In this interview segment, the HopSkipDrive representative explains how the company’s sales approach differs from a typical B2C marketplace when targeting school districts. The sales team conducts direct outreach to various district departments—such as transportation and special‑needs—using both direct procurement and RFP processes. Success hinges on earning trust and proving value, which allows HopSkipDrive to start with a small pilot and gradually add more rides and use cases as the relationship deepens. The discussion also touches on the hyper‑local nature of the market, questioning how large individual districts are and how the company scales its service across many small, localized districts.
How are you, you know, reaching schools or kind of selling into schools?
So, you know, unlike a B2C marketplace, your approach on the demand side looks a little different. So we have a sales team that is focused on reaching out directly to departments of transportation as well as other departments within a district, right? We might be talking to the special needs department or other departments, and we are reaching out to them directly. We are contracting Through direct procurement, we are contracting through RFP procurement. But once you, like, you know, the way that our business works, it is very much you get in, you earn trust, you earn the right to continue to win. And we see districts continue to add rides and add use cases. So we may start small with a district and grow over time, but we know that their needs are only gonna get bigger as we develop a deeper relationship with them.
Yeah. And you, you mentioned as far as trust, and I'm sure that'll kind of come up during the Q&A. But as far as, you know, for the school districts, you know, you mentioned like kind of starting with like a, I guess, like a kind of smaller segment, you know, as far as that. But like, you know, on a market level, like how big are the school districts? And like, it sounds like it's such a hyperlocal marketplace.
Well, it is and it isn't. So it's very much a geographic marketplace. But we work with, you know, districts as small as 2,000 students to districts like Los Angeles Unified, that have as many as 400,000 students to, you know, Cypress-Fairbanks in Houston has a little bit under that. But, you know, so it's not so much about the size of the district and there's multiple districts in a market. So we don't think about the size of a district so much as we think about the overall size of, you know, what is Kansas City, Missouri, and how many districts are in Kansas City, Missouri? How many districts are in Orange County and how do we service those? Because What is unique to us that is different from other, you know, school bus providers or other is a Care Driver could drive for District A and District B and District C all in the same day, right? And so that's actually part of our value proposition that we bring, but that's sort of new in the school transportation space. They're not really used to that concept. And so we think about densification at a city level or a market level. But it is very different. You know, it is very hyperlocal. And we think about each market specifically and what is LA looking like versus Denver versus Seattle, and what are our needs in each market and how do we— you know, we are constantly looking at, you know, supply and demand balancing in each market.
