Business Plan: Bar Hopper

Business Plan: Bar Hopper

Introduction

Bar Hopper would be a small company that specializes in getting their customers home safely for the University of Illinois campus bars. While there are a few taxi services in the Champaign-Urbana area, majority of students walk home from the campus bars. While walking is a healthy alternative to catching a ride home, it can be dangerous for some individuals. Walking alone or walking home very intoxicated are a few instances when catching a ride home is the best option. I propose to buy three vans, hire drivers, and offer a cheap entertaining ride home for the bar-going public on Thursday to Saturday nights.

Walking home alone is not something anyone looks forward to. With bar hopper this will no longer be an issue for students. According to Steve Levitt, a professor at University of Chicago, “For every mile walked drunk, turns out to be eight times more dangerous than the mile driven drunk. To put it simply, if you need to walk a mile from a party to your home, you’re eight times more likely to die doing that than if you jump behind the wheel and drive your car that same mile (Huyhn 2011).” This shows that getting a sober ride home is a great alternative to stumbling home. Accidents happen all the time on college campuses because students decide to walk home drunk. For instance, the recent case of Simon Chavez in January 2013 where he was struck and killed by a taxi driver on the way home from a bar at Santa Barbara City College according to compelledtoact.com (Alcohol Related Student Deaths-Spring 2013).

Bar Hopper can be a valuable service for thousands of students who need to be safely transported after a long night at the bar. It is a common occurrence on this campus to see students stumble home for the bar around 2 a.m. It is also too common of occurrence to get a campus alert with the details of some poor co-ed getting robbed at gun point or sexually assaulted during the late night hours. While options such as Safe Rides, Safe Walks, and taxi services do exist, I believe Bar Hopper can be the best option for students trying to make their way home. Many students are embarrassed to have to call Safe Walks or Safe Rides and many times these options along with taxis take awhile to get to where the student needs them to be. By having Bar Hopper buses already at the main bars, there will be no need to call and little to no wait time.

Plan

To start the company several busses must be purchased. We are going to buy three buses and have them stationed outside of Red Lion, Firehaus/Cylborne, and Joe’s. These bars seem to be the most popular and we believe they will contain the most of our target customers. By buying old busses we will be able to save money and decorate them as we wish. We plan to decorate them with