GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) – Suamico-based Kompelling Kars car rental company started four years ago after an entrepreneur’s perseverance to make money became a full-fledged startup.
“I’m a car guy, so I thought about renting out one of my cars one time. It went well, it snowballed from there and now I have a fleet,” Miles Anthony Smith said. “I have some business travelers, I have families that come, especially in the summer. We have people coming to Packers games. Even some local people that have a vehicle that just went down.”
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Four years later and with several more cars added to the fleet, Smith is now setting his sights on fulfilling demand for the NFL Draft.
“Well it’s going to be a lot of demand, and I’m sure that all of the rental car companies, mine included, are going to be difficult to have enough cars,” Smith said. “We’re looking actually to scale those up, and we’re looking for people in the community who have a car that is three years old or newer, that if they’re looking to rent their car and make a little money we can help facilitate that.”
Smith hopes that he is able to grow his fleet of cars the week of the draft in addition to trying to keep revenue generated from the event in the pockets of locals, and will take care of the interaction with customers and the cleaning of the car.
“It’s our way to kind of help the community,” he said. “We’ll have about 10 by the time of the draft, we plan to scale up from there. It depends on the number of people that can rent their cars and we’re able to help them, we can scale up quite a bit.”
Smith says that people have the opportunity to earn hundreds of dollars the week of the draft and that some larger types of cars are typically in higher demand.
“We’re competitively priced, most cars are around a hundred to two hundred dollars [per day]. We have sedans, minivans and SUVs, and we’re ready to go to help anybody looking to haul their folks to the draft,” Smith said. “They’ll get the lion’s share of the profit. 70% will go to the owner, we’ll take 30% for facilitating the transaction, make sure it’s clean, washed and good to go.”
For Smith, the business venture is an avenue for him to strike a mutual profit with fellow wisconsinites as hundreds of thousands of out of towners populate the area for draft week.
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“I’m an entrepreneur, I like to help other people. Honestly, if I can help other people make a little bit of money on the way to the draft, everyone’s trying to get their piece of the action so to speak, I’m happy to facilitate that,” he said. “I expect it to be a pretty crazy week, not just for rental car companies but certainly for all service providers in the area.”
“We hang our hat on service. We’re a local business, locally owned, and we provide that service.”
