Bikeworks: Social Entrepreneurs

Tell us a bit about what Bikeworks does.
Bikeworks is a social enterprise based in East London. Founded in 2007, it was based on teaching the homeless and long-term jobless to service and sell bikes. Bikeworks creates local solutions to global issues by promoting sustainable urban transport with cycling and providing employment and training opportunities for marginalised individuals. It also offers cycle training courses, repairs, bike recycling and travel planning.

How did you come up with the idea?
Jim’s partner, while studying for her degree, wrote a fictional business plan for a hypothetical company. Inspired by this, Jim took his entrepreneurial spirit and set about turning this blueprint into a reality. I then developed a business plan for a bike recycling social enterprise. The ultimate result was the development of Bikeworks.

What were you doing before Bikeworks? How did this help you with what you’re doing now?
Between myself and Jim, we have a combination of backgrounds in business and voluntary sector ideally suited to running a social enterprise like Bikeworks. Jim has always been self-employed, from his history as a club promoter to his purchase and running of a bike hire company. I, meanwhile, have a history in charitable organisations including developing a social enterprise simplyworks.co.uk that employed people in recovery from drug & alcohol dependency.

How did you fund your start-up?
Well, the first room for operations was a spare bedroom, which provided an initial base with extremely low overheads.

Since then, Bikeworks has been legally constituted as a Community Interest Company in November 2006, and began trading in March 2007. Structured as a community interest company, it has won contracts with local authorities, has a successful retail business and has turned a profit on trading income alone. Grant support has been used to start new initiatives and to support growth.

Turnover rose from £480K in 08/09 to £707K in 09/10 with a profit of 67K.

As a social enterprise, you provide a number of free services – how do you stay afloat as a business?
Alongside the free services we offer, there are a number of income generators that help keep us afloat. For example, we offer cycle training and maintenance, in addition to a retail outlet selling cycling goods and equipment.

It’s all about finding the right business model that can support an initiative and allow it to remain productive and develop further. This means trying out new methods and ways of working. For example, we recently worked with T-Mobile to highlight ways in which businesses can do things differently. Both Jim and myself worked out of the office for a week on HTC Desire phones, relying only on mobile technology in order to challenge us and our real business needs. The benefits of working on the move, with information always to hand, really opened our eyes to how mobile technology to help improve decision making.

Driving business productivity is also a must-have. Jim and I are often out of the office attending meetings with investors and investigating new initiatives (from setting up repair workshops in prisons with the Ministry of Justice to working with the Orthodox Jewish community in London to encourage cycling and learning practical skills to potentially roll out as a multi-faith project). Being able to communicate on the go with each other and share information (with photos, use of social media, downloading apps to measure cycling distances, find the best routes and even spot where bikes for hire are available) saves time and money, allowing us to focus on what’s best for the social enterprise.

How can bikes help to improve a work/life balance?
Bikes offer an obvious solution to traffic jams in built-up areas, often allowing you to get home that bit earlier after a busy day in the office. During our week in the T-Mobile challenge, I also downloaded the ‘Bike O Meter’ application on my smartphone to track my route and analyse the distance and time taken. It’s a handy way to monitor and check for alternative routes that might prove quicker next time and cut down travel time even more.

What are your plans for expanding Bikeworks? Do you think it could go global?
In an ideal world, we’d create a way to help not just local communities but entire cities become more sustainable. In particular, we have a new branch of Bikeworks just opened in Ladbroke grove, West London while the ‘social’ franchise model certainly offers the potential to be rolled out across the country.

You run courses for homeless people to learn to become cycle trainers or mechanics – has this been successful, and kept people off the streets in the long term?
Yes, very successful. In 2009 29 out of 41 starters graduated with professional qualifications in bike mechanics and cycle training, with 15 of these moving into full time employment. A number of our graduates are now employed working on the Barclays bike hire scheme, some of whom had never previously been in formal employment.

What challenges did you face getting Bikeworks off the ground?
Convincing people to back us in the early stages is always hard when you’ve no track record as an organisation. Winning some business and getting some start up finance was difficult but you have to be persistent and once we made a breakthrough being a new and young organisation can become an advantage as you’re something different from what’s out there at the moment.

How can I get involved in Bikeworks?
You can give us a call and volunteer or become a supporter and help develop our work. Alternatively, you can donate us your old bike for bike recycling or get your bike repaired. The other option is to bring Bikeworks into your workplace to look at how to get more people cycling at work.