In the spring of 2024, while a lot of people in the bike industry were still working through the hangover of the post-pandemic correction, Junaid Khan was looking at the industry from the outside and seeing something different. He saw a business that had been quietly successful for a decade, in the same location, without marketing spend, and certainly not a marketing strategy. He saw flat revenue not as a sign of decay but as headroom. And he also saw a 33-year-old shop with a loyal customer base and a good owner who had simply never had a reason to push.
He bought it.
Junaid, a real estate developer and project manager by background, had been researching business acquisitions for months. He wasn’t looking for a specific industry, rather, the right kind of opportunity. When Bicycle Chain came up, it fit the parameters he had set. The previous owner, Dave, had built something with real bones: a culture people respected, a staff that knew what they were doing, and a customer base that kept coming back. Dave was also the kind of salt-of-the-earth person who made Junaid feel confident in the potential purchase. The shop’s finances had been flat for three years running, but that wasn't the problem. The problem, and the opportunity, was that the business had never really tried to grow. There were no ads, no email marketing, no website strategy to speak of… Just word of mouth and thirty years of neighborhood familiarity.
For someone whose entire career had been built on finding underutilized assets and improving them, that was exactly the kind of thing worth betting on.
Junaid approaches business acquisition the same way he approached house flipping: find something solid, get the stuff out of the basement (literally), and build toward an version that is ready for the future while honoring the original. After closing in November 2024, his first move was a familiar one, a light renovation during the slow winter months. Then he started on a much more intensive task: listening. To his staff, to his supplier reps, to what the data was actually telling him.
The technology infrastructure was already in place. The shop was running Workstand for its online infrastructure and Lightspeed for point of sale. Junaid didn't know those platforms when he arrived, but Dave's reasoning for keeping them held up when he looked into it himself. Workstand was built specifically for bike shops, with direct integrations to the suppliers Bicycle Chain was already buying from. A benefit Junaid would come to rely on heavily as online volume grew. The Lightspeed integration was tight. For someone who had already taken the biggest risk by buying the business, the case for keeping what was working was straightforward.
"Had it not worked out, I wouldn't have hesitated to change," he said. "But we started using more of their services and things kept going well."
One of the things that stands out about how Junaid runs Bicycle Chain is that he didn't try to do everything at once. He came in and started adding one layer at a time. Each layer a low-risk experiment and each one evaluated on its own merits before the next was added.
Within the first 90 days, he added Google Ads management through Workstand, followed by a monthly website maintenance package. Junaid's approach throughout was the same one he'd applied to every other part of the business: get input from experts, evaluate the reasoning, and if it holds up, try it. Both tactics held up and the results followed.
A few months later, he enrolled in a consulting program with Workstand advisor David Martinez. He describes this three-month engagement as "game-changing" and one that paid off in ways that went well beyond the website. "Without his knowledge and help, we would not have grown our website the way we have," Junaid said of Martinez. "It wasn't only the website. He helped us with store layout, inventory, processes. I would 100% do it again."
As online order volume grew, Junaid leaned increasingly on Workstand's supplier integrations to handle fulfillment efficiently. Drop-shipping through the platform's supplier connections became a core part of how Bicycle Chain manages online orders without overwhelming the staff — moving product without requiring it to physically pass through the store first. He keeps an active feedback loop with employees on where the friction is and fixes what he can, treating each workflow problem the same way he'd treat a scheduling conflict on a construction project.
The compounding effect of each addition is something Junaid talks about simply. "The more services we started using," he said, "the better things started going."
In his first full year of ownership, website sales grew by more than 300%. That growth didn't come from luck or from the platform doing the work on its own. It came from Junaid investing in it deliberately, building real processes around it, and treating the website as the revenue channel it actually is rather than a digital business card.
He's clear-eyed about what ecommerce is and isn't for a physical bike shop. He's not trying to compete with Amazon. He's trying to keep the lights on in December.
"If you're not moving toward selling stuff on your website, especially in our market — I'm in Minnesota, where the cycling season is maybe April through October — you're missing something," he said. "I saw personally that in December and March, we had big online months, and they were huge in keeping the store afloat because in-store sales were really poor."
Shipping bikes, which Bicycle Chain started doing late last year, changed the math for the slow season in ways Junaid hadn't fully anticipated. There have been days where the store did significant online volume while only a handful of customers came through the door. None of that is possible without the supplier fulfillment infrastructure running smoothly underneath it — something Junaid treats with the same process discipline he applies to everything else in the building.
Junaid's target is a $2 million store, split roughly between in-store and online revenue. When he bought Bicycle Chain, it was doing just over a million dollars a year. He expects to surpass his revised goals for the current year, and the trajectory he's built suggests the ceiling he's aiming for is genuinely within reach.
After that, he plans to acquire the next business. Bicycle Chain is one chapter in a longer story, not the final destination. He'll optimize it as far as it can go and look to find someone to run it for him, honoring the legacy of a cornerstone business and ensuring it’s an enduring one.
For a shop owner on the fence about whether to take the online side of the business seriously, Junaid's perspective is worth considering. He came in without the assumptions that make it easy to dismiss ecommerce as too complicated or not worth the trouble. He looked at the same tools that were already sitting in front of him, made a few deliberate investments, and added layers until the results compounded into something real.
He didn't know the industry. He knew the business.
Bicycle Chain is an independent bike shop in Roseville, Minnesota, serving riders since 1991. Learn more at bicyclechain.com.