Alex Lepe
There must be an entrepreneurial opening for “randomness” in the Fort Worth market, because Rent A Frog Valet founder Warren Prescott has vacated that niche.
“I was the go-to guy for randomness,” Prescott, 42, says.
Next year, Prescott will celebrate his 20th year in business as what’s now Fort Worth’s largest locally owned valet service. Prescott estimates he parks 200,000 cars a year now as the valet for Sundance Square downtown. He has 300 employees. He runs the valet for the Crowne Plaza Invitational at Colonial and has a roster of clubs, museums, restaurants, entertainment venues, churches, and TCU events as clients.
And Prescott readily acknowledges he typically has the highest valet rates in town.
“We are not the cheapest,” he says. “We are the most expensive, actually. I always want to be charging the most. That allows me to do a good job with less jobs.”
For what he’s built, Prescott says, “I’m scared every day. I wake up scared.”
Of what? “Losing what I’ve built.”
There was a time when Prescott, who graduated TCU in 1992 with a journalism degree and launched his valet service on the side in 1996 while working in sales for a staffing agency, would have done virtually anything to make money and build his company.
In 1998, Prescott hired his first employee, Jason Murray, a high school buddy from Houston. To save money, they lived together for a few years in a small apartment in southwest Fort Worth.
“We had two king-size beds butted up against each other, with a barrier of pillows in between us,” Murray, who worked for Prescott for three years and now works for his in-laws at The Mulholland Cos. graphics company on Fort Worth’s North Side, recalls.
To appear busy in the early years, Prescott would pay employees to stand on Hulen Street with signs promoting fake valet service at non-existent clients. “The best way to grow the business was to be seen,” Prescott says.
In time, demand for “randomness” surfaced. “The title of the company at the time never stated valet service,” Murray points out. “We just got the reputations of good clean-cut guys who would do just about anything, legally.”
They drove clients’ cars to California and, for one customer, between Fort Worth and a vacation home in Michigan during the summers.
The trick: They had to shuttle a gigantic Irish Wolfhound on the Michigan trips.
“On his back legs, he was like seven feet tall,” recalls Murray, who drove the dog on one of the trips and accidentally scared a motel maid with it. “I couldn’t even see out the back mirror, the dog was so big.”
On one of his own drives with the dog, Prescott recalls the dog was fond of nuzzling up to his caretakers at night. “It was like sleeping with a hairy man,” he says.
One holiday season, Murray accepted $20 per hour to walk around in a turkey suit at an Arlington restaurant whose owner was giving away Thanksgiving turkeys to employees. Murray and another team of valets braved a wedding reception at Lake Worth where drunken groomsmen shot bottle rockets at them.
One client called to ask the Frogs to remove a dead mouse she accidently ran through the rinse in her dishwasher. “We opened up the dishwasher, and there were mouse parts everywhere,” Murray says.
And another time, a landlord called the Frogs to ask them to clean out the rent home of a hoarder tenant she had just evicted. “We got the garage open, and there were 50 cats,” Murray says, adding he remembers Rent A Frog declined that job.
But it’s been awhile since the Rent A Frogs readily accepted those kinds of jobs. Which doesn’t mean the phones have gone silent.
One woman called earlier this year to say she wanted the Rent A Frogs to wake up her two sons every morning for the rest of the school year so they could get to school on time. Prescott bid $50 per day per boy. The woman declined.
“We don’t take those kinds of jobs anymore,” Prescott says.
Alex Lepe
Prescott got his introduction to the business through a college job as a valet, which he credits to the work ethic of his father, who owned a legal headhunting company. “I was expected to provide my own spending money, my own gas money in school,” he says.
Once he launched his company, it took several years for Prescott to feel as if he was making progress. He launched the service in December 1996 after his staffing agency exited a valet service it had been offering. “I wasn’t married, I had no kids, I had (business) relationships, but I had no accounts,” Prescott says.
His biggest problem: cash flow. He made $8,000 or $9,000 a year in those first few years. He’d do a job, but not get paid for 30-45 days.
“I had the expenses right away,” he recalls. “W-2, payroll taxes. That hurt. I never felt like I was ahead for the longest time.”
He calls Murray’s hiring the company’s first big turning point; at the time, Prescott was still working the company on the side. Murray’s hiring meant somebody fulltime was helping manage it.
The pivotal event came in 2000, when a friend convinced Prescott to splurge on software that automated management and let employees — many of them students — decide their own schedules online so Prescott and Murray no longer had to call employees to fill schedules.
Prior to that, “we had a three-ring binder,” Murray recalls. We’d call every (employee) on our list. We were on the phone constantly. That red folder was our lives.”
“Getting this information into the hands of our employees allowed us to grow our business,” Prescott says. “It was a game changer. I wasn’t spending time (anymore) trying to get jobs filled.”
In 2003, the company landed the Colonial golf tournament business on what Prescott says is still a handshake agreement with no contracts.
Technology has also made the customer experience more pleasant. A customer who leaves her car at the Sundance valet, for example, can send a text message to the valet station before she’s ready to leave and have the car brought around.
Prescott estimates Rent A Frog parks “hundreds of thousands of cars” per year now. He doesn’t disclose his sales for competitive reasons.
The company’s regular clients today include the Fort Worth Club, Ridglea Country Club, restaurants like Ellerbe’s and La Piazza, the Kimbell, Modern Art, and Amon Carter museums, and Casa Mañana. Rent A Frog also supplements the valet services of Rivercrest Country Club and Bass Hall.
Rent A Frog also donates about $50,000 in valet services per year to organizations such as the Lena Pope Home, Boys & Girls Clubs, and Gary Patterson Foundation, Prescott said.
Rent A Frog’s management staff includes three employees at the company’s Camp Bowie Boulevard offices, one downtown for the Sundance business, and six weekend supervisors who’ve been with the company for more than 10 years.
Prescott says he’s no longer in the mode of pursuing business.
“I don’t solicit business,” he says. “It’s hard enough to do a good job with what’s on our plate.”
And as Fort Worth continues to grow, he and competing valets will grow, he said. “We all make our business on volume.”