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Good morning! It's Friday, October 6th. Today’s post traces CharterUp’s path to $150M in annual revenue in just 6 years!

THE FEATURE

CharterUp– The Company Monopolizing The Charter Bus Industry

To say that CharterUp’s growth in recent years has been impressive would be an understatement.

Under Armir Harris’ leadership, this online charter bus platform has seen 113,130% revenue growth over the past three years!

What’s The Business?

When Harris was 22, his uncle became severely ill and needed someone to take over his limousine rental business. So, Harris made the bold decision of dropping out of UCLA just three credits shy of graduating to operate the 25-vehicle fleet of limos, vans, and party buses.

With the business in his hands, he was pessimistic about its future as it was sluggish and capital-intensive. But the same year he took over, Harris had his light bulb moment when the DNC called in need of 60 buses for an event. Despite only having a few party buses, Harris accepted the contract and got to work calling countless rental services to secure a few buses at a time.

Harris was able to deliver 60 buses for the DNC, but not without spending multiple sleepless nights scavenging all available buses possible. Out of this struggle, he created his first company Shofur with $800– a software program that could aggregate bus bookings online.

From 2013-2017, Shofur took off and landed on the Inc. 5000 list with $12M in annual revenue. Despite the victory, Harris wasn’t content. Most of the small bus companies listed on his site were still doing inventory on scratch paper, managing drivers who only accepted cash, and booking new trips through landline phones.

Harris realized that true success for him meant “utter market dominance”, so he set out to modernize the charter bus industry just like Expedia did for travel agents and Sabre did for airline bookings. It was from this idea that CharterUp was born, an online marketplace that integrated real-time bus tracking, rideshare logistic management, and a booking platform.

Today, CharterUp has an annual revenue run rate of $150M, with 60% coming from listing charter bookings on its platform and the remaining 40% from selling their software to charter companies looking to modernize their operations.

How They Win: Lean Into Adversity

When the pandemic hit, it spelled doom for the charter bus companies– a report from the American Bus Association shows that the motorcoach industry suffered an 82.6% loss in 2020. At the peak of the pandemic, 90% of charter bus companies were using less than 5% of their fleet.

The global health crisis nearly killed Harris's startup too as he saw a 95% drop in demand and was forced to furlough 75% of his staff. Where other entrepreneurs would give up, Harris saw an opportunity.

With so many charter bus companies going out of business, he just had to keep CharterUp alive until consumers started traveling again and he could scoop up all the demand. During the pandemic, his skeleton staff of software engineers optimized every aspect of CharterUp, from inventory management to SEO strategies in preparation for an industry takeover.

Harris’ gamble paid off and his company now has over 20% of America’s small charter bus companies on its platform.

Why It Matters

Some critics mistakenly believe that CharterUp is crushing small charter bus business owners, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Harris and CharterUp miraculously saved the remaining charter bus companies that managed to scrape by during the pandemic. One such company is Elite Transportation, which has expanded from 4 to 11 charter buses and no longer needs to spend $20K a month on local marketing since listing itself on CharterUp.

Harris’s success story proves that there are still plenty of niche industries in desperate need of modernization and innovation, and there is a whole lot of money to be made in the process.

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