Lance Small has been fixing his own bike since he was 7 years old. Growing up in Venice Beach, California, Small says he got a bike as a kid, but his family couldn’t afford to get it repaired. So, he figured it out on his own. Now 58, Small is known around Venice as the Bicycle Whisperer, the name of his startup bike repair business he launched in 2011. He can fix anything. “I love repairing bikes,” he says. “It’s a hobby that turned into my business.”
He runs his shop out of a 1985 GMC van on the corner of 7th Avenue and Westminster in Venice. It’s not a mobile shop—it’s at the same location every day—but the shop itself does move from Small’s house to that street corner. He works on everything from beach cruisers to city bikes and offers bicycle rentals, both short and long term. He started working on electric bikes in the last year or so. “We do all kinds of repairs,” he says. “We don’t paint or weld, but we’ll do everything else.”