#048 - Today we visit with Maurice Brewster, Founder and CEO of Mosaic Global Transportation, a B2B limousine and ground transportation company that provides services for corporate clients.  Mosaic has 137 employees, 114 vehicles, and provides ground transportation services in over 440 cities worldwide.

Maurice started out in 2002 with one vintage Rolls Royce.  He was the driver, the car cleaner, the janitor, the bookkeeper, the salesperson, and the customer service rep. He quickly grew to 13 vintage Rolls Royces, which was the largest fleet in the country at the time.  Mosaic was the go to Rolls Royce vendor for weddings, but Maurice made his first of four pivots when he realized that he could not scale the business.

“for some crazy reason Anthony brides didn't want to get married on a Tuesday.  Now, personally, I think Tuesday's a beautiful day, but they didn't want to get married on Tuesday.  So what in essence happened was the cars just sat Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.  They were going out crazy on Saturdays and Sundays, but I couldn't scale the business, so we had to switch to a more garden variety ground transportation.”

The FIRST pivot was picking up people at hotels in Palo Alto and transporting them to Stanford and around the Silicon Valley.  The SECOND pivot was becoming a seamless one stop shop national transportation company.  The THIRD pivot was to provide employee shuttle services.  And the FOURTH pivot is to become 100% electric by 2030.

At the height of the pandemic, Maurice connected with FEMA and offered to transport essential workers for FREE.  To make this work, his employees had to agree to volunteer their time to drive these folks around - almost all of them did.  Maurice credits treating his employees as family and giving them opportunities as a differentiator in his business.

“the differentiation with us has everything to do with how we treat our employees. If we have employees that are happy - you know the old saying, if you wake up every morning happy, you'll never work a day in your life.  That's kind of the philosophy that we have, that we're a business and we are here to make money, but we're also here, my wife and I, are also here in building this business to make opportunities for the employees that work for us.”

Be sure to listen until the end to hear Maurice’s advice on establishing banking relationships before you need the money.