20 year anniversary of Gavin Hanna working at John M Hanna Cycles

Summer 2024 marks the 20-year anniversary of Gavin Hanna working at John M Hanna Cycles!

I started in the shop in May 2004 while still attending Lisburn Tech one day a week studying Business Management and Business Law.

Though in saying this I have been in the shop “helping out” from when I was no age! As you can see from the photo below I started cycling at a very young age and I still enjoy getting out on the bike 2-3 times a week (though I don’t tend to be as well dressed as in the photo below). 

I properly started cycling when I worked in the shop though with a front suspension hybrid bike that I used to commute to work on. I would also cycle from home to Oxford island on a Sunday morning which was around 25 miles. 

After a few years I got the bug for mountain biking, there's nothing to beat being in the forest on a Sunday morning flying though the trees down a trail. 

I then progressed on to road racing and I joined the Maryland wheelers and competed in the Maryland and Phoenix club races and Time Trials for a number of years. 

The pinical of my cycling adventures so far has to have been spending 4 days cycling in the French alps in 2018 and climbing the Col De Galiber, and Alp dues to name a few. I have a short blog piece about it here 

Here are a few examples of some of the things I have been involved with in the last 20 years and some things that have changed over the years.

• -Introduced the cycle to work scheme to the business
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• -Updated jmhcycles.co.uk to a more modern and easier to use platform which was later integrated into our electric point of sale for live stock control online and in store and at this time the site became responsive to suit the different devices people are viewing it on with the growth of online shopping done on mobile devices. 
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• -Revamped the shop front giving the building a more modern face lift
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• -Thanks to Dad (John) we started selling e-bikes over 16 years ago. At that time the top of the range e-bike was £1000. This has changed massively as we now sell a range of e-bikes from £1000 to £6000. 
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• -We revamped the workshop to keep up with the changing times and now have a laptop in the workshop for e-bike servicing & diagnostics. I often think if Granda (Gerard Hanna who started the business in the mid 1940s) was here today he would never have seen a computer and wouldn’t know why on earth we are plugging it into a push bike!

My role in the business has changed somewhat in this time also. I began building trikes in the shop with dad before I left school. (I took them out of the box and did the pre-assembly and then he checked and finished them.) 

I am still very much front of house in sales as that's where I love to be but also take more to do with running and managing the business and making the key decisions now.

Many thanks to all our customers new and old, heres to another 20 years!