A Story on How to Lose Your Potential Customer.

This is long story, but it does have a happy ending.

Background

To understand this story you, the reader, need a little background. Starting off my family do not own a car. We sold our last car in 2019 since we didn't use it often enough. I mean like we would go the entire winter and not drive the car. I typically took the train to work, my wife has never been a fan of driving and has always used a bicycle for her work. Since we didn't "need" the car, we decided we should go without. We bought a trailer for our bicycles so that we could do larger shopping, and better bags for our bikes.

In 2022 my company leased me an e-bike via a company called bikeleasing.de. It was an added bonus for me and it was specifically nice as it made pulling our bike trailer much easier. I could easily pull a fully loaded trailer (around 50kg) and fill my bike bags and backpack with the rest of the groceries. It was a major step up from pulling the trailer with my normal multi-speed bike (normal no motor). This was all well and good until at the end of last year, the leased e-bike was stolen. So I am back to riding my normal bike, which adds some insult to the injury.

My wife is a freelance midwife. She works for herself, which means she has to pay her own insurances and she has to pay taxes on what she earns. We are always looking for ways to find business expences that she can write off, to lower our tax bill every year. As I mentioned earlier, my wife rides her bike to her house visits. Her bike is very heavy cargo bike without a motor. She has owned this particular bike for nearly 10 years (maybe more), and while it still works she has had several costly repairs to keep it going.

My wife and I both agreed that we could really use a new e-bike, and while I could probably talk to my boss about the possiblity of leasing a new one, I'm not really interested in having that over my head at the moment. So the next logical option is that my wife should get an e-bike. As such we discussed what options are available. The Deutsche Hebammenverband is an organization for supporting midwives here in Germany and they have an agreement with the company jobrad.de for reducing the price for midwives that wish to lease a "Dienstrad" or bike for their job. So this at the time was an obvious choice as the bike that we have chosen is relatively expensive.

Please note that jobrad.de and bikeleasing.de are not the same company. As far as I know bikeleasing.de does not have specific offers for freelance or self-employed workers (I could be wrong), it was the option my boss chose when leasing bikes for employees. All experiences we've had, even with the reporting of the stolen bike, with bikeleasing was not problematic. This story is all about my wife's experiences with using jobrad.de.

Signup with Jobrad

Jobrad.de provides leasing for companies and supposedly also for self-employed people. There are apparently two separate processes one for companies leasing to their employees, and one for the self-employed, and for these two processes there are two separate portals. These portals cannot talk to one another. If you signed up for the self-employed and accidently attempt to login to the other portal, there's no indication informing you that you are on the wrong page. Simply a failed authentication. This caught my wife out a couple of times, as she forgot to check the URL to ensure she was on the correct webpage.

Apparently the signup was fairly straight forward, and she had done it before I was aware so I don't know exactly what sort of questions they asked, or if it was simply configuring a user account for her. I would like to assume that they did some very basic verficiation that she is indeed a self-employed person, but again I can't say for sure.

My wife is pretty meticulous with reading all the instructions, so she thought she understood how the process would go. She would find the bike of her choice from a company that has a working relationship with jobrad.de. She would discuss with the bike shop about the offer, and they should send her the offer so that she could upload it into her portal account on jobrad.de. Jobrad.de would process the order, and once approved the bike could be delivered and she would pay a certain sum a month for the next 3 years and then after 3 years she could make a final payment and own the bike outright. At least that's how it all sounded, but things became difficult rather quickly.

Getting an Offer

Of course our first issue was finding a bike shop that could give her an offer. The bike she wants is not always available as it is pretty popular, but also rather expensive and many shops just don't keep them in stock. We had hoped that a somewhat local shop to us could make us the offer but the guy just said that they aren't available and that was the end of the subject. So she was forced to look online. In this case she was successful, and eventually found a shop that had the bike, for a decent price, which was greatly marked down. So she contacted them to discuss the details.

The first thing that came out of the discussion was that the offer that my wife had seen online can't be used in conjunction with a jobrad lease. This is because jobrad.de does not pay the full price to the bike shop, and since the bike is already marked down the bike shop would take a loss. So The price they offered my wife was about 300€ more than the price online. This wasn't so bad as it was still below the list price so my wife said go ahead and send her the offer. The problem here is that the bike shop had never dealt with jobrad for a self-employed person. My wife explained to them a couple of times that they have to send her the offer and she would upload it, but they kept insisting that they had to do it via their portal, and that they couldn't find her in the system. This went on for a couple of back and forths and finally they sent her the offer, and she was able to upload it.

It's not clear why jobrad has uses a completely different process for self-employed than for businesses. One would think it would be easier to have some sort of lookup for their partner portal that works both for self-employed and businesses, instead of having the offer uploaded by the bike shop for businesses but require the self-employed to upload it themselves.

Credit Checking

Now that jobrad has the offer, they would need to check my wife's credit. This is absolutely expected, and understandable. The problem here is that instead of looking up my wife via the German company SCHUFA which is probably the largest credit bureau in Germany, they use a company called Credit Reform, which apparently has a much smaller database, and nothing on private or self-employed people.

So the first feed back my wife received, after several days passed, was jobrad saying that they could not find her with Credit Reform, but they do see that she works with a midwife practice and she should think about leasing the bike through the midwife practice. Here they modified the online information including the practice for the leasing. This is not what my wife wanted.

My wife does indeed share a midwife practice. This, however, isn't really a company, or a business as much as a couple of midwives working together to provide support for pregnant women in our town. The practice does make money, and so pays its own taxes. My wife pays taxes on any money she receives from the practice, but then this falls under her self-employed and freelance status. Part of the reason she wants this bike is to lower her tax obligation by writing off the costs on her taxes. If she were to lease it through the practice, she would be paying the bill but the write off would be on the taxes for the practice itself. So this is an abosolute no-go for my wife, and she discusses it with jobrad and they said well then you will need to provide your information to credit reform so that we can lease the bike to you.

The Credit Company

My wife is at this point starting to get annoyed with the amount of hoops she's being forced to jump through already, but she's not ready to give up. So she contacts Credit Reform and they say that since she is not in their system they will send her the forms to fill out. Now I'm not sure if they sent her the forms by email and she had to print them and fill them out, or if they snail mailed the forms, but this process is already taking days from the time she got the offer from the bike shop. The forms are very business oriented, and are asking for values that my wife just does not have, as she is not required to have such numbers for her taxes. So she gives what she has and hopes that this is enough.

After a few days have passed, she checked the progress on the jobrad portal to see that it hasn't changed. This prompts a call to jobrad asking why the process is still on hold. They tell her that they still cannot find her in the Credit Reform system, and they suggest she talk to Credit Reform again. So she does and the person from Credit Reform she is speaking with recognizes her name and says she personally put my wife's information into the system, and that jobrad should have access. To assist the lady with Credit Reform provides my wife the identification infomration to give to jobrad in hopes this speeds things along. It is unclear if the information provided by the lady at Credit Reform helped jobrad or if they still had problems, but eventually my wife saw a new notification.

The Last Straw

At the end of March my wife and I were visiting her mother when, finally, jobrad gave her an update. The update says that the information in the leasing request about the practice needs removed. The information that jobrad included in the leasing request, as you remember my wife didn't want to have this information in the request at all as she was NOT leasing it though the practice. Basically, jobrad felt it necessary to modify the leasing request when they wanted her to lease through the midwife practice, but now they couldn't remove it, which my wife found extremely annoying. Then to exasperate the problem further, when my wife logged into the portal to make the change, some issue prevented her from making changes. All the fields and check boxes were disabled. She initially thought it was a browser problem, and asked me to take a look, but I was able to quickly identify that the form was locked and was not editable. She attempted to write them a message in the chat box that is provided in the portal but even this was locked. So she wrote them an email to tell them she can't make changes.

So at this point, my wife has had enough. She has also been thinking about her options. She had a lengthy discussion with her eldest sister, who also happens to be a banker. Whenever we've had to make major financial decisions and weren't sure which direction to take a talk with my sister-in-law usually helps give us an idea which direction is best for our needs. For us we could afford to buy the bike outright, but then my wife would have to write it off on taxes over 7 years, but if we were to lease it then we could write it off over 3 years, which we felt was the better option. Her sister gave us a different perspective, while yes we could write off the bike over 3 years, the money we would save in taxes wouldn't cover the money we spent on intrest, which is about 1000€. Her suggestion was to buy it directly from the bike shop, and since my wife's usage will certainly be over the 50% required by tax law to write off in the long run it's the better deal.

Final Decision and Reasoning

Even after hearing her sister's suggestion my wife still took time to think things over. In the end she decided to buy the bike from the bike shop directly, and cancel the leasing request with jobrad. So what was the problem? Simply jobrad made the process for a self-employed person to lease a bike so difficult, time consuming, and in some cases just ridiculous; it gave her time to really think about other options. Had jobrad made the process as smooth as it apparently is for businesses to lease bikes for their employees, then this might not have been an issue.

Suggestions on What Needs Fixed

Listening to my wife's complaints I had the very strong feeling that no one that was self-employed has ever actually attempted to lease a bike from jobrad, or that this part of their business is only present to make them look as if they care about the self-employed, but they really aren't interested in actually leasing bikes to them as it's not worth their time. It could be that when things kicked off with the initial system for business and they wanted to make the offer to self-employed, they just "tacked" something on that "should" work which from my experience as a software developer never works well. In any case I do have a few suggestions on how they could make this process easier.

Peform a Credit Reform Check on Account Setup

I'm sure there is some information required by jobrad to prove that the person is self-employed. Perhaps set up an automated process that checks if the person is already in the Credit Reform system, and if not invite them to request the forms needed. This would have reduced my wife's frustration and also speed up the process as she would have known that these forms were required. Another option in this case is maybe for self-employed people use a credit bureau that is geared for individuals and not companies.

Unify Offer Uploads Directly from Bike Shops

It sounds like bad planning to have bike shops upload offers for your business clients, but the self-employed people have to upload the offer themselves. There should be a solution that allows both business clients and self-employed to appear on the bike shop's portal. This simplifies the interface, and makes the user experience much better.

Do Not Make Changes to the Leasing Request and then Expect the Client to Correct

I'm not sure why this was even a thing. While I get that the leasing request is a contract under negotiation and that both sides need to make changes to the contactract until it is finalized. If you make a change in the contract that needs removed, then shouldn't you remove it and not tell the other person to make the change?

Test Your Process

Most importantly the process needs tested, constantly reviewed and revised to make it much more user friendly.

My Final Thoughts

E-Bikes are a large investment, whether for a business or for a family. In some cases someone may not be able to afford to buy an e-bike directly, thus needing to finance the purchase. Just ensure that you read the fine print in the contracts, and understand that the process can be daunting. Look at all your options, discuss the finances with someone you trust, or if you don't have a personal banker, like we have with my sister-in-law, discuss it with your banking institution to find the best option. Companies that lease e-bikes are also needing to make a profit, but don't allow them to push you into making a wrong decision. I hope that this story actually helps someone understand the difficulties my wife experienced, and it guides them through their purchase. I also hope that someone from jobrad.de actually reads this and maybe looks at trying to fix some of these issues. Who knows, all I know is that my wife's bike will likely arrive sometime next week, and we can finally lay this issue to rest.

This has been thoughts from a Jason, until the next post, take care.



Jason