We caught up with the brilliant and insightful FERRELL SURETTE JR a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

FERRELL, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

Almost 10 years ago I saw a need in the underserved areas around Houston for cheap, reliable transportation. I was volunteering for local bicycle advocacy groups and their research showed that over 1 million bicycles were unused and in poor condition, well a light bulb went off in my head and I came up with the idea of having folks donate their used, unwanted or broken bicycles and I could put my 40 plus years of bicycle repair knowledge to use and recycle the donations back into the underserved communities

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?

At a very young age, I got into cycling and ever since then I’ve worked on bicycles, so for 45 years, I’ve worked on bicycles 10 years ago we saw a need in the underserved areas of the city, and we started recycled cycles of taxes in order to fill that need and we take used unwanted and discarded bicycles that are donated and we get them. We put them together and get them roadworthy and then we Then recycled them back into the underserved areas. Our main objective is to put a bicycle in the hands of everyone that we can ideally we’d like to give it to the young ones that may be having a difficult time at home when I was a child my bicycle was a magic carpet in allowed me to escape reality, if only until the street lights came on if I can do that to a child today that may not have a meal tonight Armand not have shoes for school tomorrow but I gave them a bicycle and that allowed them to escape their reality if only for 10 minutes or or 10 hours or 10 days it was it was my chance to give them a magic carpet to escape their reality.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Over the past few years, we’ve been fortunate enough to partner with UPS in the United Way to fund our our charity but for whatever reason I UPS severed their relationship with the United Way for 2023 and it created a shortfall we’ve had to get creative in the way that we fund our charity and we do that through various social media platforms through Instagram and Facebook we we have donation drives. we’re shooting to do one every quarter if we can in do that and just the power of social media with donations I think will be able to to pull through 2023 in the black and that’s a really important thing for us right now. Finding ways to overcome the obstacles of not having the the funds that we got in the pass through the United Way

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

We really rely on social media outlets to connect with our our customers and we’ve got a pretty good job of growing that bass again with our Instagram and Facebook and as well as our .com we we show bicycles being recycled back into the the community. Usually we share the story of the person that’s receiving the donated bicycle if we can, and it creates a one to one relationship with our followers

Contact Info:

• Website: www.RCOTX.com
• Instagram: Instagram.com/rcotx
• Facebook: Facebook.com/RCOTX
• Twitter: Twitter.com/rcotx
• Youtube: YouTube.com/rcotx