excited to expand from 8 bikes, to 16, 24 and 32 over the next 6 months
It’s been a wild last 12 months, the kind of growth that has been made possible because of you as individuals who support us, our amazing corporate partners and the grants we’ve received from various foundations.
We went from an organization that wasn’t able to pay a single full-time salary in 2013 as we went through our startup phase to an organization that will have five full-time employees in the coming weeks. An organization that created over 1,400% in revenue increase in 2014 and anticipates another 500%-900% in 2015.
Non-profits don’t typically grow that way, and yet we have, because of the amazing community support we’ve received.
In the coming couple of weeks we’ll be making new staff introductions. We’re still finalizing a few things behind the scenes before they all get their final offers and start dates from us. However, we think we’ve found 3 amazing individuals that will help Nine13 grow into the next phase of operations.
And our staff hasn’t rested, as soon as the second team comes online, we’re going to immediately begin working to launch a third program team in 2015 here in Central Indiana. The reality is, that second program team is already at capacity pending finalization of a corporate partnership; and to be able to really meet our capacity we need to get another team on the road ASAP. That will increase our school capacity from 40 schools with a single team to 120 with three fully operational teams. The funding needed for an additional team is $150,000 and we’ll be seeking foundation dollars (the largest we’ve sought from a foundation) to help get this third team off the ground.
We’ll be hiring two more individuals to operate that third team, another office operations type position and some part time help as well. We plan on hiring a mix of internal and already engaged individuals and opening the hiring process to the public.
We’re moving into our new corporate home at the end of June and will be installing a permanent set of equipment for that site as well. So, in total, we hope to expand from 8 bikes to 32 bikes here in Central Indiana in 2015.
Additionally, our appearance is going to change slightly in terms of program setup: we’re going to a much more fuel efficient vehicle platform (Sprinters) for team operations and hope to add those to our fleet by end of June. We’re building some pretty cool technology carts that will house the technical equipment when we’re at a program site.
Once we get this second team online in Indy, we also will be returning to our efforts for national expansion. There are cities and regions that we’ve narrowed down our focus on and we’ll be making forward progress on our 2016 launch cities.
Thanks for all you do to make what we do happen.
-The Nine13 Team