Before he ever owned a pedicab, Atticus Sloan spent his days building stages for music festivals and remodeling homes around Kansas City — tile work, carpentry, painting. The plan, when he first bought a Xion chariot, wasn’t even to run a local business. He wanted to follow the festival circuit and sell rides out of the back of a truck.

Then Kansas City started booking him before he could leave town. “The response was so great when we first started that we stayed busy servicing Kansas Citians instead,” his director of operations Mark Manning told Axios last fall. By the end of year one, EZ Pedicabs had grown from two cabs to four. By year two, eight.

Today they’re the only pedicab service operating in Kansas City. We sat down with Atticus to ask how he did it, what the economics actually look like, and what he wishes he’d known when he was weighing his options.

The version of this story that didn’t happen

Atticus didn’t go straight to Xion. He spent weeks researching. There were two cheaper paths: pick up a used pedicab from an existing operator, or import one of the models being built overseas. Both options put real money in his pocket up front.

Both were also a bet on something he couldn’t verify until the cab arrived. Used meant inheriting someone else’s maintenance history. Overseas meant praying the parts supply lasted longer than the warranty. Neither came with a playbook for what to do once the cab was sitting in his garage.

Xion offered a turnkey package — vehicles, training, an insurance shortlist, rate guidance. For a first-time operator that was the difference between launching and stalling.

From two pedicabs to the only fleet in town

The initial investment ran about $75,000 to $80,000. That covered the first two to three cabs, shipping, and an insurance policy that actually understood the category. From the day Atticus placed the order, it took roughly one to two months to be operating on the street.

The learning curve was faster than he expected. Within a few weeks the team had turned point-to-point rides into tours, started selling cab wraps to local businesses for mobile advertising, and built out a dispatch flow that didn’t require Atticus to be the one answering every call.

After two to four months of proof of concept, Atticus reinvested in two more pedicabs. The fleet didn’t grow on hope — it grew because demand was outrunning the cabs they had on the street. Hotel and convention partnerships were feeding a steady pipeline of out-of-town riders. Local businesses were booking the fleet for weddings and pop-up networking events.

How a single pedicab makes $30,000 a year

Every cab in the fleet pulls roughly $30,000 to $35,000 annually. The math works because EZ Pedicabs runs three revenue streams off the same vehicle, not one.

Rides are the engine. The peak window is Thursday through Saturday, 6 PM to 2 AM, when four cabs will average between 20 and 60 rides a night. Hotel and convention partnerships have steadily pushed those numbers higher, especially through 2025.

Advertising is the second-biggest stream. A pedicab in motion is a billboard people actually look at, and Atticus has focused on multi-month wrap campaigns plus event-based ad pricing for one-off spikes. The economics are different from rides, and the margins stack.

Events round it out. Weddings, sporting events, concerts, networking pop-ups. These are the most profitable bookings the company takes, and they cluster between May and October — peak season around Power & Light District events, the Country Club Plaza, and Kansas City Current home games.

The team grew with the fleet

EZ Pedicabs started with family and friends behind the bars. Atticus, his parents Emily and Peter, and a couple of people willing to take a chance on something nobody in Kansas City had tried. Today there are 20+ drivers, part-time and full-time, paid through a revenue share plus a competitive hourly rate.

Recruiting has been almost entirely organic. Drivers see the cabs out at night, hear about the gig, and apply. Training is real — Atticus runs new drivers through the playbook before they’re on the street alone — but the cabs themselves are easy enough to operate that the bottleneck is almost never the vehicle.

“They’re very fun, very quick, very maneuverable,” Manning told Axios. From the driver’s seat, the comparison to a traditional human-powered pedicab is not close.

What Kansas City actually thought

There’s a reason “the only pedicab operation in town” reads as more than a sentence on a website. Kansas City didn’t have to embrace the cabs. The city did anyway. EZ Pedicabs won the fan favorite award at the 2024 AltCap Your Biz competition, then came back in 2025 and took home the $35,000 grand prize. Axios profiled the company that October. KSHB covered their World Cup readiness.

The harder parts — the ones that don’t show up in the headlines — were finding a storage and maintenance shop, hiring fast enough to keep up with demand, and learning enough about pedicab maintenance to keep the cabs on the road without burning weekends in the garage. Atticus solved each one by hiring deliberately, training thoroughly, and leaning on Xion when something he hadn’t seen before came up.

About that Xion relationship

Ask Atticus to rate Xion’s support and he goes straight to ten out of ten. “Their response time, their insight, their communication — it’s excellent.” The thing that’s surprised him most isn’t the cabs themselves. It’s that the relationship has stopped feeling like a supplier relationship.

“They’ve become more than a supplier,” he says. “They’re partners and friends who genuinely care about our growth.” When asked whether he’d recommend Xion’s Business in a Box to other operators, the answer is short: absolutely.

What’s next

The five-year plan is 20 to 30 cabs in Kansas City, with the downtown baseball stadium development as the near-term catalyst. A new ballpark means a new ride zone, a new advertising audience, and a new reason for visitors to need a fast way between venues. Atticus also wants to keep the exclusive Kansas City buyer relationship he has with Xion as the fleet scales.

There’s also Tampa. He’s been quietly looking at Florida as a second market — a city with a similar mix of downtown density, sports, and event traffic. Nothing’s announced. But it’s on the board.

EZ Pedicabs operates from 1000 W 25th St, Kansas City, MO. Book a ride at ezpedicabs.com.