Omaha, Nebraska –
The co-owners of Flywheels Powersports in Omaha have used the Nebraska Business Enhancement Center’s (NBDC) consultants and expert services, together with when they opened the businesses and now as they request techniques to help the electric power sports devices company expand.
Flywheels Powersports is an impartial dealer for several models of ATVs, utility task motor vehicles (UTVs), severe terrain motor vehicles (XTVs), pit-bikes, dust-bikes, mini-bikes, go-karts, golfing carts, scooters, motorcycles, mobility scooters, electrical bikes and other sports activities and recreational equipment.
Co-proprietor Matt Shaw suggests he 1st learned about the NBDC and its providers when he acquired a Lean Producing certification while working for a information and marketplace investigation corporation. In early 2020, he begun his have software firm and labored with NBDC Engineering Commercialization Director Josh Nichol-Caddy.
When the COVID-19 pandemic strike a handful of months later, it had an quick effect on his new program business enterprise, Shaw states. “My main goal viewers was the well being care market,” he states. “COVID set health and fitness treatment into pandemic reaction mode, so my software package corporation was set on maintain.”
He turned to the idea of proudly owning a electric power sporting activities gear enterprise “because I required to do a thing I like,” he states. “There was a organization in Omaha for sale, and we wished a sector evaluation comparison of other powersport businesses for sale throughout the U.S.”
In May 2020, Nichol-Caddy introduced Shaw and his business enterprise spouse, Matt Ellis, to Tony Schultz, Omaha Heart Director of America’s SBDC-Nebraska, dependent at the NBDC. “Tony helped with the current market assessment as properly as our fiscal projections,” Shaw recalled. “It helped us validate some of the ideas and details we had.”
Shaw and Ellis utilized the information and facts from the NBDC to aid get hold of a financial loan and opened Flywheels Powersports in January 2021.
Most not long ago, Schultz introduced Shaw to Anne Herman, a Advertising and marketing and Entrepreneurship teacher at the UNO College or university of Enterprise Administration, via the NU Connections software.
NU Connections unites the University of Nebraska method to advertise college applications, companies, and sources that Nebraska businesses can make the most of to grow and diversify. Administered by the NBDC, NU Connections supplies Nebraska firms obtain to startup support, laboratory and facility use, study and technological know-how advancement, market investigate and other companies.
“I experienced begun creating a profits plan for instruction but I was not guaranteed how to market place it appropriately,” Shaw says. “Dr. Herman related me with 3 graduate college students who appeared at my resources as part of a capstone class. It was finished in May well and was quite useful.”
Shaw suggests the NBDC is a beneficial resource for commence-ups and current corporations.
He suggests he strategies to carry on functioning with the NBDC and its consultants. “I post our FTE (entire-time equivalent) counts and yearly financials,” he says. “In turn, the NBDC validates our quantities in opposition to other like businesses in their databases. It’s an additional way to validate what we’re performing. If we’re acquiring a dilemma, evaluating our quantities to other providers allows us know, ‘OK, we’re getting a issue here, but so is all people else.’”
Study much more about Flywheel Powersports.