Harley Rental Shops Rev Up Engines for Varied Customers

Sturgis is the South Dakota town where motorcycle riders congregate every August. It’s also where 41-year-old Jeff Rankin met up with a business opportunity.

Rankin, a 20-year resident of the San Diego area, crossed paths with Denver businessman Wayne “Lumpy” Ordakowski in the town near Mount Rushmore, and started talking to him about opening a San Diego outlet for Ordakowski’s enterprise, Blue Sky Motorcycle Rentals, Inc. Blue Sky specializes in renting Harley-Davidson motorcycles in 15 cities.

The more the two talked, the more the venture seemed to make sense to Rankin, who went on to invest $60,000 of his money in the business.

Blue Sky opened its doors in Pacific Beach in mid-May with four motorcycles.



Now Rankin is placing newspaper ads, talking up his business among hotel concierges , and waiting for his investment to pay off.

The clientele has been varied, Rankin said. It’s been young and old, experienced and inexperienced, wealthy and those “scraping together nickels.”

Rankin is not the only one renting Harley-Davidsons in San Diego.

Los Angeles-based Eaglerider, which has locations in several U.S. cities, Mexico and Europe, rents out Harleys from a location in the Midway district. Then there’s Route 66 Riders, which occupies the back room of an unrelated business, San Diego Harley-Davidson in Kearny Mesa.

Natalie Hendrikx, 33, runs the local Route 66 Riders shop. She is not the typical person you’d expect renting out high-powered, 700-pound motorcycles. The Swiss-born Hendrikx stands 5-foot-3 and weighs 110 pounds. But she has developed a taste for Milwaukee’s most-loved export, and is so enamored with riding, she does it on her vacation time.

Hendrikx, a San Diego resident, has been running the business for four and a half years. The San Diego operation, which currently has 18 motorcycles, is actually an outpost for the main business based in Marina del Rey and owned by Glenn Bartels.

Bartels, 38, said his rental business brought in $1.4 million during 2004. Some $400,000 of it came from San Diego. Hendrikx has a full-time counterpart in the San Diego shop, and a couple of part-timers for extra help.

Hendrikx said the moneymaking scenario in her business is a big group renting for an extended period, though she declined to give gross or net income for a hypothetical, two-week jaunt.

More often, people go local. Hendrikx sends folks to the mountains; Rankin sends them to the coast.

Hendrikx said roughly half her business comes from tourists. Others might rent a Harley-Davidson to get a better feel for a machine they will someday invest in. Maybe 1 in 20 renters are women, while 80 percent of her customers are “middle-aged guys,” said Hendrikx.

Of course, renting a motorcycle to a total stranger puts a business at risk of losing an asset , or worse. As a first step in cutting risk, Hendrikx and Rankin say they require riders to have a California motorcycle license or its equivalent. “We have a ton of release forms,” Hendrikx added. The rental agencies also offer multiple insurance packages.

Insurance, Bartels said, is a key part of the business. The rates businesses pay can vary dramatically.

The work of renting , and retrieving , motorcycles can lead to some odd hours. Hendrikx said she was once dispatched to retrieve a Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail Classic in Jackson, Wyo. A two-and-a-half-day trip to San Diego included the rocky scenery of Zion National Park in Utah, mechanical difficulties, then extreme heat near Las Vegas. But the crowning touch to her story was a brutal thunderstorm, experienced in a tank top and jeans, on a rural stretch of highway with semitrailers barreling by mercilessly.

“I was just glad to be alive,” she said, adding that the experience toughened her up.