So you want to open an indoor bike park?

The idea gets thrown around a lot in bike circles; we should open a bike park! But the reality is, the bike park scene isn’t that solid of a business plan. Ryan Greenberg knows all about it. He started Calgary’s B-Line Indoor Bike Park back in 2017. It was 60,000 square feet. He quit his job at the bank, went all in, and on paper it was gonna work. Attendance was good. It was a strong part of Calgary’s bike community. But on April 30, 2024 he had to close the place down. We chatted with him about how to make a bike park work.

Canadian MTB: So, you owned B-Line? And you ran it for a while?

Ryan Greenberg: Yeah. Yeah. 6.5 years. We just closed in April.

Canadian MTB: What happened? How come you closed?

Ryan Greenberg: Um, I guess just our, our costs went a fair bit higher than we thought they would. Blow number one was COVID. That drained our finances and closed us during our most profitable times or typically during the winter. They were telling us we can make our money back in the summer. We obviously couldn’t. We still had 100 per cent of our expenses while we were closed. Then our costs went from $13,000 in our first year to $37,000 when we closed. And that’s per month.

Canadian MTB: That’s a month! Wow. Is that rent?

Ryan Greenberg: A portion of that is rent. In our case, we included utilities and maintenance to the building and taxes and variable costs the landlord can pass on. In most commercial leases, that’s pretty typical; you pay rent and cost. We just thought our costs were gonna go from $2.50 per square foot in the first year to like $3 per square foot by the end of year ten. But they were like $7 and change a square foot by the end of five years. So we just couldn’t absorb an extra $22,000 a month. Especially with COVID and then, I mean we’re weather dependant, so.

Canadian MTB: Even $13,000 sounds like that’s a lot of, a lot of people coming in every month.

Ryan Greenberg: The $13,000 was manageable. We had good attendance. Our numbers were better than what we had in our business plan. So we were actually making a little bit more money than we thought we would. But again, not enough to cover that kind of rise in the cost. A few other costs went up too. The cost of wood doubled from when we first opened.

Canadian MTB: What about insurance? Is that big expense?

Ryan Greenberg: Yeah, it was up there. Thousands of dollars a month.

Canadian MTB: It’s part of that…