Miika’s Story: The Butterfly Effect

When was the last time you thought ‘If only I had done that’, or ‘If only I hadn’t done that’? Have you, like me, had moments when you have left undone something you were originally planning to do? And if you had done it, you wouldn’t now be where you are, reading these words.

In my six years so far as an entrepreneur, I have been involved in all sorts of stuff. Sometimes I have also stopped for a moment and thought ‘why was it again that we needed to do this?’. But all those things are the things that have led me to this point – to writing this article. Of course, it could have gone a lot better. But then again, it could have gone a whole lot worse.

One day, in the winter of 2013, I was standing in front of the post office on Kauppakatu Street in Kuopio with an envelope in my hand. The letter was already halfway in when I thought to myself ‘should I or shouldn’t I?’. The letter contained my application for peacekeeper training in Säkylä. If I had made that application, I would certainly have got in; I had good qualifications for it and the need for peacekeepers back then was large.

Where would I be now if I had dropped that letter into the mailbox? Not standing here, at least, as an entrepreneur and franchiser running Finland’s only electric bicycle taxi company Biketaxi Finland.

Over the past seven summers, an enormous amount of work has been poured into Biketaxi, and we have also hit a few pitfalls along the way. This is part of entrepreneurship, of course, and all these setbacks have guided both myself and the whole company to the point where we are now.

The coronavirus pandemic lost Biketaxi a lot of business between May and early July 2020. Now, in retrospect, we can see that the pandemic unleashed an eye-opening chain of events for our company, because the challenges it brought forced us to do things differently than we had originally planned. As a result, we managed to shape a franchise concept for Biketaxi by the end of that summer. Luck was also needed along the way, and thankfully we had enough of that as well.

This summer, our company was operating in a total of 14 cities located all over Finland. Our activities make Finnish cities more attractive, provide employment to nearly 150 young summer workers, and support ecological values. I get to do work that doesn’t feel like work.

This all gets me thinking about the butterfly effect: how small things can have big impacts. Fortunately, I didn’t drop that letter in the mailbox. If I had, I wouldn’t now get to be creating over a hundred jobs together with the fantastic Biketaxi entrepreneurs all over Finland.

Who: Miika Keihänen, 34
Company: Entrepreneur/owner, Biketaxi Oy
Family: Wife Katariina, daughter Alisa (6 months), and dog Nuga 
Hobbies: Padel and ice hockey
Education: Bartender (specialised vocational qualification)