more teams means more of this

One of the worst kept secrets in Central Indiana is the fact that we’re working on expanding. It’s a tiresome process that involves a lot of time, a large financial contribution, and others to share in my vision to make Central Indiana a better and healthier place.

What exactly does expansion look like? Well, right now, we’re focusing on getting Team Two up and running while simultaneously putting the resources in place to launch Team Three. Team Two has been a many months process that we have been working on; and we have enough demand for our programs that we believe there is significant market demand for the third team to deploy in early 2016 and are tackling that process now.

This will increase our staffing from a single full-time employee on December 31, 2014; to a staff of 9 employees once all three teams are operating.

Financially, it’s a huge growth in terms of our budget and the revenue we need to create to sustain operations. We will scale from $180,000 as a single team to $360,000 with two teams, and ultimately be operating on a $500,000 annual budget with three fully functional field programs. We start to see some economy of scale as we get into the expansion and look forward to being able to create new opportunities as part of it.

Most importantly, more so than the dollars or the staff, is the amount of students we’ll be able to serve with the expansion. Currently, we have a capacity of about 35 schools per calendar year, with three teams operating that will grow to 120 schools per year, serving over 18,000 youth and creating 72,000 total interactions. That’s a lot of schools and kids that benefit from our bicycles!

looking forward to adding to this list of corporate partners

Purely by the numbers, each expansion is about $50,000 worth of equipment and upfront vehicle costs, with the rest going towards program costs and daily operations. It’s a significant investment to procure everything needed to provide our high quality services to Central Indiana youth, but it’s totally worth it.

We are working on solutions that will help us fund both new Teams and there is a high likelihood that the approach we take to securing funding for one will be very different from the other. It’s a fun and exciting challenge to be creating the new possibilities for Nine13.

Stay tuned for the latest updates and more importantly, if you want to get involved or think you know someone who does, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me!

 

Tailwinds,

Tom Hanley
Executive Director