EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published in GCU Magazine, available in the purple bins around campus or digitally.
Photos by Ralph Freso/GCU News
Is that your Porsche?
Yeah, said 29-year-old Levi Conlow, walking outside his Lectric eBikes company headquarters off West Utopia Road in north Phoenix.
“It’s a fun car,” he said of the electric Taycan, with an air of nothing to either brag about or hide.
It seems genuine, even though Lectric eBikes is so successful, with annual revenues “north of $200 million,” that Conlow said he would never need to work again.
But at times he feels like he’s speeding through life, so he’s not interested in sitting on money. He has a new purpose – to see how much of his company success can be applied to philanthropy.
Conlow reportedly has donated several million to African orphanages and to his alma mater of Grand Canyon University, which planted in him its ethics of conscious capitalism – a business philosophy that stresses that companies should act ethically and consider the well-being of others.
He said his interest in helping foster children led to Lectric’s sponsorship of full-ride scholarships for 10 students to GCU through its Fostering Futures program.
When he heard recently from a tearful graduate who told him that the scholarship was the best thing that ever happened to her, he tripled it to 30 scholarships for the 2025-26 academic year.
And he’s shipping nearly 700 e-bikes to GCU CityServe to help solve transportation issues inherent among the economically challenged.
Conlow said Brent and Judy Conlow are great parents and great people, “and I like to have a good amount of self-awareness that there are people out there that don’t have that. They were my greatest advantage, right? So there’s these kids out there that don’t have that, and so that’s what I want to solve for.
“Orphans and foster children are important to me. I don’t always have to follow the same playbook. It makes sense to donate money toward giving away bikes, but that’s our job. How do I do something more special?”
His business helps solve another problem – getting humans from point A to point B in an inexpensive and clean way, using less of the world’s resources.
“If you look at the single most efficient form of motorized transportation, it is the electric bicycle with pedal assists,” said Conlow, who said his goal is to grow a company that changes the way people move. “Recently, we sold our 600,000th bike, and that’s cool, but you can’t say you changed the way the world moves until you add zeros to it. You need to add several zeros to say you did something special.”
Lectric eBikes employs 130 people, including nearly a dozen GCU graduates, and for the past two years, it has made the top-selling e-bike, beating the likes of Trek and Giant. Its XP bikes are second only to two Tesla models on top of all electric vehicle sales, according to Electrek, which tracks the electric vehicle market.
The origins of Conlow’s entrepreneurial acumen and philanthropic spirit go back to his childhood in the Twin Cities suburb of Lakeville, Minnesota, where Brent Conlow said, even as a small child, Levi would chat up parents while waiting for the school bus in the morning, asking about their jobs.
He was in a one-income, four-child family, so they had to choose one sport – as long as it didn’t involve expensive cleats. The Conlows lived like many Americans, Brent said, waiting for payday Friday before shopping for groceries.
Levi’s favorite activity, though, was snowboarding down Buck Hill, and he needed lift money. He started his own dog-walking business at age 10 and was so successful he had to hire friends, “and I would take a little off the top.” He did yard work, car detailing and, by 15, was making up to $200 an hour, he said.
“My parents were like, ‘Don’t waste this raw talent,’” Levi said. “They were continuing to challenge me to not take the easy way and just go find a job but to create your own job. So I give them a lot of credit.”
Levi met Robby Deziel in junior high while playing online video games. Though they went to neighboring schools, they became fast friends. Deziel said he watched the Conlow family live frugally but give much to charity. He also saw Levi’s thrift, hearing how he saved money by making “lemonade” at the cafe out of lemon slices and sugar because they couldn’t order sodas.
“In middle school, he was literally already clipping coupons,” Deziel said. “When the guys would get together, he was like, ‘Hey you want to go to Pizza Ranch? I got a 4-for-1 coupon.’ I guess? Fast forward and he is driving hard with suppliers and vendors to get a better deal and pass that on to the consumer.”
The fact is, Deziel wasn’t that excited about Pizza Ranch but said Conlow always had a knack for rallying people to any adventure or excursion and was fittingly the high school team’s mascot. And he always hung around the smart kids, living out the advice that if you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
Deziel went to the University of Minnesota nearby for engineering, while Conlow went to nearby Bethel University, until one day Levi looked around at the blowing snow and called his grandparents in Sun City, Arizona, to say he needed a winter break. Coming down the escalator at the airport in Phoenix, Conlow saw the billboard for sunny GCU.
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Soon he was sharpening his entrepreneurial skills on GCU’s campus, joining fellow Minnesotan and Ocotillo Hall resident Nathan Cooper to launch an electric skateboard company. As the first in startup business incubator Canyon Ventures, Lectric Longboards initially took off. When Deziel visited Conlow his senior year, he was astounded that Levi’s phone was constantly pinging with orders.
“He was shocked. Man, here’s Levi, the dumbest of the group – and I know I am, I have incredibly smart friends – and I’m generating money that helps pay for college,” Conlow said.
But the business ran into steep competition from the Chinese, and one of the most heartbreaking days in his young life was watching a garbage collector come pick up his inventory. But after earning his bachelor’s in entrepreneurship and master’s in leadership at GCU in four years, he had lessons to draw from.
“It was the critical thinking and analytics required for creating business plans. That plan is on the table over there right now,” he said from his spacious Lectric office. “If I didn’t have the skill to make that plan … I’m gonna say the first $35 million in revenue came from following that plan step by step.”
It’s a crazy story that began in 2018. He enlisted Deziel to help him design an electric bike after Brent Conlow said he couldn’t find an affordable model. A business plan was launched. The problem was he needed $40,000. Brent Conlow borrowed against his retirement.
His father had long bred a relentless optimism that Levi was capable of everything and anything.
Levi said, “He had a total belief and confidence in me, which caused me to have that internally.”
That $40,000 went into making an e-bike that looked basically like a road bike strapped with a battery, built for two 6-foot guys with a narrow seat. They couldn’t sell it. They even knocked on doors.
They needed a new bike, a new plan. They also needed $10,000 more dollars.
Dad?
“We lost all my money, what’s $10,000 more?” Brent Conlow said. “He’s a good salesman.
“But part of it is he has no fear of failure. He doesn’t accept obstacles,” he added, recalling the pandemic’s supply chain issues when Levi hired a cargo plane to get his product to customers. “GCU gave him that confidence.”
With the new money, they had one last chance, and Deziel changed the model to a foldable, step-through bike with smaller wheels, better suited for the older crowd who seemed more interested in e-bikes, especially those in the RV crowd. They decided to send 10 models out to RV, tech and bicycle social media influencers.
After the first positive review, the phone started to buzz with orders.
“The first day we had $40,000 in sales,” Levi said. “It was the best day of my life. And the next day and next day. And after seven days, $100,000. In 21 days, we had $1 million in preorders.”
Frantic, he flew to Asia for suppliers. They had to start building a lot of bikes.
Deziel calls him the most action-oriented person he knows, relentlessly positive, throwing caution to the wind. Most people see all the problems along the way, he said. How to build it, how to ship it, who will answer the phone. “But while we are talking, he is already on the phone making four phone calls,” he said.
Working out of a friend’s townhouse garage in Phoenix, the lowest overhead anywhere, they began making bikes and selling direct to consumers, while realizing they didn’t even have a bank account. When they were at the bank, Deziel said he had to keep stepping away to take orders.
“We were eating everybody’s lunch,” said Levi, crediting a base model that they kept under $1,000.
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The rest is history. The company, with Conlow as CEO and Deziel as chief innovation officer, attracted a private equity firm in 2020 to invest, and they could speed the backlog of orders and continue to grow. The XP flagship model bred many others as the company moved to headquarters in a facility in north Phoenix, where, in May, it launched the XP4 model to shouts and cheers and a worldwide online audience that has come to look at Lectric as a standard-bearer in the industry.
Conlow also joined the prestigious Forbes Under 30 Class of 2022.
Recently we sold our 600,000th bike, and that's cool, but you can't say you changed the way the world moves until you add zeros to it.
Levi Conlow, Lectric Ebikes
“I’m a singles hitter,” said Brent Conlow, who quit his job at Wells Fargo and is now Lectric’s customer experience officer. “He is going to swing for the fences. Everything he does tends to go to a larger scale.”
That includes GCU.
He’s upped the number of e-bikes he sent to Cooper, the director at CityServe who said the disadvantaged can now more easily travel the city.
“A lot of stars aligned for him, but he just gets it done,” Cooper said. “As a person, he is just a class act. I don’t know how else to put it. His morals and values are in the right place.”
Brandi Turner, student administrator at Fostering Futures, says she isn’t sure that Conlow knows the impact he has made at Fostering Futures. The 20 additional students on campus this fall will tell that story.
The long-haired, free-spirited entrepreneur would likely call it “sick,” as in good. “We actually believe that we can change the world,” he said, “so sometimes we got to just do it.”
