Friday, March 10, 2000

Family's driving ambition: The limo life

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        When Tim and Pam Winings' children were little, they disliked dad dropping them off at elementary school on his way to work. The problem was the car. Who'd want to be seen in that? A sleek stretch limousine would pull up to the school. Then the doors would swing open, and Jenny and Stacey Winings would hop out.

        “I would get so embarrassed,” says Jenny, who is now 17. “Everyone was like, "You're rich!' ”

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        Such is life in a limo family.

        The Winings, who live in Sharonville, aren't rich. They are hard-working members of the middle class. They just happen to have some great wheels: Six Lincoln stretch limos, ranging from 24 feet to 31 feet long, equipped with amenities such as TV, VCR, CD player and moon roof.

        Tim and Pam own Your Chauffeur Limousine Inc. Tim started the business 14 years ago with one 8-year-old Cadillac and a desire to do something he'd enjoy.

        He might be a little different than the typical small-business owner. He insists he's not a workaholic, not a Type A. He doesn't want to work every minute of every day of his life.

        “Although he has for the past 14 years,” Pam, interjects, only half-joking.

        Until starting the business, Tim had bounced around a bit. He started college, but didn't finish. He worked various jobs, from market analyst to car salesman to Greyhound bus driver. He liked driving, but Greyhound couldn't give him enough work. So he struck out on his own.

        He started from scratch. The first month, he had only seven customers. “I thought, my God, did I do the right thing?” he says. But slowly, things began to pick up.

        About three years later he bought his first stretch limo, used. It cost $18,000, and he wasn't sure he could afford it. He kept plugging away.

        “For most people with small businesses, it's just a lot of hard work,” he says. “You really have to decide what you enjoy doing, because there are gonna be days when, even though you love what you do, you're gonna hate it.”

        He didn't care much for the airport transfers — picking up and dropping off corporate clients at all hours of the day and night. So he sold that portion of the business in December, along with four sedans.

        Now, he's strictly a limo man. And although he and Pam employ about 10 part-time drivers, they still get behind the wheel occasionally.

        In the early morning hours of New Year's Day, 1999, Tim sat in one of his limos outside a Roselawn nightclub. He heard gunshots, then a bullet hit his car. He called Pam on a cell phone.

        “I think my car was just shot at.”

        “Leave!”

        “I can't. I have customers here.”

        “Do you think I care?”

        A security guard was shot and killed that night. Tim got away unharmed — with his customers. “His group was quite grateful that he hung around and waited for them,” Pam says.

        He prides himself on treating everyone the same. He's driven a few famous people, including Bob Denver (Gilligan from TV's Gilligan's Island), Paul O'Neill of the New York Yankees, and Marge Schott.

        “But I enjoy regular people the most,” he says. “Because they're thrilled to death that you're there, they're thrilled to death to be in the car.”

        He especially enjoys driving for older people. A couple celebrating a 50th wedding anniversary, for instance, or someone marking an 80th birthday.

        Typically, those folks' night in the limo is a gift from a loved one. “The thought of spending several hundred dollars on just getting to and from a restaurant, they're not going to do that (on their own). But do they love it? You can hardly get them out in the end.”

        Now that they're teens, Jenny and Stacey Winings no longer suffer from limo embarrassment. A limo is a great way to take friends to dances. But Tim and Pam allow it only if a car hasn't been booked by paying customers.

        As for Tim and Pam, they turned down one of their driver's offers to chauffeur them around on their anniversary. Being in a limo — even being in the back — feels just a little too much like work.

        Besides, Tim knows where he feels happiest. “I always drive,” he says. “It's just where I'm supposed to be.”

       

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