Nick Martin and the Art of Letting Go

Nick Martin’s early business had a volume problem. The tape gun was too loud for the library. He had borrowed a camera, photographed his possessions outside the public library in Grand Junction, Colorado, and used its computers to list them on eBay. Packing the merchandise indoors proved less welcome. Libraries accommodate many kinds of ambition. A shipping department has its limits.

Martin had come to Colorado after college, found housing expensive, and pared his belongings down to a bicycle, a Volkswagen bus and the clothes he wore. He wanted to ride and travel. Selling things was a means of staying on the road. Eventually, other racers asked him to sell their equipment, too. The temporary arrangement began to look suspiciously like a job.

The Pro’s Closet grew out of that exchange. Its founder’s particular talent was noticing that something could be surplus to one person and useful to another. Years later, he would apply a related judgment to his own position at the company. Keeping hold of a thing, even a thing you built, was not automatically the best use of it.

A racing budget with a resale department

Professional cycling supplies its participants with an awkward combination: equipment to spare and money to watch. Martin knew the arrangement from inside mountain-bike racing. Sponsored clothing and components accumulated while he and his teammates travelled. Extra gear occupied space, and space in a van was a finite commodity.

He already understood eBay. Becoming the person who could turn a teammate’s unwanted equipment into money was useful in a way that required little explanation. Someone had gear. Someone else wanted gear. Martin did the intervening work. In his own early account of the business, the turning point arrived when he was spending more time at a computer than on a bicycle.

That is a less cinematic transition than a founder receiving a flash of inspiration. It is also more revealing. He followed a task people kept asking him to perform. The customers came with the problem attached. The Pro’s Closet’s name preserved the origins of the inventory: professional riders had closets worth emptying.

By 2014, he could describe walking into a 5,000-square-foot Boulder warehouse filled with cycling parts. The bus had acquired an improbable extension. He wanted local-shop service within an online business, and trade-ins offered a way to work with traditional retailers. A shop could sell the next bike while TPC handled the previous one.

The price of “custom paint”

One of Martin’s more consequential transactions involved six Colnago Master Pista frames. In his account, the business needed more people and computers in 2014, but lacked the money. A supplier clearing warranty stock offered the frames for $600 apiece. The paperwork described custom paint. Martin thought they might fetch about $800 each.

The paint turned out to be associated with the artist Futura. Martin put the frames into eBay auctions starting at 99 cents and recalled sale prices of $12,000 to $14,000. He also kept one, hanging it in his office as an emergency reserve. The episode supplied working capital and a fairly handsome alternative to a bank statement.

It illustrates both the attraction and the difficulty of his trade. An invoice can be accurate and still tell you remarkably little. The right buyer sees a history, a rarity, or a use that the previous owner has stopped seeing. A reseller earns a living by closing that gap. Occasionally, the gap is large enough to pay for computers.

A minimalist with inventory

There is some comedy in a minimalist running a warehouse of desirable objects. Martin’s answer was circulation. By 2016, he had described a habit of giving away or selling one possession a day. The business redistributed things that already existed: used components, spare equipment, unsold stock. Its growth could make other people’s garages less crowded.

Minimalism here had a practical streak. The business needed goods to move, rather than sit around looking valuable. An object’s usefulness depended on finding someone who would actually use it. A bike could have another season in it even when its owner had already begun thinking about the next model.

The same impulse gave his company a wider market than its Colorado address suggested. In 2015, roughly 40 percent of TPC’s business came from international customers. Online selling let a small specialist reach riders far beyond the local season. Winter in one place did not mean every potential customer had put the bike away.

He also kept an interest in bicycles that deserved preservation. TPC’s museum displayed historic machines, including handmade bikes brought to the North American Handmade Bicycle Show. This was an appealing complication in the philosophy of clearing things out. Some objects carried enough of the sport’s past to justify a longer stay.

Making strangers comfortable

Used bicycles ask a buyer to make several judgments at once. Is the price reasonable? Is the frame sound? Does the description mean what it appears to mean? A seller faces a different set of chores: photographs, questions, negotiations, packing. Knowing how to ride offers surprisingly little protection against an exhausting exchange of messages.

Martin put the trade-in problem plainly in 2016: “The hardest part of buying a new bike is selling your old bike.” TPC’s Trade Up partnerships offered valuations that could become purchasing power at a participating shop. The independent retailer could complete a sale without becoming a specialist in secondhand inventory.

Outside capital followed. In September 2017, TPC announced a $9 million funding round led by Foundry Group, with Ridgeline Ventures participating. The business had 40 employees. The money would support its website, team and the infrastructure needed to service and recondition bikes. The computer work had grown a workshop around it.

In 2019, the Certified Pre-Owned program added a 141-point inspection and a buyback framework. These were concrete attempts to make the used purchase feel more predictable. The terms mattered because a repeat customer needed confidence in both transactions: buying a bike today and passing it on later.

By January 2020, Martin reported that more than 80 percent of orders came through TPC’s own website. The company had learned on someone else’s marketplace, then developed a place where it could shape the customer experience itself. The origin remained modest; the work was becoming more complicated.

Four days beyond the conference room

Meanwhile, a friend had noticed an occupational hazard. Cycling journalist Zap invited Martin on a four-day trip around Utah’s White Rim, a roughly 100-mile loop through Canyonlands. The business of bicycles was taking him away from riding them. A journey into the desert offered a rather direct remedy.

Martin chose a titanium Mosaic GT-1. He admitted that his priorities had shifted toward family and business, and that riding now happened about once a week if he was lucky. The former professional was uneasy about becoming the weak link in the group. Expertise can survive a busy calendar rather better than riding legs.

He was also reluctant to be away from his wife and young son. That detail complicates the usual founder adventure story. The freedom he had once pursued in a bus had acquired attachments worth keeping. He wanted time for the people at home as well as the enterprise bearing his ideas.

The next thing to release

On September 28, 2020, Martin announced that John Levisay would become CEO. The handover took effect on October 12. Levisay had sat on the board since 2016 and had experience building the online learning business Craftsy. Martin had decided that TPC’s next stage called for experience beyond his own.

He described discussing the decision at length with his wife, Elizabeth. His letter acknowledged the founder’s temptation to retain control even when a company’s needs outgrow an individual’s capacity. He would remain involved with culture, brand and processes. Giving up the chief executive title made room for another kind of contribution.

“What expertise do we need around the table to achieve our vision?”Nick Martin, September 2020

The business then had 92 employees and was preparing for a much larger Louisville facility. Its subsequent history included expansion, layoffs and an October 2024 closure. New owners acquired its digital assets and brought the brand back. In November 2024, returning manager Justin England said Martin had been outside operations for several years and was not involved in the relaunch.

Those later events belong in the chronology without turning Martin into the executive in charge of every chapter. His public LinkedIn profile now lists Martin Real Estate Management in Boulder. The former racer’s record at TPC remains a sequence of practical experiments: sell the spare gear, make the handoff easier, give the next rider a reason to trust the purchase.

He had begun by reducing what he carried. Building a company made him responsible for much more. When he handed over the CEO role, he returned to a question that had followed him since the van: what is worth holding on to, and what might work better in someone else’s hands?