experience – Seven Cycles

The Value of Experience

We sat in a circle in the showroom, low morning sun teeming through the tall windows, discussing our readiness for the coming season. We meet here regularly to talk about how things are going, where the bike industry is going, how we will address all the changes that come in endless waves, all the things that make building bikes fun and challenging and sometimes maddening.

January is a funny time for us. The end-of-year rush has subsided. Those bikes are delivered. And we are turning our attention to building the bikes that people will want to ride when the warm weather comes again. Now is the time to start. So there is a busy quietness about January. It can be tempting to go easy, but experience tells us that hard work in January makes the rest of the year much easier.

As we sat discussing our prospects for 2016, it occurred to us that we were all one year wiser. What is the value of that experience? It can be hard to quantify. We are 19 years into our bike-building adventure, and each successive year brings new challenges. Simultaneously, we have a lot of problem solving behind us, a lot of engineering, a lot of craft. We have been in business through a few up and down cycles in the national and global economy. Emerging trends look more and more like things we’ve seen before.

And so, it feels good to sit there in the sun in the morning light and be able to say that we are in good shape. Leadtimes are short. The shop is staffed with experienced and passionate bike builders in every department. We have been the grateful recipients of recent media exposure both local and global. We have a committed set of retail partners who want to help us build great bikes, and every day we’re getting phone calls and emails from riders who are excited to build their own best bike.

It could be that the value of experience is the calm certainty that it’s going to be a great year, and that just how great is entirely up to us.

Sweet Eighteen

We were so busy building bikes (and shoveling snow) in January that we failed to remember that we turned 18. It was January of 1997 that saw Seven, in its first incarnation, 1000sf of machinery, desks, and bike builders all jumbled together, putting out the first all-custom frames from our original location in Topsfield.

Eighteen years later, 30,000+ frames, 17,000sf and a team of 30, we’re all grown up and still growing. Like so many milestones, you don’t see them coming. They creep up on you, you reflect on what they mean, and you move on. When we set out, we believed the world’s cyclists would respond to the idea of a fully-custom bike, built on a short timeline, but you can never see the future. It’s nice to be here now, and see it working out.

Data, Experience, Passion, Results

When we set out to build custom bikes on a timeline measured in weeks rather than years, there were a litany of challenges to overcome. Chief among them was how to bring all of our collective experience to bear on each frame. Because of the scale and speed of what we do, making sure each person working on a Seven frame had the benefit of the years of frame-building work that had come before, became a real arbiter of our long-term success.

There are usually 10-15 people working on our factory floor. About a third of them have been engaged in frame-building for more than twenty-years. Another third fall in the 10-20 year category, and then finally we have a handful just embarking on their bike industry careers. Everyone who works here, regardless of their experience, brings a passion with them. That passion may be for high-end paint finishes, or for precision welding, rather than the “it’s all about the bike” mentality, but passion is one thing you can’t teach. To work at Seven, you have to bring a certain level of motivation with you. The rest we can teach.

And when we say teach, what we really mean is that we can show you the way we do things. In order to transfer the knowledge and experience of our most seasoned staff, we created highly-defined systems based on real-world data. We can’t impart five, ten or fifteen years of experience to people walking through the door, but we can build it into our way of doing things, so that those who are motivated to learn to do things the right way can replicate our results while they’re on their way to becoming veteran craftspeople, when muscle memory takes over.

We romanticize the craft of what we do all the time, but the truth is that, while important, craft alone would not let us achieve what we set out to do. We are a long way from the one-person workshop, cranking out single frames in stoic silence. We certainly have a crew of builders here who could step into that shop and build those bikes, but what we have tried to do is bring riders the same, full-custom experience you might expect from a single craftsperson, but without the long wait that comes along with the that type of custom work.

Doing what we do requires passion and drive. Those things are a given. One of the greatest sources of pride for us is that we are also data-driven, systems oriented, and customer focused. We founded this company with the goal that every Seven embody the breadth and depth of our experience, expertise, skill, precision, knowledge and commitment to the customer no matter who builds it.