In the past five years, Bobby Kelting and his crew have taught close to 2,000 St. Louis kids how to ride a bike. And a few adults, too: Kelting believes it is never too late to learn.
Kelting’s BK Bike School offers one-hour private lessons for kids ages four and up, priced at $70 per lesson. His aim is that after just one lesson, kids will be confident enough to ride sans training wheels.
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“We pride ourselves in one lesson and you’re done. We’re not trying to milk people out of multiple lessons by any means,” Kelting tells SLM. “We have the parents there, and we’ll show the parent at the end of the lesson how to keep working with the child if the child isn’t fully riding yet.”
Kelting got into the bike-teaching business as a P.E. teacher for fifth and sixth graders in northern Arkansas before he moved to St. Louis for his wife’s professorship at Saint Louis University.
He taught around 30 students how to ride mountain bikes before his move. Then, he taught his own kids to ride. Word spread of his unique talent for instruction. “I had taught my oldest [child] to ride at the start of COVID, and then started informally teaching other friends’ kids, and it just took off from there,” he says. He founded B.K. Bike School in 2021 and predicts that this year the school will give more than 600 lessons—up from 330 in 2024.
The school employs nearly a dozen high school and college-aged instructors to teach kids to ride. The lessons take place in school and church parking lots throughout St. Louis County, generally locations near the instructor’s home. Lesson locations span South County up to Hazelwood, with bookings also available in St. Charles.
Isaac Emmenegger, a rising high school senior, has worked for BK Bike School for two years and given almost 200 lessons in the Captain Elementary parking lot in Clayton.
“It’s heartwarming, is just the best way to put it.” Emmenegger says of his job. “Most of them will come in like really timid and a little scared … [but] their confidence builds and builds and builds, and by the end of the lesson, some of them even give me hugs. They’re so happy with how they did.”
Emmenegger added that learning from Kelting about the day-to-day operations of the bike school inspired him to pursue entrepreneurship in college. “I’ve always loved the idea of starting a business myself, but this has really given me the [skills of] how to lead [a business],” he says.
Kelting believes that his instructors being framed as “bike riding experts” helps kids get past mental blocks. “I tell people it’s about 85 percent mental riding a bike, and once you can get over that, and go from there, [riding unassisted] comes together pretty quickly.”
In addition to helping with mental blocks, BK Bike School has special bikes. Through a partnership with Guardian Bikes—a Shark Tank-supported child bike company out of Indiana— instructors bring Guardian bikes and balance bikes to help kids get started.
The Guardian Bikes have a special “sure stop braking system,” which means that both the front and back wheels can be stopped by a singular hand brake rather than pedaling backwards, which can put kids off-balance.
The bike school encourages parents to watch the lessons and to bring their kids’ bikes so that they can practice riding on their actual bike at the end of the lesson.
Part of his value proposition is that while parents may be tempted to step in to help when kids look unsteady, his instructors can identify the difference between being slightly off-balance versus about to fall.
“I equate it to swim lessons. If you try and teach your own kid how to swim, the kid yells out for you, and as a mom or dad, you want to grab them right away, and you probably don’t realize that they can figure it out,” he explains.
“[We have] different techniques and drills that we use really in about the first 15 to 25 minutes of the lesson, [and] we have very very few falls. If kids were falling while they were working with us, we wouldn’t be in business,” Kelting adds. “I think the value’s there for parents.”
BK Bike School isn’t the only option for outsourcing bicycle lessons. St. Louis Bworks offers free group lessons teaching kids to ride. Its classes are so popular, many fall options are already sold out.
Kelting believes that St. Louis has a vibrant biking community which has been very supportive of his business, citing organizations like Trailnet and BWorks.
He equates kids learning to ride a bike to a teen getting a driver’s license, explaining, “It’s a sense of independence.”
