July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
Ride of their lives
Ride of their lives
For most casual sports fans in America, cycling comes down to one event each year: the Tour de France.
Their knowledge of the sport doesn't go too far past American seven-time champion Lance Armstrong, or possibly his predecessor and three-time champion Greg LeMond.
But if a couple of Portland residents have their way, they'll be involved in the Tour de France on a much greater level than just rooting for the top U.S. rider.
Brothers Dave and Tim Poole founded AeroCat, a Portland-based company that makes high-performance bicycles, in 2006. Along with friend Dan Hiller, Marion, they've created a professional cycling team and sought to build their brand name through other pro teams, college teams and everyday riders.
They have big dreams about their company and their bicycles. In fact, they don't just hope to someday see one of their bicycles cruising along the Champs Elysee in Paris, the final leg of the Tour de France, they expect it.
"Absolutely. It will happen," says Dave. "It's just a matter of time."
Re-inventing the wheel
The idea that led to AeroCat didn't even involve an entire bicycle, but just the wheel.
Dave, a 1982 graduate of Jay County High School and 1987 graduate of Purdue University, had been an avid cyclist and came up with the thought of inventing a spoke-less wheel about four years ago. He built prototypes, and quickly realized that in order to sell such a product, he would have to create a brand.
"When I stood back and looked at it, it looked like to just brand a complete bicycle would be the way to go," says Poole, who was working at Berne manufacturer CTS at the time. "Because once you sort of start at the top, you can work your way into the components.
"That was sort of the seed, and then it took us in a different area."
The first step to create such a company was to come up with a name, and Dave and Tim had two requirements. They wanted something that sounded American, because a lot of bicycle company names have a European feel, and something that sounded fast.
The duo first thought of calling it "Speedcat," a nod to the mascot of the former Dunkirk High School. But there were issues within the cycling community with using that name, so they settled on AeroCat.
Dave had hoped his spoke-less wheel would create a more aerodynamic ride. However, because of some technological and marketing issues, he never took it to patent.
But out of that idea, a new high-performance bicycle company was born.
"He came up with something out of nothing," says Tim.
Following their passion
Brothers Dave and Tim, who graduated from JCHS in 1977 and the Air Force Academy in 1981, were a natural pairing for creating their business.
Both have been passionate about fitness throughout their lives, and they had already written a patent for an electronic interface for a CD player together about 20 years ago.
And cycling, says Tim, seemed a natural fit as well.
"Cycling is a great lifestyle," he says. "It's a great industry. Dave and I have always been into health. We've always worked out ... We always talked about having a business. ...
"Throughout our careers, we've always had something."
Dan is the outsider of the team, but he fit in perfectly as well.
The 2008 Marion High School graduate, who used a bike for transportation throughout high school, connected with the Poole brothers at a group ride in his hometown in September.
"We just went for a ride and started talking," says Dan.
At some point during that ride, Dan challenged Tim to do a race with him.
Tim agreed, throwing a challenge back for Dan to join him on a 100-mile bike ride as part of his training for an ironman competition.
Each lived up to their end of the bargain.
"He passed the first test," Tim says. "He had the passion."
Built in a hotel room
With the idea and brand name in place, AeroCat was on its way.
Dave and Tim started working on prototypes, learning about carbon fiber frames after first buying one on eBay. Their first frame still hangs on the wall at their Tyson Road shop.
After a year of work, they traveled to Las Vegas for the cycling industry show, Interbike, in 2007. That first trip was an adventure.
"We pulled it all off in the last few weeks," says Dave, who began working on AeroCat full-time when the CTS Berne plant closed about a year ago. "(We) literally shipped bikes to our hotel room, put them together in our hotel room and showed up at the show completely launching a new brand no one had ever heard of before.
"That's really where it began."
Instead of continuing to build their products in hotel rooms, the group now puts things together in their Portland shop.
The frames they design there are manufactured in Taiwan and China, and Dave makes several trips to Asia each year to inspect the product before it is shipped to the United States. The bicycles are then customized and assembled in Portland, a process that takes Dan, who is also full-time, just a few hours.
From that first bicycle, AeroCat now has nine different models. The seven road bikes range in price from $1,899 to more than $4,000. The triathlon and mountain models retail for about $4,000 as well.
"It takes usually about a year to bring a new (model) to life," says Dave, who hopes to build and sell between 300 and 500 bicycles in 2010.
Starting a team
A major way that bicycle companies build their brand name is through their professional riders. Thus the AeroCat Cycling Team was born.
The team started with the help of Daniel Asconegui, one of the many contacts Dave and Tim met at their first Interbike show. Asconegui, whose father was a national champion in Uruguay, became the first member of the AeroCat team and helped the company connect with riders from South America.
The team also includes Juan Pablo Dotti, Argentina's under-23 2005 national champion in individual time trials; Diego Garavito, who competed for Columbia in the 2000 Olympics; and Emile Abraham, a nine-time Trinidad and Tobago national champion who won his last title in 2006.
Abraham and Dotti finished back-to-back in first and second places in the Hyde Park Blast Criterium in Cincinnati in June.
"The bicycles are very comfortable, stiff, for sprinting," said Abraham. "It's light and durable, and it's just a bike that I love to ride.
"Some of the other bikes ... they're not as stiff as an AeroCat. ... I like a compact, stiff bike that gives me good performance. The bike is very responsive. ... I get all my power into the pedal, and it helps me to be able to win a race."
"They're a small company. And they accommodate the team very well. With the production bikes that they make, I think they have a very bright future ahead of them."
Several other professional racing teams ride AeroCats, including Texas Roadhouse Cycling, which picked up 18 victories this year; Team Revolution, an organzation targeting female riders; and Barbasol/Rapid Transit Racing Team.
AeroCat also has provided about a dozen bicycles for the Lindsey Wilson College team. The Columbia, Ky., school finished the 2009 season ranked fourth in Division I of the National Collegiate Cycling Association.
Fitness is the key
While the professional and collegiate teams help build the AeroCat brand and create publicity, they aren't the main target market for sales of high-performance bicycles.
A portion of the bicycle-buying market is made up of people who race, but not for a living. Like the AeroCat trio, they compete on the weekends.
"There's a bigger racing community than one would think out there," Dave says. "Most of these people that race bikes, they have full-time jobs, but on the weekend they go race their bicycles."
But the main target market for Aerocat is everyday riders who use their bicycles to stay in shape.
"That's our primary target," says Tim, a part-timer with AeroCat who works full-time as the manager of the engineering department at FCC. "The teams, that's to get our bikes out there, get them known, because the recreational fitness people, that's what they look for."
"That's probably 80 percent of our market right there," adds Dave. "They are people who are into fitness. They want a nice bicycle that is going to fit them right. They're going to spend a lot of time on it, so they're willing to make that investment."
Some of those people are right here in Jay County, including Westchester United Methodist Church pastor Darrell Borders.
"They're a local company. I was in desperate need for a bicycle," said Borders, who rides 20 miles a day with his wife, of why he decided to buy an AeroCat. "It turned out to be a superior bicycle.
"It's made for me, and it's nice and light. That's what I like about it. I get to go even faster on that bicycle."
Currently AeroCat sells most of its bicycles to individual buyers, but the goal is to transition to mostly dealer sales. They will sell their product to dealers, and those dealers in turn will deal directly with the customer base.
Their Indiana home
Logic would indicate that most of that customer base isn't located in the Midwest, and such a company might be better off moving to southern California or the southeastern United States. Warmer climates in those areas allow cycling, like other outdoor activities, to be year-round sports, not limited by the winter weather found in the north.
However, the Pooles feel Indiana is the place to be.
"When we started, we thought, 'This is where we live, and this is where we're going to do it,' even though California, Florida and the East Coast are more popular cycling zones," says Tim. "Well, it turns out that Portland, Indiana, is a great place for AeroCat. There is a big opening.
"All those places have a regional brand to call their own. ... The Midwest is yearning for us."
To support his point, Tim pulls out a map indicating where U.S. bicycle companies are located. From Seattle, down along the Pacific coast, across the southern states and up the Atlantic coast there are little dots representing dealers.
But in the plains states and the Midwest, there is a giant white space. And that's the void AeroCat wants to fill.
The Pooles have done their homework too. They point out that Indiana, before the invention of the automobile, was a hotbed for bicycle manufacturing.
The state website (www.in.gov) cites an 1896 issue of "The Cycle Club Bulletin" that lists nearly 100 bicycle manufacturers or businesses in Indiana at the time. The Pooles note that the number is now down to almost zero.
"What's interesting is there is a lot of appeal locally for our product," says Dave, noting Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Michigan as target areas along with the Hoosier state. "Because we're the only brand that is doing it here now."
And while the auto industry took over the manufacturing lead from bicycles in the state, that same industry is also a reason the Pooles think Indiana is a good home for their carbon-fiber product. That's because Indianapolis, led by auto racing manufacturers, is a leader in the use of carbon fiber technology.
And, Tim says, AeroCat is working on a grant to try to allow the company to manufacture its frames in Indiana rather than Asia.
Dave and Tim also point to rural areas of Indiana, like Jay County, as great places to ride. They brought their team, a group of racers who have ridden bikes around the world, to the state for a week earlier this year.
"They said it's the best place they've ever been to ride bicycles," Dave says.
"A natural resource we have is our country roads," adds Tim. "If you live in Indianapolis, it's difficult to get to a decent place to cycle."
Indiana is also home to several nationally ranked collegiate cycling teams: Marian University and Indiana University in Division I, and DePauw University in Division II.
'Pedaling' their product
Since that first hectic trip AeroCat has continued to take part in the Interbike show, making contacts across the country and in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, England and South America. But the industry conference and the racing teams are far from the only way the company is getting its name in the public eye.
Some of it is old-fashioned legwork. From time to time, Dave and Dan jump into the AeroCat RV for a sales trip. They'll spend a week on the road showing their bikes to dealers and spending nights in the RV in Wal-Mart parking lots.
A USA Cycling advertisement in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated featured an AeroCat bicycle. And the product will also be on television in the near future.
The bicycle is expected to be part of "Miami Trauma", a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced television series that will debut on CBS in January.
One show's characters, played by Mike Vogel ("Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants", "Rumor Has It", "Poseidon", "Cloverfield"), is a doctor who cycles to stay healthy.
"The producer 'Googled' high-performance bicycles and AeroCat popped up first on the list," says Tim with a smile. "We sent him an AeroCat the next day."
Also at the Interbike show this year representatives from Universal Sports approached the AeroCat team. The NBC-owned station that broadcasts sports such as cycling, track and field, swimming, triathlon and gymnastics, shot a 60-second piece on the AeroCat product.
"It was really pretty cool," Dave says. "It drew a lot of attention to our booth."
The piece is planned to air on Universal Sports and its web site (www.universalsports.com) in December.
Riding into the future
The progress the company has made thus far, and sheer belief in and dedication to his product, are why Dave believes sometime in the future riders will be pedaling AeroCat bicycles in the Tour de France. The company also has a more immediate goal of seeing AeroCats in competition at the 2012 Olympics in London.
And its financial targets may be even more impressive.
The market for high-performance bicycles in the United States, Dave says, is about $6 billion. He notes that about half of that is sold through independent retailers.
"We see our primary market in the U.S. alone around $3 billion," says Dave. "And five to 10 years from now we see ourselves being a big player in that market, which could be a fairly large company. Right now what we're doing is growing it slow."
Their business plan for creating such a large company out of nothing is fairly simple. It's something, Tim says, his brother heard from Donald Trump during an appearance on "The Big Idea" with Donny Deutsch.
Trump said the formula for a successful business is as follows:
- Choose a business that you love doing.
- Never quit.
"If you follow it, if you think about it, you are going to succeed," says Tim. "We chose bicycles, we shook hands and we're never going to quit.
"You go through your ups and downs, and if you just pick your self up and keep moving forward, you're going to succeed. I really believe that."
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Their knowledge of the sport doesn't go too far past American seven-time champion Lance Armstrong, or possibly his predecessor and three-time champion Greg LeMond.
But if a couple of Portland residents have their way, they'll be involved in the Tour de France on a much greater level than just rooting for the top U.S. rider.
Brothers Dave and Tim Poole founded AeroCat, a Portland-based company that makes high-performance bicycles, in 2006. Along with friend Dan Hiller, Marion, they've created a professional cycling team and sought to build their brand name through other pro teams, college teams and everyday riders.
They have big dreams about their company and their bicycles. In fact, they don't just hope to someday see one of their bicycles cruising along the Champs Elysee in Paris, the final leg of the Tour de France, they expect it.
"Absolutely. It will happen," says Dave. "It's just a matter of time."
Re-inventing the wheel
The idea that led to AeroCat didn't even involve an entire bicycle, but just the wheel.
Dave, a 1982 graduate of Jay County High School and 1987 graduate of Purdue University, had been an avid cyclist and came up with the thought of inventing a spoke-less wheel about four years ago. He built prototypes, and quickly realized that in order to sell such a product, he would have to create a brand.
"When I stood back and looked at it, it looked like to just brand a complete bicycle would be the way to go," says Poole, who was working at Berne manufacturer CTS at the time. "Because once you sort of start at the top, you can work your way into the components.
"That was sort of the seed, and then it took us in a different area."
The first step to create such a company was to come up with a name, and Dave and Tim had two requirements. They wanted something that sounded American, because a lot of bicycle company names have a European feel, and something that sounded fast.
The duo first thought of calling it "Speedcat," a nod to the mascot of the former Dunkirk High School. But there were issues within the cycling community with using that name, so they settled on AeroCat.
Dave had hoped his spoke-less wheel would create a more aerodynamic ride. However, because of some technological and marketing issues, he never took it to patent.
But out of that idea, a new high-performance bicycle company was born.
"He came up with something out of nothing," says Tim.
Following their passion
Brothers Dave and Tim, who graduated from JCHS in 1977 and the Air Force Academy in 1981, were a natural pairing for creating their business.
Both have been passionate about fitness throughout their lives, and they had already written a patent for an electronic interface for a CD player together about 20 years ago.
And cycling, says Tim, seemed a natural fit as well.
"Cycling is a great lifestyle," he says. "It's a great industry. Dave and I have always been into health. We've always worked out ... We always talked about having a business. ...
"Throughout our careers, we've always had something."
Dan is the outsider of the team, but he fit in perfectly as well.
The 2008 Marion High School graduate, who used a bike for transportation throughout high school, connected with the Poole brothers at a group ride in his hometown in September.
"We just went for a ride and started talking," says Dan.
At some point during that ride, Dan challenged Tim to do a race with him.
Tim agreed, throwing a challenge back for Dan to join him on a 100-mile bike ride as part of his training for an ironman competition.
Each lived up to their end of the bargain.
"He passed the first test," Tim says. "He had the passion."
Built in a hotel room
With the idea and brand name in place, AeroCat was on its way.
Dave and Tim started working on prototypes, learning about carbon fiber frames after first buying one on eBay. Their first frame still hangs on the wall at their Tyson Road shop.
After a year of work, they traveled to Las Vegas for the cycling industry show, Interbike, in 2007. That first trip was an adventure.
"We pulled it all off in the last few weeks," says Dave, who began working on AeroCat full-time when the CTS Berne plant closed about a year ago. "(We) literally shipped bikes to our hotel room, put them together in our hotel room and showed up at the show completely launching a new brand no one had ever heard of before.
"That's really where it began."
Instead of continuing to build their products in hotel rooms, the group now puts things together in their Portland shop.
The frames they design there are manufactured in Taiwan and China, and Dave makes several trips to Asia each year to inspect the product before it is shipped to the United States. The bicycles are then customized and assembled in Portland, a process that takes Dan, who is also full-time, just a few hours.
From that first bicycle, AeroCat now has nine different models. The seven road bikes range in price from $1,899 to more than $4,000. The triathlon and mountain models retail for about $4,000 as well.
"It takes usually about a year to bring a new (model) to life," says Dave, who hopes to build and sell between 300 and 500 bicycles in 2010.
Starting a team
A major way that bicycle companies build their brand name is through their professional riders. Thus the AeroCat Cycling Team was born.
The team started with the help of Daniel Asconegui, one of the many contacts Dave and Tim met at their first Interbike show. Asconegui, whose father was a national champion in Uruguay, became the first member of the AeroCat team and helped the company connect with riders from South America.
The team also includes Juan Pablo Dotti, Argentina's under-23 2005 national champion in individual time trials; Diego Garavito, who competed for Columbia in the 2000 Olympics; and Emile Abraham, a nine-time Trinidad and Tobago national champion who won his last title in 2006.
Abraham and Dotti finished back-to-back in first and second places in the Hyde Park Blast Criterium in Cincinnati in June.
"The bicycles are very comfortable, stiff, for sprinting," said Abraham. "It's light and durable, and it's just a bike that I love to ride.
"Some of the other bikes ... they're not as stiff as an AeroCat. ... I like a compact, stiff bike that gives me good performance. The bike is very responsive. ... I get all my power into the pedal, and it helps me to be able to win a race."
"They're a small company. And they accommodate the team very well. With the production bikes that they make, I think they have a very bright future ahead of them."
Several other professional racing teams ride AeroCats, including Texas Roadhouse Cycling, which picked up 18 victories this year; Team Revolution, an organzation targeting female riders; and Barbasol/Rapid Transit Racing Team.
AeroCat also has provided about a dozen bicycles for the Lindsey Wilson College team. The Columbia, Ky., school finished the 2009 season ranked fourth in Division I of the National Collegiate Cycling Association.
Fitness is the key
While the professional and collegiate teams help build the AeroCat brand and create publicity, they aren't the main target market for sales of high-performance bicycles.
A portion of the bicycle-buying market is made up of people who race, but not for a living. Like the AeroCat trio, they compete on the weekends.
"There's a bigger racing community than one would think out there," Dave says. "Most of these people that race bikes, they have full-time jobs, but on the weekend they go race their bicycles."
But the main target market for Aerocat is everyday riders who use their bicycles to stay in shape.
"That's our primary target," says Tim, a part-timer with AeroCat who works full-time as the manager of the engineering department at FCC. "The teams, that's to get our bikes out there, get them known, because the recreational fitness people, that's what they look for."
"That's probably 80 percent of our market right there," adds Dave. "They are people who are into fitness. They want a nice bicycle that is going to fit them right. They're going to spend a lot of time on it, so they're willing to make that investment."
Some of those people are right here in Jay County, including Westchester United Methodist Church pastor Darrell Borders.
"They're a local company. I was in desperate need for a bicycle," said Borders, who rides 20 miles a day with his wife, of why he decided to buy an AeroCat. "It turned out to be a superior bicycle.
"It's made for me, and it's nice and light. That's what I like about it. I get to go even faster on that bicycle."
Currently AeroCat sells most of its bicycles to individual buyers, but the goal is to transition to mostly dealer sales. They will sell their product to dealers, and those dealers in turn will deal directly with the customer base.
Their Indiana home
Logic would indicate that most of that customer base isn't located in the Midwest, and such a company might be better off moving to southern California or the southeastern United States. Warmer climates in those areas allow cycling, like other outdoor activities, to be year-round sports, not limited by the winter weather found in the north.
However, the Pooles feel Indiana is the place to be.
"When we started, we thought, 'This is where we live, and this is where we're going to do it,' even though California, Florida and the East Coast are more popular cycling zones," says Tim. "Well, it turns out that Portland, Indiana, is a great place for AeroCat. There is a big opening.
"All those places have a regional brand to call their own. ... The Midwest is yearning for us."
To support his point, Tim pulls out a map indicating where U.S. bicycle companies are located. From Seattle, down along the Pacific coast, across the southern states and up the Atlantic coast there are little dots representing dealers.
But in the plains states and the Midwest, there is a giant white space. And that's the void AeroCat wants to fill.
The Pooles have done their homework too. They point out that Indiana, before the invention of the automobile, was a hotbed for bicycle manufacturing.
The state website (www.in.gov) cites an 1896 issue of "The Cycle Club Bulletin" that lists nearly 100 bicycle manufacturers or businesses in Indiana at the time. The Pooles note that the number is now down to almost zero.
"What's interesting is there is a lot of appeal locally for our product," says Dave, noting Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Michigan as target areas along with the Hoosier state. "Because we're the only brand that is doing it here now."
And while the auto industry took over the manufacturing lead from bicycles in the state, that same industry is also a reason the Pooles think Indiana is a good home for their carbon-fiber product. That's because Indianapolis, led by auto racing manufacturers, is a leader in the use of carbon fiber technology.
And, Tim says, AeroCat is working on a grant to try to allow the company to manufacture its frames in Indiana rather than Asia.
Dave and Tim also point to rural areas of Indiana, like Jay County, as great places to ride. They brought their team, a group of racers who have ridden bikes around the world, to the state for a week earlier this year.
"They said it's the best place they've ever been to ride bicycles," Dave says.
"A natural resource we have is our country roads," adds Tim. "If you live in Indianapolis, it's difficult to get to a decent place to cycle."
Indiana is also home to several nationally ranked collegiate cycling teams: Marian University and Indiana University in Division I, and DePauw University in Division II.
'Pedaling' their product
Since that first hectic trip AeroCat has continued to take part in the Interbike show, making contacts across the country and in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, England and South America. But the industry conference and the racing teams are far from the only way the company is getting its name in the public eye.
Some of it is old-fashioned legwork. From time to time, Dave and Dan jump into the AeroCat RV for a sales trip. They'll spend a week on the road showing their bikes to dealers and spending nights in the RV in Wal-Mart parking lots.
A USA Cycling advertisement in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated featured an AeroCat bicycle. And the product will also be on television in the near future.
The bicycle is expected to be part of "Miami Trauma", a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced television series that will debut on CBS in January.
One show's characters, played by Mike Vogel ("Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants", "Rumor Has It", "Poseidon", "Cloverfield"), is a doctor who cycles to stay healthy.
"The producer 'Googled' high-performance bicycles and AeroCat popped up first on the list," says Tim with a smile. "We sent him an AeroCat the next day."
Also at the Interbike show this year representatives from Universal Sports approached the AeroCat team. The NBC-owned station that broadcasts sports such as cycling, track and field, swimming, triathlon and gymnastics, shot a 60-second piece on the AeroCat product.
"It was really pretty cool," Dave says. "It drew a lot of attention to our booth."
The piece is planned to air on Universal Sports and its web site (www.universalsports.com) in December.
Riding into the future
The progress the company has made thus far, and sheer belief in and dedication to his product, are why Dave believes sometime in the future riders will be pedaling AeroCat bicycles in the Tour de France. The company also has a more immediate goal of seeing AeroCats in competition at the 2012 Olympics in London.
And its financial targets may be even more impressive.
The market for high-performance bicycles in the United States, Dave says, is about $6 billion. He notes that about half of that is sold through independent retailers.
"We see our primary market in the U.S. alone around $3 billion," says Dave. "And five to 10 years from now we see ourselves being a big player in that market, which could be a fairly large company. Right now what we're doing is growing it slow."
Their business plan for creating such a large company out of nothing is fairly simple. It's something, Tim says, his brother heard from Donald Trump during an appearance on "The Big Idea" with Donny Deutsch.
Trump said the formula for a successful business is as follows:
- Choose a business that you love doing.
- Never quit.
"If you follow it, if you think about it, you are going to succeed," says Tim. "We chose bicycles, we shook hands and we're never going to quit.
"You go through your ups and downs, and if you just pick your self up and keep moving forward, you're going to succeed. I really believe that."
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