Alex Lepe
Business ideas come easy to Austin Patry. He has a list of 70 he maintains on his iPhone. “Whenever I think of something, I write it down,” Patry, who graduated from TCU’s Neeley School of Business in May, says.
Nice finish. Patry had a bad experience with a parking valet two years ago, and he went home and sketched out the beginnings of his Voila Valet, a mobile app that lets valet customers pay, tip and keep track of their cars. Finished with early tests of his app for Apple users, he’s developing one for Android. Then he’ll pitch the app to valet companies for a pilot test. Valet companies will love the app because it’ll make the business more efficient and help eliminate employee theft; employees will get higher tips, Patry says.
And then there’s the food trailer, Rollin’ n Bowlin.’ Patry and partner Sophia Karbowski, a just-minted Neeley graduate he met in class last fall, spent six months developing the basis of what they think can be a franchise-worthy healthy fast-food business. Rollin’ n Bowlin’ serves up 18-ounce thick fruit smoothies topped with fruit and granola and rich with superfoods and acai seed known for its antioxidants. Patry and Karbowski are seeking permits for a trailer they bought on Craigslist and, before the end of April, catered three events, prepping the smoothies at other locations. Their target launch: August.
“I’ve always grown up around food, and I’ve always had a passion for it,” says Patry, 21, whose father was in restaurants and grandfather emigrated from France and opened a French restaurant in Dallas. “Being here [Fort Worth] for four years, there wasn’t anything around here I craved that I could walk to.”
The valet app presents two key revenue streams. Valet companies would pay monthly fees to link to it. And valet users would pay convenience fees of 50 cents per transaction. The valet company records the car’s vehicle identification number and driver’s name; that establishes an account for future use. Customers can pay and tip by card, or pay cash and use the app to request their car.
Finding a designer was the first hurdle. Patry met a group of designers through family connections, but “they said it would cost $100,000,” he says. One of the group’s spouses is a software developer, and Patry convinced him to work at a substantially lower price. “It wasn’t a huge investment,” he says, declining to say what he paid.
Patry, whose older brother works in oil and gas, has invested in Voila Valet. The Bill Shaddock Investment Fund, which provides capital to student-run businesses at TCU, has granted $13,000.
For Rollin’ n Bowlin’, Patry is looking to raise $20,000-$25,000 startup costs, of which he and Karbowski still need about $15,000. They’re running a $8,000 crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The money would go toward buying a generator, deep freezer and pickup to tow their trailer. “We’ve been borrowing trucks,” he says.
The menu includes four bowls at $9 apiece and two cold-pressed juices. Within a year, the partners want to open a store, Patry says. “We want to make it one of the first genuinely healthy fast-food places,” he says. “We think that’s a big untapped market. We want to bring that here and then franchise it out.”