From the first Build-A-Bike ® in November of 2005 until July of 2006, we only delivered a few programs, but they were important to getting off the ground. These first few events were the start of an entire industry. As a result of these trend setting activities, charity team building activities grew exponentially in the just a few years.
Bring It On Dallas, November of 2005
Bring It on Dallas was the very first Build-A-Bike ® client. In fact, some of the original ideas for the event came from the leaders of Bring It On, Kari Skinner and Donna Koppenheffer. For details about this event, make sure to review the post The Very First Build-A-Bike ®. This was the event that started it all. We didn’t have everything perfect, yet, but what we created was something special.
Wells Fargo, Anchorage, AK January of 2006
At this point, we were still buying all of our materials retail. I arrived in Anchorage a couple days early so that I could purchase all of the needed materials. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find bicycles in January in Anchorage? It took quite a bit of driving, but we made it happen. The funniest thing about this program was that since we were buying bikes off-the-shelf, most of them were already assembled. So we ended up rolling the bikes into the meeting room from the freight elevator. Then, we had to disassemble them so that they could be reassembled.
The most memorable part of this program, though, was the view. We were on the top floor of the tallest building in Anchorage. The sunset was at about 2:30 PM. So, just as we started the event, the sun set over Denali (Mt. McKinley) out the plate-glass window. It was gorgeous!
Steak & Ale February 2006
When I was growing up, Steak & Ale was a favorite place to take dad on his birthday. (We couldn’t afford to go any more frequently.) So, I was very excited when Steak & Ale called us to have us be a part of the annual manager meeting in Grapevine, Texas. Since we had already had so much success with Build-A-Bike ® I had all of my local instructors in the Dallas. Ft. Worth area (four of us at the time) take part. One of the instructors, John Wright, came up to me at the end and said, “I’ve heard you talking about this event for months, and I knew it was going to be something special. I had no idea, though, how emotional this thing was going to be.” A lot of people over the years have had a similar reaction.
Morris Communications and ExxonMobil March 2006
In March of 2006, Morris Communications in Augusta, GA hired us to do a Build-A-Bike ® for them. This was the first Build-A-Bike ® delivered by an instructor other than me. Rick Highsmith, who was out Orlando-based instructor at the time, led that event. In addition, a week later, I taught the ExxonMobil event in Baton Rogue that I talked about in the post, What Happened to the Relay Race.
Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Harvard Business Review in May 2006
We taught another Build-A-Bike ® in California in April of 2006. But in May, we had our first big-group event with PricewaterHouse Coopers. This even had over 150 participants. As the groups started getting bigger and bigger, we had to begin to alter the activities in the program. Some of the small group activities didn’t work as well for the bigger groups. Also, at this point, we were assigning an instructor for every 50 participants, so the cost to deliver an event was still pretty high. Also in May, we conducted an event for Harvard Business Review that went really well. We were beginning to establish some momentum!
The First Year
That first year, we taught about ten Build-A-Bike ® events. We learned an awful lot along the way. We also established some relationships with a number of huge companies who were now our biggest fans. The real momentum hit in August of 2006. That was almost a full year since we first put Build-A-Bike ® on our website. That month, we delivered seven events, and our client list grew and grew from there.