With bikes outselling cars in Australia, Cadel Evans winning the Tour de France and Australia’s first professional road racing team Green Edge on the verge of receiving a license to race in the Tour de France, cycling is on a crest of a wave.

 Look at any trendy café in any of our major cities early in the morning and you will see hoards of lycra-clad men and women chatting earnestly and sipping their macchiatos, before heading off to their busy professional lives. With the latest carbon fibre bikes costing upwards of $2000 dollars, the bikes sitting outside these cafes can amount to 6 figured sums. In the same way that golf maintains exclusivity with expensive memberships, road riding has entered this realm and tends to attract a great number of well-heeled business people.

 Cycling, like any sporting discipline, creates great friendships and long-term relationships. On a bike, there is great competition, but also enormous encouragement from other riders who you regularly ride with… and those bonds of trust are further developed at the coffee shop.

 With a large proportion of riders in the 30+ professionals group, the coffee shop sessions can also lead into a business self-help group. And as on a golf course, those relationships can lead to a great amount of business being done away from the office.

 If we look at the buyer’s journey process that moves the purchaser from unawareness to a purchase, one of the most important stages is building trust and understanding.

 Certainly, the sales-cycle on large ticket items or services can take a long time, with the majority of the time taken up with the purchaser gaining trust and knowledge. Of course ultimately in the end, as the old saying goes, eventually ‘people buy from people’.

Cycling accelerates the knowledge and trust component of the sales cycle. If you have created a business opportunity in the cycling bunch, there is nothing like suffering up a large hill together to build a great deal of mutual respect and trust in the face of a 12% gradient hill of adversity.

 I have managed to build a fantastic bunch of friends first, then business colleagues next through cycling, and certainly riding with them regularly enables them to give me frank views on my business and how it’s performing.

 So if you are looking for a new business drive, a reason to get fit and want to develop some lifelong relationships with likeminded people, buy some lycra and a road bike and contact your local club.

 You can also visit tourdecure.com.au, which arranges rides around the country as well raising money towards curing cancer.

By Martin Mason