Lifecycle of a Business

EPISODE 6 REBIRTH

Bianca: It’s the last episode, how are you feeling?

Avery: Bianca, I’m heartbroken. How am I supposed to go back to my old life after this adventure?

Bianca: Well hopefully we’ll get another season.

Avery: Ah, season two, I didn’t think of that.

Bianca: But until then we gotta wrap this season up, this is episode six and we wanted to end on a high note so I wanted to do an episode on rebirth so I asked you if you found anyone.

Avery: Bianca, I moseyed my way down to the heart of Texas to talk to the king of rebirths, the monarch of metamorphosis, Mr. Mark Mitchell.

Bianca: For all of you out there who’ve had a failed business there is hope yet. This is Episode 6: Rebirth.

Mark Mitchell’s life in business started early - he got his first job at the age of nine selling newspapers on the streets and in the bars of San Francisco when he was only 9.

Mark: Yeah, you’d stick your head in there and go ‘anybody need any a herald examiner? I’m selling papers?!’

And from there, you might need a map and a piece of paper to keep track of what followed. Mark seems to have lived everywhere and done just about everything.

Mark: I worked as a car salesman at 17 in Los Angeles. At 18, I went into the oil refineries and worked on the maintenance gang. And then worked up in northern California in a refinery for years. Worked for a chemical plant making rocket fuel, and not long after that got into semiconductor and worked for advanced micro devices, Motorola. Mitchell aviation I started while I was working for a mechanic. Umm, probably the next one was Mitchell Investigations.

Okay, that I’m curious about.

Avery: So you were a PI?

Mark: It’s not Magnum PI where people are shooting at you but it’s

Avery: Did you have a gun though? Mark: I did! I carried a 380 automatic. Semi-automatic. Did that for a couple of years till I moved to Texas.

Mark: In Texas, I started a christmas tree farm. To do that I had to buy a backhoe...

We don’t have all day here so I need to jump to the business I want to focus on. In the 1990s Mark’s dizzying path landed him in the cell phone tower construction business. And he’s a big player in the game.

Mark: I started out just managing crews and then I had my own crews and we built it up to a company of about 50 employees.

Business was booming. Or as Mark would call it

Mark: Blowing and going business.

And the kid that was once happy to make 5 cents a paper was making some serious money.

Mark: Well there was so much on the line and each job was worth somewhere around 100 thousand dollars well your profit in those jobs was 30 thousand, maybe forty thousand. You know, if you did it right you might be able to squeeze 50...

And everytime he checked his bank account there was more money than before.

Mark: We owned three properties. One in Angel Fire, New Mexico...

....And then something happened that no one could have foreseen...

9/11

Mark: Everything just stopped.

Just like that, Mark sees his business drop by 90%.

Mark: It hit the pocketbooks of people that didn’t know what was coming next.

Now instead of piling up profits, Mark is watching money fly out the door.

Mark: And so you had to figure out what you were going to do and I think my fault was not shutting down quick enough or not downsizing much quicker than I did. I thought it was going to turn around. These people had a big plan to build all these towers and put in all this infrastructure, they're gonna get back on that plan eventually. Well, because of the war, we didn’t.

We let it go too long until we went into the savings, and I tried to hang onto everybody and in the end I lost the whole thing.

You walk into a courtroom, judge says “How much money do you have in the bank?” you say “Zero”, they say “How much money do you have in your pockets?” you say “Zero” and he goes: “You’re bankrupt”

And then you go out and start over. And that was probably the hardest part--you walk out flat broke, and no job in my case. So that was a little bit depressing. Oh, and I was going through a divorce at the time....And no car! As part of the bankruptcy, I let that go back to the bank.

But in Texas, under the homestead exemption, bankruptcy claimants are able to keep their house.

Which for a scrappy guy like mark means one thing. Another chance.

With his house as collateral Mark may be down, but he isn’t out.

Avery: So then what’d you do?

Mark: Went out and bought a car.

Avery: What’d you get?

Mark: a Volkswagen convertible Beetle.

So there Mark is, cruising down the road, wind whipping through his thinning hair, and one thing on his mind: how is he going to reinvent himself this time?

What’s a guy with experience selling papers, pumping oil, digging ditches, spying on people, slicing deli meat, growing christmas trees, making microchips, detailing airplanes, refining rocket fuel, and building cell phone towers do next...

Mark: Well, I shut it down in 2003 and immediately started looking at what Austin might need in the way of a new business.

And what’s he come up with?

Mark: All the cities, I used to travel a lot and all of the cities that I’ve been to had bike rental places in the park, and if they had a lake like we have, they’d have bike rental places if not in the park right outside the park.….

Yup, after years of building cell phone towers, Mark Mitchell decides -- he’s gonna start renting bicycles

And what's even crazier about this is that he doesn’t really even like biking

Mark: Yeah, it wasn’t for love of bikes, it was for an industry that I didn’t see being looked at.

In other words, he saw what he considered to be a weak spot in the marketplace.

And then he literally bet his house on it.

Remember Mark’s venture as a private investigator...Well, believe it or not, he applied a lot of those skills towards business development

Mark: So I decided that’s what it needed and I went and staked out Barton Springs Road, sat down there and counted cars and traffic and you know is it better on Saturday? What is it on Monday, is there anybody out?

Based on his sleuthing, Mark decides to lease a building on Barton Springs Road.

Mark: My shop now is 2000 square feet. We are about a quarter mile from the pool and 150 meters from the park.

And then he buys 120 bicycles.

Mark: And 20 electric bikes.

And 20 electric bikes.

And with that, Mark Mitchell becomes the proud owner of Barton Springs Bikes.

Mark: In the very early days I would get up in the morning and I would get to work at 9 oclock, open the store, and I’d stay there all day till 9 oclock at night and there would be gaps of seven, ten days, two weeks where no one would come in the store.

Suddenly Mark’s not feeling very good about his gamble--

Mark: Yeah, the first few months were very very scary because there was so much at stake.

He does all kinds of things to try to lure in customers. Everything from the usual.

Mark: Putting together brochures, I was ordering signs. We did discounts if you came back a second time.

To buying an old church bus.

Mark: 15 passenger bus that I had wrapped like an old woody and that's what we would go pick people with at the hotels. We did a free shuttle which no one else did. We did roadside assistance, no one did that.

And this being Austin, he even had his friend who rides a horse post up outside of the shop

Mark: Grey Horse is just one of the Austin icons that comes by our shop every once in a while and there are a lot of colorful characters in this town and a lot of them hang out down by Barton Springs.

Avery: Do you think he draws attention to the shop when he posts up there with the horses?

Mark: Yeah, I think anything that goes on outside the shop--the shop is kind of a funky shop, it is just south Austin funky so it is not unusual to see Grey Horse sitting on a horse or a mule outside my store.

And when someone did walk in, Mark, who can be a pretty charming guy when he wants to be, stressed customer service to turn them into repeat customers.

Mark: Yeah, it's not just a bike we’re renting, it's more of an experience. You come into our shop and we greet you and find out where you’re from and we talk to you for a while, get your bike needs, get you fitted on bikes, what you wanna ride, where you’re gonna go. We treat you a little different than other bike shops.

But don’t take his word for it. Here’s some uhhh voice actors I hired to read some of Mark’s first reviews...

Mark: They’re a great place to rent from, the owner was incredibly friendly.

Mark: We were completely blown away by how generous Mark and the other staff were.

Mark: Mark the owner and his staff are really nice and helpful. They come and pick you up in a cool woody like bus.

And with reviews as good as that, business began picking up.

And then, yet again, something completely outside of Marks control happened that had a huge impact on his business...

Austin became hip.

Mark: In the beginning, Austin was not really a destination. Now people come from all over the world because they’ve heard about Austin, Texas.

As an Austin resident myself, I can vouch for this. It’s freaking bonkers how many people come here now.

But Mark sees the business opportunity that this tourism boom presents and he adapts his business to take advantage of it.

Mark: We started doing tours years ago but we started getting serious about it and now we’re doing four tours a day now and that made a big difference in the business.

Mark: We did one last month that was over 200 people, we did it 50 people at a time and on a busy Saturday I would say we rent out 200 to 300 bikes.

Or another way of saying that is Mark Mitchell’s gamble paid off.

Avery: What are you most proud of when you look back at a life in business?

Mark: Probably this shop.

Avery: The bike shop.

Mark: Yeah, I would say this shop has been the most positive business I’ve had. You know sitting in a van all night watching somebody’s house is really not a fun job, showing up at 4 o’clock in the morning to make sure your concrete guys are there--not my favorite. But going in the daytime and renting someone a bike or getting them out on a tour--that’s fun. So yeah, I would have to say that this is probably my favorite business.

Avery: And none of this woulda came about if you hadn’t failed in some and moved on in others.

Mark: Yeah, and as far as places go, this is not a bad place to be.

So you could look at Mark’s life and see it as a series of totally random leaps

Or if you look a little closer, you might see that there was a continuous through line all along--of a guy that rolled with the punches, of a businessman willing to adapt

Mark: Yeah, gotta reinvent yourself sometimes.

With business steady and a staff he trusts, Mark no longer feels the need to make the drive to the shop everyday.

Instead, on most days he settles into his living room next to his dog Shorty with a cup of what he calls mocha, but I call coffee with a lot of hershey's syrup in it and he works from home trying to come up with even more ways to improve the business.

And when he gets tired of that, he likes to read reviews.

Super huge thanks to Mark Mitchell.

Lifecycle of a Business is a podcast from Mailchimp, produced in partnership with Missing Pieces. It's hosted by me, Bianca Giaever, reported by Avery Thompson, executive produced by Ari Kuschnir, Kate Oppenheim and Brian Latt. Music by Stellwagen Symphonette. Our line producer is Vicky Illk.

Mark: The next crane I hired in Houston, I told the guy I needed a crane, I said what do you need from me, you know, send it over to my office and he goes ‘what’s your mother’s phone number’ and I told him and he said ‘if you don’t pay me, I’m calling your mom.’