 And it's another exciting show of The Economy and You. I'm Chris Lethem here on Think Tech Hawaii. Today's guest is Dan Walters. Dan Walters is the president or general manager, I'm sorry, for classicallimos.com. Welcome to the show, Dan. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Yeah, so we're going to talk a little bit about your business and the line of work that you're in. Our show is called The Economy and You. Sometimes it's a microeconomy, economy of one, or economy of one small company, trying to sort of sprout out of the sidewalk here in Hawaii, because we know Hawaii is a tough place to launch a new enterprise. And so your company, classicallimos, classicallimos.com, has been experiencing some of the weird and wonderful of doing business as a startup here in Hawaii. Well, we're getting our feet wet right now, as we speak. Just got the limousine license from the PUC. Yeah, congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that took a little while to get. It did, and well, we had it before, and then the insurance was the real challenge. And then by the time the insurance came through, the first license lapsed, so now we've got the second license. So now you're ready to rock it? Now we're ready to go. OK. A little bit off schedule, but everything else is still on track. Good, good, good. So how did you decide to get into the limo business, of all businesses? That would be my wife, Sherry, the president of the company. It was her idea back, oh gosh, probably in 2002. So it's her fault. Yeah, yeah. She saw a company for sale doing what we do now in Orange County, California. And we went down and met with the seller and got very interested in the entire business until it came time to see the cars, and he didn't want us to see the cars. And so we kept asking, when can we see the cars? We had five Rolls Royces in a Cadillac, and they were all from the 30s all the way through the 60s. Well, when we finally saw the cars, then we understood why he was delaying. They were all fakes. They were fakes. They were five fake Rolls and one fake Cadillac. How do you fake a Rolls Royce? I got to ask, because this is just amazing. It's astonishing to me. You know, we used to have a joke called, we had a car called a Rolls Hardly, because it would roll downhill and hardly make it up the next. But how do you fake a Rolls Royce? That's amazing. The most common practice in America has been to bring a car in called the Austin Princess, take the grill off it and put an aftermarket inexpensive chromed Rolls Grill, which is, of course, illegal. Now, I have seen these on Volkswagen's, by the way, but I've never seen anybody actually claim that it's a Rolls Royce. Well, the story behind it is there was a guy in the Midwest in the 70s that brought hundreds of these over from England where they were assembled. But it's actually a Denmark company. And then they're out of business and so forth. But they bought these cars. They had British styling, which then lent themselves to the fake Rolls Grill and looking like a Rolls. And then he would put the fake Rolls Grill on it and then call up limo companies and say, how would you like to buy a whole bunch of these for the cost of one Rolls? And that's how they kind of infiltrated America back in the 70s. Most of them today are worn out. So you don't see that many. Southern Cal probably has the most. And I would estimate there's probably still 30 running around Southern California. Yeah. But so anyway, so you had the idea was, you saw this and you decided, well, wait a minute, this guy isn't selling Rolls Royces. So what did you do? Well, he wanted a half a million for the business and we thought, well, wait a minute, how much do you want for the cars? And he said 10,000 a car and we said 10,000 for fake. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. Yeah. So we decided, you know, why don't we just put maybe our own money into starting something up and doing it the right way rather than starting off with this whole history of fake Rolls. And it was hard for us to accept the notion that there was goodwill there. Yeah. Because it's kind of like the guy that walks down the street and he pulls up his sleeve and he's got a bunch of Rolex, fake Rolex watches running up his arm, right? Right. It sort of gives you that same sensation. Well, there's two problems. One is the fake part itself. The other part is telling everybody else they're real. Yeah. And that was what he was doing with the clients. Oh, he was telling them that they weren't fake. Oh yeah, he had no indication anywhere on his advertising that these were fakes. Oh. And that was the real problem. That's misleading. Yeah. So that's how we started. And my wife actually found most of the first four cars which would be the stationary photo on our website. So is this like American Pickers? You go around and you find these cars that are sort of not being used and a little bit dilapidated and then you have to restore them? Or were they already in good working condition? It's a little bit of everything. Hamines has old car ads and I think my wife, Sean, probably two thirds of them on eBay. There's a certain look for her after and she did a lot of research initially but we bought, let's see, the 35 Rolls from Canada that was our first car. That did not arrive right away so the second car we bought was our 27 Packard which is now here in Oahu. Now but a Packard is not a Rolls. A Packard is a very different kind of car, right? It's a different kind of car. It's a high-end car like a Rolls but it's back in the 20s, the nickname for a Packard was the American Rolls Royce. A lot of Americans would refer to a Packard as American Rolls Royce. But it's a high-end car. It's a hand-built car. It's still a beautiful car, yeah. They're bigger typically than a Rolls. Yeah, and what is this car here that we're looking at? That's the first car we bought, 35 Rolls. That's a 35 Rolls. That one belonged to Lady DeFries who owned the Mayflower Hotel in London. Oh, okay. Now, when you see a car like that, I would imagine there's a great deal of work that goes into the restoration and maintenance of those vehicles. Yeah, the acquisition cost is high, restoration is super high, repair is high. Maintenance is not so bad. But all those first three, those are the big ones. Those are the ones that get, those are the gotchas, huh? And the... Well, these are beautiful cars. Yeah, that's a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud one there. Uh-huh, and look at that, look at that, that's just a very memorable photo, something like that. Now, the cars in the background there are the first four we bought. There's a Rolls Royce Phantom 5 by James Young, 1960. Now, those two in the middle, those are the white and the silver. Those are... Those are Rolls, or? The two in the middle in the background? Yeah. That's the packers off to the right, that's the one that's here. The one in the foreground here is the 62 Rolls Longwell Base Silver Cloud. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's our niece by the way in the photo. Oh, is that right, she looks great. And that's a 65 Rolls Royce Longwell Base, no division, very, very rare car. Uh-huh, wow, beautiful. So now these cars, I'm... Do you have somebody in your family that has a special love of these vehicles that just comes in and takes care of them for you? We have, through the years, developed quite a few mechanics that do certain things that you get, at some point, they become your go-to guy. So you have to kind of develop your local talent. Yeah, we've, through the years, we've tried out different shops. We kind of have settled on a really good machine shop that happens to also be mechanical, and they tend to be very careful. So sometimes they have to sort of create new parts because you can't buy them anymore. That's exactly right. The Packards especially, the 27 Packards, there are no parts to buy anywhere that we know of. So if something breaks, the machine shop will tell us, if you see it cracking, let us copy it before it breaks. Ah, ah, ah, good, good, yeah. And then they have a template to go off. Okay, so preventative maintenance is a big part of your requisite to stay in business, and yeah. The real key with the old cars is making sure they don't overheat and making sure you have good braking. Those would be the two big keys. Yeah, okay, cool, cool. Now, you've gotten, so how many cars now do you have in your fleet? Between California and Hawaii, we have 12. You have 12, okay, and then you have two here. We have two here, so 10 in California now. And at some point, you'd like to bring over a couple more? Like to end up with at least six here. Would you, really, okay. So that means you've got to have a demand. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, so what do you see now? One of the things when we talk about as clearly your value proposition is there. You know, we talk about the value proposition of a business, and that is that you've got these beautiful cars. I'm sure people enjoy riding in the cars. I'm sure the riders are fantastic. The interiors are probably immaculate. And so, how do you build a market for these vehicles? Well, that would be my wife's area. She does great marketing with the website. In our case, we're mainly weddings, so she's gonna market to all of the wedding, the high-end wedding online sites in California. Hawaii's a different setup though. Hawaii's primarily gonna be Asian weddings through wholesalers. So California's a retail market for us. Every bride calls us directly. Occasionally we'll get a parent calling us or a wedding planner, but most of the time it's the bride calling us directly, and I take those calls. Well, you know, Hawaii is a little bit different market, especially the Asian market, and I will specifically say the Japanese market because the planners are in Japan. So if you want a planner to book your vehicle, you pretty much have to go to Japan and talk to the planners there because the coordinators, we're only gonna coordinate the weddings that have been planned previously off-site in Tokyo or Osaka or wherever they might be. So I think you should go to Japan with me. That's a good idea. I think you should come with me and we'll go talk to these wedding. We realize that's the place to actually get it done. The last time we were here on a research trip before we moved, one of the landmark hotels here in Waikiki the wedding director there told us, he said, you know, you start doing the weddings for us and within a couple of months, the wholesalers from Japan are gonna be calling you and asking you to service their company rather than our hotel. He said, that's my biggest concern. And he said that once that happens, he said you'll be back bringing your whole fleet over. So I don't know how true that is, but I hope it is true because it's nice to have the fleet in one location as opposed to two states. Well, why did you choose Hawaii? When you were thinking about this business and moving vehicles to Hawaii, I mean, you kind of had a flavor that Hawaii is a tough place to do business. I mean, if you read Forbes magazine, we're number 50 on the list of friendly states to do business with. We're dead last. So you just have masochistic tendencies or is it that you, did you just see something here that nobody else saw? Well, keep in mind, we're from California, which is also a highly regulated state, not the easiest state to do business. But you're correct. This is a little bit tougher. Part of that is it's new for us. The thing to remember with our businesses, and this is where we felt that Hawaii wouldn't be an undue burden for us to figure out, in California, the two regulatory bodies, which are basically the same as Hawaii, but it'd be the PUC and the DMV. When you read the entire code that applies to what we do from both agencies, it's really clear that neither agency thought of us for a millisecond when they wrote the code. Vintage limos used for weddings and special events is not something they had in their mind when they wrote the code. They're thinking full-time limousines. They're thinking an emphasis on transportation. Well, because normally what happens when you write statutes like this is that you go talk, you bring some people in and they work in the industry, and they probably went out to some of the bigger ones, invited them into a session, and said, we're gonna write some regulatory laws around this to protect your interests. I'm sure that's how it got framed, because we wanna make sure that you have reasonable protection under the law that you're prevented from undue litigation and yada, yada, yada, and interoperating within the confines of the law. And these are probably the guys that were sitting in the room. You were invited. So how did this impact you? Well, the California experience was a little bit frustrating. Every year we would call the head of licensing, we'd say, okay, we've got inconsistencies between your two departments. Which one shall we listen to on this point? And he would sort that out for us and say, okay, I've made a record of it. You're good to go for this year. Thanks for bringing the inconsistencies to my attention. So we thought, you know, with that whole thing, it probably prepared us a little bit for Hawaii. Hawaii, keep in mind, has never really had this type of industry hit it before. No, no, well, we do have inconsistencies. But I mean, the vintage wedding from Marcus is almost non-existent in the state of Hawaii, which is kind of a, gets back to your other question on why we wanted to come here. If you analyze the wedding market worldwide and you look at the popularity of cities and locations around the globe for weddings, Vegas is number one. Not for dollar spent, but for volume of weddings. Istanbul, Turkey is number two, which surprises a lot of people. But that's kind of like the Vegas of the Middle East. And then you get to number three is the state of Hawaii. The difference between those top three is Hawaii has a lot more time and money being spent here. On the wedding. On the weddings because they're destination weddings and the bride is coming with a small group or a family and usually staying seven to 10 days and merging it into a honeymoon. Well, we're gonna talk a little bit more about this because I think this is an interesting topic. When we start talking about demographic, we gotta take a short commercial break. We're gonna be right back. I'm Chris Lethem with The Economy and You. Today's guest is Dan Walters and we'll be right back. Stay tuned for more. Aloha. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of likeable science on Think Tech Hawaii. I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what is likeable about science. We bring on scientists of all ilk, astronomers, physicists, chemists, biologists, ecologists and they talk about their work and more importantly they talk about why you should talk about their work, why you should think about their work, why you should like their work. I help them bring out why their work is understandable, why it's meaningful, why people should care about it, why people should support science. We have a good time. We talk about current events of interest. We talk about historical events sometimes. We dig deep into their research, why they do what the joys and delights and frustrations of their work are and in all we show a real world of science, a real world of likeable science. I hope you'll join us every Friday at 2 p.m. And welcome back everybody. I'm Chris Leatham here with the Economy and You here at Think Tech Hawaii. Today's guest is Dan Walters, the GM for ClassicLimos.com here in Hawaii. We're just talking about some of the interesting demographic you said Hawaii is number three. Turkey is number two. Istanbul, Turkey you said. That's right. Number one is Vegas. Vegas. Yes, the land of the drive-thru wedding. Yes, gotta love it. Istanbul, Turkey does sort of surprise me. I'm not surprised that Honolulu is in the top. This is number three. I don't know about Waikiki Honolulu. I think it's the entire state of Hawaii as a, but most of the weddings are here. Yes. But it comes in number three and getting back to your other question on why we actually wanted to come here. We were on vacation. We did a couple of vacations here and the first time we were at Koalena and we kept our sliding doors open the entire week and never did close them and so we fell in love with the weather. Yeah. And we're over there looking at one of those coves and one of those chapels and watching eight weddings every day. Bear in mind, we're from an area that 90% of our business is a wedding on Saturday afternoon. You did you see me out there going, don't do it, don't, don't, don't do it. Don't do what? Don't get married. No, no. We had never, ever seen anything like that. Yeah. And then we started to inquire and then we realized how often that's being duplicated all over the island. That's right. With weddings at chapels, just, just. Well, do you understand why the Japanese come here to get married? Do you know that there's really a strong rationale for that? It's not just because they love Hawaii. I researched it and hopefully my research is correct, but I researched it at Star with Princess Dies wedding. Well, it also has to do with if you get married in Japan and everybody shows up at your wedding. That's right. You have to go to everybody else's wedding. So if you come to Hawaii and get married and you only invite a few people, then you only have a few weddings to go to. That's the financial side, yeah. Yeah, and obviously too, it's a time consideration because if you have the Japanese sort of keep a book of everybody that came to the wedding and so we have to make sure that we reciprocate. And this book of reciprocation, for lack of a better term, could go on for years. And so by coming to Hawaii, you sort of break that cycle of having to reciprocate. And then everybody's still being polite to everybody. Everybody's still being polite, but you don't have to go to three weddings a month for the next five years. I had heard that when I actually went online and did research for where it originated. It was the Princess Dies and Prince Charles when they got married was a live broadcast. I think that was before VCR, so people weren't recording it, but there was almost a billion people watching live. And that included Japan. And up till then, 95% of all the Japanese brides were getting married in Buddha temples. Yes. And the same year, and I don't know the name of this actress, but she was a singer actress, a beautiful woman that was I think in her 20s or 30s was the most famous person in Japan at the time. And after Prince Diana's wedding, she got married and decided to do Western style and mimic what everyone had seen. This must have been Seiko Matsuda. I'm just guessing, but I got a feeling it might have been Seiko Matsuda, as a singer actress who was very popular. Right, and she never, and after she got married, then she retired from... Yes, well, that's kind of it. Yeah, that's the sort of social norms and sort of that's the way it works. And what my research said is that's where it started with the Japanese bride. From then on, I want to have a Western style wedding became the thing. Uh-huh. And... So, here we come, here they come. Well, and that ties into what we do in California because if you look at our market there, in the mainland market, the average caller thinks it's about photos and transportation in a vintage car. The average bride is inspired, gets on the phone, I start to converse with her, and she is, without telling me, envisioning the movie version ending. Ah, yes. That grand send-off, throwing rice, everybody yelling and screaming at the car. And then the bride and groom are the first to leave, right? That doesn't happen on the mainland now. No. That happens in every wedding in Australia, in New Zealand, yeah, in most of the churches. We don't throw rice anymore? We don't do any of those things anymore in the mainland. We don't even end the wedding outside anymore. Really? So, yeah, when a caller comes in, I have to correct their presumptions there because I don't want them to be disappointed. So I let them know how their wedding is slated to end. That's gonna end in the church when the priest or minister introduces them as a new couple. That's where it ends. And people start clapping and then they walk down the aisle and that becomes the ending of the service. Well, we've never ended our wedding there. We've always let people have the option of a grand send-off at the car. Yes. As far as I know, we're the only ones who do that nationwide. See, that's so awesome. That fits the whole reason why the Japanese bride wanna come here, which is to get the Western style. So I'm just gonna start a new business of people who do nothing but stand outside expensive cars and throw rice. I'd bring a broom and a dustpan to clean it all up, but it's all over with. Yeah, cool. The best way to think about it is if you were to have a rich uncle provide a bride last minute with a horse and carriage at any church in Oahu. There's over 700 churches in Oahu. If you had a horse and carriage show up at a church, everybody would instinctively know what that's there for. It's not really for photos. It's certainly not for transportation to the reception. It's a horse and carriage. It's for the final scene of the wedding. It looks good. Looks great. Yeah. It's where everybody gets to yell on the screen. Yes. It's that photo finish where you have that grand finale and it's beautiful and you get to ride off on it. But it's hard to tie those cans behind a horse and buggy though, right? You don't necessarily... Did they request the cans behind the limo? We do get that request probably several times a month. And we'll go ahead and do that if it's all on private property. Yes. California, you don't want to be caught going down the road with sparks. You'll start up for a spark. You're going to get in trouble. Oh, yeah. But we get that request and we do it. Well, how about shoes? Shoes are something that... We've done shoes. I've had one that was a movie scene shoot on a mansion up in the mountains of Malibu where when we did the grand send-off scene when I'm looking what they tied behind my car, it was shoes. It was about a half a dozen brand new stethoscopes. Which I never quite understood what that was, but I ended up getting a couple of those. They were all chipped up, but they worked fine. Yeah. And... Yeah, that's interesting. The stethoscope thing. I never quite figured out what that was. That's all about, yeah. Well, here's the thing. So now you're doing business in Hawaii. And what are your sort of emotionally... Where are you at now? Are you excited? Are you sort of now a little bit sort of having now dealt with Hawaii? You're going, wow, this is a tough place to do business. The tough part with Hawaii was really the insurance. There's less companies offering insurance. In our niche, on the mainland, there's less companies offering insurance for what we do than there is for regular limousine service. And that's just magnified here. Now, is that a barrier to entry into the... This sounds like a barrier to entry. I think it's probably the reason why the number one or one of the top wedding locations in the world doesn't have a vintage wedding car industry. I think it's the insurance. It's the insurance. We have insurance now. I hope to find some that's more affordable because it's a lot more than what we're paying in California. And we've never had an accident, never had a claim. And we've been the largest in America for 12 years. So that's interesting. Actually, I wouldn't think that California and Hawaii would be significantly different in terms of the experiential aspect of doing an actuarial assessment, which is how you would determine the premium. You're absolutely correct. If you look at most of the commercial limousine vehicles here, that you see in abundance from motor coaches to limousines, and you get a quote on what that would be for Waikiki, and then you compare the same vehicle for the same coverage in, say, Southern California where we're from, you're gonna find... I want all those insurance companies out there listening out because this is where you go, well, where does the rubber beat the road here? And how is it that you can justify charging so much more in Hawaii than, say, someplace like California? When California is not known for low premiums. Yeah, if you did a comparison, which I've done, you'll find California is a tad more across the board. And then we hit the vintage side and we were getting quotes when we first got here of 10 to 20 times what we were paying in California. 10 to 20 times. I would see 10 to 20%, maybe even 25%, but 10 to 20 times it doesn't seem to make, actually, it doesn't make sense. And I think it's a little bit of just a few companies that do it and then no volume and no history, fear of the unknown. I had one agent tell me we're on an island and I said, well, so is New Zealand. That's right. And New Zealand... And they have earthquakes. And they have earthquakes and they're right on the ring of fire. And New Zealand has one company with more vintage wedding cars for hire than any company in America. Well, I wanna talk about one thing before we get it. We just have a few more minutes left for the show, but I wanna talk about that young couple that's in the car and we were talking earlier about that sort of, that mistake that new grooms make when they are on their wedding day because I thought this was kind of funny. So the wife is, the new wife is in the car and something goes awry. The flowers didn't show up with the right color or... Yeah, anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's what, let's explain to us what this mistake is. Just so that all those guys out there know how to address this problem. Yeah, sooner or later this will happen to just about every groom throughout the wedding day, at least once or twice. The bride is gonna have omnivision. She's gonna notice every mistake of the day. Because it's her day. It's her day. It's not his, it's hers. That's exactly right. And so the groom won't catch things but the bride will see everything. Behind her to the side doesn't matter. As soon as she sees a mistake, she will typically verbalize her displeasure. The moment she does that, the groom will typically ask her to repeat whatever's bothering her. And so the example I gave you earlier was Charlie forgot the flowers. And the groom will say, what was that honey? And then she'll say, Charlie forgot the flowers. And then he'll pause and he'll say something really stupid. And let's say guys, this is it. This is it right here. Really stupid like, oh honey, don't worry, it's no big deal. Yeah, no big deal. It's a down cut. No, no, no, no, do that. What you do is take her side. Yeah, up play it. Up play it, right? How could he do that, right? Like that, right? Well, we're almost out of time. So how could people get ahold of you? What's the best way people can reach out and talk to you? Well, you can Google us, Classic Lemos Hawaii, Classic Lemos Newport Beach, 800-550-3125. One more time? 800-550-3125. Put the website on the screen, classiclemos.com, yeah. Yeah, and then our cars will have little signs on them that'll say 888-LX-Lemos. Uh-huh. That'll work too. That'll work too, okay. Well, Dan, it's great to have you on the show. Good luck with your business. Thank you. I wish you all the success in the world. We'll see you in Japan. Okay, let's go. Okay, I'm Chris Letham. This is The Economy and You, and we'll see you next time somewhere in maybe Indonesia. Loha.