Merry Christmas and HAPPY NEW YEAR

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL FROM HEREFORD PEDICABS!

Watch out for some fancy dressed antics tonight..



See you all in the new year.

Will, Ben, Luke, Ad, Daz, Matt and Tom

Being creative..

After being at the do lectures I found myself well and truly energised. I met plenty of creative people who were achieving or seeking achievement. Who had desires to create solutions to problems and engage the power of community to do it.

After being re-inspired to unleash my creativity I've come across some interesting articles. I found this chap some time ago whilst exploring some marketing developmentsthat had happened, which caused stormhoek's sales to go through the roof. Hugh is also very well know as the chap behind Microsofts Blue Monster So understandably Hugh is packed full of creativity and it came as no surprise to see that he had written a very good piece on how to be creative

It's really worth a read, I think I was particularly enamoured by number 11 which uniquely sums up my approach to many of the things I've done to create and award winning business. - Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether. Which in more detail is something like this:

Your plan for getting your business out there has to be as original as the actual concept, perhaps even more so. The business has to create a totally new market. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.

It really hit home and lead me to think about a company I've recently become involved with Bionic Books which aims to take the hassle out of doing your accounts. So making null and void one of the boring bits that might slow you down a bit in creating your amazing company. It's an amazing idea and it looks like it might be free to use and mean that you get you UK or USA accounts done at a discounted rate. It's nice to see something refreshing helping out startups not only financially but freeing up time for them to do what they should be doing,

So yeah, time to get back to being creative about the solutions to the problems that I face, why wouldn't I be?

The final week of Moustached goodness!

So we are in to the final week of Movember and things are going well, I'm sporting a lovely little handlebar and have gone through the bad itching! We're raising some really good funds, online we have cleared £500 and I know that of the 20 team members that most have plenty more up their sleeves. If you haven't donated and want to you can do it here . On Sunday we are having a party at saxtys there will be a hog roast, plenty of fancy dress and some special prizes to be raffled! Come along, everyone is invited!

The Mo's are coming on!

So Luke and I have been growing our Mo's for 20 days now and they are taking shape. As you can see Luke has a classic ginger top lip modelled on Goose from Top Gun and I have gone for a slightly more horrible truckers handlebar... It is all of course in aid of raising money for The Prostate Cancer charity.

On the 30th of Movember from about 7:30 we're holding a party at Saxtys in Hereford, there will be a hog roast, free entry, cocktails and all sorts of drinks promotions, raffles and other prize giving and a general knees up to celebrate all 50 of the Hereford Mo brothers achievements. Fancy dress welcomed! We'd love it if you would come along!

Sponsor our MOUSTACHES!!

Hi All,

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) Luke and I are growing Mo's. That's right we're bringing the Mo back because we're passionate about tackling men's health issues and being proactive in the fight against prostate cancer.

You can donate to our Mo's by either:

Clicking this link and donating online using your credit card or PayPal account, or

Writing a cheque payable to ‘The Prostate Cancer Charity Re: Movember', referencing my Registration Number 1403626 and mailing it to:
The Prostate Cancer Charity
First Floor Cambridge House
100 Cambridge Grove
Hammersmith
London W6 OLE

The money raised by Movember is used to raise awareness of men's health issues and donated to The Prostate Cancer Charity which will have an enormous impact on many men's lives and the awareness will help us to fight prostate cancer on every front - through research, support, information and campaigning.

Did you know...

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK. 35,000 men are diagnosed every year and one man dies every hour.
1 in 11 UK men will be diagnosed in their lifetime .
For those that have supported Movember in previous years you can be very proud of the impact it has had.

It’s not fair us to expect you to do any of this without an incentive so we've had our top lips sponsored and anyone joining sponsoring or helping in anyway gets a free pass to any gym class at 6th Sense Fitness (http://www.sixthsensefitness.co.uk/classtimetable.htm). Get in touch and we’ll get your name to the gym.

So that’s about everything, if it all goes well and loads of you are keen we'll throw a Movember party in Saxtys at the end of the month and we can all come as the personalities of our moustaches…

Thank you and we look forward to your donations!!

Will and Luke

Movember 1st

It begins. Clean shave.

Winter

So it's officially winter. The nights come sooner the mornings are crisp and frosty, riding in to work in gloves and hat, thermal tights on but there's something great about it. You see the one thing about this time of year is that you see more sunsets and sunrises, early fog burning off, frost melting in the sun. It's not all bad, that happens when it gets wetter..

I've had some time off recently as I've not been feeling too well, very unusual for me but I guess 18 months of straight working has to have an impact somewhere. Any how key to my recovery has been plenty of Vitamin C, so imagine my good fortune when I was out on the cycle path this morning and I discovered some of these lots of lovely rosehips. They are packed full of Vitamin C and this time after the first frost they are the sweetest. My enthusiasm for a spot of foraging was rekindled at the DO lectures when I met foraging expert Yun Hilder a really interesting chap who makes the most of what nature throws his way. Whilst on the subject of the DO lectures and food I should point you towards this place the Carreg Restaurant a fantasic little place with some great food if your ever heading toward deepest Wales..

So what else have we been up to? This November Luke and I have decided to get hairy and grow a moustache for Movember (November) to raise money for ‘The Prostate Cancer Charity’. If your keen on donating you can go here

That's it for now, in the mean time happy Halloweeeeeeen...

Exciting night

So last night was the Pride of Herefordshire awards. A chance for people in Hereford to be recognised for things they are doing, in their words...

'The Pride of Herefordshire Awards are designed to celebrate the very best of what goes on in our area. The awards, a joint venture between the Hereford Journal, Herefordshire Partnership and Sunshine Radio, are designed to highlight the achievements of the many people who are unsung heroes, or who work quietly behind the scenes but make a real difference to the success and well-being of Herefordshire'

It came as a surprise a few months ago when I found out I had been nominated for 'Environmental Champion', it was even more of a surprise to find out a few weeks ago that I had made it through to the finals. So yesterday I arrived at the award ceremony and was sat on table with the competition. All sorts of awards were given out, courage, carer, contribution and then it was time for the environmental award, and very shortly after that is was time for me to collect my award as Pride of Herefordshire Environmental Champion!

The best bit about the whole process was the realisation that someone had taken the time to recognise and nominate the achievements we have made. All to often we put our heads down and work, hard, all day and into the night to make this happen. When we do that we bog ourselves own in the small things, the fixing of bikes and the logistics of pickup and project management, things like this make us think that we are making a difference.

When we remember we're making a difference the small things don't bog us down any more. The reason we won was because we have instigated change in people and have fundamentally changed the way people go about their daily work. It was nice to be around people who are doing good things.

So thanks to Cynthia for nominating us, to everyone who voted for us and to all of staff for being part of our project.

Have a good weekend.

Will

There are worse jobs

Sun bursting through the fog.

Jinrikishaw

The staff 'Thank You' party

So last night we had the staff 'Thank You' party, a chance for all of us to get together, have a curry and a few beers and for me to say thank you to them for all of the hard work they do.
Predictably everyone had too much to drink, mocked me for how much hair I've lost this year and generally had a great time. The downside of that is of course that Luke looked like this this morning.I think with those glasses people might think he's trying to catch children in his cage..

wu wei

So I've been back from the Do lectures for a while now
and since I've been back I've been really busy doing things; foraging for wild food, making bread, getting involved with things, motivating myself and generally getting my oomph back as it had mysteriously disappeared (and I didn't even think it had).

One thing really stuck in my mind from the lectures. It was the feeling I had after Alastair Mcintosh spoke. You can see his talk here and if you do one thing this week I suggest you watch it. Make a brew, take 40 mins out, alone, and sit down and listen. It totally changed my view of where we are with climate change, what will happen, how we will change it and how our mindset should be in relation to it.

So I'm much more optimistic about things now, and I have realised I don't say thanks to the staff enough, so tonight I'm taking them for a curry and a few beers to say thank you. Thanks for the hard work, for believing in what we do and for giving it their all. Not sure I'm ready to tell them that though..

Oh and thanks to Nick Miller for the food festival tickets, we had a great time!

Test blog

Free bikes, free cider and bike polo!

A treat awaited me this Saturday when I arrived at work, some lovely soul had seen fit to 'donate' two bikes to us..Sadly I don't think there's much we can do with them but we will take them down to SPOKES who will recondition them and hopefully sell them on to someone who can make use of them. Who knows maybe they might be perfect for a spot of BIKE POLO now that we have the mallets all we need to do is get some beers and a court and start playing hard and hopefully by the time we're up to speed and playing well the apple juice we pressed on the weekend will have turned in to cider to reward out efforts!
>If you could see the press in more detail (which was expertly built by Pedicabs handyman 'Big Tone') you'd see that the central bucket is made of bike rims, it did a fine job and by summer next year we should be on for some home made 'Vintage'...

Don't just stand there, DO something

So since I put the 40.1mph on the clock I've calmed my riding down a bit, still the same daily occurrences with other road users, all of us battling for the award for 'most important road user' but all in all things have been steady.

Last week I had the opportunity to go away to the Howies Do lectures. Those of you who know us, or read our blog will know that Howies are very good to us when it comes to kit for riding in. Each year they donate a percentage of their profit (1% - they call it an Earth Tax) to creating a series of lectures to help folk out. We were invited last time but sadly couldn't make it as we were launching our company! This time there was no stopping me, it was a fantastic opportunity and I met some amazing people.

Apart from some amazing lectures in a wealth of subjects THE DO LECTURES there were some amazing people there. Each of them with their own 'Do' and a passion for making a difference. It was a very refreshing chance to speak to people with plenty of drive and energy who were doing some amazing things.

One of the lectures was about the campaign for real bread, a chap dedicated to getting people to make their own bread. Sounds daft but in fact it was incredible. Learning about what's in bread and why it's like that (to meet demand that sort of thing) and why we should make bread, share the skill and pass the knowledge on. It reminded me that I used to make bread, so for all of you out there reading this, here's a recipe to try:

450g of flour (in the super market you'll see all sorts of flour for
bread making, but pretty much you can use anything)
2 heaped tea spoons of bicarbonate of soda
350ml of beer
150ml of water
large pinch of salt

It's easy - preheat oven to 200
Sieve all the dry ingredients together, add the beer
See what it looks like, add the water bit by bit if you need to
Don't make it too wet, or too dry
It'll end up as one large bit of dough
Too wet add more flour
Too dry add more water
I do the whole thing in a large food processor

Dust a surface with flour and shape it how you want, I put mine in a loaf tin but you can just whack it on a floured baking tray
Put the whole thing in the oven for 30 mins then turn the oven down to 180 for the last 20 mins

Take out the loaf, tap the bottom, if it sounds hollow its done, if not put it back in. Mine usually looks something like this..
So all in all I had a great time at the lectures (next week they'll all be online) and returned to work refreshed. This week has seen a few changes but really the thing I'm most keen on is letting all the staff know how good they are and that without them we wouldn't have a company this great.

Have a good weekend, happy baking.

Will

Finally 40!

Well it took longer than I thought it would and now I can hang up my gloves safe in the knowledge it's possible!

I started faster, put more power down earlier, kept the power on, tucked in and more importantly braked much much later.

Almost. .

0.2 mph off 40. Maybe next week!

Sooo close

Hello!

So Luke has been away for almost three weeks and as you know we have a speed challenge going on, it happens on a certain bit of road on a certain route that Luke usually rides. I used to ride it so understandably held the fastest speed, then as Luke took the route on there was a bit of competition and finally he took the high speed. When Luke left the fastest I'd managed was 37.2mph, he however had trounced me with a 38.2mph. Over the past three weeks I've worked hard, I've even swopped the flip flops for shoes, my goal has been 40mph yesterday I got closer than I have ever been...I have one more ride today to hit 40 but either way I'm happy!

In other news last Friday we went through out first year of Cargo operations, in which we have moved something like 30'000 items! We have been amazed at how busy we have been especially seeing as it was our first year, who knows what will happen in our second year!

One of our customers (Hereford Council) have been particularly happy, so happy in fact they threw a party for us!

Right, I'm off riding, here's to 40...

Smashed

Forty here I come. . Luke's got some making up to do when he's back.

The title falls. .

Luke is away for another week and a half. Today I took the 8 freight faster than it's ever been. By the time Luke's back i'm hoping we can hit forty. . .

Jobs

We're really busy at the moment and with Luke away in America my workload has good through the roof.

Today i jotted down no less than 20 areas that could do with development. Looks like it'll be a busy year!

Long time no Blog..

Hello!

First of all an apology, an apology for not updating this blog for a long time. Too long. If it is any consolation though it’s because we have been very very busy here at Hereford Pedicabs!

Currently Luke, the boy wonder, is on a 3 week holiday, this would have left us somewhat in the lurch had it not been for the miracle return of our boy Darren aka ‘Bobby Dazzler’ from his travels in Central America. Darren is working hard to make up the time that Luke has been working so all of our lovely customers can continue to have a first class service. More of this later..

Whilst Darren is working flat out, I am working hard to repair the bikes that the team are going through, young Matt aka ‘The Member’ had repeated misfortune with his vehicle which culminated in an overhaul and some colourful language. All is fixed now and the company ‘hug until it’s better’ policy smoothed over all HR issues…

In other news my brother and his wife have been working on one of our riders to be. Young Zak will begin training in the near future.

As well as plenty of goings on, we’ve also been to visit some big companies to see if what we have learnt so far can help them. One in particular thinks we can. They have a huge office, which looks like this.
We met them and some of their team to look at integrated sustainable transport, it was really interesting and it looks like there will be a future to it. And for all of you wondering what it looks like from the top…

Regular work has been disrupted a little as Bulmers have been moving some large and impressive concentrate tanks… It didn’t stop Luke beating my record top speed just before he left for holiday though.. It’s only a matter of time before it comes my way again and he knows it. In fact I’ve been taking advice from a race horse.

We are nearing a very exciting time for the company, as you will know back in April we were a year old, well, in a few weeks out cargo operation will have been one year in operating. In that time we’ve delivered way over 20’000 items! Who would have thought that would have happened? Our recycling operation now services around 200 inner city business, prevents 10 tonnes of recyclables from going to landfill a week and is expanding into other retail areas. So things are still very exciting for us. We have, as always, plenty of plans and plenty to be getting on with so keep you eyes peeled for some big things soon.

All in all things are going very well, with 7 part time self employed riders, hundreds of cargo customers, thousands of freight items delivered and tens of thousands of Pedicab customers, things are on the up! And I promise to keep you more informed than I have been doing..

New new top speed. .

So after last time luke made a valiant comeback with a 36.9 mph but I hit a surprise 37.2 mph in flip flops today . . First to 40 anyone?

New top speed

Who says we're not quicker now. .

Pedicab riding!

Hello everyone!,

So it's been a while since I rode a pedicab, all of the guys and girls do a great job and there are rarely any spare nights available on the bikes for me to jump on. Friday however was different, I was booked in to ride and it was awesome!

Luke and I were pedalling the streets all night long, with a steady flow of customers and a warm evening we were straight down to business and busy riding all the way up to midnight. It was fantastic to get back on the pedals!

It's a great job, I should do it more!

Got to love luke...

Worked his socks off all day only to find he'd lost a lock worth more than his earnings. . . Shouldn't laugh . . ,

Almost polo mallets

Soon we'll be playing

Faster than a speeding bullet

We let you catch a glimpse of our need steed "The 8 Freight" some months ago and since then, as you can see, she's undergone some modifications.

We had a box made by a chap called Lars who makes some truly amazing things out of aluminium, he set to work using top grade thin wall aluminium usually used to make fancy bits for custom motorbikes. Lars is a real perfectionist to spent plenty of time getting the box perfect. It's not square, if you look carefully it's very cleverly curved to fit in the frame.

After we had the box back we had to make the inside usable to we've hung some movable baskets and fitted it with a tool kit, first aid kit and all that sort of stuff. After undergoing some fettling to ensure there were the minimum of rattles we sent her to have some vinyl applied.

And now 8 Freight is ready to roll!

We can take loads of around 75kgs, up to 100 every now and then.. and that doesn't include the rider. Barely shoulder width we can average 20mph all day (the cargo bikes appear to have given us some fantastic training) and shoot through the traffic.

Watch our Royal Mail...

Wedding Season

It seems that it is becoming quite the thing to leave your wedding or arrive at a prom in a Pedicab. We'll be booked right up if it keeps on going like this..

Not bikes but. .

Made a whale out my my hedge today. The sun was shining and i had a beer in hand. Roll on summer!

Hereford bike week

Click the image to Zoom

Busy sunny days!

Well done luke, working like a trooper.

Bike Polo 2 - wanted.. old ski poles!

So.. it's all hotting up on the bike polo side of things, it's just that nothing can happen until we have some mallets.

And the best way, so I'm told, is to make them out of gas pipe and ski poles.

Any body know where we can get old ski poles?

Bike Polo

Oh yes.....

Coming soon....

Have a gander at this, it'll give you an idea.

Should be a nice excuse for drinking some beer in the sun, come on Summer!

Pedi Keetch

We've been up to plenty recently, here's a picture we had with Paul Keetch (local MP) on Monday, Tom and Luke moved his office for him last week. Sadly Tom couldn't make the shoot so I jumped in. The story is here - Keetch Story and will be heading to a paper near you soon I'd imagine!