Filing our BOC-3

Apparently having insurance, having federal, state, local licence and permits is not enough. By law we are required to have a process agent aka attorney in every state that we intend to operate in. This process agent is there so that if anyone wants to file a claim with us for injury, accident or whatever that they can easily find us and contact us. I am honestly not sure why this is required. But it is. So since it is we are following the law and we setup a process agent for Oregon.

Since we are right on the boarder with Washington we have been getting requests for services in Vancouver. So we went to find a process agent for Washington. We found something much better and I decided that I wanted to share it. The average cost of 1 state is $30 to $45 when you talk to a process agent directly. We already paid that for Oregon. But then we found http://www.evilsizor.com/ . This company does 48 states for $30 total! Score. :)

I figured I would share this because it is a huge savings on time and money. I don't get anything for referrals. But if you call them tell them that you found the info on our blog here. We setup with them this morning. About an hour later we had a list of all of the contacts for every state FAXed to us. Looks to be a good service. I highly recommend it.

On another note. The repair estimate is now at $14,000. What's another thousand bucks? Ugg.

Turning down customers.

It's funny. I have not created much buzz about the new limo service outside of the blog here. I'm not sure you can call this buzz. But it's been my only public place that I've been giving out information. Our website for the company is not up yet and there is no real contact information on the blog here. Yet there is a buzz happening. I've gotten a few calls already asking to accept reservations. So far I've been turning them down. To me no car equals no reservations. I am taking names and numbers though. I just find it interesting that there is such a high interest level already and I have not even tried to promote it yet.

In other news. We are joining the Oregon Trucking Association. We went looking for a DOT consultant. We posted on the Limos.com forums. Dean Schuler replied and directed us to Norm Littler of the American Bus Association. Norm is the man. He hooked us up by referring us to the OTA. Joining the OTA for us is only $260 per year. The assistance they offer is something that we were ready to pay thousands of dollars for to a consultant. They can help us to meet all of our federal regulations. Including hooking us up with companies that provide required services such as a random drug test program. Thanks Dean and Norm!

The last thing on my mind today is the fact that I can only find one quality limo community site in the USA. It's the Limos.com forums. I think they have an excellent forum there. I have found it to be very useful. It's a great forum. I've made around 30 posts and have not been flamed. I'm my forums that I run for the video game community flaming is a very common thing. I'm betting that the maturity level in the Limos.com forum is much higher. :)

With Limos.com being the only site in the US that I can find I'm left a little wanting for more choices. If I can't find what I'm looking for I may have to create it. I would consider myself to be a professional community builder. I have built many communities over the last 10 years. I see an opening here. I would prefer to find another good community and not build another one. But I can't seem to find any others. If any of you reading this know of any good community sites please do tell.

Cheers.

$13,000 repair. Ouch!

So that is the official estimate from Hummer of Sacramento. They estimated high. So it might be less. I doubt it though.

So here's the details as I know them so far. The transfer case is shot. The transmission has lost reverse. since they started messing with it, now it will not go into gear sometimes. So the transmission is being replaced also. Then there is the brakes. The wrong brake fluid was used. It has caused damage to the seals. So there is a lot of the break lines and other stuff that needs to be replaced.

Heck. I'll have a new car when I go pick it up. Hopefully that will be soon.

Now for the good news. Or at least the fun news. I've planned a stop at Electronic Arts headquarters right after I have picked up the car. I've been there a few times. It's a fun place. I'll be meeting some of the people who work on Ultima Online. I'll be sure to post a few comments and pictures.

Cheers.

Showing the money

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to show everything. So here is a report on the money we have spent so far. I'll update this every few posts and give some details. For details on previous stuff you'll have to look at old posts. :)


Previous balance: -$51,250
Expenses from our cross country trip. (So far)
Gas: $835 20 fill ups
Food: $758
Lodging: $541
Repairs: $1013
Other: $734
Licensing and Taxes: $900

New total. -$56,033

Some up and coming costs. I already know that insurance will be almost $9000 and that will need to be paid up before we take our first customer. Another big cost will be the repairs. I'm expecting it to be around $8000. We blew out the transfer case. The transmission lost reverse. So we will be replacing the transmission at the same time. We also lost the front brakes on the trip. That could be messy as the wrong brake fluid was in the system and it was actually corrosive to the seals. I don't have any estimation on that yet.

Fraud already? But we have not even talked with any customers!

I tell ya. If it's not one thing it's another. By law we are required to comply with several regulations. To assist us with this we went to http://www.oshasafetytraining.net/ to purchase materials needed so that we can be in compliance. We purchased a CD and a book. Today we noticed a $1 hold on our credit card. We use a Paypal card for a lot of stuff and it's great because they send us emails about every transaction. "This is to notify you that a payment of $1.00 USD was made to WLI*RESERVATIONREWARDS 800-732-7031 CT using your PayPal ATM/Debit Card." I may have missed this otherwise.

So I call this place. I get put on hold for 10 minutes by an automated system and then the call drops. I call again and this time I get through. They tell me that we authorized them to bill us for a monthly service. The info can be found here: http://home.reservationrewards.com/ They stated that we double opted in. What that means is that we added our email address to their system. They then sent us an email asking us to confirm the subscription. Or so they said. We got nothing of the sort. Dennis, our Operations Manager was the one who made the purchase. He's Internet savvy. He's did not double opt in for this.

We did a little Googling about this company and we were shocked at what we found. Thousands of people complaining about the same deceptive practices. I knew we would get some fraud from time to time but I did not expect it so soon! This company has me a little ticked. I actually had this happen to me about 2 years ago with the same company. I looked up old emails and I went through the same thing. Except last time I did not catch it for several months. It's been long enough ago that I don't even remember if I got my money back.

So to let the OSHA Safety Training company know that we are displeased I had Dennis send them the following email.
---

After we bought from you, I was sent to a page for reservation discounts, or something along those lines. I closed out of it because I was not interested in that service. However, we have since got a bill to our credit card for $10.00. We looked it up and found that your affiliate WLI uses highly questionable, if not downright dishonest business practices. They said we double-opted in for this service, and that never happened. If your company authorized this transaction on our behalf, that is not proper. I will let this link I am giving you speak for itself.
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/the_man/webloyalty_aka_wli_reservations_is_a_scam.html

If you continue doing business with this affiliate I will find it necessary to stop doing business with your company.

Thank You,
Dennis Hutchinson
Operations Manager
Markee Dragon, Inc.

--

If you look at the link we included in there. You'll see thousands of other people that have had this issue. I refuse to be a customer of any company that would help this company scam it's customers. All I can think is that they must get paid very well to make up for the lack of ethics.

/RANT

**Update. 1/19/07. We got a reply from the site where this happened at. I wanted to share it with all of you.

Dennis,

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I will not stand for such things to be done to my customers. Please be assured that we did NOT authorize any charges to your card other than for the products you bought.

The webloyalty program is a "feature" of the secure shopping cart we use; however, it is not something I have ever cared for. Up to this point I did not realize that I could opt out of this; however as I was looking into this I discovered that I could opt out, and did so immediately.

Since this happened following a purchase from my website, I have directed that my supplier credit your card for $10 to reimburse this charge. Just please be sure to cancel whatever subscription or "benefit" they (web
loyalty) say you signed up for.

I apologize for not getting back to you sooner; we had a major ice storm and it's been rather hard to keep current on the email-- I've been without power for a week now...

Once again, I want you to know that I am extremely upset that this happened to you, and I am going to start firing some emails to my shopping cart service for betraying your (and my) trust.

You should see the credit on your credit card next week; my supplier is down today due to another power outage.

Respectfully,

Tim Morton, owner
Osha-safety-training.net

Arriving in Oregon today. Minus the car.

Well it was not pretty. We were towed 110 miles to Sacramento. That's where the closest Hummer dealership is located. I think we got a bit lucky with it's location. They are the nations number one seller of H1s. So they deal with a lot of them. Hopefully that equals some better expertise.

That was the good news. Now the bad news. The bearing was just a small part of the issues. We actually lost our transfer case. When they were checking the transfer case they identified that the transmission has some serious problems. Reverse is shot and the rest of the gears are in questionable condition. Since we would have fixed that stuff anyway when we got home I'm just having them do it. We'll see how big the bill will be. I'm estimating $5000 to $8000.

They can not fix this overnight. They estimate 2 weeks to fix everything. So....... We have booked a flight back to Portland.

A few people have mentioned that they wanted to see pictures of the inside of the car. This is me last night writing my roadside report.

We took a few pictures of it being towed for your viewing pleasure.

Oh and.... My wife does not know I'm arriving home today. It will be a nice surprise for her.

Show me the money.

I mentioned that I would show and tell everything in this blog. So I guess it would be good to show you the money. It will be a few days after I get back before I have the full figures. But I thought I would go ahead and get started. I'm going to start showing any costs and the money earned.

So lets get started with two items. The cost of the car and the plane tickets. The car was $49,500. The plane tickets were $1750. Did I mention before that I paid cash for the car? It was not financed. so the number there is how much I actually spent so far.

Funds earned to date: $0
Costs to date: $51,250
Profit / Loss: -$51,250

By my count we have been to the gas pump and filled up 14 times since Dallas. We've also had a motel or hotel room for the last 7 nights. Not to mention all of the repairs and the huge towing bill from tonight.

This should be interesting. It also gives me a very visual goal keeping track of this. The goal is to have a profit and not a loss. So far with not having earned a dime yet it's a big loss.

Later this morning we should have word from the Hummer dealership. Hopefully we can get back on the road right away. No post this afternoon will be good news. If you see a new post you'll know that I had a lot of extra time on my hands waiting for the repairs.

Live roadside report!

I can tell you that this report was not planned. Here we sit just off of I-5 in California. We broke down 110 miles south of Sacramento. We broke the rubber jacket around one of the drive line bearings. This causes it to have some movement and get out of balance. Every time it gets out of balance it slams real hard into frame holding it.

I was happy to have my camera with me and a mobile Internet connection. I sent this picture to my operations manager. He was a Hummer mechanic in the Army. It's been a long time since he was doing this but he still knows a lot about them. He let me know that we had the possibility that we could crack the back end of the transmission if we continued to drive with it in this condition. The tow company that we are waiting on estimates about $450 for the tow. That's cheaper than replacing the transmission by far.

Now i just hope the hummer dealership we are going to has the part in stock. After the fuel switch going out and finding out that it's no longer being manufactured. I don't have 100% faith like before.

So that's my report for today. I'm a bit frustrated and don't feel like writing more tonight

Night.

A few good days

Friday was a good day. We had dinner with Lady Alex from Markee Dragon and we did not have any car issues. The only thing that was a mild issue was that it was overcast and the way that we have the GPS receiver mounted in the car it was not able to see the satellites. That caused us a bit of a problem when trying to find our way in the evening.

With the limo being an H1 Hummer it has a windshield that is almost perfectly straight up. No slant to it. Hence when we put the GPS unit on the window it has a very hard time seeing the satellites. It has to look at the ones it can see on the horizon instead of the sky above us. So when it was overcast there was just to much cloud cover for it to get a signal.

So we resolved this by taping the GPS receiver on the roof and running an extension cable into the computer in the cab. It's not pretty. But it's worked 100% of the time since we did that. I have left it mounted on the car. Hopefully it will still be there in the morning. :)

Saturday we met up with Mercury and his girlfriend. Mercury is someone I have been working with for the last year or so. I have been promoting his product WoW Glider ( http://www.wowglider.com ). It's a software tool for the game World of Warcraft ( http:// www.worldofwarcraft.com ) that allows automated play of your characters. It's a product that is both loved and hated by the players. Mercury has done very well with this application. I was able to visit "The house that WoW built". I can't show you a picture of his house. But I can show you the view. It's very good. That little limo down there in the center of the picture if ours. He has a very nice place.

Mercury and his girlfriend make a great couple. Both of them are programmers and they seem to fit together very well.

We had lunch at Mercury's place. His girlfriend made some stew. It was great to have a home made meal. We've been eating out since Sunday morning. I had spoken with Mercury many times over the phone and every other day over Internet chat. This was the first time to meet him. I think that we have a lot of things we will be working on in the future that will be joint venture kinds of things. I don't know what the stuff will be. But I know that the opportunity is there.

Mercury is a bit more famous (Or infamous) than he realizes. One of the volunteers on one of my sites asked for me to get his autograph. Mercury has not really met many of his fans so he had not run into this before. It was fun to watch him sit and figure out exactly what he would write. We talked a little bit about what I went through the first time someone asked me for my autograph. I had no clue what to do and I think Mercury felt the same way. He did come up with something good and now I have this autograph I'll be sending to one of my guys.

Before leaving we had a little fun. They own a Mini. So we parked it in the middle of the limo to show the size difference. Looks like we could fit more than one of them in the limo. It was great to meet them. I know I'll be meeting them in person sometime again in the future.

We ran into break issues after leaving Phoenix. (Mercury's place) Our break light came on. The picture above us of the brake fluid cover. It's the brown thing down below. The first thing I notice is that some dumbass installed stuff over the cover. The manual for the Hummer states that you should check out the fluid level once a month. It's stupid to have this stuff installed over this. I unhook the stuff in the way and realize it's the alarm system that was just installed. Grrrr.

So I get the stuff off. I then have to clean the cover. The cover was so grimy that I wondered if the mechanical inspection I had requested covered the breaks. It should have. But I can't help but think they would have had to clean it off to check the fluid. I don't think they did so. When I open the cover I know 100% for sure that they did not check! The Hummer requires DOT 5 fluid. DOT fluid is purple. The fluid in the system is clear. I do a little research to find that clear is DOT 3. At first I did not think this was a big deal. DOT 5 is rated at 510 degrees and DOT 3 is rated at 401 degrees. I did not think this would be an issue. Then I found out that when you put DOT 3 in a DOT 5 system it eats the seals. This could be part of the break issue I am having. The breaks stop us just fine. But they feel spongy. I'll have to get our mechanic to do an inspection of the whole system and replace parts that are eaten away.

I'll be giving the seller a call about this when I get back to town. Part of the value of the car was that the breaks had been completely redone a month ago. Obviously the people who did the breaks made a serious error. I feel that the cost to fix it should be refunded to us. Then the seller can go after his mechanic for the funds.

We got our insurance quotes in for the car. The low one is just under $9000 and the high is over $12,000. These are per year prices. The insurance companies insist on paying these per year. We asked about paying them quarterly. But then they want to finance them like a loan. I don't think I am interested in doing that.

My research shows that it's the first two years that are killer on insurance rates. I can understand that. Even I have made a few bone head moves on this trip. One of them was that I missed seeing a stop sign until I was very close to it. I ended up skidding to a stop. If I had passengers in the back that could have been bad. The other was one that I'm a bit frustrated about. In Oregon when you are in a left turn lane and you have a signal. That signal is yours. When it turns green you have the right of way to turn left. The only time that you have a signal for your lane and you don't have the right away it has a sign stating as such. Something like "Left turn yields to oncoming traffic". In Arizona it's not that way. You yield to oncoming traffic even if you have a green in your lane. There are no signs stating this. Hence. I followed two other cars in a turn and almost got smeared by an SUV. I pulled out in front of them and did not have the right away. I didn't know it at the time though.I had to look back at what happened to even figure out what I had done wrong.

This leads me to curb number 8. Yep. I hit curb 8 for the trip today. I'm doing much better with judging how much room I need for turns in this beast. So I only hit one curb in the last two days. (GRIN) I'm sure glad curbs don't raise my insurance rates.

Seven

Seven is the number of curbs I've hit in the last 1,800 miles. One of those is not really a curb. We hit a storm drain in the dark while trying to pull into a motel. It was about 2 feet deep. when I hit it I wondered what the hell I had just done. Both the front and back passenger tires went into it. After I stopped to inspect the car I was very pleased to find no damage. I'm 100% sure this is because the Hummer is designed to take this kind of punishment. If it had been a regular limo I would have hit the front bumper and scraped the underside very heavily. Score one for hummers!

Wednesday was another travel day that was not without issues. After we started heading to Dallas. I noticed that even though I was on the main tank the gas tank was draining very quickly. I could watch the gauge go down as we were driving. Not a good sign. We stopped. I checked to see if we had a leak. We did not. So after looking a little more I discovered that the tank switch had stopped working and we were stuck on the auxiliary tank. It's only 12 gallons. At 8 miles per gallon mileage we will not get far on a tank that size. This was a show stopper. After Dallas there are some stretches of highway that are far enough we would not be able to make it on 12 gallons.

We got into Dallas and we were early for our dinner meeting. So we headed out to find a mechanic to take a look at the problem. We found a place called City Garage. They identified that the mechanical part of the fuel switch had failed. They called several Hummer dealerships to learn that the part is no longer being manufactured. Oh crap! No longer manufactured? Well they got it switched over to the main tank. So now we are on that tank. Thanks to City Garage of Dallas. BTW: They could not repair it so they did not charge us for the hours of diagnostics. So I gave the 3 guys that worked on it a $20 tip each for their help. I always like to reward good help. It fosters more of the same kinds of actions for everyone.

We made it to dinner on time. Getting into their parking lot was another example of the trouble we will have with getting clients to their destinations. We could not make the right hand turn into their driveway. there was just not enough room and there was no possibility of jogging the car to get it in. The road we were on was also a freeway off ramp. There was no way I would consider backing up to make a corner here. The only way to get into their parking lot was to come at it from a different road. so we did. The detour to do that though was about half a mile. We are going to have to keep in mind that we are going to have to do stuff like this. The customer won't understand and think we don't know how to drive. So I think a little education about how the car turns and the problems with the customer will be needed to keep a good image.

We met with (From left to right) Viceroy of UO Radio, Stev of Markee Dragon, Marcus Eikenberry aka Markee Dragon and Ramirez from Markee Dragon. (For those of you wondering what's with the names. The names I used are our online names we use for the online communities we work with. We are all from the video game industry. It's part of one of my other companies.) We had a great dinner. It was a 4.5 start restaurant and the food was very good. I had met Ramirez before. But I had not met Viceroy and Stev. After working with them online on different projects for so long it was great to meet them.

After dinner we headed out towards El Paso Texas. Once outside of Dallas it's all oil country. We would go stretches of 20 miles or more with no exits. When there was an exit it was just for a farm road. You could not even see any lights around. We were out in the middle of no where.

It got late and we started looking for a motel. Every motel on this road was booked full! We ended up driving an extra hundred miles or so to find a motel. The 9th one was a charm.

Thursday we got an early start. We drove a lot of miles. The land here is very flat and you see oil wells everywhere. We were told by someone at one of the truck stops that they would stink really bad. We did not really experience that. Later when we got to the Rio Grande river. OMG. It smelled like a urinal. It was very bad. We think it was the river that smelled this way because we drove along it for some time and it smelled bad the whole time we were near it.

On the way to El Paso we had to climb up into the high plains. We topped out at 4500 feet. Going up the hills we got very close to overheating several times. It was 20 miles or so of nothing but up hill. It was very hard on the car. The car for most of the hill ran at 220 degrees. That's to high for normal. But given that the car weighs 15,500 pounds. I think that's about 7,000 pounds more than normal. It's much like pulling a very heavy trailer all the time. So it will put an extra load on the motor and that creates more heat.

Today we are headed to Tucson Arizona. We have a dinner meeting there tonight with Lady Alex from Markee Dragon. It we arrive early enough we are going to visit Tombstone before the dinner meeting.

Cheers.

500 miles on one take equals "out of gas"

Actually I should say Diesel. The limo has 2 tanks. The main tank is supposedly the big one. We found out today that it's actually only 30 gallons. I wonder how big the small tank is. lol

We did 500 miles today. Since it has 2 tanks it was not a huge deal to run one dry. You just flip over to the other tank and if you are still moving you'll have power again in about 20 seconds. Most likely we will never run into this when the limo is in service.

Tomorrow we will make it into Dallas Texas where we are meeting some of the volunteers who help in the forums on one of our video game sites. Should be fun to see them.

On another note. Something that I am finding very annoying. People fall in love with the limo as soon as they see it. It's attracting a lot of attention. I can't even fill the tank at the pump without 2 or 3 people asking if there is someone famous in the back. It was fun the first few times. But now I'm finding it to be a bit irritating as it's taking up my time when I'm working at getting on the road again. Guess I'll just have to think up something clever to tell people who ask.

Them: "Whoa! Cool limo!"
Me: "Thanks"
Them: "How much does it cost to ride in it?"
Me: "Sorry it's a private car and not for hire"
Them: "Oh? Must be someone famous inside"
Me: "Sorry can't talk about who is in the car"
Them: "Wow! This is so cool!"
Me: "Have a good day" (Hoping they will walk away)

When we have clients it will be a different story. If our clients want attention they will get it for sure. If they don't want attention. Well...... They should not choose this limo for their travel. It may be very difficult to shield customers from all the attention just because the vehicle is so unique.

It will be interesting to talk about the subject after we have had a few real experiences on both ends.

Cheers

Successful purchase and fixing stuff before the trip

We purchased the car Sunday night. The purchase went nice and smooth. Well the care was smooth at last. I never loose anything but I managed to loose a pair of brand new headphones on one of the flights there. then I managed to leave my jacket in the sellers truck with my ipod and some other stuff. Wish I had noticed that while we were in the same state. lol

So back to the car. It's definitely something that catches peoples eyes. It's huge. I believe it's about 36'. I don't think it will be fitting in my driveway at home. Heck. It hardly fits at the gas station.

The car was at a good price. The asking price was 20 to 30k below what I estimated the market to be at. When I saw the car in person I could see that the paint is going to cost me 10 to 15k to get into shape. Then I also estimate that there is another 5k or so of other work that will need to be done.

When I asked why the car was in a bit worse shape than the photos I found out that he used photos from two years prior when he purchased it. I was a bit disappointed in this. It was a bit misleading and made it not as good of a deal. But I believe the value is still good and proper. So we purchased it anyway.

Now we are headed home. But we have many stops on the way. One of our first stops was Target. The windows were very dirty. I also needed some electrical tape to hold down the wrap on the steering wheel.

We also ended up locking the back doors to the car and then realized there was no locks to use the keys on! The alarm that operates the door locks was not functioning. So we went to a stereo shop and asked them to help out. They ended up installing a new alarm. But as for the back doors they could not help. So I called the seller to ask him about the back doors. He says "Just roll down the windows". "Duh!" I thought. In a limo you can control everything from the front. It was funny. we way over thought the problem. It was very simple but we did not see it.

I think it would be good to mention that this is one of the most challenging vehicles I have ever driven. The Turing radius on the H1 sucks. stretching it out it's the worst thing I have ever driven for turning. I commonly have to do button hook turns when in the city taking as many as 4 lanes to do it. It's ugly. I'm getting the hang of it though. I've only taken out 3 curbs so far. (GRIN) That may sound like 3 to many. But it really is a beast to take into town. Should be interesting for trips into downtown.

So we made it to Atlanta today. We are a bit ahead of schedule. We are meeting friends in Dallas on Wednesday for dinner. But if we keep up this pace we will arrive tomorrow night. So we might have a day to screw around in Dallas. We'll have to see what kind of tourist stuff there is to do in Dallas. I'm sure we will find something.

Examining other limo services

I've spent a lot of time looking over other limo companies websites. I've taken the best things I've seen out there and we will be incorporating them in our own site we are building. That's only part of it though. We also need to use the other services here in town to see how it's currently being done in our city. That and we needed a car last night. lol.

Last night we used Executive Touch Limousines from here in Portland. We had Cliff Robinson drive us in their 14 passenger Hummer H2. Cliff is not only a driver. He's the owner of the company. Having the owner of the company drive for us was a great opportunity to learn a little bit about the industry. After all. It's been over 10 years since I drove limos and a lot has changed in the industry. So there is more to learn.

The first thing I learned is that Cliff is a bit of a risk taker. Or at least that was might thoughts when I saw the limo. Their H2 limo is a 2006 and if I remember correctly it's a 200" stretch and it's a total of 34' long. It's a very big car. Seeing it I noticed Santa across the side of it with the words "Happy Holidays". I think that people who are willing to theme their cars are risk takers. I have read about them but that's my first one I had ever seen. I personally didn't care for it but my wife liked it. We also got several comments on it when we went to one of the near by casinos. The car is a beautiful vehicle.

ETL's H2 has a video touch screen for controlling everything in the car. Back when I was driving everything was 100% analog controls. It took me a minute to get used to it. But it actually was pretty easy to use. I think the controls need to be as easy as possible. It's important especially if you are driving someone who is not technically savvy. Cliff did take a moment when he picked us up to go over the controls. This was required as we never would have found them otherwise. I would never think of touching one of the LCD screens in the car. One drawback I noticed of the digital controls on the touch screen. One of our people we had with us wanted to restart the DVD that was playing ( Blue man group ) and touched one of the main screens thinking he could get a menu. I could see this assumption in the future ending up with damage to one of the larger screens that is not a touch screen.

One thing I learned is that when you look at limos on the web and such and they say they are a 180" stretch. That number refers to how much the vehicle has been lengthened, It's not the total length. I had assumed that it was the total length. So the H1 we are flying out tomorrow to pick up is a 200" stretch. If this H2 we rode in tonight was a 180" - 200" stretch and it is 34' long I may not have a big enough parking space when I return with the car. I planned to just park it in my driveway for the moment after I returned. Then I was going to look for warehouse space. Well I have two parking spots in my driveway. One is 30' and the other is unmeasured. I estimate it's about 36'. The H1 is a bit bigger than the H2. This could prove to be an issue. I won't know though until I return.

Cliff was also nice enough to give me the number of a good insurance agent that specializes in limos. We've been turned down by 6 companies so far. We are currently pending with our 7th. Right now I have the insurance for driving it home on my personal policy. That's ok for personal use but it won't be able to work that way for customers. We will need to have a commercial policy in place.

After meeting Cliff I think we will be able to do some business together. I can learn a bit from him and I hope that I can create some fair exchange so that he has value in working with us on some stuff.

Tomorrow morning we fly out just after 6am. Cheers.

To have a limo company you need to have a limo!

So we actually started thinking about doing this limo company in November of 2006. It's only just now that we decided to create a blog about it. Since I want to make sure that all the info is here we'll start with what we were doing back then.

I use limos quite a bit. I end up renting them several times a year. Being a user of them and a fan of large vehicles my operations manager and I started looking at if we could actually purchase a car. I run a few successful companies in the video game industry. So we have a bit of start up capital for us to consider a limo company. My idea of a great limo is the biggest one I can find. So we set out on a quest to find the biggest and the most impressive.

We started by Googling for limos for sale. It's actually not a very big market. So it's hard to find good stuff. Then we found at a limo company in Denver the biggest and baddest limo we had ever seen. It's called simply "The Mammoth". We found the company that makes them. We decided that this would be our first car.



So we did some research. Talked with the manufacturer. It's $165,000 for one of these in the configuration we wanted. So we worked on our options for purchase. We looked at leasing. But financially that does not work out to be a good option. We looked at financing it. After finance charges the total cost is $235,000. That's better than leasing but still not a good option. So we looked to see if we could pull the money from one of our other companies. We could but it would be a hardship on the other companies. So that's not a very good idea either.

So we mulled over the ideas though the month of December. The plan was going to be to save up for it but I personally had issues with the timeline. It was going to take us until Summer before we could get one. that's to long if i have a goal to have another company opening this year and be successful by the end of the year. So not knowing exactly what we were going to do we set stuff aside for the holidays.

After the holidays I stumbled across a very nice Hummer H1 22 passenger limo. The price was right for being able to buy it outright or finance it on a short term loan. I contacted the seller. He's a multiple business owner like myself. Except he is doing law school at the same time. So he decided to give up his limo business even though he was sold out every Friday and Saturday night at $185 per hour on his limo. I agreed to purchase the car after a mechanical review. He agreed and I sent him $1000 paypal to hold it.

This last week he got the car into the local Hummer dealership. They reviewed the car and gave it a clean bill of health. So this Sunday we fly out to pay the balance on the car and pick it up. Here's where the adventure begins!

Now that we have a car it's time to figure out what we need to do to comply with all of the states and federal laws. This turned out to not be an easy task. But I think we got it all done. Let me briefly touch on all of the stuff we had to do. You have to apply for a USDOT number and a motor carrier number. We also had to get insurance. It's required to have $5,000,000 in liability. Ouch. Then there is also a person that is required to get involved. They are called a process agent. They are used to verify insurance with the state and to be the front man for claims. I'm not sure why we need them. But it's the law that we use one for each state we operate in.

So ..... Speaking of Insurance. It's very hard to get insurance as a new company. The first 6 companies we applied with turned us down. Today is the last business day before I leave to pick up the car. So my insurance agent ended up writing a temp policy for us just so that we can get the car back to Oregon. Hopefully by the time I get back we will have a commercial policy in place.

So this Sunday I'm flying out to South Carolina to pick up the car. My father (Who's also one of my best friends) asked if he could come along to keep me company. I thought that was a great idea. You have to have a CDL to drive the car and he does not have one. So he won't be able to help with driving. So Sunday we will pick up the car and start our journey driving it back to Portland Oregon. We are giving ourselves 10 days to get back home. Along the way I plan to see several of the volunteers that help in our forums for our other companies. I'll also stop and see a few people that I'm doing some joint ventures with. It should be a fun trip. I'll have Internet access on the tip. I'll be sure to post some pictures and thoughts.

Introducing a new limo company

I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Marcus Eikenberry from Portland Oregon USA. I'm in my mid 30s and I own a few successful businesses. I have a goal of opening 1 new business per year. My 2007 business is a limo service company here in Portland Oregon. My goals for this company are pretty simple. The first goal is for it to be successful. Success can be defined as a company that is profitable. It also includes being good for the community and for the companies employees.

I come from a background of online businesses dating back to 1997 and a few brick and mortar businesses dating back to about 1992. Some of them have been very successful and some of them have bombed horribly.

I will post updates often talking about the limo company. For the most part I've very willing to tell all. Many people may be shocked at the level of information I will talk about. I say this because if you wanted you'll be able to follow in my footsteps and create your own limo company. You will of course have to decide if I am successful or not.

I believe in something called coopetition. That's a made up word. Basically it can be defined as cooperating with your competition. I have done this many times and while it's bit me in the ass a few times I believe that by far I have been much more successful because of it.

So how about a little history? Why a limo business? Back in 1992 I worked for a year for Prestige Limousines here in my home town. At the same time I worked for the local transit authority. I worked for Tri-Met as a part time driver of city busses. I've always enjoyed driving large vehicles. So I guess that's the first clue. I like the challenge of driving through town with something that may be larger than the street was ever made for. While I was part time at Tri-Met I needed more income than I was making. Full time work was not available. So I dreamed up the idea of driving limos. I applied at Prestige and got the job.

I drove limos for 6 months to a year until I was let go because a customer complained that I drove like a bus driver. I can laugh about it now. But back then it really ticked me off. But it was no matter. I moved on. Soon after that I went full time driving city bus. I drove for about 5 years for the city. I really enjoyed it. But the entrepreneur in me needed something more. That's reason 2. I've opened several companies since leaving Tri-Met. I've also worked for a few companies in between. I believe though that I was born to be self employed.

Reason 3 is that I can't seem to get away from driving large vehicles. Here's my SUV for example.

So I feel like it is an easy next company for me to start. I'm comfortable with it and it excites me. I also like a challenge and I think I have one here.