can share our unique model of customer service with. It turns out there is an endless supply of potential lifetime customers, if you have the courage to go after them.