This summer, the National Bicycle Dealers Association turns 80. Founded in 1946, the NBDA has spent eight decades doing one thing consistently well: giving independent bike shop owners a place to stop competing with each other long enough to make each other better.

That's easy to say and hard to build. It took decades of volunteer board members, one improbably long-tenured executive director, and a lot of retailers willing to open their books to people who, on paper, should have been their rivals.

The Fred Clements Era

For 27 years — from 1989 to 2017 — Fred Clements ran the NBDA. He came to the job sideways, from a background in journalism rather than bicycle retail, hired by Steve Ready, the founder of Interbike, who had been keeping the association alive on a volunteer basis and simply ran out of hours in the day. When Fred took over, the NBDA was barely more than a newsletter and a modest membership roll. He spent the better part of three decades turning it into something retailers actually depended on.

Fred has said the thing he's proudest of from those 27 years isn't the biggest program or the flashiest initiative — it's P2, the Profitability Project. It came out of a simple but stubborn insight: retailers are often more willing to share their real numbers, their real mistakes, and their real fixes with a shop owner three states away than with the competitor down the block. Group retailers who aren't competing with each other, give them each other's P&Ls, and something clicks that a seminar alone never quite manages. As Fred put it, P2 groups end up functioning as each other's boards of directors.

Built With the Mann Group

The Mann Group has been part of that story from close range. Liberty Bikes was our first client, and it was Liberty that introduced us to the NBDA and to Fred, a relationship that grew into the Mann Group leading the NBDA's own strategic planning process, and into the NBDA becoming one of our largest accounts. Dan Mann worked directly alongside Fred and the NBDA board to build P2 from the ground up, directing the program for its first ten years and growing it into three groups of 20 retailers each. Erik Kugler helped shape the metrics those first groups used to actually measure what they were sharing, turning "compare notes" into something closer to a real KPI framework.

The founding P2 members deserve to be named, because without them there's no case study  just a good idea on paper:

• Wheel and Sprocket
• Liberty Bikes
• Bicycle Garage Indy
• The Bike Route
• Bike Gallery
• Free Flight
• Lakeside Bicycles
• Cahaba Cycles
• B&L Bicycles
• Palo Alto Bicycles
• Bicycle Connection
• Lee's Cyclery
• City Bikes
• Mike's Bikes (Canada)
• Cycle Craft
• Turin Bikes
• Spin Cycle

These were retailers willing to be the experiment, to hand a stranger their margins, their payroll numbers, their inventory turns, and trust that the trade would be worth it.

[Photo: original P2 members who stayed with the program for all ten years, gathered together to mark the milestone.]

A Model That Outgrew Bicycles

P2 launched in 2006 as the first of what the Mann Group came to call its "mastermind groups” -  non-competing retailers meeting twice a year to trade notes on operations and strategy in a way that turned individual businesses into a network of allies. It worked well enough that it didn't stay confined to bicycles. The same model went on to shape Grassroots Outdoor Alliance's Engage program, Running-C2, Adidas's adimaster panel, and the Shimano Dealer Panel, proof that what started as one industry association's idea for its retailers turned into a template other industries wanted too.

The people inside those rooms are the ones who can vouch for it best. Nolan Moser, Corporate Manager of Retail Services at Shimano America, has said the Shimano panel adds real value to how dealers run their businesses rather than serving as another vehicle for pushing product — and that having an independent facilitator gives Shimano confidence the sessions stay focused on what actually helps the dealers, not the brand's agenda. Steve Donahue of Recycled Cycles has called the experience a genuine opportunity to learn from other retailers' best practices, and pointed out how reassuring it is to find that shops everywhere are wrestling with the same problems — proof, as he put it, that retailers are all in it together.

That's the same instinct P2 was built on twenty years ago: retailers do better work when they stop assuming they have to figure it out alone.

A Volunteer's Association

It's worth pausing on something easy to overlook: the NBDA's board has always been unpaid retailers, volunteering their time on top of running their own shops. That's true today under Executive Director Heather Mason, who has led the association through some of its hardest recent years — including the loss of two of its three historic revenue streams when trade magazines and Interbike wound down. It was true under Fred, working with boards of 10 to 15 dealers who rotated in, put in the hours, and rotated out having built something durable.

The Throughline

Ask Fred what separates a good bike shop from a great one, and he doesn't talk about square footage or margin points. He talks about joy — the thing you can feel walking into a store where the staff actually love bikes, whether or not the fixtures are new. It's an odd thing for a trade association built on spreadsheets and KPIs to be organized around, but it tracks: P2 was never really about the numbers. The numbers were just the excuse to get retailers talking to each other honestly, twice a year, for going on three decades now.

Eighty years in, that's still the NBDA's real legacy — not a program or a policy, but a habit of retailers helping retailers that shows no sign of running out.