We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Donald Scott II. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Donald below.

Donald, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.

As we’ve been building PiggyBack Network, sharing our story of why now, and who benefits, it’s become more obvious to me that though we focus on racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic attributes to call a group “underserved”, the reality is that parents and caregivers in the U.S. as a collective group are not treated with the proper respect.

Here’s a story. Maternity leave is some kind of fabricated debate. School buses are being taken away from many communities. Having a family signals lack of “dedication” to the office. School choice also means justifying closing schools in some communities. The cost of youth sports, and their increased influence on future financial success is creating a barrier to entry. Public transportation is being diminished. There’s a misplaced and manufactured animosity between parents and educators – many of whom are both educator and parent, both of whom are caregivers. PiggyBack Network is focused on helping busy parents find like-minded families who share similar values.

We are focused on youth transportation because we live in a car-based society. Transportation and mobility affects everyone, not just the people sitting in traffic, and pick up lines, and parking lots. Emissions and pollution are a concern for anyone sitting in a classroom or in their front yard, when cars start lining up (in some cases, an hour early) idling, running a/c or heat, reading, scrolling, napping or meeting without considering the consequences of their actions, or the alternative options available. We know parents who miss meetings, get the kids late, run red lights, bully other parents, and in general are at their limit trying to get their kids to school, sports and activities. And when our challenges are verbalized, the response we get in one way or another sounds like “if you can’t handle the responsibility, you shouldn’t have had kids.” Parents and caregivers should be prioritized in our society, instead they are underpaid, overworked, or consistently disrespected, PiggyBack Network empowers busy caregivers to support their family, their community, their office, and the future success of the each – by lowering the hurdle of transportation so that equitable access to future opportunity doesn’t require so much personal sacrifice.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

PiggyBack Network is co-founded by two active dads who are also community volunteers, athletes, engineers, old teammates, data & ai solution architects, educators, and entrepreneurs. We are passionate about uplifting our community, our society, and our global lived experience. Busy parents & caregivers know how important safety, trust, values like reliability and respect, and access and sustainability are to raising healthy well-rounded members of society.

We created the incentivized carpool network to address the challenges or gaps that other options do not. We believe community bonds are more important than gross margins. We believe that reinvesting in schools, nonprofits, and enrichment activity businesses is better than extracting resources from the community. We believe that creating equitable access to future opportunity elevates the lived experience of everyone around.

PiggyBack Network targets absenteeism and tardiness. We focus on fun and play. Kids at play are kids learning leadership, adversity, partnership, collaboration, critical thinking, and how they respond to challenges. Kids sharing rides get to know each other outside of the classroom – and in many cases build friendships that would have been impossible without PiggyBack. Parents can allocate time to others things: work, relationship, self-development, household chores, the ever-elusive “quiet me time”.

We are trying to take more cars off the roadways, reducing traffic, accidents, road rage, pollution, roadway degradation, and time spent commuting. Fewer cars trying to fit into one parking lot, line, or left turn lane creates space for more innovation.

As innovative, flexible, parent-oriented transportation options become more important for everyone around the world – we want people to know that PiggyBack Network is built to seamlessly integrate into the lifestyle of parents, guardians, and caregivers responsible for getting kids around town.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Ismael and I have been building relationship with people our entire lives. Trust is the social currency that powers our ability to acquire customers. For those who don’t know “customer acquisition cost” and “lifetime value” are two primary metrics with which people evaluate the strength of a business. We have established ourselves as reliable, dependable, socially-conscious partners, spouses and parents – who have a passion for creating change, resolving conflicts, and building solutions that unite groups of people.

The best source of new clients, whether we’re talking partnerships with organizations like YMCA and Corral Riding Academy, or individual ambassadors who are PTA leaders or local little league coaches – has been our ability to share a resonant message that is rooted in our legacy thus far. People know that we are true to our word, action-oriented, and determined to support the community.

Influential friends, colleagues, associates, and observers continue to see the work we’re doing and they’ve been asking us “how can we help”; and our answer is simply “tell your parents, coaches, teachers, principals, directors, and neighbors about us”.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Along our founder journey, we have learned that our story to business partner is quite unique, and sets us up for success. We’ve known each other since 1999. We were recruited by the same Coach – shout out to Don Dobes – to play football at Princeton University. We are both electrical engineers. We are both from Chicago (my Grandma lived around the corner from his childhood home). We have been teammates, roommates, classmates, coworkers, and world travelers. When it was time to start getting married and having kids families we supported each other. We’ve both been volunteers, mentors, teachers, and have provided transportation services to youth – having driven kids from school to home during our college summer breaks.

We both felt that 2018 was a good time to try our hand at start-up life, and our decision to build a community focused youth transportation solution was naturally agreed upon, given our personal lifestyles and professional experiences.

People ask us, what sets us apart, what makes us special, why are we the right team for the job? The full answer takes many forms depending on the audience, but the short answer is, we know each other. We know our strengths, weaknesses, nuances, insecurities, blindspots, trigger points, and most importantly – we know each others commitment to excellence. This means that any incremental adversity we face while in business cannot be greater than the sum of what we’ve navigated over the course of 20 years. Resilience, trust, and wisdom are the qualities and values that we carry with us into any room, decision, or partnership – and these are the qualities that make PiggyBack Network an amazing company.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.piggybacknetwork.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/piggybacknetwork/
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/PiggyBackNetwork
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/piggybacknetwork
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/ZZkCELa925I?feature=shared
• Other: https://youtu.be/P6TjqVtbNWg?feature=shared https://youtu.be/Pt6dYXIP3U8?feature=shared