As Reston Limousine celebrates 30 years in business as the Washington DC metro region’s premier limousine and shuttle bus company, we thought we’d share some of the professional advice that President and CEO Kristina Bouweiri has offered over the years.
In a podcast interview with Fred Diamond, founder and executive direct for the Institute for Excellence in Sales, Kristina shared how she grew Reston Limousine from a startup catering to only corporate clients to a multimillion-dollar business working in 13 market segments.
When I came to work for William, he was a very corporate business only really selling corporate accounts and hotel accounts and I’m the one that said, “We need to do weddings” and I bought list of brides and I cold called brides and within a year we had 100 weddings in a weekend. That was the first market I diversified us into. Then we got an opportunity to bid on a government contract and that was a bus in Reston Virginia going from USGS in Reston into DC back and forth all day long. We won that contract and I said, “There have to be more of these” so I started researching government contracts and found out that every single agency in DC had their own bus system connecting their buildings.
That’s really how I grew the business from say 5 cars to 100, was by doing government contracts and bus contracts. We had lots of buses and vans and that was our biggest niche the first 10 years, but then we ran out of our small business size and we had to diversify again. That’s when we diversified into hospitals, universities and commuter shuttles for different corporations so today we just have a real mix of different industries that use us and we still mostly have buses and vans but we also do still have Sedans, SUV’s and limousines.
… Today we are in 13 different market segments. We have government clients, we have non-government clients, we have hospitals, universities, embassies, we have tourism, we have wine tourism, brew tourism and we do weddings so one of the reasons why we are so successful is because we have diverse markets and usually all of them are busy at one time or another. We are a seasonal business so we’re super busy in spring and fall, not so busy in the summer and the winter.