Simply Brilliant Show: Episode #2 "Think Forward"

Transcript

This is Richard Fertig, and on this episode of the Simply Brilliant Show, we're coming to you live from the Harrah's Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, where we're visiting the LCT conference, which is one of the largest conventions for the ground transportation business. So, I hope you enjoy.

Today, we're filming the second episode of the Simply Brilliant show from the Harris Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. I'm here attending the East coast's largest convention on ground transportation, and as much as we want to film these things in real-time and share our thoughts with you, even at the cost of poor video and audio quality, we think it's important to get our message out. So, please bear with us.

Nonetheless, I wanted to talk to you today about thinking forward, and it's a message that my team and I spend a lot of time talking about. And it's ironic that we're here at the LCT show, or perhaps this is why we're talking about thinking forward. Five years ago, when I came to this show, and I walked onto this floor that I'll show you images of, there was all sedans and SUVs, and stretch limousines, and pink Hummers, and the floor couldn't look any more different today. Today, it's all about vans and minibuses, and motor coaches, and sort of the opportunity that I saw five years ago when I disrupted this space is now being embraced by the rest of the industry.

So, one of the things that we talk about is, as Wayne Gretzky says, to skate to where the puck is going, not where it is, and when we took a look at the opportunity five years ago, we thought that there was a lot of room for small group transportation, vans, minibuses, luxury transportation, and so now you can see that the rest of the industry has sort of caught up.

What's interesting, is that from our perspective, even though there's been a disruption in the way of Uber and Lyft and some of these other companies that have disrupted the sedan business and so on, we've never seen better opportunities ahead, and largely what we're realizing is that people like the way that we think and what it is that we do and how we listen and present ourselves, and it has much less to do with the fleet itself. So, our business is changing, we see a tremendous opportunity, and what I wanted to talk to you about was thinking forward.

About 10 years or so ago, I was in a hedge fund business. I was running a $4 billion portfolio, and I had the pleasure, or lack thereof, of calling one of newest hedge fund manager startups, really pedigreed group of people. They were raising billions of dollars, and I had to call and tell this individual, a legend in the investment community, that we were going to pass on his new fund launch. Basically, we didn't think that the systems, the processes, the infrastructure was comparable to the enterprise that he was trying to build. So, as a result of that, we were going to pass on that.

To put this in perspective, we generally invested between and $25 and $75 million at launch. So, it's a major commitment. And I'll never forget, the individual was taken aback, and probably a little bit offended, and said to me, "Richard, do you play chess?" And I thought, "Gee, that's kind of a strange question to be asking. I used to play chess when I was a child, but I don't really play currently. Why do you ask?" And he said, "Well, look, I think the reality of it is that you're playing checkers and what we're doing here is playing chess, and we're thinking four, five, six steps ahead. So, we have that covered."

And so, I thanked him for his time and thought about it, and I wasn't bruised or insulted, but I really took this legend's commentary to heart, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I think that when you think forward, which by the way, is not easy and it's not natural. And I'm not talking about one step ahead; I'm talking about three, four, five steps ahead. You start planning contingency plans: Contingency plan A, Contingency plan B. What do I think happens? What happens if this happens and that happens, and I think that's a really prudent way to run a business or your life, but that's really preparing for the what if scenario. The scenario that I like to think about from a think forward perspective is "What can I do? What can I accomplish? Where's the white space, which was vans and minibuses back five years ago, uncrowded blue ocean strategy, and so where is that today? And where should we be swimming? Where should we be going forward?"

And so, that's what my business is constantly thinking about, my teammates, my energy, and really what this allows is for you to drive your business and your productivity forward. Instead of being passive and reactive and waiting for things to happen and worrying about your competition, when you're constantly thinking forward and you're going after the white space or the blue ocean strategy, you're making your own future. You're creating your own destiny. You're in charge of what happens, and that's a much better, yet more difficult way to be. So, thank you very much for joining us here today from the LCT show in Atlantic City. I hope you found this episode interesting, and we would encourage you to subscribe to the channel and continue to receive these messages.

Thank you very much. Again, it's been my real pleasure, and I look forward to hearing from you. Take care. Have a great day.