DALLAS — Texas is open for business! Whether a company is native to the Lone Star State or just got here as fast as it could, we want to know: What makes these businesses tick? Why are so many of them calling Texas home? And how do they plan to continue to expand in the years to come? This is Trending in Texas.
Whether you’re trying to avoid the hassle of parking, need to get to an appointment on time or even just want to have a driverless night out with friends, ridesharing companies have revolutionized the way we travel.
While Lone Star State residents have plenty of choices for ground transportation, one company is taking the wheel and steering the industry in a new direction.
Found in 2018, Alto is a "rideshare-elevated" brand, according to CEO Will Coleman.
"At Alto, we’re providing the safest, most hospitable, most consistent experience for passengers and drivers alike," Coleman says. "We’ve really turned the traditional rideshare marketplace model on its head. We have only W2 employees -- no independent contractors as drivers -- and we own all of the vehicles, which we can keep clean, safe and well-maintained that we provide to our drivers while they are operating on our platform."
While women typically make up about 30% of most rideshare customers, for Alto that number is much higher -- somewhere between 50% and 55%.
"That’s because the safety message and the cleanliness really, really resonates with this cohort," says Alto's Chief Customer Office Alex Halbardier. "Women really think about who their driver is. They’re getting into the car with a stranger, and personal safety matters a lot to that demographic. Our second big group of customers are professionals. Professionals have outsized needs for transportation. They’re going places where it’s important to them that they have control over their in-car experience -- so, they call an Alto because they trust that they’re going to have a professional experience on the way to a professional context."
For Coleman, it's the experience that sets Also apart.
"We’ve always believed that there is a segment of customers that want something really different," he says. "Alto’s business model is really about creating a highly differentiated experience -- one that our customers and drivers can’t get anywhere else. In exchange for that, we think that we can demand a slightly higher price and a slightly higher wait time from our customers. It’s those two things that allow us to be profitable in a space where profit has been really elusive for quite some time."
Although Alto is not considered a tech company, it relies heavily on technology to coordinate the experience that drivers and passengers receive in its expanding fleet of vehicles.
As Alto's Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Campos explains it, technology plays a crucial role in the success of the company. It's what's helped Alto expand into new markets, and what sets it apart from other growing businesses.
"We are a technology-enabled company, [but] we’re not specifically a tech company," Campos says. "That said, the technology is the backbone that runs everything. Once you get anything beyond one market and a handful of cars [and] drivers, to scale it all, to get those economies of scale, you have to have the technology supporting that. So, for the first few years since our inception, we spent a lot of time focusing on the passenger experience and the driving experience. Now, we’re focusing on the full logistics platform that provides Alto the ability to expand to new markets."
Alto currently operates in six cities: Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Washington D.C., and San Francisco.
"Launching Alto in a new market is a really unique launch strategy because it’s not like we’re a company where we can put our product up online and anyone can buy it anywhere and we can ship it," Halbardier says. "We really have to launch in a way that we enter a city and really even kind of pick a neighborhood. In that way, we can also spend our marketing dollars more effectively."
It's a strategy that appears to be working. Alto has expanded by almost double in 2022, and it has aspirations to continue life in the fast lane through 2023 and beyond.
But even with this national expansion, Coleman sees many benefits to being based in Texas.
"First is access to talent," he says. "Here in Dallas, we see that we’re able to attract and retain incredible people at, frankly, a lower cost than you could in many other major cities. Dallas is attracting young talent, mature talent -- people with a lot of experience from across different industries. Dallas has always really been a transportation hub. [We have] Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, BNSF Railways. There's lots of companies here that have been disruptors in the travel industry. We've been really excited to be able to build on that legacy."
Whether a company started in DFW or relocated here at some point along their journey, if you know of a business headquartered in the North Texas region that you believe is Trending in Texas, we'd love to hear from you! Please e-mail us at trending@wfaa.com for coverage consideration.