What’s the growth of Digital Hospitality right now?

Bhimji: At this point we have much more work than we can handle. The growth in terms of projects and complexity of projects goes up tenfold every year. I would say we’re growing at about 200 percent revenue per year, give or take, over the last three years.


So you guys had no tech background but wanted to start a tech company. What was the logic behind that?

Bhimji: Actually there was no logic behind that. [Laughs.] When push comes to shove, when there’s a tight deadline, no matter what, Dave and I will get it done. We knew going into technology that we could make it happen just because we’re resourceful, we’re skillful, and we just have a lot of passion with everything we do.

Holmes: Both Dave and I come from hospitality backgrounds. A few of our colleagues complained of poor service from existing providers and a need for a better alternative. We decided we could do it better and jumped right in. We haven’t looked back.

We were doing a lot of things by trial and error. We had some really good programmers, but programmers need a lot of hands-on leadership. They’re great, but you have to be very specific in telling them what you want to do, especially on the website development side of things. In the beginning, to get companies to trust you, it’s great when you can go to people you already know and say this is what you’re doing, and they’ll take a bit of a leap of faith at doing it, too. But to buy into a market and create brand awareness, we had to come in with a low-cost model to attract people to come over and build our portfolio. I also think it’s a combination of our backgrounds in hospitality. We saw there was an opportunity in the market and jumped right in.

Now that you’re almost three years into this business, is it an advantage or disadvantage to not have a tech background?

Bhimji: It’s an advantage and a disadvantage. A disadvantage, because you are having to learn a lot more and a lot faster than everyone else. You can’t really rely on anyone to say, “Hey, what does this do? Why did we do this?” You need to find that information. It’s survival. You’re there by yourself and you have to put food on the table, so you have to learn every single thing as fast as you can because somebody else already knows it and you’re competing against them for business. Your clients have a certain level of expectation in regards to delivery of technology, so you’ve got to be well ahead of the curve.

It’s an advantage because if you’re not from the I.T. background, you’re bringing creativity, new ideas, and fresh blood to the development process. You can actually see things from a different perspective, or from the client’s side. People who are too much from the I.T. background are really wrapped up by how functionally rich it is and how great it is what they have created. They fail to see the usability it actually provides people using the software or visiting the website. As people without an I.T. background, we’re more critical but also we think outside the box.

Holmes: I would totally agree with David on that. We’re really good at the needs-analysis, looking at the problem we’re working on and looking at what’s required to solve the problem from the end-user’s perspective. We’ve looked at a lot of software and web-based programs that have been developed by programmers, where they come and think they know the individual’s industry better than the actual individual does, and they’re going to solve their problems. So, they build this application from a programmer standpoint. It might be very feature-rich, but it’s very difficult to use; it’s not user-friendly.

David says it best, if his mother or my mother can’t figure out how to use our software and be comfortable using it, then it’s not something we want to give to our clients. There’s no need to overcomplicate the issue. We make the solution very easy to use and tailor it to solving the needs that they have instead of forcing them to use something they don’t necessarily need.

Are you guys number one in your category?

Bhimji: I would say in Canada there aren’t any companies that are as highly specialized as we are, so we are the market leader. Our name carries weight in the hotel and hospitality industry. In America there are two or three larger companies that compete in the same market that we do; however, some clients of those two or three large companies are now coming to us.

There are about 77,000 hotels in your target market. What percentage of this is your market goal?

Holmes: 77,000 hotels! The largest growth we’re experiencing right now is in the United States because there’s a lot more people and a lot more hotels there. At any given time we have about 25 sites on the go simultaneously. As soon as we finish one off there’s usually two or three more coming in behind it.

Bhimji: That’s tough to answer because there are a lot of services that we provide. With a lot of our projects we’ll complete them and then the client will want additional features and even more add-ons. Some projects can be completed in under a month, while we have other clients with projects that stretch across the entire year.

What’s the biggest challenge right now that you’re facing?

Bhimji: We have so many projects, and so many new software programs that we’re launching, and so many repeat customers coming back and wanting upgrades, that our speed of delivery is a little bit slow when normally it has been very fast. We’re at a bottleneck right now and there’s only so much we can do.

It’s challenging to balance quality in terms of trying to get this completed as soon as possible with achieving high quality at the cost of fast delivery. The foundation of Digital Hospitality was built around providing high levels of customer service and quality. We never want to lose sight of this.

Talk about your new business, PerimeterBus.com. What exactly is it?

Bhimji: PerimeterBus.Com is basically an Expedia model for bus transportation, private charters and limousines. The website provides transportation services from key areas: Vancouver, Whistler, Squamish and soon Vancouver Island, Banff, Calgary, Jasper.

Why a transportation company, when your other business is doing so well?

Holmes: Perimeter is in some ways an extension of our current business and in some ways it’s completely different. It is a bit like Digital Hospitality: we see a hole in the market, a bit of a niche market, and figure out how can we do things better than the existing providers. Perimeter Transportation had a 35-year history of providing high-quality transportation motor coach service between Vancouver and Whistler, as well as deluxe motor coach charters throughout BC and Washington and Alberta.

And they were a bricks-and-mortar company that fell on hard times?

Holmes: That’s correct. Unfortunately they made some decisions that didn’t turn out so favourably for them, and as a result they filed for bankruptcy in November 2008. Dave and I started to look into it and thought, this is interesting, because here’s a well-known company that had a website that ranked extremely well on all the major search engines when you searched for “Bus Charters in Vancouver” or “transportation to Whistler,” and there’s definitely some value here.

So we made an offer to that company to purchase some of their assets, including their name and website. At that time it was just kind of, “Let’s send off an e-mail and see what happens.” They came back to us and said that yes, they were interested in talking.

So we proceeded in purchasing their website, the name of the business, their telephone number, and effectively launching ourselves into the transportation industry [laughs]. The core of any business is the name and the goodwill associated with the name, the telephone number and the website. We were able to obtain all that and move into transportation.

Where do you see Perimeter going at this point?

Holmes: There really isn’t any other company in Vancouver, or for that matter in BC, which allows you to get online and reserve your bus transportation to go to Whistler. With the Olympics coming up, people are planning their trips now and their seat to Whistler; they’re going on Google and they’re looking for transportation, and nobody offered this. Nobody offered anything online where you could purely go and see what times were available, put your credit card number in and have a bus ticket instantly e-mailed back to you. That’s a relatively new concept, surprisingly.

There are companies like Hotels.com where you can book airlines and hotels, but you can’t book bus travel. We thought, there’s definitely a need for this. So we took our existing skills of developing hotel booking engines and working in hospitality to developing something similar for transportation.

Now you can come to our website and very quickly, 24 hours a day, reserve transportation from the Vancouver airport, downtown Vancouver, to Squamish and Whistler. It works very easily and we’ve had a lot of people from around the world – Japan, Great Britain, Australia – who love it because they can book online while our reservation office is closed. To back it up through customer service we have a call centre that can also take the bus reservations and reserve custom bus charters over the telephone.

You guys are pretty young to be doing this kind of thing, is that fair to say?

Bhimji: I think so. Essentially the two of us dove into our first business head first pretty much right out of university with very little hesitation. At the time neither of us really knew what we were doing, what we were getting ourselves into or even how we were going to do it.

However, Dave and I were certain that this was the ideal opportunity to start up businesses. Fortunately for us, we figured out at an early age that being self-employed is what we really wanted to do, and to this day I still can’t believe how much fun we’ve had.

What do you attribute your success to?

Holmes: What’s worked well is the synergy that Dave and I can put together. He’s learned a lot in the past three years about leading our design team, our web developers and our programmers; he’s really good at doing the project management. I bring in a lot of strong skills on the sales side of things. We both tend to complement each other like the yin and the yang. He’s strong where I’m weak and vice-versa.

Digital Hospitality - www.digitalhospitality.com
Perimeter Reservations - www.perimeterbus.com