Photo credit: TranSports Group
The world of business is all about disruptions and, often, all it takes is a little luck and ingenuity.
This past weekend in Atlanta, the TranSports Group had a nearly 100-car fleet in the area shuttling sports industry professionals from one place to the next. The three-year old company worked tirelessly with eight NFL sponsors and several prominent brands on the ground in Atlanta.
A decade ago, Ryan Peck lamented to a colleague in the agency world why there wasn’t a one-stop shop for transportation at major sports and entertainment events across the country. Researching the best companies and ways to get VIPs from point A to point B on the ground at major events can take up a lot of time.
“You’re asked to do 100 things and you have time for 50, and this is one of the easiest things to outsource,” said Peck, the managing partner of TranSports. “For many events, transportation is 10 percent of a program, but takes up 40 percent of the time.”
He knew there was a better way.
Obsessed with finding a solution, Peck sought to become an industry innovator, with a commitment to customers and customer service, and a network of support. Tapping into his prior agency days, he and his team understand the needs of his agency, brand, and property clients.
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By creating a true one-stop solution for clients, TranSports provides peace of mind with complete program coordination, execution, and real-time tracking technology. TranSports connects all the chauffeurs for a client on the back end and gets them where they need to go via the most efficient vehicle, ranging from a luxury sedan to luxury coach bus. Client program managers are given a vehicle-tracking application customized to their program so they can see where their VIPs are at any given moment. The app provides critical information about their vehicles, chauffeurs, and timing that eliminates inefficient communications with dispatchers and vehicle operations managers.
Peck has always been an entrepreneur at heart. He hails from an Iowa farm and is driven beyond the corporate structure. Despite this, he worked at agencies for the first part of his career, before stumbling on this chauffeur solution.
Peck isn’t from the transportation industry. He had experience with a pain point and knew he could solve the problem. He partnered with George Jacobs and Tim Crockett, highly respected limousine and bus industry executives with more than a combined 60 years of experience, to create solutions for every size of need both domestically and internationally.
The success has in part been because Peck said he speaks the language of the users of the service, but also the delivery of an upscale product that hits when it’s needed.
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“We do what we say we’re going to do,” Peck said. “We work hard on the customer service side. Price is price, we don’t compete on price. We compete on service, relationships, and being relentless in pursuing better ways of doing things.”
There are plenty of legacy chauffeur companies across the nation in major cities, but there’s no centralized system. Transportation ridesharing disruptors like Lyft and Uber haven’t broken into the VIP transportation world, but some companies have emerged focusing on the business community — leaving sports and entertainment relatively unserviced.
Unlike Ubers and Lyfts, chauffeurs must know the routes without maps, be sensitive to high-touch clientele, and leave the customer feeling like they had a true luxury service. This means getting to a city — like Atlanta — days in advance to work out detours and familiarize themselves with the traffic.
“The niche is a strength,” Peck said. “People pay for superior quality and service, so let’s be great in this space and let things fall where they will.”
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Timing was in Peck’s favor. Hard work and brains can only do so much, he said. As TranSports launched, it had the luxury of a nearby Super Bowl in Minnesota. With the large fleet in an area Peck knew well, his initial major event launch was a success.
“If that Super Bowl is in L.A., and it’s my first year, we’re probably not at this same point,” he said.
The company has continued to grow with work at events in the U.S., such as the Super Bowl, NHL Winter Classic, the Masters, Final Four, and Sundance Film Festival. The group has recently made inroads into the PGA Tour too. The international business for TranSports has continued to grow, and it has recently done work at the Olympics in Brazil and Russian World Cup.
“We’re very fortunate. We continue to talk to more and more international events for opportunities,” Peck said. “The tracking technology is intriguing to clients and we are looking to employ it with the largest properties. It’s simple, scalable, and provides a unique value to our clients by adding much-needed transparency and accountability in our industry.”
