Selling direct to customer is like any retail bike sale in the sense that you don't get to choose or alter the customers wants/needs. Your choice is only how to deal with them. Have you noticed how certain salesmen seem to get sucked into the time vortex with customers more than others? The conversation is yours to steer if you are at the helm.
On an unrelated note here is an anecdote from working the e-infobox at a bike shop. Potential employee emails resume and cover letter - nothing out of the ordinary. We aren't actively hiring and I tell him that if/when we hire it's generally someone with a bit of shop experience. I'm returned with a snide remark to the tune of "How am I supposed to get shop experience if no shop will hire me without said experience?" I left it there but the experience really proved the point that some people do and make and others ask and hope.
No one is ever given experience and I have certainly been at the ask and hope stage. That said there are plenty of places to sharpen teeth and get to work. I am constantly impressed with people who do more with less and am slowly coming down the mountain of mystical reverence of all things bikes. Steel tubes melted together - GO.
I'd say that I have gotten lucky to get what amounts to a apprenticeship in a fab/prototype machine shop but luck isn't the case. My this led me here and who knows where next. I think that a lot of people want to want to build bikes but their that will just never take them there.
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