It’s been a while since I’ve done a video. Thought I’d being you all up to date. In fact, I think it was about January of this year is the last time I did a video.
We’ve worked really hard on making this company successful. Trying to be top-notch service and to do it legally. There’s a lot of things we’ve done that if I had to do it all over again, I would definitely do it different.
The reason I’m talking about this is because I think we’re done. We are going to sell the company.
I got all my cars here. It’s been a good run. I have an excellent manager right now. It hasn’t been what I’ve needed it to be. We have had shortfalls every month that are quite a bit of money.
A lot of it is our fault and some of it is the economy. The biggest thing is that we mixed both the big buses – see this one here: got bus plates on it. Then we’ve got the cars here. Then we have of course, the famous money-suck.
It’s not been set up right. What we should have done is we should have either done buses or all cars. In our region here, buses actually should probably be full buses and not just these giant limos that require bus plates.
The insurance is a big difference on these cars. It’s around $4000 a year difference per car because of this. What happens is because that because we’re federal, it requires us to do our cars at the same rates as we do the buses. Those rates are just a lot higher. So that’s insurance thing, that’s one.
Then there’s another thing. This giant building we have here – this is actually only half of the building. I have a whole other half to it. We have 15,000 square feet. We knew we were going to use around 7,000 square feet for the limos. This is an expensive building. The expenses on the limo side equal around $4500 a month just for the rent for the building. We should have used a pole barn or something like that. Something where we could park them and they’d be safe and would cost us $1000 a month instead of $4500 a month.
Another thing is we should have bought used cars to start out with and not so many of them. Not the brand new ones. I’ve had like the Chrysler here, we bought it brand new. We also bought the H2 here brand new. The H2 we had it custom made. It was made by Legendary Coach Works out of Florida. It’s been a pretty good vehicle. We have had probably around $5000 in repairs we had to do to it. Some of those were defects; some of those were caused by us. In fact, I still got to show you guys the video of this running over the front end of a car. I’ll have to get that one up.
Unfortunately, I didn’t choose well with the companies because they went out of business. Or, at least, they don’t return my calls. They are still in business, their website still works but they don’t return my calls and they owe us thousands of dollars. We haven’t been able to get any warranty work out of them. Some other stuff like they accidentally gave us the wrong wheels; they’re supposed to be chrome wheels and they weren’t.
With the Chrysler 300 here; this was made by Crystal Enterprises. It’s been a fabulous car. They’ve given us great support. The car cost probably around 12%-15% more than the competitors that could make a car like this. We’ve used that with insurance, not insurance but with repairs. We’ve used the warranty. There’s been several issues that have happened with it but they’ve taken care of most everything in a pretty timely manner overall. I’ve been pleased with that.
One of the issues why this hasn’t done as well for us is because I have made all my money in the online arena – in the Internet. This brick and mortar stuff – I’ll leave that to the brick and mortar people. It just hasn’t worked out the same. I keep trying to apply Internet-type business tactics to our company here and it just isn’t working out the same way.
Finally, our manager has given his resignation. He was a really good guy, really on the ball with this stuff. The writing’s on the wall. I had clear goals we had to make. It’s been really difficult with the economy and everything. One of our competitors in town who also owns an insurance company and insures a lot of limousine companies told me that 20% of the limousine companies that he insures have gone out of business in the last year. A lot of it is the economy. People just don’t want to spend the money. I’ll chalk it up to 80% our fault and 20% the economy.
So, we’re giving it up. I you know anyone who wants an existing limo company; we’re selling it as a whole. If for some reason we can’t find a buyer by January, we’ll start putting the cars up for sale individually so they can go out to different companies in time for prom.
Anyway, this won’t be the last video. I’ll have a few more videos, some other final thoughts. I’ve also got some other videos which I still have to get published. Maybe we’ll do something with all our bloopers. Like when I got the H2 stuck in a carwash. Then also, with the H2, driving its tandem axles up over the front of another car that snuck in on the side. So we’ve got some pretty fun video of that stuff.
For the moment, signing out. Everybody take care. If you want to buy a limo company in Portland, Oregon, for a good deal, give me a call.
Has is been a year already? It's actually been more than a year we have officially been in business. This video has the truth about our status, how we are doing and the future we look forward to.
No the limo is not really on fire. We have just put this limo into service and one of the last things we did was to try out the fog machine. It produces a lot of smoke. We need to play with it a bit to make sure we don't make the smoke to thick to use.
My son is a ham on camera. He shot and edited this all himself. I was very impressed so I wanted to share it with all of you. This was taken when we picked up our Hummer H2 and drove it back across country.
