A growing fleet, a premium ride, and C$1M of revenue by year two.

Part 1 · Executive Summary

Part 2 · The Opportunity

This isn’t a bet that people will show up, or that they’ll rent bikes when they do. Both already happen on Denman Street every summer. The opportunity is to serve that established demand with a materially better product.

The Stanley Park figure is the City of Vancouver’s 2021 mobility research[4] — 18 million visits made by roughly 9.5 million individual visitors, so visits and people are not the same number. The overnight figure is Destination Vancouver’s 2024 reporting[1] and the cruise figures are the 2026 season[2][3]. They are not additive — an overnight visitor who cycles the Seawall appears in two of them, and a cruise passenger who stays a night appears in three. Each measures a different slice of the same crowd. What matters for a Denman Street storefront is that all four slices arrive in the same few blocks: the park gate is a short ride away, the Seawall starts at the door, downtown hotels are within walking distance, and Canada Place is a twenty-minute ride along the waterfront. Peak arrivals are August and July; cruise season runs March to October, which is the season this plan operates. Mobi, the city’s own bike-share, now sees e-bikes take 40.9% of trips — the shift to electric assist is already underway. Researched

Stanley Park across a 240-day season

Stanley Park is the single largest draw in the catchment and an established cycling destination — the Seawall loop is the reason a large share of those visits happen at all. CYKEL operates 240 days a year: the start of March to the end of October, eight months. Those eight months hold 245 calendar days, so 240 operating days means opening essentially every day of the season, with only a handful of closures — not a five-day week with weekends off. It also brackets the cruise season, which ran 26 February to 13 October in 2026[2]. The remaining four months, November to February, are outside this plan entirely. Applying 55–75% of annual visitation to that window gives an indicative 9.9–13.5 million seasonal park visits[10]. Internal planning assumption — the City publishes no seasonal split; this is a range we have applied, not verified data

The relevant point is not the size of the number but the nature of it. These are people who have already decided to spend an afternoon in the park. CYKEL does not have to create the intent to ride — only to be the obvious way to do it.

Denman Street — demand that is already being served

Denman Street is an established gateway to Stanley Park with proven rental activity. Through direct customer discovery, Bikes and Blades confirmed approximately 26,000 annual rentals across its regular bike and e-bike fleet[7]. Based on our market research and Spokes’ premium location near the park, CYKEL estimates Spokes completes 30,000–35,000 annual rentals[8]. The two figures are different in kind and are kept apart deliberately: one is operator-confirmed, the other is ours. Bikes and Blades — operator-confirmed in customer discovery Spokes — CYKEL estimate, not confirmed by the operator

We have not added them together, and nothing in this plan treats their combined volume as a market size. They are two independent benchmarks, and what they establish is scale: a single street supports rental businesses turning tens of thousands of transactions a year, without a premium contactless offer among them. That is the gap this plan is built around — not an untested market, but an underserved one.

Cruise passengers as an acquisition channel

Canada Place puts 1.4 million cruise passenger visits[2] within a short ride of the store, and roughly 76% of them spend time in Vancouver either side of sailing[3] — an average of 1.4 nights, rising to 2.6 for visitors from outside North America — most of it on Alaska itineraries with a fixed day or two in the city. That is a visitor with limited time, no car, and a strong reason to want one memorable thing done well. Four routes reach them: hotel and concierge partnerships in the downtown core, online booking before arrival, cruise-package tie-ins, and self-guided Stanley Park and waterfront experiences sold as an itinerary rather than a bike. None of this assumes every passenger is a prospect — most will never rent anything. It assumes a small, reachable share of a large and repeating flow.

What CYKEL is targeting

Against that backdrop, the Year 1 operating target[9]:

14,400 rentals is a mid-tier target, not a best case. It is 60 rentals a day across thirty bikes, or two turns per bike — well inside what a 30-bike fleet can physically deliver in a 10-hour day, and below the volume a single Denman operator already confirms running. It is also well above the volume the store needs. On the financial model’s own cost base, EBITDA breaks even at 1.19 rentals per bike per day — about 8,600 rentals a year, or 40% below the target. Everything between 8,600 and 14,400 is margin for a slow first season, a wet July or a slower ramp than planned. The case for reaching it rests on the demand the street demonstrates and on a product built to convert more of it: faster to get on, better to ride, easier to extend. That low break-even is a function of the technology, not of optimism about costs. A counter-led store serving the same 14,400 rentals needs roughly 18 minutes of staff attention per rental against CYKEL’s 3 — about 3,600 more staff-hours a year, or 1.8 full-time equivalents, which at a loaded C$25 an hour is close to C$90,000 of payroll this model does not carry (Part 4). Payroll is the largest fixed cost in the plan, so removing that much of it moves the break-even point directly: the same store run conventionally would need around 9,900 rentals to cover its costs, roughly 15% more volume than CYKEL needs for the same result. The advantage is not that CYKEL expects to sell more rentals than the street already supports — it is that it needs fewer of them. What the competitor benchmarks do not do is guarantee it. They establish that the market exists at this scale; CYKEL’s own utilisation remains a projection, and Part 13 treats it as the risk it is. Model output

C$1,008,000 is gross rental revenue before tax, discounts, operating costs and any ancillary stream — not a profit figure, and not a forecast of what will be collected. Note a live discrepancy. This target is priced at C$28/hr and C$70 a rental. The rest of the plan — Parts 1, 5, 7 and 12, the Part 15 assumptions and the pro forma workbook — still runs on C$0.467/min, or C$27/hr and C$70.00 a rental, giving C$1,008,000. The C$36,000 difference is left visible rather than quietly propagated through the financial statements, and the daily cap in Part 5 (C$108–110) is still set off the old per-minute rate. Repricing the model to C$28 is a single change that flows through revenue, EBITDA, tax and closing cash, and it has not been made. Discrepancy — Part 2 priced at C$28, the financial model at C$27. Needs a decision before this goes out.

How the price compares

* Cycle City and Reckless both carry a two-hour minimum rental. Their hourly figures above are the two-hour price halved, so the column compares like with like.

Rates were re-checked against each operator’s own rate page. Read down a column for one shop’s card, across a row to see where CYKEL sits on that rate. Half day and full day are not defined identically by every operator — a half day is three hours at VanEcoRide and six at Spokes — so the hourly row is the cleanest comparison. Net of GST, a Vancouver e-bike hour runs C$19.50–23. CYKEL at C$28/hr, before tax, sits above every one of them. Researched — operator rate pages, October 2026

Two of them are on our street. Bikes and Blades at 718 Denman and YesCycle at 679 Denman rent e-bikes at C$20 and C$21 an hour, and both sit between the planned store and the park. A rider comparing prices on Denman is comparing CYKEL at C$28 against C$20 — a 40% premium, C$20 more on a 2.5-hour ride. The day rates tell the same story: their all-day e-bikes are C$80 and C$82 against a CYKEL day capped around C$112. The premium is consistent at every duration, which is the right shape for it — it reads as a different product, not an hourly rate that drifts. That gap is the whole thesis: a bike taken straight out without a counter, a route and audio layer that makes the afternoon rather than just enabling it, and gear and valuables handled rather than carried. If a rider cannot tell the difference inside the first five minutes, the price does not hold.

A note on tax basis. The operators do not quote on the same basis. Spokes quotes tax-inclusive; Cycle City states rates are subject to 5% GST; the rest say nothing either way. The premium column above strips 5% GST from Spokes and treats the unstated rates as pre-tax, which is the assumption least flattering to CYKEL — if Bikes and Blades is in fact quoting tax-inclusive, its hour is C$19.05 net and the premium against it rises to 47%. Worth confirming next door before this argument is put in front of an investor. Assumption — tax basis unstated for four of the six

Why the premium is defensible

CYKEL is not opening another bike rental shop at a higher price. The model is built around three objectives, and the price is the output of them rather than a positioning decision taken first.

That layer is what a rider is paying the extra C$8 an hour for, and it is the only honest justification for it. None of these improvements is proven at scale yet — the onboarding time, the effect on ride length and the utilisation gain are design intentions tested in the model, not measured results from an operating store. Part 13 carries them as risks. Assumption — performance improvements are modelled, not yet demonstrated in operation

Part 3 · Concept

Three things this plan is built on.

Part 4 · Customer Experience

The same rider, the same corridor, two different front doors. Times are planning estimates for a typical summer afternoon, not measured figures. Assumption

Getting riders onto the bike is the whole point of the front door. A counter-led rental spends about half an hour between the door and the pedals, and almost all of it is a member of staff working through the same script they worked through for the party before. CYKEL moves the booking, the waiver and the payment off the shop floor entirely — they happen on the rider's phone before they arrive — so what is left in store is a scan, an unlock and a helmet. On a busy afternoon that is the difference between a queue out the door and a rider who is already on the Seawall.

It is also the staffing argument. Assume a counter needs roughly 18 minutes of staff attention per rental and the CYKEL flow needs about 3. Across the 14,400 rentals modelled for Year 1 that is 4,320 staff-hours against 720 — a difference of 3,600 hours, or about 1.8 full-time equivalents. At a loaded C$25 an hour that is roughly C$90,000 a year of payroll the model does not have to carry, which is what makes the six-person team in Part 10 and the C$300,000 payroll line in Part 12 hold together at a fleet of fifty. Assumption — staff-attended minutes are an estimate, not a measured figure

Part 5 · Pricing & Revenue Model

Usage-based pricing means the customer never has to predict a rental duration before starting — the meter simply reflects how long the ride actually lasted.

The revenue relationship is simple and compounding: fleet size sets how many bikes can be out at once → rentals depends on fleet size × utilization → average ride duration sets the price per rental → revenue is rentals × price per rental. Every lever in Part 6 and Part 7 moves through that same chain.

Part 6 · Fleet Growth

Ten bikes added a year after the opening thirty, each with its own C$350 advanced helmet. Model output from the three-year pro forma

Utilisation per bike is held flat at 2 rentals a day across 240 operating days — 480 rentals per bike a year, C$33,600 of revenue per bike. Growth in this plan comes from adding bikes, not from working the existing ones harder, which leaves utilisation as headroom rather than as a number the model already depends on.

Part 7 · Path to C$1M

At C$0.467/min and a 150-minute average ride (C$70.00/rental), C$1,000,000 of annual revenue takes about 14,286 rentals — a shade below the 14,400 modelled for Year 1. The milestone is cleared in the opening year, but only just: the margin is 114 rentals, and it rests on ride length far more than on fleet size.

The same target implies very different utilisation depending on fleet size — which is why fleet growth and the C$1M milestone are linked, not independent:

Cells show rentals needed per bike per year to reach C$1M at that fleet size and ride duration. Cross-check: at 30 bikes and 150 min, 476 per bike is required against the base case's 480 — four rentals a bike of headroom, which is exactly how narrowly Year 1 clears the line. Model output

Part 8 · Go-to-Market

Kept deliberately simple — a small number of channels that match how people already discover rentals on this corridor.

Part 9 · Operations

Why lockers are part of the build, not an extra

A rental that starts at the Seawall and runs two and a half hours is long enough that riders leave with everything they walked in carrying — wallet, keys, phone, sometimes a jacket. On a bike, in a jersey pocket or an unzipped daypack, that is a loss waiting to happen. We have watched it happen next door: two riders at Bikes and Blades lost their wallets mid-ride, and each one turned a good afternoon into a ruined day, a police report and an operator problem that no amount of front-of-house warmth fixes after the fact. Observed at a neighbouring operator — anecdotal, not a published figure

The conventional answer is a cardboard box behind the counter and a staff member who remembers whose keys are whose. That fails twice over: it makes the store liable for property it never wanted to hold, and it puts a human handover back into a flow built to remove them. Connected lockers solve both. A locker is assigned with the booking, released by the same tap that unlocks the bike, and opened again on return — no key, no ticket, no staff member in the loop, and a clear line that CYKEL never takes custody of a rider’s belongings.

It also belongs in the premium argument rather than beside it. The difference between renting a bike and being hosted for an afternoon is whether the operation has thought about the parts of the day that are not the bike. Somewhere secure to leave your things is the clearest, cheapest signal that it has — and it removes the single most common way a rental day goes wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the ride. The locker bank is budgeted inside the C$150,000 store fit-out in Part 11 rather than as a separate capital line; it is specified as part of the interior build, and the allowance has not yet been broken down against a supplier quotation. Assumption — no separate locker quotation yet

Part 10 · Team & Staffing

Headcount held at six roles across all three years in this plan — deliberately lean, and flagged as a risk to stress-test in Part 13.

CYKEL's technology is designed to reduce administrative workload — digital onboarding, booking, payments, in-app navigation, and customer self-service all shift work away from front-line staff. This plan does not claim a specific dollar figure for that saving, since none has been measured on this exact operation; it's the reason the team is sized at six rather than a larger conventional-rental-shop headcount, not a promise of an exact multiplier.

What the lean team buys is a lower floor, not just a lower cost. Payroll is the biggest fixed line in the plan, so the staff-hours the technology removes come straight off the volume the store has to do before it washes its face. On the model’s own numbers, EBITDA break-even is 1.19 rentals per bike per day, around 8,600 rentals a year. Add back the ~1.8 full-time equivalents a counter-led operation would need at the same volume — roughly C$90,000 — and that floor rises to about 9,900 rentals. The same storefront, the same fleet, the same rates, needing 15% more custom to reach the same point. Model output Rests on the flat-staffing assumption flagged in Part 13 — if a bigger fleet needs more people, the floor rises with it

Part 11 · Capital Requirements

Year 1 capital is the opening cost of the store and its first thirty bikes, funded by two rounds that between them raise C$500,000. Years 2 and 3 are fleet growth, funded from operating cash flow rather than a further raise.

The two rounds are raised for different things and are kept apart: the C$150,000 community bike fund buys the thirty bikes and their helmets, and the C$350,000 private investor round covers the fit-out, the startup equipment and the working-capital reserve. Together they cover the C$329,942 of opening capital — which now includes the cost of getting the fleet across the border — with C$170,058 of headroom, and the model never returns to the market — Years 2 and 3 fund their own fleet growth out of operating cash. Model output

Getting the fleet to Vancouver

The thirty opening bikes are ALSO e-bikes, manufactured in Taiwan and bought through the United States. Three things decide what they actually cost on the shop floor: where the purchase is transacted, how they are freighted across the border, and which taxes stick to them rather than being recovered. The plan is to buy direct and ship through a logistics company in Portland, Oregon.

Washington charges roughly 10.55% retail sales tax, which on a C$150,000 fleet is C$15,825 of pure transaction cost. Oregon levies no general sales tax, so buying through Portland removes that line entirely — at the price of a longer haul north, about C$1,150 more freight, and a US$15-per-bike bicycle excise. Net, Portland saves roughly C$14,000 against a taxed Seattle purchase. Model output

A third route exists: a Seattle purchase structured as a qualifying export sale, where Washington sales tax does not apply because the goods are documented as leaving the country. On paper it is the cheapest of the three, by about C$1,800 against Portland. We have not planned on it. The exemption depends on ALSO and the freight carrier documenting the export correctly, and it is not automatic simply because the buyer is Canadian — so it is modelled as an option to be taken only on written confirmation from ALSO and its tax adviser, not as the base case. Assumption — export treatment unconfirmed

On the Canadian side the bikes are expected to classify under HS 8711.60.00 at a 0% duty rate. Origin is taken to remain Taiwan, not the United States, which matters: Canadian counter-tariffs on US-origin goods should not attach to a Taiwanese-made bicycle that merely transits a US warehouse. Import GST at 5% — about C$7,500 — is payable at the border but recoverable through input tax credits, so the plan treats it as a cash timing item, not a cost. BC PST is modelled at nil on the assumption the bikes meet the provincial e-bike exemption criteria. Assumption — classification, origin, surtax and PST exemption all pending confirmation by a licensed customs broker

What this does to the plan. Landing the fleet adds C$4,442 to Year 1 capital — C$3,825 of freight, brokerage and insurance plus C$617 of Oregon excise — taking opening capital from C$325,500 to C$329,942. That is absorbed inside the existing C$500,000 raise rather than increasing the ask; the headroom falls from C$174,500 to C$170,058 and Year 1 closing cash from C$395,075 to C$416,157. The capitalised cost per bike becomes C$5,148, against annual rental revenue of C$33,600 per bike. Every figure in this section is preliminary until the purchase structure, customs classification, freight quotation and tax treatment are confirmed in writing. Model output

Part 12 · Financial Plan

Every line below is taken from the CYKEL Rental Store 3 Year Pro Forma workbook. Figures not directly implied by the fleet, rental and pricing inputs are labelled planning assumptions — see Part 15 for the basis of each.

Year 1 carries the whole opening cost — C$329,942 of capital against C$246,099 of operating cash flow — which is what the C$500,000 raised in Part 11 exists to cover, not an operating loss. EBITDA is positive from the first year at a 37% margin, and cash closes Year 1 at C$416,157. Model output

Part 13 · Risks & Mitigation

We'd rather surface what could go wrong than let it show up unannounced.

Part 14 · Three-Year Vision

The operating target this model implies — not a guaranteed forecast.

Part 15 · Sources & Assumptions

Cross-checked against every file in the project before this plan was written — see the flags below for what was found, and what this plan deliberately does not use.