SPEAKER_01 0:00

The biggest thing I tell the team is our enemy is not any competitor. Our enemy is actually low expectations. We don't want people to demand too little of us. Like we charge a very high price point. You should ask a lot for that. You should expect a lot for that. And if you're not getting that, then honestly, we're not doing our job.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

You're listening to the Ground Transportation Podcast with Ken Lucci of Driving Transactions and James Blaine of PAX Training. Learn how you can build a thriving transportation business with real profits, three peak clients, and enterprise value. And now for your host, Kennan James.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Good afternoon, Ground Transportation Podcast audience. My name is Ken Lucci from Driving Transactions, and welcome to what will be an absolutely exciting, one of the most exciting episodes. I am joined today by Nathan Foy, the founder of Fortas. And he has an executive team that includes President Brian Gorrell, COO Matt Lawrence. You have two new executives that will get into your executive team, Bill Kennedy and Kelly Chung. Fortis has been among Inc. magazine's fastest growing private companies several times on the list, which is exceptional. You're an asset-light business model, which we should talk about, but you're really different. You're what I call the ultimate boutique network. You focus very clearly on wealthy, high-touch clients, and service differentiation and technology is what is keeping you growing. That's all from your website and all from the news articles I've read on you. Welcome, Nathan. And I'm really glad to have you here today. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed on our little podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Of course, Ken, it's good to be with you.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

So, Nathan, for anybody in the audience, I'm going to show you one of my favorite books. And this is What Rich Clients Want But Won't Tell You by Nathan Foy. And I was just telling Nathan before we started that he gives away some extremely interesting advice. This is not an ego project. This is a how-to serve wealthy clients. And you can see I've tagged some things that I really want to get to on the podcast, but I would encourage anybody who's in the hospitality space to look at this and read it, outline it the way I have. And I definitely want to show you. I've got highlights like crazy on this. And I would put it right up there with the Ritz Carlton Gold standard, which I've reread many times, taking those courses. So tell us first, tell us about Nathan Floyd. Tell us about your background.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

So I went to college in Atlanta. And when I was in college, I had an idea for a prepaid taxicab card for college students. I went to uh a school, Emory, that did not allow freshmen to have cars. It was hard for people to get around town. And this is 2000. So there were prepaid meal cards, there were prepaid phone cards, and I thought there should be a prepaid transportation card. And so I was always having business ideas and running them by friends and family. Most of the time, they said just get your degree, it's not a good idea. That one was one that people kind of resonated with. And so I raised money. I went up and down the East Coast to build a network of taxicab companies. And we went to college campuses, we went to campus bookstores and we did direct mail in order to solicit parents. And it was going reasonably well until two weeks into the school year, 9-11 happened. And so parents stopped visiting their kids. We couldn't sell to them. We couldn't uh do direct mail anymore. And I was out about a quarter million dollars of other people's money.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

So we've all done that.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

That didn't feel great. Um, and so really I had one opportunity to take a bridge loan to keep the company going, and really honestly, it was an answer to prayer. I prayed about it and I felt led to just take it and to give a stab at it. And we made a deal with the Checker Cab Company in Atlanta. We got their list of clients. They said you can call our clients, which again, answer to prayer, right? Like nobody gives their clients away. And one of their clients wanted black cars, chauffeur cars. And I'd never ridden in one, not even to prom in high school. True. And so I said, Yeah, we can we can do that. And so we started doing that. And this is now early 2002. Uh, and then two referrals later, we got our first private aviation company. Now, TSA had just started post-9-11. Right. People that had money were flying charter a lot more. So uh, you know, we we started to do that and we started to cater to that world and became a lot more high-end very quickly. So I think kind of baked into my story and the story of Fortas is humility because the original idea didn't work. And so, in my own strength, it didn't really happen. It really kind of was a gift, and uh, and we try to steward that in a way that uh benefits our clients.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

I do think, listen, every success, every success is every real true bootstrap up success is built on failures. So you're lucky you pivoted, but I think your basis for starting the business based on total differentiation, something that nobody else did, that taxi guy, all you were doing was soliciting his customers for your cards to use your cards with his customers, correct?

SPEAKER_01 5:27

That's right. Yeah, just basically kind of a means of delivery for the taxicab networks.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Very innovative. At 23, very innovative. So talk to us a little bit about when you transitioned to black car service. Did you ever go the traditional route with your own fleet, or were you always building demand and had asset light from the beginning?

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Asset light from the beginning. We wanted to be able to find the best, use the best, and kind of be an honest evaluator of that. And so with that, frankly, we didn't have enough volume in any one location. We've always been, I mean, now it's global, but at the time it was probably more eastern US, but we've always been relatively light in each market, right? You know, it's just it adds up when you add the number of places that we do.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Sure, sure. So you start in taxi, you get black car requests, but how do you go from that to your ideal client profile of the wealthiest of the wealthy? Tell me a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

So from 2002 to 2007, we called everybody in America that had a private jet. Literally, we had a war room smiling and dialing, and we would just sell to them. But then doing that, we realized a few things. Number one, there were different classes within that. There was fractional, there was charter, there was people that owned their own plane, there's people that owned ultra-long range heavy jets. And during the Great Recession, everybody took a step back except for the people at the very top.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

07 to 9, correct?

SPEAKER_01 7:05

So, you know, again, in my process of deduction, I said we should get more of those guys that don't seem to be that affected by the recession. They're actually traveling more because the world's on sale, right? It's like Black Friday.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

It's so funny that you say that because look, I was an operator and I started in 05, 06, and we grew like crazy through seven, eight, and nine. We bought three companies that existed solely on affiliate work and corporate, like the big ass networks. So we grew right through it. But one of the things that hindsight 2020, our industry, if you're serving just the general corporate client, the mid-level, it suffers with every downturn, right? So you can look at the depressions, recessions, and economic events like COVID, etc., and the traditional industry, the mainstream, 80% of the industry takes a massive hit. So you identify that you wanted to serve the wealthiest of the wealthy. What's different? What are the top things that are different between serving the wealthy corporate executive that's allowed to fly first class, or the road warrior, corporate traveler, and the ultimate highest net worth wealthy people? What's the half dozen different things?

SPEAKER_01 8:26

I think the first thing is that they're experts at finding other experts. So they will size you up in five to ten seconds. And if they don't like you, percent, if they don't like you, you know, you can't have a standard of I never get bad feedback because they won't take the time to give you bad feedback. They'll just they'll just move on. Yeah. Yeah. And the guy that I use, I anonymize him in the book, but the guy that I am referencing in that story, who, for those who haven't read it, it's I think three or four cars, three or four days, it's in Boston. The chauffeur is a five-star chauffeur. He just didn't have his A game that day. Like he didn't really project confidence and competence. And they immediately fired him and went to Uber. So, you know, I think a myth is that they don't want to be led, that they just want to dictate every single thing that's kind of frivolous or not needed, you know, like the green MM type of request. I think the reality is that they actually are more capable of being led than most clients. It's just that they require expertise to be led, and they're pretty good about sniffing that out.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

When that happened at Boston, how did you pick back up from that? How did that end up? How did you solve that problem?

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Well, first, Ken, it was a huge autopsy because nobody said anything. So we're talking to the principal staff. The principal stated client actually became a really huge client of ours, but he didn't even tell his staff. Again, it's just kind of like I've moved on to the next thing, right? So it took weeks of conversations and follow-ups to kind of get to what actually happened, which you know, I don't want to roll over that. I think that's a very important piece of it. Is internally I call it hugging the cactus. But like when there's bad information or there's a trial, lean into it rather than just try to squeeze around it or act like it doesn't exist. But yeah, we had to hug the cactus on that one to get to the truth of the matter.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Okay. So I wanted to touch on this a little bit later, but since you're there, you get a chapter in here called Problem Solving the Next Level of High Performance Service. And you lay out what's right behind you, by the way, is your skyscraper of success, and you talk in this, you spend a whole chapter on why it's worth it to examine every one of your problems, how you use it to drive innovation, and how it creates customer loyalty. Why do people shy? Why do service providers or even hospitality companies or restaurants and hotels, why do they not do this? Why do they just allow it to happen in your mind?

SPEAKER_01 11:10

I think several reasons. It's hard to do the research, and sometimes you don't get conclusive answers, so you can just say, well, that was just a waste of time. I think sometimes people rather focus on the positive feedback that they have. We see this with service providers that we have, is that when I do mystery rides and I give critiques at the end of the ride, I have sometimes guys that will debate me on that. And they just don't like negative feedback, they get defensive about it, and that's a good way that we know they're not a fit, right? It's not that everything I say is the absolute truth, but we should be able to interact with it in a spirit of trying to get better. And a lot of people don't want that.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

There's a saying mediocre players want to be left alone, average players want to be coached, the highest level players want the coach to critique their every play. And I've had a little bit of experience with that. I used to be the primary chauffeur for the New York Yankees, and I used to drive Captain Derek Cheater to spring training practice all the time. And I mean four hours earlier than they had to report. And we were walking through the tunnel one day, and I said to Captain, can I ask you a question? He says, sure. I said, Why do you come in and do batting practice four hours before? The coach was meeting him. He said, Ken, success is great, but it's fleeting. It's fleeting. You have to constantly be training to stay on top. I think the biggest mistake that we make in this industry is good enough. Good is good enough. Let's get back to the importance of problem solving. I would like everybody to read that chapter because it was an eye-opener to me. Let's get back to you, you said your ICP, the wealthiest of the wealthy. You said something that they want to be led. Tell us what you mean by that. I do agree with it, by the way. Tell me what you mean by that specifically.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

I would say maybe just to put a really fine point, the book is what risk clients want, but I would probably say that we're most optimized for the highest income earners, the people that are kind of like most ascendant. And so some of them are people that are giving it all away and sign the giving pledge and those things. Of course. But yeah, very high income. So you can't handle it all. Like you have to have trusted allies that are your eyes and ears, but you have to have it as very optimized people. So I think two examples of that. I mean, if anybody's seen Last Dance with Michael Jordan, absolutely. I think it's just great because you see it's not just that he is the greatest basketball player, but his agent was the best agent because his agent got him Space Jam and said, Look, if you're going to capture a whole generation of kids, why not defend the earth against cartoon enemies and be a hero for that? And then if you're going to do shoes, why not have your own branded shoes? And like that could be a thing. And so, like, Michael Jordan wasn't just the greatest basketball player, but he was an expert at finding experts that he trusted. And look how much it optimized all of his brand, not just his basketball game, right? And I think another example of that too is there's a client of ours, they have a key account team. And the principal, one of the principals, gave the key account manager a Rolex, like a $30,000 watch at Christmas. This is one of your people? No, this is one of our clients' people. Gotcha. Yeah. But we were there visiting and they said, Oh, they got a Rolex for Christmas. And I thought that was a perfect example because I think to the untrained eye, what that looks like is frivolity, right? Just like this guy is so rich, he gives $30,000 Rolexes at Christmas. But I know this guy and I know that he's not frivolous. What it is is him saying, stay here next year because you're going to go home at Christmas and do what everybody does, which is have conversations and relax and say, Do I want to be doing this again this time next year? And if you look at that Rolex and you say, you know what, this is a pretty good gig, then he's got the same person in place for the next 12 months. And for him, you know, that's like me tipping a waiter, right? Like that's just a tip for thanks. And but in so doing, he keeps the same experts in place. And I think that's how they they really operate.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Your business is to the level. And I've been there once or twice in the space with clients when I was an operator. And I like to think we're there with what we do now as far as financial reporting and with some of the major clients we deal with. That you are you're the trusted expert that they defer to. So, how do you find partners in the industry? I've got concerns about blurring the customer experience so that when a black suburban fills up, you're not sure whether it's an Uber black suburban or a chauffeur car. How do you find partners that understand what you're looking for? And how do you make sure it becomes muscle memory to their operations? So it's not just another affiliate trip. This is a Fordas trip. This is a Fordas client. How do you do that?

SPEAKER_01 16:16

So lots of ways. One is, you know, we have a very thorough screening process. The book is a tool for that, Ken. So we don't just ask them, have you read the book? but we ask them specific anecdotes about the book that resonate with them. You'd be amazed at how many people reach out to us and they say, I've waited two years to be with Fortas. And we say, Have you read the book? And they say, No, no, no, I haven't read it yet. And so, you know, that's a that's a tool in of itself. And, you know, it's not a very comprehensive quiz, but we want to make sure it resonates with you.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

You know, and it's such not to keep going back to it, but it's so easy to read. It's a combination to me of common sense and the best, highest level service is invisible, but it's so common sense, but it also granular takes it to a level where, okay, now I get this. This is not just about the A to B. This is about everything that happens along the way, every piece of communication. So I'm honestly surprised more people in the industry haven't, but you've given so much in this book. It's incredible. I don't care if you're a one-car operator, you can get a lot out of this book. Were you ever afraid of saying, you know what, I'm kind of worried about this. I don't want my competition getting this.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

No, I really wasn't. And that goes to our vision statement, which involves creating a legendary level of service in secure private travel. So my view is that if an operator in Toledo starts to adopt these things and his business gets better, that benefits everybody in our industry.

SPEAKER_02 17:47

Rising time.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Everybody that's in this space. And our vision statement is not just for within the walls of Fortis. We want to actually help more service providers to have a very flourishing life through doing these kinds of services.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

And so few of them do. I mean, we deal every day with people who are just stuck in the grind, and it's almost like they become a victim of their own circumstances. And you listen to them and they talk about, well, you know, this problem occurred. And I'm like, okay, well, you realize you talked to me about the same problem a few months back. Now we do their financial and KPI reporting. We're not coaches. My business partner is a genius in corporate finance. I get by, I know what the all the numbers mean, and I know, you know, what KPIs point to poor financial performance. But when I hear that, I say to them, You realize you talked to me about the same kind of problem before. And it's obvious to me that you didn't create a teaching moment out of it. Do you find that there's a shortage of providers? Do you get concerned about that? I mean, top shelf quality providers, or is your network pretty, pretty solid?

SPEAKER_01 18:54

I think in the biggest cities, I think there is a huge number of really good people that are hungry and humble. Those are two key aspects that we're looking for. I think when you get to secondary and tertiary markets, particularly in the U.S., yeah, I think it gets a lot harder to find A players.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

Yes. And I myself am pretty disturbed when I see things online. There was a there was a pretty high-level meeting in Asheville, North Carolina this summer. I might be wrong on the G4, but it was something pretty high level. And the Asheville operators were talking about, okay, everybody stick together. We're going to demand eight-hour minimums and on our SUVs. And I know some of our clients that actually had to pull, you know, 10 SUVs from DC and Charlotte to service it. I think that's self-defeating for the industry. Do you ever come across that when you've got a high-intensity meeting where people, not just a Super Bowl, but where people are trying to hold up for you know pricing that's just astronomical? How do you deal with it?

SPEAKER_01 19:58

Yeah, so um candidly, we don't have that problem, but it's probably because we pay more than others do. So at the inauguration a couple years ago, that was a very interesting event because two weeks before the inauguration, it didn't seem like there were that many people going. And then all of the tech bros decided that they were going. Sure. And it just became a wave. Sure. And then there's a huge run on vehicles and things. We didn't have a problem even then because a lot of chauffeurs were waiting to see what we needed. And, you know, a lot of that just goes to paying them well, paying them on time, treating them with respect. We demand a lot. I'm fully up front about that, but we also try to compensate and treat them like we want to be treated.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

And I think that's setting expectations right up front. And I agree with you that we talked offline about the and we'll get into your culture, but ultimately the people on the line in every city are an extension of you. So if you don't have the proper systems in place, you're gonna trip over yourselves all the time. That Boston issue that was a one-off would constantly happen if you didn't have the right people. So let's talk about the culture of your business. I've become fascinated with people who know me say I obsess about too many things too often. But I did a lot of travel in this summer, like a lot more than I wanted to. We've got 34 pretty big transactions in the works. And I was out West and I traveled with one specific company quite a bit. And it really occurred to me that it's just like they've got it. They're really differentiated. And I was in meetings with them and I was trying to put my finger on it. It really came down to what the executives talk was the walk on the street. It was the walk. How do you talk to me about your executive team and talk to me about the culture within Fortis?

SPEAKER_01 21:51

I think you're exactly right. If I ask people to do a legendary level of service and they don't feel cared for internally to our team That's just not going to happen. We very much adhere to the Peter Drucker quote of uh culture eat strategy for breakfast. If you have the best battle plans ever, but everybody's going a different direction and wearing a different uniform, you're not going to win anything. Just to give one example of that, we have an annual culture survey that we give. And then every two years, we have a deeper dive set of questions for people that have a tenure of two years or more here.

SPEAKER_02 22:27

Talk to us about that. Do you anonymize it? If Ken fills it out, do you know it's Ken? Do you have an outside company do it?

SPEAKER_01 22:34

We have outside consultants do it. And it is anonymous, but you can choose to unmask yourself if you want.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

If you want to, I like that.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

I love that. This past one, I'll tell you like we got some bad marks on it. One of them that I owned was as the person responsible for the vision, a lot of times I communicate what, but the how and the when and the why. And I think that I have not been as diligent as I should be on some of the new initiatives that we've had. I need to set the who and the when and the why and the how so that people know that. And that's super clear. I can't just say the what and then expect the executive team or our directors to translate all that because then it ends up having mission creep. It's like a big game of telephone. Some of the critiques we got on our last culture survey, I totally resonated with because I see them from the other side, which is I see sometimes I make an announcement. I'm like, well, why is this not going the way I wanted it to go? Sure. And I think I just need to communicate a lot more clearly. We share the results of the culture survey, the things that come up multiple times we share with them. There's some things that we say we're going to solve as an executive team. There are certain items I push to directors, and there are certain things that I said, you know, honestly, I don't think this is going to change. I think this is something the team needs to adapt on. So there's a variety of things, but I think the most important thing is people feel heard and that it's addressed.

SPEAKER_02 24:03

I agree with you. And, you know, it's, I don't know, yeah, 100 years ago, I was in the back of a chauffeur car. At the end of 2012, we were the primary on the presidential conventions. Republicans were in Tampa, the Democrats were in Charlotte. I was driving back from Charlotte on my accountant, called me and said, Hey, you know, 1.4 million just hit. What are you going to do now? I said, I'm contemplating selling this thing. And he's like, What are you talking about? I said, It's at $5 million. What am I going to do? Take it to $10 million and double my problems? So I got back to the office, and my team, who was led by a lovely lady named Shelly Taylor, who I talked to all the time, my team was there, and they basically said to me, You're an animal. You either need to go take a vacation for 30 days or we're leaving. And we're going to walk out together. I'm like, all right, all right, I hear you. Because it was very stressful. So I left and I went to the Ritz-Carlton. My idea of a vacation was to sign up for the Ritz-Carlton Leadership School, right? So I come out of the Ritz-Carlton and I rewrite all our manuals. And about three, four months later, I'm in the back of a chauffeured car, and there's an absolute direct ripoff of the Ritz-Carlton. I think it was the standards of excellence, right? Total rip-off. I mean, it's almost word for word. We were using that company as an affiliate, and they became a problem. So my whole point in saying that is you can't just write something on a document and expect your people to buy it. And it's almost insulting to them when you do that, but you don't walk the talk. And what you just talked about is the CEO is expected to say this is what we're going to do. But I love the how and the why. Tell me what you think about this. I think that this generation of workers, they've acquired the how and the why. They need to understand it. And I think the best people want to understand it. So if you do find an issue, how do you how do you how does the executive team I'm talking about an internal cultural issue? How do you take a vision or take the what we're gonna do? And how do you make sure it permeates the internal company? And then how do you make sure it permeates all your partners?

SPEAKER_01 27:28

Well, we're figuring that out, Ken. But some things that we do on that, so we have five soon-to-be six offices. I didn't know that you had six offices. Yes. So we've uh that's one of the big things that we've grown in since COVID is we added uh Nevada office, we added two in India, and uh we've expanded our Hong Kong office as well. So I've started doing town halls, and I used to do town halls, but just with basically everybody not in our headquarters, and I realized people weren't really being candid. So now I do it office by office. So there might be 10 people from one office or 15 people from another office, but it's a lot more of an environment where somebody feels willing to maybe rattle the cage or ask a question that might be a bit skeptical or something, because it's with their colleagues that they work with. They may have even been voicing it to each other.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

So let me understand this. It's not an all hands, it's like branch by branch, additionally, branch by branch.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

So it's like you're visiting their branch electronically.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Yes, and I do physically as well, but I cover the gaps uh with the the remote town halls. Do you ever do the town halls with partners? We have uh partner town halls, yes, and I do jump into those as well.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

So I know how you select, you've got into a little bit of how you select. But beyond mystery rides, do you visit all your affiliates?

SPEAKER_01 28:55

The preferred way that we do it is through conferences. Last year we hosted, I think it was between four and five conferences. I think the year before we did as well. There's one in Thailand, there was one in Portugal last year, there in Asia, there in Europe, multiple locations in North America. So, what that is is a variety of things. There's teaching, there's opportunities for feedback, there's round tables with our preferred partners on how are you doing things, how are you seeing things out in the field. We think it's important to listen. We go through a lot of scenarios because a lot of times, if I just teach people out of the book, it gets pretty old pretty fast. But if I try to bring the book to life by taking a scenario and then applying principles from the book, we have some very interesting sessions doing that. Those are some examples of how we do that.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

So you might take a failure and dissect it. I think that that's you know, it's somebody said that was reading something, I forget where, and they said an entrepreneur has to absolutely love pain and has to get excited about it was a Bezos Bezos, he gets excited about problems. Some of his executives were talking about and saying, you know, when you bring a problem to him, he actually gets excited about it. So that's almost counterintuitive. But I think that what you're saying is if you look at your greatest, only look at your greatest triumphs, great, good for you. But when you look at your worst failures and you try to dissect why, or just the repeat failures, that's when you can make the change. If you take it down to the granular level, this is what happened, and this is how we're not we're gonna make sure it never happens again. So talk to me a little bit about you know the pandemic. When did you publish the book? Book references 2018 in the final, you know, one of the final chapters, but when did you publish September of 21? Okay, so talk to us about the Fortis before, the Fortis during, and then what have the biggest changes been for you after the pandemic to the operation?

SPEAKER_01 31:00

So pre-pandemic, February of 2020, I had a company meeting and I declared that we had reached adulthood, and you know, we were popping corks and you know, all those things because uh what I meant by adulthood was that we had gotten big enough to the point where people weren't wearing multiple hats. We were able to specialize, we were able to kind of like have traction. And within two weeks of that meeting, as you know, Ken, the world shut down. And so I think what was different about COVID for us, and I'm sure for everybody in this industry, is in 9-11 or Great Recession, all boats were kind of equally affected. But in this one, we were in one of the worst industries for this. I realized I can't convince a billionaire to fire up his private jet if he doesn't want to fly somewhere because I tried. Um, so uh immediately what we did, we took the PPP, we took everybody down to 30 hours because we just honestly didn't need all their hours, but we wanted them to keep their benefits, right? And then we did charity work, like in New York, we did um shuttles to and from Central Park, those outdoor hospitals that they had. And what was really cool, we had clients that gave to that, so that was something that connected us. In that process, we realized how to do partitions just because we had to, and so we had a really good partition playbook. But that whole, you know, 12, 16 month era, really until about the time the book came out, it was very difficult. You know, I can't sugarcoat it. It was probably even the best month in there was like 50% of normal at least price.

SPEAKER_02 32:38

That would have been a fantastic month for many of the people I know. I mean, it's the industry statistic, and we ran it through Dun and Brad Street, that 40% of the operators didn't make it to the government programs, meaning PPPA. So between the time the pandemic hit and shut us immediately down the next day, 40% of the operators were gone before they could even apply because they didn't have the cash flow and their companies were not healthy and strong enough, which scares the shit out of me a little bit because I'm seeing some people repeating that. But so did you lose any key people? Did you lose people? Do you feel like the culture got hurt? Well, were we able to preserve?

SPEAKER_01 33:18

We lost some people, and there were uh people that we lost that I really wasn't expecting to lose. But I will say, in the main, the team that was extremely resilient, they didn't turn inward, they didn't turn gripey or negative. I tried to always show math, like we're pretty open book company in that regard. You might not agree with what I'm doing, but I'll show you how I got there and I'll show you what's informing that.

SPEAKER_02 33:42

Do you practice open book management now, or it was just because of the pandemic? I mean, what do you share with your not the executive team, but what do you share with the staff about how the company is doing?

SPEAKER_01 33:53

I mean, pretty much everything except for individual comp plans, you know. So even our shareholder meeting that we have every December, I invite the team to it because I say, look, I'm telling this to shareholders, you should know what I'm saying, even if you're not an owner in the business, and it's gonna kind of give you kind of the the box top to the puzzle more than any other meeting will. Um, so yeah, we're pretty we're pretty open, not just during COVID.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

How important is that open book, if you will, about the critical metrics? How important is that to your culture?

SPEAKER_01 34:27

I think it's important. I think that there's mavens that really geek out on this stuff, probably like you and I do. And then I think people go to the mavens to just be like, does this check out? Right? Yep. Yep. Um, and so as long as you're making the mavens, it makes sense to the mavens, I think you're doing pretty well.

SPEAKER_02 34:42

So before we get into some grit about the industry itself, why did you write the book? What was your reasoning? I mean, because look, I wrote a book called Driving Your Income, How to Increase Your Income as a Professional Show for Don't Buy, it's still on Amazon, it's horrible. I'll do a rewrite. But it ain't easy. I mean, it's not easy. People are like, oh, I just write a book. Why did you decide to do this? And what was the start of the process for you?

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Yeah, so I have a friend that is a um a publisher, and uh, I told him maybe this is in 2017, 2018. I said, I think I have a book inside of me trying to get out. And what it was was I felt like we spent so much time distilling what we want out of service to service providers. And then on the client side, I think we spent so much time trying to tell them to expect more than actually what they're asking for. I think the biggest thing I tell the team is our enemy is not any competitor, our enemy is actually low expectations.

SPEAKER_02 35:43

Um say that again.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

Our enemy is low expectations. We don't want people to demand too little of us, like we charge a very high price point. You should ask a lot for that, you should expect a lot for that. And if you're not getting that, then honestly, we're not doing our job.

SPEAKER_02 35:58

You have a publisher who's a friend. He tells you you have a book in you, which is always good when a publisher tells you that, right? And what was your process?

SPEAKER_01 36:07

So I wrote the book. I want to say, I think it was 2018, 2019. Every morning I woke up and I wrote it longhand. It really helps me to actually write it pen to paper rather than typing. When I type, I just get distracted within five minutes and I end up checking sports scores or something. So I just had to just go analog.

SPEAKER_02 36:28

That's the entrepreneurial mind, by the way. That's just the way the minds work. So you write it longhand every morning you get up.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Jerry Seinfeld has a really good quote on that, too. He said that when you're giving birth to an idea, writing, treat it like a newborn infant. You know, you're just cradling it, no idea is bad, it's just wonderful coming out. When you edit, edit like Lewis Gossett Jr. in an officer and a gentleman. Like, you know, you're just completely a drill sergeant about does this word even belong here? Should this be here? So don't be hard on yourself when you're just getting the ideas out. It's just two different processes.

SPEAKER_02 37:05

So every morning you get up, you get four kids. How do you find the time to do that every morning?

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Well, that's where I woke up. That's what time's time. What time do you get up? These days I get up earlier, probably about 4.15, but back then it was maybe like five o'clock or so.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

I'm gonna email you every morning when I get up at 4:15, but I get up because I have to go to the bathroom. But anyway, so you you're writing for okay, you're writing in 18 or 19, but you end up publishing in 21.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Yeah, so I wrote a version of the book and I socialized it among friends and colleagues here. And basically the feedback that I got was it's a mediocre book. You know, you need to go back to the drawing board. I mean, people some people might read it, but it's not really enjoyable, it's not really like easy to understand, it's not those things. And I really didn't want to do harm to the Fortas brand by writing a book that was mediocre.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

Uh a thousand percent, I agree. That's incredible to me that you're so self-aware that you share it with people, and you also did something most entrepreneurs don't like, it's take tough feedback. So once you circulated the original book, what did you do from there?

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Well, um, basically, uh there was a group of people that said I should write an allegory, kind of like who moved my cheese, you know, and then there was a group of people that said, No, you need more kind of gritty stories or whatever. And I read Jocko Willink's book, It's Extreme Ownership.

SPEAKER_02 38:33

Not read it, but I've heard about it.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

Yeah. So I think one of the great things that he does in there is that he has a great story ripped from the battlefield that begins the chapter and then he teaches the lesson and then he concludes the story. So basically, the story is the sugar for the pill to swallow.

SPEAKER_02 38:51

No, I like that. I absolutely like that. So you second time around, did you show it to those same people?

SPEAKER_01 39:00

I did. Uh, and I I showed it even more broadly. I also changed my editor on that. So I had a new editor. So he was somebody that I trusted and I'd read some of the things that he had done. And then also, it didn't hurt that this was at the winter of 2021, probably one of the most bleak times that we've had. Yeah, I had time on my hands. So I could just have meetings with him every week about you know the edits that we needed to make in that process. And then we were able to get the new version out within, I guess, seven or eight months.

SPEAKER_02 40:37

Yeah, it helps. And I don't care what you're writing, I don't care if you're running a manual for your company or an SOP. It helps to have somebody who is a professional writing SOPs. And also, if you have an editor or a book, it helps you. 10,000 foot view, sounding board. I've I do I have a lot of starts and stops in my reading. I mean, my writing. I enjoy reading much more. I think I've come to lifelong learning a little bit too late in life, but I have time now to do a lot of reading, listen to a lot of business podcasts. So let's shift a little bit and let's talk about. You know, Uber just bought Black Lane, the deal closed, Uber has launched their latest iteration of trying to get to the wealthy client, Uber Elite. Do you think they're gonna be successful? And are you worried about our existing market share as an industry?

SPEAKER_01 41:30

I think they could be successful in terms of like undifferentiated middle market. I don't think they'll be successful in going to the high end of the market. But I think that, I mean, I've never been an Uber basher or a Lyft basher because they're here to stay. But I think that's a really great vote of confidence that those of us that are moving to the higher end. I mean, even Lyft and Uber are moving in that direction as well.

SPEAKER_02 41:56

Anybody on the podcast doesn't know. Yes, the Black Lane deal has closed. Um, and uh recently Lyft came out and announced their new brand called Alcove, and they're going after the Premier Luxury Client. Uber, I was on an Uber Analyst call last two months ago, and uh 45-minute call, and I timed it, 25 minutes of it was on their barbell strategy. Well, on one end of the barbell is the existing Uber business and then the Uber premiere business. Talk to me about what you just dropped a bomb there, on differentiated service. Talk to me about what you mean by that for every operator that's out there. Tell us what you mean by that.

SPEAKER_01 42:35

Well, I think the barbell is the direction of the economy. So, you know, when I was a kid, there was, you know, Applebee's Ruby Tuesday, you know, these middle market chains that a lot of families would go to on a Friday or Saturday night, and it was a nice night out. Yep. A lot of those don't exist anymore. The Ruby Tuesday near where I am has become a Chase bank. Um, and you know, but what you see is very high-end steakhouses are doing well, and there's a lot of food trucks, right? And so you have to decide do you want to go and you know do the work to become a high-end steakhouse, or do you want to do a food truck? It's not bad to do a food truck, it's just know which one you want to go after. But the thing is, I think undifferentiated middle market is largely going away. And I think that's a function of some macroeconomic things that are beyond our control.

SPEAKER_02 43:30

I I totally get it. It's like our own version of the K economy, okay? And what I'm seeing from where we said is the $1.5 to $5 million operators, they're getting of the age where they want to get out. And what you're saying is our industry is kind of you have to look at at the macro, and we're seeing some of kind of a a hollowing out of maybe the middle middle that may have taken Schauford, but yeah, well, now I'll just bring my car to the airport. First and foremost serving luxury clients is a lot like sincerity. You can't fake it. And they see right through it. How do you convince or do you even try to convince an operator? Listen, you you're don't tell me about your 2026 suburbance. You need to take it to the next level from a quality of service perspective. Do you try to convert? I don't want to say convert the agnostic, but how do you get a partner to believe in your vision? Because you've got it, your vision is much stronger than just uh, you know, we are we're ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. That's the Ritz Carlton, but it's backed up by five volumes of service leadership and service education. How do you get operators to buy into being able to serve the wealthy client and not be part of that undifferentiated middle?

SPEAKER_01 44:55

I think you tell stories and you paint a vision and you see who it resonates with. We have stories. I could give you a story of a gentleman in LA. He was a three-star chauffeur by our rating system. He came to our partner conference in our headquarters. It was the same content. I told him this. I said, You're getting the exact same thing you've already gotten. He said, I want it again. He drove that time from LA to Reno in the snow, and he became a five-star chauffeur from being a three-star chauffeur because he bought into the vision. And the vision is that you are a craftsman that owns your own craft and you hone your craft. And because you're doing that in a way with your life experiences and your skills that involve all the different skills and experiences that you've had, we give you the principles and the way to hone that. But ultimately, the way you do the craft and the way I do the craft, it's going to be individual to each of us. It's going to have the same kind of calling cards, but it's going to be distinct. And that's a really powerful place to be. And the speech I gave at CDNLA a year and a half ago basically was the service industry has a bright future if you embrace these concepts. Because in our world, a billionaire is never going to be able to do that. Going to get into a self-driving vehicle because it can be hacked. He always wants some human that can override the computer, just like they're never going to get into one of these e Vital automated drones, right? Agreed. So we're in a place that won't be disrupted. And I know people, I know a guy that is an MBA, went to an Ivy League school, did all the things right at General Electric. He got laid off, and he's looking to get into a service business because he knows that that won't be disrupted. So I think there's a vision, there's a positive vision. You can own your own craft, you can have price differentiation, you can make a good living, and that's a very good place to be. That's the positive vision. There is a negative vision, which I try to coach people to avoid, which is there's going to be a lot of accountants and a lot of lawyers and a lot of people that are kicked out of what they're doing by AI. And they're going to go into chauffeuring in these kinds of service businesses because they see the opportunity. But these are guys that adhere to a playbook. These guys don't have a problem being coached. They know that there are standards and practices and a way of doing it. So I think it is a positive vision now, but I think for those that don't differentiate, I think it's going to be disrupted by those guys very soon.

SPEAKER_02 47:25

I agree with you there. We work on the motorcurse side too. This past week, there are two motor coach operators. One of them is a dear friend, and the two motor coach operators closed because their fleet insurance got out of control. I think you're right. I think that the positive view for those who get it and those who run their business with that positive vision and embrace what you're talking about. I think they're going to be safe because everybody always, you know, the wealthy people always people who appreciate service always seek out the best. I worry for the mid mid-range mediocre. There's just no other way I can describe it based on my limited vocabulary. There's a lot of mediocre mediocrity, I say. So you brought up AI. How are you? Don't get specific if you don't want to, but do you think AI is a game changer for what you do?

SPEAKER_01 48:21

I think it's a game changer in the sense of offense and defense. Like we can do new things and we can do them more quickly and spin them up. Like we have our core proprietary software, but then we've deputized different people in different departments to kind of be the captain of vibe coding for different aspects of what we're doing. So the vibe coding captain will actually, if it's in accounting, he or she will check in the code for our development team and then they'll review it. So we kind of have a way that's more democratized, but there's still a council of elders, if you will, that's kind of overseeing it. So it's not just completely anarchy. And so we've gotten more efficient as we've grown. And then I'll just give you one example on the defensive side, just spending less time on things that don't make money or time wasters. It was one person's 20-hour a week job to do all of the scheduling of all the shifts for all of our different offices. And now I think that's under two hours just talking to AI because the scripts are written and there's a little bit of tweaking, a little bit of horse trading with some people that are on the edges, but it's a very quick process.

SPEAKER_02 49:30

So dive a little deeper on the vibe captain concept, please. Go into a little bit more. What do you mean? You were over my head there for a second. So me bobby.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Over mine too. Over this past January, I did a trip to our offices. And while I'm visiting our different offices around the world, I have a lot of downtime and travel time. Sure. So I started vibe coding myself, and I started to say, you know, we could incorporate this with our existing software. And I came back and I showed it to the development team. And I said, look, I want people to be able to implement this. So most teams, you know, between 10 or 15 people or so have a maven of AI already that's just organic. That's like, guys, we should be using this, we should be doing this. Um, and so we took that person, we gave them some uh vibe coding training. We use Claude and OpenClaw, but you know, there's lots of different platforms for it. And so they will address their own concern, and then it goes through the review process to make sure that it's not going to break anything and that it fits with the other things that we're doing. There might be a few tweaks on it, but then it gets implemented. So instead of there being one on-ramp into our main code base, there's probably seven or eight different ones with the different vibe coders that we have.

SPEAKER_02 50:49

And vibe coding as a definition means in your mind, tell the audience what vibe coding means.

SPEAKER_01 50:56

Basically, you tell the software what you want it to do, and it writes the code on your behalf. So somebody like me who doesn't know how to write one line of code, I can literally chat with Claude and say, I need the buttons on the right side, I need them bigger and shinier and labeled, and then it just does that, right? I don't need to know how to design the button, I don't need to know how to code the buttons, I just tell it what I want, and then I can play with that and give it more feedback and just iterate.

SPEAKER_02 51:27

So you get teams in the company you that do that do the vibe coding, but then you have a process where they have to go to your developers and say, the developer has to say to you, boss, this is not going to break anything.

SPEAKER_01 51:41

Yeah, and and you know, uh that that's all handled with Matt, our COO. He's the one who's kind of overseeing that. He would be the boss in that regard. And then our ability to have, I mean, we just did a new accounting module that I think speeds up billing, speeds up payments, speeds up everything. I think from beginning to end, it was maybe six to eight weeks. And that was being implemented at that same time, other things were being implemented.

SPEAKER_02 52:07

You know, it's interesting. We've reviewed again 350-something companies, and recently I interviewed a guy that is an AI expert, and we actually hired him. And my business partner is in his, he's probably the most intelligent guy of his generation. I've imagined he's 35, and we have a great yin and yang partnership. He likes to say that we have no overlapping skills at all, and which is really good on most days. Some days we want to kill each other, but that's beside the point. But with the two of us plus two researchers, we can't scale. Listen, I'm 61, I don't really want to scale, but I want to get to the level that we can help everybody that wants our help, which is tough because sometimes we have to say, look, we can't take you on for another four months. So we are creating a relational database on everything we've done. We anonymized everything, and we're creating a relational database. We're also putting in total available market on every airport. We're looking at first-class passengers by airline. It's all public. You just have to find it. He's using it to make his life more easier. I mean, the financial packages we create, he never told me this. They have, on average, 70,000 calculations, 70,000 formulas. And it's the AI guy that told me that. He said, This is these are the most detailed Excel packages I've ever seen. Because we'll take full five-year, we'll go KPI to financials and we examine everything. So we're hopeful, and it seems to be doing very, very well. We're in the middle of the project. We've been able to create some great dashboards. We haven't talked about, I'm not going to keep too long, but we've not talked about QA. Are you are you a big are you is your team big dashboard people? Are they big dashboard people? Look at data.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

Oh, yes. And in fact, that's gotten revolutionized with this whole process too. So it used to be Salesforce, and then now we basically don't need Salesforce anymore. We're kind of running our own reports. I get a daily summary that has everything I need to know basically on one link. Yeah. And that's better than what we used to have to coddle together on Salesforce even six months ago.

SPEAKER_02 54:16

And you know what? It's it's Salesforce is very complicated, complicated. I'm not sorry to see that we're all able to do things a little bit more streamlined. So you get a CEO dashboard every day. How important is that to you?

SPEAKER_01 54:30

Uh super important. We have that is a daily dashboard. I get a daily email that's got operation statistics, and then we have weekly scoreboards that we go over in our executive meeting.

SPEAKER_02 54:42

So I promised only to keep you for an hour, and we're at the hour, but I want you to address one thing for me. If one, what do you think the biggest threat to our industry is? We both agree that there's great growth potential in the Schoppert space. I call it private transportation. I refuse to use the word limo anymore. What do you think the biggest threat is?

SPEAKER_01 55:03

Um probably uh lack of differentiation. If you are talking about the vehicle, if you're talking about basic standards that I think are just kind of like price of entry, and that's your calling card, I think that's going to get disrupted.

SPEAKER_02 55:21

Absolutely 1000%. And I use the Burn Steakhouse analogy. Burnt Steakhouse in Tampa has been on, I think, America's top 100 lists for forever. They have a 15,000 bottle bottle of wine cellar. I sold my company in 2012. I go back there, the manager still remembers my name. They still sent me, you know, thank yous and Christmas cards, etc. That will never disappear. Meaning that level client will never disappear. And you made a great analogy. The Applebee's, all of those family chains, those have disappeared. I think the middle of the market and the people that I believe, you know, I use the term blurring, blur the line. There's no real differentiation between the you know, the Uber blacks and the chauffeured service. Um I think they're gonna have a problem. But overall, for Fortis, you're pretty optimistic about the future.

SPEAKER_01 56:17

Very optimistic about the future. Um, because we view it as we're expounding the boundaries on on the services that we offer, and there's blue ocean there. And it's not just for us, it's for our service providers, our partners. We have a concierge team that's being built out, that's growing extremely rapidly. We have a security team that's growing out, that's growing rapidly. We have a team of facilitators which function as traveling assistants, and that's increasingly in demand all over the world. And so I think for people that want to be differentiated, that want to hone a craft, Fortis isn't the only game in town. There's other people that are pushing out and going high-end too. There's other networks and services to work with. But I think really doing that, learning that, I think that's a very right place to be. I always say if you align with the meta trends, you can get a lot of small things wrong. And I think the meta trends are for what we do, private jets are selling better than ever. The rich are getting richer, yeah, the world is becoming more globally connected. And I think more and more people want security and discretion. And as long as we're aligned with those things, I'll get a lot of small things wrong, but I think the meta trend will be in our favor.

SPEAKER_02 57:33

But when you do get the small things wrong, you're gonna examine them, you're gonna hug the cactus. I think that's a great spot to leave it, but I gotta tell you, anybody in this business should go out and buy this book. Anybody in the hospitality business, what rich clients want but won't tell you by Nathan Foy. Nathan, a couple of chapters I want to point out to some of my clients. Problem solving, the next level of high performance service. You you nailed it, hug the cactus. Right behind you on the wall is the skyscraper of success. The last thing I do, I'm not gonna keep you, but I want to point out to everybody on page 196 the four tips to sustain your success. Stay humble, go deep, then broad. You gotta read that one. Incentivize accountability and remember why you did this. So I think this is our first, but I know I'm gonna have you back on the podcast. Tell people how to get the book, tell people the best way to get the book that works for you.

SPEAKER_01 58:38

Yeah, it's on Amazon, it's on Barnes and Noble. I'm told that we need to uh do some more hardcover, um, but there's softback and there's also Audible and Kindle, and it's on all those formats.

SPEAKER_02 58:50

Okay, so I'm gonna ask you for a favor if I buy a hardcover and I send it to you, I'd like you to inscribe it for me. Can you do that?

SPEAKER_01 58:58

I'll do you one better since the hardcovers aren't available readily right now. I'll just send you one.

SPEAKER_02 59:02

I appreciate it. Nathan Foy, this has been an absolute pleasure. We will have you definitely come back. Um, known about your company for many years, but in this one conversation, I can tell where the ethos of the company comes from and where the culture of the company comes from and the service delivery comes from. So, congratulations on your book and thank you again for being on the Ground Transportation Podcast. I appreciate your time, Nathan, and thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 59:30

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 59:32

Thank you for listening to the Ground Transportation Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about PACT training and to contact James, go to PAX and for more information about driving transactions and to contact Ken, go to driving transactions.com. We'll see you next time on the Brown Transportation Plan.