we believe our bikes can be a dozen cities or more by 2020
The executive staff at Nine13sports has always had visions of not only expanding locally here in Central Indiana, but expanding into other cities across the country. Our expansion plan includes a half dozen cities over the next three years, having a dozen online by the end of 2020, and is designed in a way that allows us to carry our non-profit mission from coast to coast.
We’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that we’re hoping to expand locally by adding a second team in early 2015 to meet the demand of our program services. We expected expansion into another city in the Midwest would come in late 2015 with two more coming online in 2016. While our expansion here locally is still our top focus, things have shifted on the additional city expansion.
As with all growing organizations, plans change and opportunities present in totally unexpected ways. Last week, after offering support and advice for an up-and-coming effort in Portland, Oregon, we began investigating combining forces with their effort and using Portland as the first expansion city for Nine13sports. We’re in the very early stages, researching all the complicating factors, reaching out to other NPO’s that have expanded into new territory to seek advice, and figuring out the best structure for this potentially new and exciting idea.
While this is still a developing idea, our Board of Directors has offered support to our executive staff to further pursue this relationship and growth. There’s still all the major things we need to figure out, such as funding and exact business models with those we serve, growing our mission to fit the needs of not just Indiana, but across the country and all the other logistical stuff that comes with thousands of miles potentially between offices. We’re not sure of an exact time frame yet, but we’re feverishly working to do the logistics development of this concept and hope to have a better timeline as we approach the end of the year.
So, we’re reaching out to other organizations and individuals who have experience in the non-profit or the for-profit sector who have gone through the process of expanding into new cities and opening new program offices, what is the single best piece of advice you have and the single hardest lesson you learned? Email us at info@nine13sports.org or tweet at us at @Nine13sports.Â
While we won’t be discussing specific details of the expansion development until further contracts are signed and we have initial program development on the ground in Portland, we figured opening up dialogue with others in a general learning sense is the best way to help us hear real world feedback.