Very excited to announce that a project I’ve been working on for a long time has finally launched: 2r.

It’s a multi-media magazine about cycling, combining in-depth written articles with photo galleries and video. Available for the iPad right now (iOS6 required) and on some additional platforms shortly. I’m very excited that Paul Kimmage will have a “big piece” in 2r every month.

In issue 1, Paul interviews LeMond about his relationships with Hinault, Fignon and Armstrong. In the 44(!) page interview, they also cover races being sold, cocaine, and awkward dinners (with the chef of Renault and Lance). Boonen revisits his worst loss, Gesink draws his first bike and Nuyens contemplates retirement. To top it off, Cavendish thinks about what he would do as the UCI president. Plus the most beautiful photos from l’Équipe and Sirotti.

2r will appear monthly and best of all, it’s FREE. Download it for the iPad here. To follow 2r (and receive announcements when other formats are ready), choose from the following:

website:   2Rmag.com
twitter:     @2Rmag
facebook: 2Rmag

I really hope you like the magazine and if you do, please tell your friends about it! Thanks.

I stumbled upon this celebrity behavior a while ago, and to be honest I was amazed. Or maybe I’m naive and “this is how the world works”. Say there is a celebrity who wants to do some charity work (to feel good or look good, who knows). So she proposes to a bunch of business people:

• Let’s do an event in your town, sell 500 tickets at $200 for a total of $100k, and “100% of the proceeds go to charity”. Are you in?
• But for me to show up to the event, for you guys to be able to claim “We got her to come visit for charity”, you’ve got to pay me personally $1M.

How do you feel about this?

• Praise the people who paid $200, which is going straight to charity?
• Praise the business people who paid $1M to generate $100k for charity?
• Damn the business people for being so star-struck that they paid $1M to the celeb, instead of straight to the charity they claim to care so much about?
• That celebrity is a lot of things, but a giving personality concerned with charity she ain’t?

I’m feeling a mix of all four. How about you?

I promise I’ll get back to cycling in my next blog.

Probably the hardest thing for companies to do nowadays; customer service. I can appreciate it’s difficult, and usually I’m not too upset when I don’t get a response or only after a long time – as long as I get a feeling the company is trying.

A few days ago however, I visited a presentation from Lithium. It’s a pretty interesting company that helps brands create communities (forums on steroids, to be disrespectful) and some other social media stuff. They had a panel discussion with three of their clients as panelists; KPN, TomTom and HP. The stated reason for these three companies to create a community? “Call-deflection”.

The idea is that if you create a community, people ask questions there and other people answer them, reducing the need to call customer service. Why do they want to do this? Because customers hate customer service and because it’s expensive.

“Call-deflection”. Think about that for a while. So customer service sucks and instead of fixing it, they ask their customers to fix it. Don’t get me wrong, the result is probably pretty positive, as I have no doubt that the average customer knows more about the product than the average call-center-voice.

But the cynicism was just shocking to me. We’re not talking about a company where sometimes the lines are busy or the person picking up the phone doesn’t know the answer, we’re talking about companies who actively try to avoid talking to you.

Of course this started back in the 20th century, with endless phone trees. That worked for a while but people started to figure out how to get to the end of the tree. So they moved all that stuff to India, ensuring that if you managed to get through, at least it wouldn’t cost them very much. Whole towns in India have adopted Texan and New York accents for this purpose.

But now they have found a new way to not have to talk to their customers – the community. For all the beautiful reasons they could have to start a community (learn their customers’ frustrations, ask for input on new products, reward loyalty), the one they pick is the polar-opposite; contact avoidance.

I just don’t get it. I have been involved in a few companies, all of them far from perfect. Also in customer service, I am sure there are plenty of areas in which they could have been better. But the one thing we always enjoyed was to talk to the customer and learn. From the early days of Cervelo when Phil and I visited every possible race to today’s world of Twitter and blogs, contact with customers is key. How can you ever hope to have a long-term relationship with your customers if you don’t want to talk to them? Bizarre.

This evening I will be a guest of  ”de Avondetappe”, a Tour de France talk show on national Dutch television. Two years ago I was there for the first time, and my appearance shocked the homefront.

You may remember, it was just after the first Giro for Cervelo TestTeam, where we won four stages and Sastre finished on the podium. But it could have been five wins. Serge Pauwels was in the lead group on a mountain stage but was called back by JP van Poppel to help Sastre (as were a few riders from other teams). Through miscommunication (both human and electronics-caused), it was a complete disaster.

At first Serge refused to slow down, and when he finally did 10 minutes later, it was no longer necessary so it looked like a complete cock-up – which it was but a different one than it appeared on TV. Anyway, a team blunder but an honest one. Unfortunately, an inferiority-complexed commentator saw it as proof of a Dutch conspriracy to prevent a Belgian win. That week several people on the team received death-threats.

Somehow I had never bothered to mention these threats at home. I can’t really remember why I never mentioned it (“Anything happen at work today?” “Nothing special”). So my family learned about it while watching some relaxed talk show two months later. They were not amused. So let me get this out of the way before the broadcast: There have been no death threats in the past two years.

I’ll be away next week for a long-long-long-awaited vacation. I have some posts lined up, but I won’t be able to respond to your comments until I return home. But I do appreciate your comments, so I will catch up asap.

Note: This post is about the poll results from Friday, a “normal” blog post will follow shortly.

Thanks to everybody who filled out the poll. 3x a week got the most votes, but very closely followed by 5x, 1x and “other”. So it’s all over the place. Most people wo voted “other” said to post whenever I had something interesting and/or intelligent to say. No pressure!!

That said, I understand what you mean, and maybe that sentiment was also in the votes for 3x per week when I am currently blogging 5x. Maybe it’s not about the frequency per se but more a reflection that some of the posts simply haven’t been what you were looking for. Obviously I write about what interests me at that moment. I do try to ensure it will interest YOU as well, but that’s hard to know for sure.

Maybe we can make a deal: For the moment, I will keep writing 5x per week (especially with the Tour coming up), but:

1. If I don’t feel it’s up to snuff, I skip a day
2. If you don’t feel it’s up to snuff, you let me know (privately by email at gv@gerard.cc, via the comments section of the offending post or via twitter)

Not a traditional blog entry today, but a question about this blog. I really hope you can help me figure this out. I don’t want to annoy people by blogging too much or too little (and frankly, I don’t want to kill myself writing either), so why don’t you tell me?

Thanks in advance for your answer.

A few days ago I mentioned “full-service” airlines Swiss and KLM, but recently I flew Cathay. People rave about it, but I have to say I found it average. The seats were comfortable but really cramped, and the difference between the upright and relaxed position were difficult to spot without a microscope. I guess their core market is Asia, where people are on average a little shorter than I am.

But what stood out for me on that flight was that I was running late, as my train was delayed. So with 30 minutes to take-off, I was still making my way to the gate. How surprised was I to get a call from Cathay, wondering if I still planned to fly with them today, as they hadn’t seen me at the gate yet. A personal touch for a non-frequent flyer that, just like EasyJet’s gesture, doesn’t really cost them anything and probably helps them plan their gate procedures. Maybe not nice enough for me to look forward to folding up in their seats again, but who knows.

When you fly with “cheap” airline EasyJet and you arrive early for your flight home, they will put you on an earlier flight for free if there is space. A nice gesture that costs them nothing (in fact it’s positive for them as it gives them a – be it slim – chance to sell the seat you just opened up on the late flight, whereas surely nobody was going to buy a ticket anymore on the flight that is just about to leave). But the point is, it costs them nothing, it’s a nice gesture, the customer is happy.

Try to do that at “full-service” airlines Swiss or KLM. If the person at the check-in is nice, you may be fine. If he/she follows the official rules, they’ll send you to the ticket office to BUY the change. The ticket office will then display the flexibility of a concrete wall, lecture about how your class of Economy doesn’t allow this, etc, etc (don’t get me started on how there can be a dozen classes of Economy that are neither logical nor clearly explained nor have any resulting effect on what the customer gets, except for how difficult you make life for him/her and how much you charge).

Anyway, the point is, if you have a business and there is something you can do that doesn’t cost you anything and makes the customer happy, do it. Yes, give some thought to whether the customer can game the system, but the vast majority of them won’t and will simply appreciate your gesture.

What could a bike company do to make your life more enjoyable? Let me know in the comments section of this post or on twitter.

People sometimes ask me how you know if a business idea will work. The answer of course is that you don’t, (business) life is not that easy. Or as I tend to say:

If it was easy, everybody would do it

Which explains exactly why even if such a “can’t fail” plan exists, it would be foolish to follow it. Plans that can’t fail are per definition plans that many people will follow, which means that there is no money to be made with it (supply-demand, that stuff). Which of course in turn means the plan fails, and so it wasn’t a “can’t fail” plan to begin with, merely an easily executable project without reward.

Being “backstage” at the Formula 1 Grand Prix for four days last week, the one person who stood out for me was Sebastian Vettel. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an athlete so relaxed. He made time for everybody to have a little chat, take a photo, sign an autograph, on and on.

Most drivers didn’t seem to be going anywhere without their agent by their side and a bit of nervousness in the air. They too would allow for a few photos and autographs, but then they’d duck into their secluded areas as quickly as possible. Even at the eve of the race, when most drivers left around 5pm, Vettel walked out at the same time as I did, sometime after 7. Yes, I know, he didn’t win the next day, but being able to stay that calm in a sport that is mental as much as physical has to be an advantage.

It made me think if I know of a rider who is as calm before a race, but I can’t think of any. It’s not that they are all nervous wrecks, far from it, but Vettel was at a different level of serenity. The only time a cyclist claims to be that calm or “tranquilo” is if they have just been accused of doping. Have you ever noticed that, how the first response is often that they are tranquilo? How can that be, if you’ve just been accused of the worst thing possible in your sport? Was it no surprise? Would you not go out of your mind if you’d just been notified of a false positive?