By the time the BikeLNK contract was signed, I’d been watching bike share launches for years. I’d seen dozens from a distance and been present at three up close — standing on sidelines, making mental notes. How they staffed up. Where they got slow. What they would’ve done differently if they’d known what they were doing before they started doing it.
So when the contract landed, I wasn’t starting from scratch. I had hiring plans. Task lists. Vendor relationships I’d spent years building on purpose. I knew I could do it faster than the industry standard, and I knew I could do it cheaper. The eight-month average launch timeline had always seemed like a symptom of figuring things out as you go. I’d already figured things out.
What I didn’t plan for: pulling key staff days before our first planned launch date.
It was the right call. I knew it then and the results confirmed it later. But “days before launch” is not when you want to be making personnel changes on a program you’ve spent four months building toward. We made them anyway.
The other thing that happened in those four months: my wife had our second kid. Second kid is more chill — you’ve done this before, you know what you’re doing. We would’ve made the launch date either way. The weather delay just gave us a little extra runway, which, after a staff change and a newborn, I wasn’t going to argue with.
BikeLNK opened on time, under budget, and won “most trips per bike per day” in its first year of operation.
The lesson I took from it isn’t that I’m fast. It’s that speed is mostly preparation. The four months everyone saw was the tip. The years of watching and waiting and building relationships nobody knew I was building — that was the actual work.
Omnium Growth Partners 
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