Portland Limo Company - Blogging a limo startup

Current status

2008-10-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog. We have been publishing articles over to our other limo community site. It never really took off like I wanted. I've had other sites that have grown huge in the video game industry. The market for limos is just not as big.

We did get everything up and running with our company called Portland Limos. With the economy the way it is now we have had a hard time covering the costs of running the company. Thus we now have it for sale. So I wanted to publish a copy of the sale information here.

We've had a great run at this business. I had a lot of fun with it,. But it turned out to just not be our thing. But I will say. I am an expert at other online business areas. One of those areas being how to affiliate market and do sales online. So I may change this blog into an information resource for online sales and bookings for limos. We'll see. If I make more posts here you'll know I've decided to do that.

Here is the information on the sale of our company.

Limo Company and cars for sale: Portland Oregon. Portlandlimos.com

We are selling the entire company. This is the cars and the companies assets. We are willing to sell all of it or part. We are willing to make an incredible deal on the entire package.

3 of the 5 cars have loans. 2 of the cars are free and clear. We will make a package deal for the exact same price of the loans payoff at $188,000. The cars are valued at $220,000. Plus there is other assets such as the domain name http://www.portlandlimos.com that will be included for free if purchasing the entire company.

Quick overview:
-2007 H2 Hummer 18 passenger, Tandem axles, 37 feet in length. Black and Silver
-2007 Chrysler 300, 8 passenger, Black and Silver
-2003 Ford Excursion, 20 passenger, White
-1997 Hummer H1, 20 passenger, Black
-1993 Lincoln, 8 passenger, Black
Domains: http://www.portlandlimos.com | http://www.wideloadlimos.com
Limolinks scheduling software
Full customer list
Currently running full page ad in the NW Gay and Lesbian phone book. Prepaid for this entire edition. This includes entries in their online site. http://www.pdxgayyellowpages.com/p/listing.php?id=3842
Introductions will be made to current business clients.

All cars are in great shape and have been fully maintained.

Detailed information on each car:
==================
2007 Chrysler 300 Limousine
Pictures: http://limonster.com/gallery/showgallery.php/cat/511

Vehicle Details-
Year: 2007
Make: Chrysler
Model: 300
Miles: 8,388
Color: Black/Silver
Passenger Capacity: 8
Coachbuilder: Krystal Enterprises
Body Condition Rating: 10
Mechanical Condition Rating: 10
Interior Condition Rating: 10
Vehicle Classification/Type: Limousine
Vehicle Status: Used

Warranty and Financing-
Is there a warranty on the vehicle? Yes, coachbuilder

CD/DVD – Sounds System
2 Video Screens
2 Bars

$59,000

==================
2007 Hummer H2 Limousine
This is the longest limo in Oregon.
Pictures: http://limonster.com/gallery/showgallery.php/cat/512

Vehicle Details-
Year: 2007
Make: Hummer
Model: H2
Miles: 14,699
Color: Black/Silver
Passenger Capacity: 17-21
Coachbuilder: Legendary Motorcars and Coachworks
Body Condition Rating: 10
Mechanical Condition Rating: 10
Interior Condition Rating: 9.9
Vehicle Classification/Type: Limousine
Vehicle Status: Used

Vehicle Description-
CD/DVD – Sound System Level 2
6 Video screens
3 bars
Light-up disco floor
VIP seating area

$105,000

==================
2003 Ford Excursion Limousine
http://limonster.com/gallery/showgallery.php/cat/514

Vehicle Details-
Year: 2003
Make: Ford
Model: Excursion
Miles: 61,896
Color: White
Passenger Capacity: 17-21
Coachbuilder: Ultra
Body Condition Rating: 9
Mechanical Condition Rating: 9
Interior Condition Rating: 8

Vehicle Classification/Type: Limousine
Vehicle Status: Used

Vehicle Description-
CD/DVD – Sounds System
3 Video Screens (One is in need of repair. It's non functioning, reason unknown.)
4 Bars

$34,000

==================
1997 H1 Hummer Limousine
This is one hell of a macho limo.
Pictures: http://limonster.com/gallery/showgallery.php/cat/513/page/1

Vehicle Details-
Year: 1997
Make: AMC
Model: H1 Hummer
Miles: 110,168
Color: Black
Passenger Capacity: 22
Coachbuilder: Royal Coach
Body Condition Rating:
Mechanical Condition Rating:
Interior Condition Rating:

Vehicle Classification/Type: Limousine
Vehicle Status: Used

Vehicle Description-
CD/DVD – Thumping Sounds System
2 video screens
4 bars
Fog machine + Lasers

$35,000
==================

1993 Lincoln Town car Limousine
Pictures: http://limonster.com/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/121
Year: 1993
Make: Ford
Model: Lincoln
Miles: 247,118
Color: Black
Passenger Capacity: 8
Body Condition Rating: 6 - For it's age it is very good. It does show some age though.
Mechanical Condition Rating: 8
Interior Condition Rating: 6
Vehicle Classification/Type: Limousine
Vehicle Status: Used

$4000
==================

We have been very successful in online businesses. Running a transportation company turned out to not be out thing. We will sell all of this at a loss so that we can just move on to business areas we are good at. Our giving up in this area can be your fortune.

Contact Information: Marcus Eikenberry Email markeedragon@markeedragon.com or call my cell 503.484.3279 I am available 8am until 8pm by phone. 24x7 by email. :)
http://www.markeedragoninc.com

Picking up the new H2 Limo

2007-06-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.limonster.com

Announcing a new limo community site

2007-05-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

We have been working for several months on a new limo community site. It's located at www.limonster.com . There are a couple of limo based communities on the net today. They left me feeling a bit wanting for more. Since I could not find it we decided to create it. Please feel free to bookmark the sites address. We will still post the videos here at this site. But they will also be posted at Limonster as well. All transcriptions will be posted only at the new site.

I look forward to seeing you there!

New offices location

2007-05-13T09:58:00.001-07:00

Finding the right location

2007-04-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

Limo Detailing

2007-04-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

New limo community site - Almost.

2007-04-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

A brief Krystal limo review

2007-04-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

Krystal's Website

Fly and Dine - Doing dinner in style

2007-04-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

Responding to comments about Crappy limo service

2007-04-09T17:09:00.000-07:00

See the original here. These are in reply to the comments in that post.

Crappy limo service

2007-04-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

Is it wrong of me to complain about the condition of the car and the service?

Oh man. Look at that mess of wires!

2007-04-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

More shop time

2007-03-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

A few missing videos

2007-03-25T13:18:00.001-07:00

Here's a few missing videos from the trip. Sacramento to Portland.

Getting the limo back to our home town.

2007-03-10T07:58:00.001-08:00

It's been another wild day. It's been interesting though. We got more attention than I was looking for including a guy mooning us and a gal lifting her shirt to the car. Sorry. I did not catch video of that for you all. (GRIN)

We picked up the Money suck. It gets to much attention!

2007-03-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

Several videos today. Being on the road I could not upload them until now. Lots of good viewing. I got all of the good stuff today except for the crazy lady that would not get out of my way. I needed to turn and she was very aggressive. I could not get into the turn lane so I had to start easing into it with her there. Just to let her know I needed to get in. She turned very hostile. Followed us to the gas station. Blocked us with her car. Got out and yelled at us.

That was not all though. She came back 10 minutes later before we had left and yelled at us some more. I was wondering since she came back if she went to get a gun or something. she just wanted to yell some more. She stopped when she saw my son in the car.

What's the kicker of this? She was like 65 years old. I've never seen road rage from a woman senior citizen before. Guess this was the first time.

Final choice for the new limo

2007-03-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

Finally picking up the H1 from the shop

2007-03-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

Transcribed by Kimmi Clark

Hello!

Well, I have an update on the H1 Hummer limo, it’s done and we’re picking it up on Thursday. Behind me here you can see a picture here of the Hummer being worked on. This picture was actually taken when we were in Dallas, Texas when we lost our fuel switch. The H1 is finally done; there is still stuff to be repaired on which we will have to get to. We will take care of the damage once it gets back. The damage isn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be. In total the damage it’s over 12k so I’m only going to have to pay out another 5k when I pick it up instead of the anticipated 7k.

We’re going to take it up from Sacramento where it’s currently at right now. We plan to then drive over to SF and hopefully meet up with some friends of mine over there who are developers over at www.EA.com who are currently working on the Ultima Online game. We want to take them all out to lunch but we’ll see and then we’re heading up the coast towards Oregon.

Hopefully we don’t have any more issues. I will take the camera with me and we’ll work on getting videos uploaded from our trip and maybe just show some fun stuff. Hopefully it won’t be stuff “Here I am broke down at the mechanics again.” We’ll gross our fingers.

Anyways I also wanted to mention John Husting. I wanted to mention him because I paid him $9.00 today for mentioning how many “uhms” I had in my previous video. Just so you know I’m paying out $1 per unintentional “uhm” because I am trying to break myself of this habit and the more expensive it is the harder I’ll work at breaking it. He counted my “uhs” and my “uhms” but I am working on them one at a time. Let’s get rid of the “uhms” and I’ll hit the “uhs”. If anyone is watching this and future videos for every “uhm” I am paying a buck for each one. If you’re the first to email me and tell me about it I will pay out as long as you’re correct.

Take care, that’s all for today

Picking the best limo manufacturer

2007-03-03T15:57:00.001-08:00

Video Transcript
Transcribed by Kimmi Clark

ME: Hey everybody. I am here with Dennis, he is our Operations Manager.

DH: Hello.

ME: We’re looking to purchase a brand new limo after our problems with the H1 that keeps costing me more money. My buddy Tim has started calling me and asking me “How’s the money suck?”, and that’s all it’s been. I don’t even have it home yet, I’m hoping today to find out more information about that.

So we’ve been looking at brand new limos and I’ve found this Hummer that I fell in love with. It has a 240 inch stretch, tandem axel, and a large screen HD television in it. There is also a dance floor, a fog machine, laser lights, the whole works. It seats around 24-26 people with a really nice bar configuration inside. It was from California limos, http://www.kalifornialimos.com , if you go to their site right now though; unfortunately it says that their web domain has been suspended. Maybe that means they’ve gone out of business, I really don’t know. All of the information I had for contacting them was on that site so I can’t get to it now. I guess they’re out of luck.

I did some searching around in the limo forums, www.limos.com. I got recommendations and questions answered about what I need to look for in a brand new vehicle and everything. The biggest thing that they were all telling me is about warrantee. The first recommendation was www.krystal.cc and I didn’t call them first, instead I looked at the California limousines picture and started looking around at some of the other builders. I found that www.royalcoachbyvictor.net looked to be the limo that we wanted. So I called Royal and I talked to them there, I got a quote from them and everything. In the background here you can see a picture of the H2, 200 inch stretch. I asked them about a 240 inch stretch with tandem and everything and I didn’t get what I wanted. Dennis and I were talking about it and the best that they’ll give us is a 200 inch.

DH: Why don’t they do the 240 inch stretch?

ME: Well what they told me was that they manufacture five cars per week in an assembly line and for safety reasons they don’t do the 240. Even though they acknowledged that the one I saw on the California site was probably made by them. It appears that’s a policy made within the last year.

DH: What about the tandem axel option?

ME: The tandem takes an enormous amount of time and this goes back to their five a week assembly line. If one car takes longer than the other cars it holds everything up.

DH: Will money buy what you want?

ME: I did offer more and they said it just wasn’t possible. I’ve decided after talking to them that I really like the way this car looks. I really like the Lamborghini style front doors and the suicide doors in the back. It’s really cool looking, two-toned with really nice rims. I can show you the inside interior in just a minute.

So let’s get back to www.krystal.cc, their website is 100% flash and is very hard to navigate. You have to wait for menus to pop open; you can’t just look at pictures. It also has noises on everything you click on. This is the standard option for Krystal, they do offer a two-toned option but they don’t offer some of the other things I wanted. For example, let me show you the Victor one here again (Royal Coach). Here is the site and a picture of the limo I was just showing you. They have a dance floor, the large screen TV, (By the way the television I am using here as a monitor is a 46” Sony Bravia, I talked to them about it because it will do really high computer resolutions, it will do 1920 by 1080. I talked to them about putting these in there and they said it was just fine. So we’re going to use one of these puppies up in the front.), and they talked about having the dance floor style stuff up in the head bars up here. It’s pretty nice interior; I actually like what I see there.

Then I talked to Krystal about their warrantee because they have a 3 year 36k mile warrantee on all their Hummers. All I would have to do is take it to their dealership and it will be fixed. They also had a warrantee on their own electronics and they would ship out new warrantee parts of there was a situation. Although, with Krystal, this is it! You don’t get extra frills. The interior is just one design that I could get out of them. It looks very nice but it’s not quite the seating capacity I was looking for. Their seating capacity is 14 people. We can do 24 in the Victor but we have to give up some stuff. We wouldn’t have to give up the TV up front but there would have to be seats across that portion. The problem with that is I can see people banging the back of their heads into the TV and I don’t think that it would be very smart. We could do really high seating capacity, around 24, but what it really looks like is that we’ll end up doing about 20 in order to get all of the features we want.

www.royalcoachbyvictor.net , I talked to them about warrantees as well, including Krystal’s, and what they said was that the warrantee was an after market warrantee (when you cut a Hummer in half you void the warrantee) and so the after market warrantee is not an actual hummer warrantee even though you take it to a hummer dealership for service. It’s an extra warrantee and if you dickered with them you get take that off of the price, roughly around 2k. They also told me that if I wanted a warrantee like what Krystal offered I’d have to add a couple thousand dollars to the price. I guess that sounds very much the same although maybe it’s the way the presentation is between the two warrantees that makes Krystal’s sound more like a factory warrantee.

DH: Krystal is selling the warrantee more as a feature, more than Royal is.

ME: Correct. In fact Royal does have a warrantee, their warrantee is on all of the electrical and components put in for 1 year and then the exterior is 3 years, I believe it’s either 3 years or 300k miles. I wouldn’t quote me on that but I think that’s what they said it was. The exterior warrantee is for the paint not to bubble, and no issues with the body, and they guarantee that it will not sag or crack on the frame. That to me actually sounds really good because with the H1 we found some stress cracks, and those are going to have to be repaired now too. I’m sure that will be a fair deal of money!

So for features, I really like the Royal version, the only thing I don’t like is the length, I really wish we could get it longer. We will be able to get the flat screen TV, two 17” TV’s, and a 7” TV. It will also have a nice sound system, bass boxes, and an intercom system. Since where the TV (on the picture from the monitor) goes is actually where the partition will be it does not raise and lower. Since it doesn’t raise and lower there is an inferred camera, in the interior on the passenger section, so you can see what’s going on back there. I’ll assume that we’ll have to make our camera very visible or we’ll have to let our clients know about that. We don’t need any extra curricular activities going on back there and catch it on camera. It has other stuff like an Xbox 360 with wireless controls and we’ll have computer input on the screen. We will also have a disco floor and disco parts on the ceiling rails. We’ll get the suicide doors, even though it’s a 10k option. I think it will make it much easier to get and out of the vehicle, plus it looks really cool. The total that they’re quoting me right now is 134k so that is within our ball park for what we’re looking for, for our new limo.

DH: I still can’t get past the fact that we’re not going to be a really monster limo with it. If we can’t do the tandem axels and we can’t do the longer stretch, I personally don’t see a reason why we would get it.

ME: That is a concern, especially since one of the things we’re doing is going for the biggest limos in town. I think we’re going to look some more, I might have to settle on this because I do believe that warrantee is very important. I haven’t been able to find very many manufacturers that our going to do the extra length. In Oregon we can go up to 40 feet and I would like to do that if I can find one, ideally a 240”-260” stretch with a tandem axel (mostly for the breaking power).

Are there anymore questions?

DH: No that’s it!

ME: Thanks everybody for watching!

H1 limo delayed AGAIN!

2007-02-27T06:31:00.000-08:00

Today was the day is was to be ready. I got voice mail last night stating it will not be done. Uggg!

Transcribed by Kimmi Clark:

Ok I’ve got a bit of a rant here; I’m getting really ticked off. I’ve talked about my H1 Limo that I purchased back around the first of January. We drove across country and it broke down in Sacramento. So we took it to Hummer of Sacramento and I flew back home here to Portland because it wasn’t ready. We weren’t able to get it done very quickly. They assessed the vehicle and we’ve got the transmission out, we’ve got the transfer case out, and we have break problems. The wrong break fluid was put into the system, the fluid put in was actually acidic and the wrong type. There are several other issues as well.

I’ve been working on it and it’s just been one delay after another. Right now it is February 27th, we dropped it off before the 15th of January and so now were looking at six weeks that the H1 has been sitting in the shop. It may very well happen that we’ll get the second limo before the first one even arrives. I’m a little irritated today, I got a phone message last night from Hummer of Sacramento that said basically that they just got started on the work it was scheduled to be done today. I’ve been trying to call them the last few days so I could get my airline tickets and go down and get it. Apparently they are behind and so they also found some other things wrong with it, like welds that need to be done. I guess they’re helpful on things but these delays are just killing me. That’s my rant for today. I’m getting thoroughly disgusted with having purchased a used vehicle, most likely never again will I purchase a used limo. They’ll all be new from here on out.

What an expensive lesson to learn. So far I’ve paid 50k for the car and up to 70k in expenses and I’ve got another 7k-10k expenses before I get it home. What an issue!
End of rant!

Purchasing a custom H2 limo

2007-02-25T06:15:00.001-08:00

Transcribed by Kimmi Clark

Welcome to another video for the blog “Portland Metro Limos”, its http://portlandlimo.blogspot.com. I just want to go over a couple of things that have happened recently and to welcome you all to the first official video, there was another video just kind of explaining things. For those of you who have been following, this will be transcribed; transcription will be up in a few days. In the future most of the videos will be transcribed right away.

First off, for those of you that are counting, every time I say “uhm” I will pay out a $1.00 to the first person who emails me at Markee Dragon at Markeedragon.com listing the number of times I said it in the video. I do this once for each video, I’ll pay you via PayPal so the payment will be instant. I know that my first video was very costly. It’s a habit I am trying to break so I’ll just pay out on it. So if you catch me go ahead and email me, Markee Dragon at Markeedragon.com and I will pay up if you’re the first one to email in about it.

So the status of the H1 Limo, well, it has really been a disaster. So our first car, we bought it used and it didn’t go quite as planned. We bought it in South Carolina and started driving it back and we only got as far as California (we’re in Portland). We blew out the transmission and the transfer case. It’s been there for 6 weeks now at Hummer of Sacramento. They finally got the transmission put in it this week and it should be finished on Tuesday. We might have our first limo back here on location the following week.

In other BIG news, I’ve been working a loan for our second car. It’s kind of funny because our second car is almost arriving before our first. We’ve been working on financing and that has gone pretty good. I managed to get all the documentation for the bank and was able to get 100k approved for our first brand new car. My price range for the new car is around 120k. The car that I have been looking at on www.kaliforniaLimoSales.com is a pretty interesting car. It’s a 240” H2 stretch and comes with 42” widescreen TV in the back, disco floor, laser light show, fiber optic and LED lighting. It is also tandem rear axel. It looks pretty spiffy and looks like a b*tch to drive around town. We are however going for the niche of being the biggest and most bad a$$ limousines in Portland, Oregon.

I did a little checking and I’ve been a member of the Limo Forums sponsored by www.limo.com. Their web address is actually www.limos.infopop.cc/eve. The forums there have been really helpful for me. I got a lot of good advice. I asked whether or not this would be a good vehicle to purchase and asked what things I needed to look out for. It seems that the number one thing people replied with was the warrantee. They said I need to be concerned about what kind of warrantee California Limo’s had to offer. They don’t have anything on their website about a warrantee.

Most of the recommendations were that Krystal is probably the best place to get a custom car and to have a good warrantee. I’ve been checking out their website but they don’t list any information about making custom cars. They have 200” limos but their H2’s look like they hold only around 14 passengers. Now the 240” from Kalifornia Limo Sales can hold 24 passengers.

We got all of our D.O.T stuff and we are registered motor carriers. Plus we’re all CDL drivers at the company here. We might as well go for the really big stuff because that’s where we are going to make our money.

A couple of guys on the forums recommended a couple of people that we plan to call on Monday. Hopefully they can build us a quality car.

That’s the update today and thank you for watching this.

Introducing Video entries

2007-02-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

Good news

2007-02-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

Finally some good news today. The transmission finally arrived at the dealership. Did I mention before it got lost in the snow storm on the east coast? I'm very happy that we will be able to start moving forward.

In other news. We are working on financing for a brand new H2 Hummer limo that will be 22 to 24 passenger. I'll finance $100,000 and then cover the rest of the cost out of pocket. I have a few builders that have designs that I find to be very attractive. Once I have the financing in place I'll start talking to builders and custom order.

Both of the builders I'm looking at are in California. If anyone can recommend a builder that is in the Pacific North West USA please feel free to suggest them to me. I would be interested to use a builder closer to home.

No I didn't blow my transmission this way

2007-02-18T17:26:00.000-08:00

Transmission is finally on the way

2007-02-10T17:11:00.000-08:00

It looks like the transmission that has been on back order is finally arriving on the 16th. Thank God. The 16th will make one month and one day that the limo has been in the shop. They expect to have the car available to me on the 23rd. So hopefully that weekend I'll be picking it up.

Sacramento Hummer contacted me and since the bill is up to $14,000 now they wanted some money. I don't blame them. So I sent them a check for $7000.

So how about I bring us up to date on how much in the hole I am. :)

Previous balance was -$56,033
Part payment to Hummer of Sacramento -$7000
Purchase 4 domain names registering them for 10 years. -$350
BOC-3 -$30
Company dinner to brainstorm for company names. -$135
Subscriptions for industry mags. -$85

New total: -$63,633

We also start our insurance on the 12th. We have to get that started or we loose our DOT application. So we will start commercially insuring the car on the 12th even though we don't have it yet. By the end of this month I might hit -80k. Fun fun.

Announcing our names.

2007-02-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

Yes names. We are going to use two of them. We will be using one name for business customers and the other for the party crowd. For the business end of things we will be using "Portland Metro Limos" We have the domain www.PortlandMetroLimos.com . For the party crowd we will have "Wide Load Limos" at www.WideLoadLimos.com .

The sites right now point to the blog here. But they will repoint to the sites as we get them up. We will make a few sites. There will be two different business class sites and then a couple of party sites. They will both have the same information but when you go to them the target audience will clearly be different.

We registered both of these names with the state. so we are good to go. Now all we need are some car!

As for the car. The H1 limo is still stuck in California. We finally got a date on when the backordered transmission will be in. It will arrive on the 16th of this month. I am planning to pick it up on the 23rd. As for other cars. I'm working on a business class limo. I'm working on getting a 6 to 10 passenger Cadillac or Chrysler 300. For the party side I'm looking at an H2 hummer. It's very possible I could end up with one of these other cars before car number 1 arrives here in town.

My goal right now is to be available for bookings March 1st with the H1. We will see though.

Properly naming our Limo service

2007-02-06T12:34:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a name for a business is very apparent. Other times it is not. Our current name we are running the business under is not proper for a Limo service. It's good for all of the other stuff we do. But it does not project the proper image we need. So we brainstormed a bit and we did not come up with much that we liked. So I took our brain storming to the next level. We did the Solution People (link) version.

The solution People method is to work in a group but independent at the same time. The method uses a group of people. We did this at our company meeting. We even had my youngest son and my dad who are not on staff help out with this. There was 11 of us total and in 10 minutes we came up with exactly 200 ideas for names. It was the first time I had used this method since I learned it last year. Here's a list of some of the names we came up with. Some of the ideas are very good. Some were very stupid and some were just outrageous!

Limos "R" Us
Choose Us First
Treat You Right
Markee Limos
Top Rated Livery
Big Black Whale Limos
White Trash Limos
Large Limo Livery
Esquire Carriage
Dragonrunners
mEr
Paramount Limos
Magnum Opus
Portland Limos
Columbia Limos
Sex Party Bus
Aphrodite's Carriage
Tux Limo Company
Killer Limos
Dragon Limos
Your Total Limo Company
Special Time Limos
Fun time limos
Super Limo Service
Better Limo Company
MD Limos
Long Load Limos
Leg Room Limos
Beautiful Limo Company
Markee's Awesome Limo Company
Shack's Caddies
First Class Limos
Busboy Inc.
Celebrity Magnet
Markee Motors
Markee Machines
Dragon's Tail
Love Machine Tours
Big Big Buses
Limo of Love
Death Trap Limos
Dragon Coaches
Hummer Livery
Masterpiece Transport Services
Big Butt Carriages
Smokin! Long Limos
Uppercrust Carriage
Troop Transports
Freakin' Huge!
Fantasy Trips
Portland Assault
TLC Limos
The People's Limos
Monster Limos
Skid Marks Limos
Over the top
AAA Limos
Cat Snot Limos
Red Dog Limos
Big Wheels
Fo Shizzle
Enchanted Limousines

and my favorite of the goofy ones: Tyrannosaurus Trux!

I did not want to type out all 200 of them. So I just picked some of the best ones. Or should I say most interesting.

We did choose two of them that we really like. One that is more of a business customer name and another that is a party name. You'll have to wait for another post before I'll announce what they are. We need to get them set in stone. Registered and such before we mention them.

The list I think is pretty funny. Do you think we would get good funeral business if we called ourselves "Death Trap Limos"? lol

Brakes done by a Hummer Dealership

2007-02-02T10:50:00.000-08:00

About 2 months ago the brakes were redone on the limo to the cost of $1800. The work was done by a Hummer Dealership in South Carolina. Just to bring everyone up to speed on this. On our trip from South Carolina to Oregon we lost our front brakes in California. Must of the fluid mysteriously disappeared in the front reservoir. We looked in the manual for what kind of brake fluid was needed. The manual states DOT5.

After we finally found some DOT5 fluid (Most everyone carries DOT3) we opened the reservoir and filled it. To our surprise the fluid in the system was clear and what we were putting in was purple. DOT5 is purple or yellow. DOT3 is clear. DOT3 is assidic to the system and will eat the seals in a DOT5 system. See the problem here?

So today I called the company I purchased the limo from. I know that the brakes had been done. But I assumed that they were done by some joe blow shop. In fact he told me today that they were done by a Hummer Dealership. If that's the case I should be able to get some sort of warranty to help cover the costs of the breaks. We'll see. I put in a call to the Hummer dealership where the car is at right now. I'll ask them to pull the receipt from the glove box, take a look at it and see if this is in fact a warranty situation. Hopefully so. It will save me a few thousand if it is.

*Crosses Fingers*

Filing our BOC-3

2007-01-31T10:08:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-29T06:10:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-01-26T06:55:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-18T15:51:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-01-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-15T13:22:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-14T23:21:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-01-14T17:41:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-14T06:35:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-12T06:30:00.000-08:00

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"

2007-01-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-08T21:10:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-06T07:43:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-01-05T14:38:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-05T12:28:00.000-08:00

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.