With This Device You'll Always Make Your Payments On Time

Jake Frank and Stan Schwarz Story


http://www.passtimeusa.com/

When they first introduced their product, PassTime creators Jake Frank and Stan Schwarz received a lot of opposition to the car starter-interrupt devices, which they tried to sell to new-car dealerships as part of a payment plan offered to customers. Once they’re installed, PassTime’s products immobilize the car after a certain number of days if the owner does not make car payments on time.

“On the surface, we look like bad guys, trying to shut people’s cars off,” says Frank, 53. “But essentially what we’re doing is changing people’s behavior. Their car payment becomes a high priority--they can’t put [it] off for a day, or they lose one of the most important things to them: their mode of transportation.”

“We help rebuild their credit,” Schwarz adds, citing that the average delinquency on a loan in the sub-prime market drops from 30 percent to under 5 percent when a PassTime product is installed. The number of repossessions drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent.

Schwarz, 51, speaks of his target market from personal experience. In the ’80s, he was unable to buy a car due to bad credit. Today, PassTime enables people in situations like his to qualify for car loans. By incorporating one of four devices, car dealerships and finance institutions can negotiate payment periods and offer higher-value vehicles while tracking their assets.

In early 2007, the company, which projects 2006 sales of over $15 million, will introduce a new product that incorporates GPS tracking into the standard starter-interrupt, code-based payment system.

Car Enthusiast Millionaire

Michael And Lewis Story

http://www.pfyc.com

Start-Up Cost: $583

After eight years of working for others-after he'd owned his own business-Michael Lewis got the inspiration to start PFYC.com. The car enthusiast had been chatting on a Pontiac Grand Prix community Web site when he met Brian Marks, 28, and the two commiserated about the difficulty of finding specialty car parts. Both had jobs in the tech industry at the time, yet they wanted to launch a Web site to meet car hobbyists' needs. Says Lewis, 42, "We had this idea we could do this with little risk because we could use the Internet as our catalog."

The partners started part time out of their homes-with Lewis in Sammamish, Washington, and Marks in Raleigh, North Carolina. "We didn't even meet until we'd been working together for three months," says Lewis. Their earliest expenses were $55 per month for Web hosting and application fees for the Internet transactions and merchant bank account. To save money, they didn't stock inventory at first, but relied on drop-shipping from vendors instead.

In 1999, Lewis quit his job to devote himself full time to the growing venture; Marks quit his job in 2000 and still resides in North Carolina. Lewis credits outsourcing with keeping overhead low-even today, with sales in the millions, they outsource warehousing, distribution and shipping. "As much as you want to start with $2 million in capital, keep the day job, and get your toes wet," says Lewis. "Learn when the consequences aren't so high."