As a mother of four navigating Atlanta traffic, Amia Mize understood the challenges of transportation.
One afternoon, she arrived at a school and a young boy approached her car asking, “Are you my Uber?”
The question startled her. In that moment, she realized how easily a child could get into the wrong car, mistaking a stranger for a rideshare driver. It was clear to her that families needed a safer, more reliable option.
That experience inspired Takes A Village Transportation, a child-focused ride service. In 2015 with support from ACE through affordable funding and business advisory services, Amia brought her vision to life.
Today, she operates a growing fleet that safely transports 42 students daily and has completed over 30,000 accident-free trips.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, perhaps worse than the initial shut down, which forced her business to a halt, was realizing that 5 months later the majority of schools continued their remote learning. With no other option than to pivot and her readiness to implement new technologies, she accelerated her timeline to get a diverse supplier certification and pilot a new App that enabled her to provide service on-demand child transport, similar to larger ride-share platforms. With these actions, she became a preferred vendor with Atlanta Childcare Services and acquired a new contract. That, coupled with vital access to ACE’s TA support for bookkeeping, its business preservation program (which included an initial 4-months of debt payment relief) and her participation in the ACE Resilience and Recovery Program (which provided more BAS assistance with our newest educational tool, Initiate, and 6 months additional months debt relief), Amia was able to progress unanchored by short-term debt obligations and put her business in driving gear again.
Guild may observe the speed limit, but she is in the fast lane of entrepreneurial growth. “I believe I was called by God to help families with children,” she says, “and ACE is enabling me to do that.”
“The bank wouldn’t help me with capital, but ACE would. It was so much more than capital, though. My business quickly went from yellow to green. I learned how to balance my books, I hired an accountant, and I learned about bottom-line revenue.” Amia Guild
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