Revolutionizing the Limousine Service: Limos.com CEO T.J. Clark (Part 3)

Sramana: How much did Limousine operators have to pay to get a directory listing on Limos.com?

T.J. Clark: They were spending a couple of hundred dollars a month.

Sramana: If Limos.com was generating a million dollars a year in revenue, then it is fair to say that a lot of limo owners had already found out about this service.

T.J. Clark: Absolutely.

Sramana: How did you stage the capital infusion and takeover of the company?

T.J. Clark: We had a small group of investors who were eyeing the business. The business was publicly available for sell and we knew this group of investors was eyeing the business. We connected with them through some personal relationships and we were able to coinvest in the original acquisition. We brought four team members from Hotwire.com to the table as management. The timing was ideal. All four of us started on the same day, and I started as the CEO.

Our vision was to rebuild the site from scratch with a modern technology platform that would allow us to upgrade the level of limos companies that were participating in the service. Our goal was to then gain limo companies from all over the world, standardize their rates and availability within the system, and then create a booking system and service. Once that was accomplished, we would be able to put our inventory into mass distribution with travel suppliers like airlines, online travel agencies, and corporate travel distribution channels.

Sramana: In order to do that, did you have to put a piece of software on the limo operator side? Everybody who has done anything similar to this has had to completely change the supply side of the business.

T.J. Clark: Completely. It was an exceptionally fragmented supply base. There were thousands and thousands of local companies that each did their business their own way. That is one of the issues that attracted us to the space. Unlike Hotwire or Expedia, we could connect not connect to a service like SABRE to get access to the inventory and booking capability. We had to build that capability ourselves. We built an extranet where we encouraged these suppliers to load their rates and availability and we managed it in our own system. We were able to use our data to put them into a mass e-commerce system.

Sramana: How well did that process work? You obviously had a large directory of suppliers, but managing this type of inventory is not easy at all.

T.J. Clark: It was really hard. I think a number of businesses have failed when they attempted to do this because they were afraid to get their hands dirty enough. There is no avoiding the relationships that you have to create with local merchants to win deeply in local. You can have great technology, but the local merchants are very focused on day-to-day operations. You have to help them to use your technology if they are going to come to rely on using it in their day to day operations. There is no way around it; you have to get on the phone and then visit them face to face.

Sramana: Isn’t that a lot of people to visit face to face?

T.J. Clark: It is. We dealt with 2,000 suppliers around the world that we had chosen to have in our service. That is not only viable, but vibrant. We went after the best companies only. Of those 2,000 suppliers they have about 25,000 vehicles and they serve 14,000 cities.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Revolutionizing the Limousine Service: Limos.com CEO T.J. Clark
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