3 years old!

On April the 13th 2007 Ben and I stood in front of a bunch of people on a warm spring evening and announced we were launching a Pedicab business in Hereford. There were a few reasons why we were doing it:

1) We wanted to do something positive for the environment.
2) It seemed a cool idea.
3) Ben needed a girlfriend.

There were a pile of other reasons too, we wanted to launch a true values based company in Hereford, launching something people hadn't seen before that would help them and asking them to pay what they thought it was worth to use it.

It was a great success and soon we had our 1000th customer were involved in a police chase, employed some new riders, first luke then Ad and then Daz . From there we ticked over, taking more and more customers. We did lots of weddings that year too.

Building on the success of Pedicabs we soon launched Pedicargo and began delivering freight. At the same time we took our 5000th customer on the Pedicabs. Cargo continued to get busier and busier and we hit our 10,000th item in no time.

We didn't rest on our laurels and began to look for other things we could do, we soon launched a trade waste recycling programme and had to extend our premises.

Things grew and grew, we took on Matt, and Tom and had to throw thank you parties to say well done for all the hard work our staff put in.

Then we won a pride of herefordshire award which was pretty amazing and soon after we got a grant so we could buy the stuff we needed to produce all of our own power.

From here we plugged away, taking thousands more people in our cabs, transporting thousands of items of freight and cargo and recycling hundreds of tonnes of trade waste. In the process we started to clock up quite a carbon saving. We started to total it up for out customers so they could tell their customers what they were doing for the environment. We thought it'd be nice if we gave an award for the biggest savers.

At this point something really cool happened. We won an award from the Prince's business network in recognition of the work we were doing to save carbon. It was a real pat on the back for us and spurred us on to push for bigger and better things.

And that's what we have been doing. We've been growing slowly and strongly now for three years, putting in to place the groundwork for the future. There are lots of articles about why businesses fail in the first 3 years, some mention business plans, some mention cash flow, some mention poor marketing but we think it's a bit simpler than that. You have to do something you enjoy and you have to be realistic about its potential. There is a big difference between optimism and potential and I think sometimes that's where people get confused. It hasn't been easy getting to this stage and we have asked for plenty of help to get us here, we think what we are doing is the right thing to do and what's more we've stuck true to our values.

The company is growing up now and we're taking on more riders and staff and some of our team are moving on to other things , it's been a great journey so far and we've enjoyed it.

This week we interviewed some new staff for various jobs so things are still growing and evolving. Who knows what the next three years might bring!