Turn Idle Coaches Into Charter Demand

A coach sitting in the yard still costs you money.

The finance payment, insurance, storage, yard space. All of it keeps running whether the wheels are rolling or not.

An unsold date in the off-season is revenue you never get back.

Most operators treat that as weather. Something that happens to the business. Bill Mulligan argues it is something you build, months ahead, on purpose.

Quick Answer

Bill Mulligan, Partner and President of Caffeine, says charter demand is structurally built, not seasonal, and is planned months before a buyer ever calls. In the Idle Assets Lead to Lost Revenue webinar, he lays out three steps, done in order: be findable where buyers research, know your top 20 target accounts by name, and put follow-up on a set schedule. Operators who do all three sell next year’s weekends now, know their cost per booked charter, and choose which trips to take.

How Do Motorcoach Operators Turn Idle Coaches Into Structurally Built Charter Demand?

Motorcoach operators turn idle coaches into charter demand by treating demand as something they build months ahead, in a fixed order: be findable where buyers research, know the 20 accounts that matter most, and put follow-up on a schedule the sales team doesn’t have to remember. Bill Mulligan calls the operators who do this proactive. The rest are order takers, waiting for the phone to ring and hoping the people who find them fill the calendar. The five answers below follow the webinar’s own sequence.

1. Charter Demand Is Built Months Ahead, Not Drummed Up in a Week

Charter demand is structural, and the dispatch report two weeks out is too late to change it. Bill Mulligan’s first point in the webinar is that charter is not a seasonal function tied to fall foliage, ski season, or college athletics. “Charter demand is structurally built. It is planned months before the call,” he says, and for some operators it takes a year or two to get fully humming. An operator who notices idle buses on a dispatch report and tries to fill them in the coming weeks is reacting to a decision the buyer made months earlier.

The cost of getting this wrong shows up in two places. The first is the yard: finance payments, insurance, and storage run whether the coach moves or not, and an unsold off-season date is revenue you never recover. The second is harder to see. Bill Mulligan points out that CDL driver hiring is one of the biggest limits on growth in the industry, and “the more your buses are rolling,” the more trips and tips a driver earns, which makes you the more attractive employer when drivers weigh other offers.

Demand you build in advance keeps coaches and drivers working.

2. Be Findable Where Buyers Research, Because They Never Call the Operator They Skipped

The first step is visibility at the research point, and it costs nothing but attention. Nearly every buyer researches before they call, and that research is where they make the shortlist. “If your phone is not ringing, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a trip. That just means that they weren’t calling you,” Bill Mulligan says. “They will never call an operator that they skipped.” The buyer in question is usually someone who has never used you, or an organization that has but whose new coordinator was never handed your name.

Findable means showing up where the planning happens, with more than a company name. Bill Mulligan lists the places to check: what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot say when someone asks who charters coaches in your market; Google Business and Yelp listings; the vetted-partner directories at the buyer’s national association; RFP sources for college athletics; and broker lists, if you want broker business. His advice is to ask the AI assistants yourself, on their deepest research setting rather than a quick one-line answer, and read closely what they recommend about your market.

The second half of findable is friction. “There should be absolutely no friction on the quote request,” he says, by phone or online. Online tools such as The Bus Network handle most of that for you, but the phone process has to be as solid as the web form. The mystery-shop story in the worked example below shows what three days of silence costs.

Visibility is decided before the phone rings, by people who will never tell you they skipped you.

3. Know Your Top 20 by Name, Because Two or Three of Them Make the Year

The second step is a one-page list of the 20 accounts in your market worth the most to you, and Bill Mulligan says this is the step that moves the needle. The method runs against the usual advice. Rank trips by revenue per trip, not by how easy the customer was or whether you enjoyed the run. Include the tour operators and brokers who place trips in your region. Add corporations, athletic programs, weddings, and the SMERF market (social, military, education, religious, and fraternal groups). The full list may run to hundreds or thousands of names. Then cut it to 20.

Those 20 get a different kind of attention. “If you get 2 or 3 of those top 20 groups in the course of a year, you are going to significantly move the needle,” he says, “so most of your effort is not going to be on that list of 400,000.” The 20 are engaged with account-based marketing: personalized communication, not blast email, built on research into who decides, who influences, when they plan, who they used before, and what they have said in reviews about other transportation providers.

The list has one guardrail. It should not include anyone beyond your reach. “Don’t try to reach out to Coca-Cola or John Deere if you are not capable of servicing their business. The worst thing you can do is lose trust by overreaching,” Bill Mulligan says. Attainable and desirable, both.

Twenty names on one page, known intimately, outperform a database of thousands you don’t know at all.

4. Put Follow-Up on a Schedule, So Nobody Has to Remember

The third step is systematizing the communication that goes out, so the top 20 hear from you on a set schedule, “not when you have availability.” Bill Mulligan describes the operators running at full strength as ones whose follow-up is structured, automated, and on a defined calendar, rather than depending on someone finding an email three weeks later and deciding to reply. Tools can pre-draft the emails, generate content, and send on schedule.

What goes in the emails matters as much as the cadence. The message is not a pitch to drive the football team. “You need to give them a reason to read it,” he says. Write about trends in availability, routes, capacity, and dates, and what affects the market, whether or not they book with you. That builds trust, and over months, trust makes you the preferred candidate.

The same structure reaches three other groups. Lapsed customers, which Bill Mulligan defines as regular bookers who have not rebooked in over a year, get a deliberate, personal reconnection rather than “do you have anything coming up?” Quotes that went quiet get a second touch, because “often all they really needed, a couple months later, was a second touch.” And every lead lives in one CRM at the organizational level, not in one salesperson’s inbox; he names the free tiers of HubSpot and Zoho as good enough to start.

A follow-up calendar is the difference between being remembered and hoping to be.

5. Know Your Cost per Booked Charter, Because That Is Where Pricing Power Comes From

The operators at the top of the Sleep Score can state their cost per booked charter without guessing. Not cost per quote, and not the cost of running the trip. The fully amortized cost, internal and external, of acquiring the booking itself. Bill Mulligan says the best operators Caffeine works with can “spit that out,” and that knowing it tells you where to invest to bring it down and which trips are worth running. “We can certainly discount away,” he says, and buses roll with zero profit more often than operators admit.

Once the three steps are working and you know the number, the rest gets easier. Peak dates sell earlier and at a higher price. Fewer coaches sit in the yard midweek and off-season. Outbound happens every week as a program, not when someone finds two hours. Quotes go out on the customer’s schedule, not the sales team’s. And with a full calendar comes the choice Bill Mulligan describes: “You get to quote from what you want to charge, not what you think you have to charge to keep that bus filled.”

When you know what a booking costs to win, you stop pricing from fear.

The Sleep Score at a Glance

The Sleep Score is Caffeine’s nine-question self-assessment for motorcoach operators, scored across four levels: Decaf, Half-Caff, Coffee, and Espresso. The webinar works from its first question: on demand growth, are we reactive or proactive? The four levels below use the Sleep Score’s current wording. When Bill Mulligan recorded the webinar, the levels were named Decaf, Half-Caff, Coffee, and Espresso; the tool has since been renamed Decaf, Half-Caff, Espresso, and Caffeinated, so “espresso” in the recording refers to the top level. Operators score themselves privately and are not asked to share results.

Decaf

Where business stands: Business is asleep.

What it sounds like: We wait for the phone to ring and hope bookings come in.

What Bill Mulligan sees: Order takers. The people who happen to find you fill your calendar, and gaps show up on a dispatch report two weeks out with no way to close them.

Half-Caff

Where business stands: Starting to wake up.

What it sounds like: We’re doing a lot to drive business, but we’re not sure what’s actually working.

What Bill Mulligan sees: Real activity without a fundamental plan. Some progress, but it comes in uneven weeks.

Espresso

Where business stands: The right pieces are coming together.

What it sounds like: We have identified opportunities for growth, but we aren’t consistently focused on the opportunities that will have the biggest impact.

What Bill Mulligan sees: Structural components are in place and starting to fill off-seasons and midweeks that used to sit empty.

Caffeinated

Where business stands: Operating at full strength.

What it sounds like: We know where our best growth opportunities are and actively pursue them.

What Bill Mulligan sees: Next year’s weekends are selling now. The top 20 targets are known by name, type, and likely trip dates. New quote requests arrive because the operator was discovered, “not just remembered.” Follow-up runs on a predefined schedule. Cost per booked charter is known without guessing. And the operator chooses which bookings to take.

One Phone Call, Three Days of Silence

Caffeine mystery-shops the operators it works with, and the results surprise the operators every time. Bill Mulligan describes the setup: an anonymous call asking to move 50 people from point A to point B, on to point C, and back to A over three days. A clean, well-defined trip that any operator would want.

What happens next is the lesson. “It’s interesting to see how often we put in a phone call, we get transferred to someone’s voicemail, and then we wait three days for a response,” he says. “That is friction. And you know what? People who are buying will move on in those three days.”

The same operator’s website may have a quote form that works in thirty seconds. Bill Mulligan’s point is that the offline process has to be as structurally solid as the online one, because the buyer does not care which door they came through. A trip that was theirs to lose went to whoever picked up.

The flip side of that story is the operator who called Bill Mulligan to say they were done taking weddings. They had moved up the Sleep Score far enough that demand let them choose. He does not hold that up as a goal in itself. He holds it up as proof that building demand in advance turns “we’ll take anything” into “we’ll take what fits.”

What You Will Learn

Why an idle coach costs the same whether it moves or not, and why an unsold off-season date is revenue you never get back
Why charter demand is structurally built months before the call, not a seasonal function you can drum up in two weeks
How full coaches help you hire and keep CDL drivers
The one question that separates reactive operators from proactive ones, and the four Sleep Score levels from Decaf to Caffeinated
Where buyers actually research a charter now (AI assistants, business listings, association directories, RFP and broker sources) and why they never call the operator they skipped
How to build a one-page top 20 list ranked by revenue per trip, and why two or three wins from it change the year
What to send your top 20 so they read it, and how to structurally reconnect with lapsed customers and quiet quotes
Why cost per booked charter, not cost per quote, is the number that gives you pricing power

How to Apply This in the Next 90 Days

Bill Mulligan closes the webinar with a 90-day plan an operator can start the following week. It needs no new staff and no new spend. The order matters: visibility first, then targeting, then cadence.

Score yourself honestly. Sit down with your leadership team and complete the Sleep Score. If sales is decentralized by market, score each sales team separately; Caffeine has seen enterprise operators where one market runs green and another runs red.
Build the long lists. List your trips by organization and by type, ranked by revenue per trip. Include tour operators and brokers who place trips in your region.
Run the market research yourself. Ask Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini who charters coaches in your market, on their deepest research setting, and read closely what they say about you and your competitors. Do not stop at a one-shot answer.
Remove quoting friction, online and by phone. Confirm a web quote request takes seconds, then mystery-shop your own phone line. If a caller lands in voicemail, fix that before anything else.
Audit your presence everywhere. Ask an AI assistant to audit your organization across the web and list every discrepancy: misspellings, old addresses, wrong phone numbers, former employees still listed as contacts. Work the list in month two.
Pick and research your top 20. Rank the long list, choose the 20 accounts that are both attainable and desirable, and learn who decides, who influences, and when they plan. Make first contact with several people at each one: the coordinator, the assistant, the receptionist, not only the top name.
Put the outreach cadence in writing. Schedule what your top 20 hear from you and when, and give them content worth reading: trends in capacity, routes, and dates.
Learn your cost per booked charter, then rescore quarterly. Track the fully loaded cost of acquiring a booking, and retake the Sleep Score at least once a quarter to see which levels moved.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Bill Mulligan say charter demand is structurally built rather than seasonal?

Because buyers plan charters months before they call, so the demand on any given date was decided long before the dispatch report shows a gap. In the Idle Assets Lead to Lost Revenue webinar, Bill Mulligan says demand is not a function of foliage, ski, or athletics seasons; it is built through visibility, targeting, and follow-up, and for some operators takes a year or two to fully develop.

What is the Sleep Score for motorcoach operators?

The Sleep Score is Caffeine’s nine-question self-assessment across three areas: idle assets, recurring business, and AI readiness. Each question is scored at one of four levels: Decaf, Half-Caff, Espresso, or Caffeinated. The webinar works from the first question: whether an operator is reactive or proactive about demand growth. Operators complete it privately and can download it from Caffeine’s site.

Where do charter buyers research operators before they call?

Bill Mulligan lists AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot, Google Business and Yelp listings, vetted-partner directories at national associations, RFP sources for college athletics, and broker lists. Buyers shortlist from that research and, in his words, never call the operator they skipped.

Why only 20 target accounts?

Because winning two or three of the right 20 in a year moves the needle more than lightly touching thousands. Bill Mulligan recommends ranking every potential account by revenue per trip, cutting the list to one page of 20 that are both attainable and desirable, and engaging them with personalized, account-based communication rather than blast email.

Should brokers be on the top 20 list?

Bill Mulligan’s view is that brokers can be on the list in the short term if an operator is scoring Decaf or Half-Caff and needs an immediate path to business, but the long-term goal is to move past brokers to higher-margin direct relationships.

What is cost per booked charter and why does it matter?

Cost per booked charter is the fully amortized cost, internal and external, of acquiring one booking, as distinct from cost per quote or the cost of running the trip. Bill Mulligan says operators at the Caffeinated level can state it without guessing, and that knowing it shows where to invest, which trips are profitable, and when to quote from what you want to charge.

What should an operator with multiple markets do differently?

If sales is centralized, complete the Sleep Score once; if it is decentralized by market, score each team. Either way, Bill Mulligan recommends a separate top 20 list for each market and arguably for each yard, since the goal is to keep each yard’s coaches from sitting idle.

Continue the Conversation

The Risk of Waiting for the Phone to Ring. The written version of the webinar’s first argument: buyers research before they call, so the operator who introduces themselves early wins before the comparison starts.
The Risk of Relying on the Same Types of Trips. Why school, sports, and seasonal tourism feel safe and are not, with a three-part test for new audiences. Pairs with the top 20 step.
Why Growth Feels Like Starting Over Every Month. The case for lifetime value over single trips, and why SMERF and corporate accounts carry built-in recurring need. Pairs with the follow-up step.
Why Smart Operators Are Done Waiting on AI. How to pick one costly problem and test an AI tool on it in two hours, which is exactly the market-research and presence-audit work in the 90-day plan.
The Sleep Score. The nine-question self-assessment the webinar is built on. Download it, score yourself with your leadership team, and rescore quarterly.

About Bill Mulligan

Bill Mulligan is Partner and President of Caffeine, a Madison, Connecticut consultancy that helps operators put AI, marketing, and digital tools to practical use. He works directly with motorcoach operators on building charter demand, from visibility and account-based targeting to AI adoption, and writes Caffeine’s operator-focused series on growth and AI. Connect with Bill Mulligan on LinkedIn.

About Caffeine

Caffeine is a creatively charged, strategically focused consultancy in Madison, Connecticut, that helps operators of real businesses, including motorcoach fleets, ski resorts, distributors, and professional-services firms, use AI, applications, websites, and marketing to generate bookings and recurring revenue. Its approach is to start with one specific problem that costs time or money, prove the fix in one place, and build from there. Caffeine is at 897 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT 06443; 203-468-6396; drinkcaffeine.com.

Key Moments

00:46 The biggest financial leak point: buses sitting idle
01:05 What the webinar promises, and the one-question self-diagnostic
01:56 Why a coach in the yard costs the same whether it rolls or not
02:26 Charter demand is structurally built, not seasonal
03:04 The CDL driver connection
03:31 Reactive or proactive: the Sleep Score question
04:42 Decaf to Caffeinated: what each level looks like
05:53 The operator who stopped taking weddings
06:32 What an operator at full strength does differently
08:08 Cost per booked charter, not cost per quote
09:47 What gets easier at the top level, including pricing power
11:13 Three core steps, in this order
11:54 Step one: be findable at the research point
13:02 They will never call an operator they skipped
14:49 Ask the AI assistants who charters coaches in your market
15:30 No friction on quote requests, online or by phone
16:12 The mystery-shop call and three days of voicemail
16:37 Step two: know your top 20
18:44 Two or three of the top 20 make the year
19:11 Step three: systematize the cadence
19:35 Give them a reason to read it
20:25 Lapsed customers and quotes that went quiet
21:48 One CRM for every lead
22:24 The next 90 days
24:43 Download the Sleep Score
25:38 Q&A: operating in multiple markets
26:48 Q&A: should brokers be in the top 20
27:27 Q&A: organizations in multiple parts of the country
28:36 Close

The transcript below has been edited lightly for clarity, speaker identification, and proper names. The audio remains the authoritative version of the conversation.

Full Transcript

[00:46] Bill Mulligan: Today we’re going to talk about essentially one of the biggest financial leak points for operators, which is buses sitting idle. And we’re going to talk about some strategies for how we can prevent that from happening and ensure that we are operating at full capacity.

[01:05] Bill Mulligan: So today, some promises that I’m going to make to you. First, we’ll start with a quick self-diagnostic tool. You’re going to answer this yourself. It’s going to give you the opportunity to diagnose yourself as to where you currently stand in your ability to structurally build charter demand. We’ll then take that and show you what a fully functioning charter booking machine might look like. For operators operating in the green on the diagnostic assessment, we’ll discuss what you need to do to move from red to green, then provide a 90-day action plan you can start next week.

[01:43] Bill Mulligan: All right. So you’ll score yourself in about four minutes going through all of this. Again, you’re not asked to share your scores here, but it allows you to get some perspective on where you currently stand.

[01:53] Bill Mulligan: I don’t necessarily need to talk too much about this, but if a coach is sitting in the yard, it’s depreciating. You’ve got finance payments, you’ve got the insurance components, storage, obviously yard availability. All of that keeps running whether the wheels are rolling or not. And if you have those unsold dates in the off-season, that’s going to be revenue that you will never get back, and it is really the opportunity to build from.

[02:26] Bill Mulligan: We also need to recognize that charter isn’t a seasonal function. It’s not the fall foliage season or the winter ski season or the college athletic season. Charter demand is structurally built. It is planned months before the call, and depending on where you stand as an operator, it might take a year or two to really be fully humming. But it’s not something that is just drummed up in the course of a week or two as you look at your dispatch report and see that you’re going to have some buses idle in the coming weeks.

[03:04] Bill Mulligan: And finally, and this is actually the most interesting one. As we’ve been dealing with many operators about growing their charter demand, one of the things that we’ve come to realize, and everyone in the industry is challenged by, is hiring CDL drivers. As a matter of fact, in some ways, that’s perhaps one of the greatest limiting factors of growth in the industry overall. The more your buses are rolling, the more trips that a driver can get, the more pay and potentially tips that they’re going to get. That makes you more attractive as an operator to CDL drivers who may be considering other opportunities.

[03:31] Bill Mulligan: So I said in the beginning, that one-question diagnostic tool to ask yourself. It comes down to: are you reactive or proactive? And I’m going to introduce you to the Sleep Score assessment. We’ll talk more about that towards the end of the presentation today. But one of the key questions that we ask in that self-diagnostic tool is to get you to assess, in terms of demand growth, are you a reactive operator or a proactive operator? And you can see, as we go from red on the left to green on the right, we provide some frameworks for you to help identify where you might sit in the overall diagnostic scoring, obviously done by color here.

[04:19] Bill Mulligan: As you take a minute and start to think and honestly assess where you sit as an operator, generally speaking, operators can put themselves in one of these four buckets. As you make that assessment yourself, I think we can provide some context of what some of these levels might look like.

[04:42] Bill Mulligan: So if you’re in the red, that full Decaf level, you are essentially order takers. You wait for the phone to ring, and those who find you are going to be the ones who fill your calendar. In any given month, you might notice gaps coming based off of a dispatch report that’s two weeks ahead, potentially 30 weeks ahead, which has some unsold capacity. [Check audio: source reads “30 weeks”; may be “three weeks.”]

[05:06] Bill Mulligan: Obviously there are key differentiators as you start to become more sophisticated at building demand as an operator, ranging from what we call Half-Caff, those who are really starting to do things but don’t really have a fundamental plan. They’re starting to see some progress, but it’s up and down, uneven weeks. Moving on toward those who are really making progress, and they start to have some structural component that’s filling their off-seasons, filling their midweeks in ways that they hadn’t previously. And then those that are really humming. They’re not just taking bookings. They’re actually choosing which bookings they’d like to take.

[05:53] Bill Mulligan: I was working with an operator recently who had started to move up the caffeine level here, and they said, “Bill, it’s been great. Now I’m going to make the choice. I’m no longer going to take weddings.” Okay, that’s great to know. It’s good that you have the ability, based on demand, to now make choices as to which trips you will take and which trips you won’t. So assess yourself. Figure out where you are.

[06:16] Bill Mulligan: We’ll talk more about the Sleep Score at the end of this. It’s a nine-question assessment that you can download at the end. But think about where you actually sit in this caffeinated structure, and we’ll then talk later about what you might be able to do in order to move yourself up the color scheme.

[06:32] Bill Mulligan: So an operator who is running in the green, the weekends are being sold now. And we’re talking about next year’s weekends being sold now. It’s not something that you’re hoping will fill as you get closer to that window. They know the top 20 targets that they most want. They know them by name. They know them by type. They know most likely the dates of the trip. And we’ll talk about why 20 in a little bit. But they can name those 20 groups and can talk about them intimately.

[07:09] Bill Mulligan: The requests are coming in because you were found, meaning that you were visible to someone who actually had not run a trip through you before. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of value in the repeat customer. We’ll talk about that as well. But someone who’s truly operating at that level is receiving new quote requests because they were discovered, not just remembered.

[07:36] Bill Mulligan: As we get further, follow-ups are really happening on a predefined schedule, not based on whether someone in the operator’s marketing or sales team comes across an email and decides that they’re going to respond to it three weeks later, something along those lines. The follow-up component is structured. It’s automated. It happens on a defined schedule. And that way you’re not relying on your customer to remember you when considering the next opportunity.

[08:08] Bill Mulligan: And this is a really interesting one. The ones who are really humming are able to tell you, and just spit out, what their cost per booked charter is. Not cost per quote. Cost per charter. Without guessing. That’s fully amortized. That includes all internal and external expenses. And that isn’t the cost to actually run the trip. This is the cost to actually acquire the booking itself. The best operators that we work with are able to spit that out. And sometimes it takes some time to get there. But if you’re operating at that level, you know what that cost per charter is.

[08:50] Bill Mulligan: The reason why that’s valuable is because then you can know where you can make investments to ensure that you are improving on that cost per booked charter, and where you can continue to operate at a highly profitable level. We can all take trips, right? And we can certainly discount away. And I’ve certainly seen it many times where buses are rolling with literally zero profit opportunity. But we want to get the ones that are going to be highly profitable. In order to understand what’s going to be highly profitable, we assume that we have our operations down and are able to cost a trip fairly well when we quote. But we understand what it took to actually acquire that customer and what costs went into that.

[09:47] Bill Mulligan: When you actually get to that green level, things get a lot easier on a number of different levels. One, peaks we can sell earlier. And by the way, they sell at a higher price. You have fewer coaches sitting in the yard at various points during either a week or a season or whatever that may be. Outbound isn’t an effort. Outbound means reaching out and trying to solicit new business. It’s something that’s happening methodically, programmatically. It’s happening every week. It’s not happening as, “Oh, I found two hours. Maybe I can go and send out an email or put in a phone call.” Quoting is happening instantly, on the customer’s schedule, rather than based on the availability of the sales team.

[10:21] Bill Mulligan: And once you’ve got that schedule full, obviously you now start to have some pricing power. We talked a little bit about that earlier. You get to quote from what you want to charge, not what you think you have to charge to keep that bus filled. You have the opportunity to perhaps walk away from bad rates, from pressures from brokers, whatever it might be. And you start to build some repeat groups that pay for reliability. They pay a premium over, let’s call it, the basic market rate, because they are comfortable with you as a reliable partner. And then finally, you’re making your investments, perhaps money but also certainly time, and everyone’s time is limited, where you know it’s going to convert, where you know it’s going to provide real opportunity for you as an operator, rather than hoping. Closing your eyes and throwing the darts.

[11:13] Bill Mulligan: How do you actually start to move from red to green? From Decaf all the way up the levels. So we’re going to start to outline some of this today. Essentially, there are three core steps. Broadly speaking, we can break this down into hundreds of different individual tactics, but three core steps that you, as an operator, should assess and work on. And we encourage you to do them in this order, and we’ll get into the reason why a little bit. This doesn’t require additional investment from you. It doesn’t require you to add staff in order to be able to do this. It is going to be easy work for you to do. But while it’s easy, it’s also so important to have this foundation for your structural success moving forward.

[12:00] Bill Mulligan: So let’s dig into the first one, which is be findable. Be discoverable by someone who’s researching a charter. If you’re not visible at the research point, where they’re researching, you’re not going to be found. And obviously, when we’re talking about this, we’re talking about customers who have not used you before. Or, honestly, and this happens more often than you think, have used you but forgot who they used. Or while the organization may be the same, the contact person has changed, and they weren’t handed the information for your role with that organization. They don’t have the background or the context.

[12:39] Bill Mulligan: So the important thing is to be found while they are looking and where they’re looking. Because if we evaluate this, nowadays pretty much everyone is doing some level of research before they call. And if your phone is not ringing, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a trip. That just means that they weren’t calling you. They will never call an operator that they’ve skipped in their early research. They will never call an operator that they skipped. So how do we make sure that we get the call? We have to show up where they’re planning the trip, how they’re planning the trip. And we don’t just want to throw out our company name.

[13:23] Bill Mulligan: Let me go back to the operator who said they don’t want to do weddings. If you do want to do weddings, how is your listing showing up? If someone does research for a wedding transportation partner on ChatGPT or on Claude, how does it come up? If they look at Yelp or Google Business listings, how does it look? If they’re going to their national organization and looking for vetted partners, that’s where they’re doing their planning work. And they aren’t just looking for your company name. They’re looking for details and some history about you and your operations experience that they can use as a means of shortlisting operators who will perhaps be the best fit for them.

[14:08] Bill Mulligan: So we want to be listed and current wherever RFPs and broker sourcing may happen. Especially college athletics and things along those lines. The RFP market can be a good structural way to build business and build repeatable business. We all know how much of a pain RFPs can be, but typically they’re a path to regular, sustained revenue. And listen, brokers, you can love them, you can hate them. They do provide a role in generating interest, in generating a contact or a lead for a trip. So we want to make sure that we are listed where they are looking as well, if we do want to take business from brokers. Not saying you should, but if you do want to take business from brokers.

[14:49] Bill Mulligan: We need to make sure that the AI assistants, again, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and some of these, by the way, if you go into Booking.com or Yelp or Expedia, they now have their own AI assistants. We can ask ourselves: who are the charter coaches in our market? And really look closely at it. Don’t use the medium setting on Sonnet or the low-effort mode on ChatGPT, but really allow it to go deep using the Opus levels, the high-effort levels, and see the research it provides. Look closely, read it, determine what it says and how it recommends you go about and approach the market build-up in your territories. [Check audio: source reads “Terra on chassis” at 15:13; rendered as ChatGPT.]

[15:30] Bill Mulligan: There should be absolutely no friction on the quote request. When someone finds you, either by telephone or online, they should have no friction to be able to generate a quote request. If you’re using online tools like The Bus Network or other tools, that friction should be taken care of for you, for the most part. But often we do some mystery shopping work with operators, and it’s always surprising the results we find. We’ll put in a phone call to an operator that we work with, anonymously, and say, “Hey, we want to take a trip for 50 people from point A to point B, going to point C, and back again to point A over the course of three days.”

[16:12] Bill Mulligan: And it’s interesting to see how often we put in a phone call, we get transferred to someone’s voicemail, and then we wait three days for a response. That is friction. And you know what? People who are buying will move on in those three days. So make sure your offline process is as structurally solid as your online process in fulfilling quote requests.

[16:37] Bill Mulligan: Next, knowing your top 20. Now, this one really does move the needle, but it’s kind of odd what I’m about to talk about. It goes against what a lot of people are saying. First step you need to do: rank the trips by your revenue per trip. Don’t look at how easy the customer was, whether you liked the trip, or whether you didn’t like the trip. Make sure you include tour operators and brokers who place trips in your region. Include them as the potential quote contact on all of those things. There’s going to be more to that list. Corporations, athletics programs, weddings. You guys know a lot of this. What’s known as SMERF, the SMERF market: social, military, education, religious, fraternal, et cetera. Make a full list here. And that might be a long list.

[17:20] Bill Mulligan: Know who decides, who influences, and when they plan. There are good tools out there, by the way. ChatGPT and Claude, and I don’t mean to keep hounding on this, but they can help you identify the names of the people who might decide or influence a trip within those groups, and the planning window. That might be a big list, though. It might be a list of a couple hundred, depending on your market. Maybe even more. It could be a couple thousand. I’m not saying you need to make this a multi-week effort. But the interesting part about this is I want you to break it down into one page. Twenty names on that page. And those 20 names are going to be your highest value. Your ranking needs to say those are going to be your highest-value opportunities moving forward. [Check audio: source reads “Township declawed” at 17:28; rendered as ChatGPT and Claude.]

[18:13] Bill Mulligan: They are going to get a different level of communication from you. They should be engaged in what’s known as account-based marketing. You are not just going to send them blast emails. You’re going to send them personalized emails. You’re going to research and know everything about those groups. And again, who decides, who influences, when they plan, what their motivations were, who they used previously, what reviews they have posted online, both positively and negatively, for others in the travel and transportation space. You’re going to know them intimately, and you’re going to communicate with them intimately. [Check audio: source reads “You are just going to send them blast emails”; context indicates “not just.”]

[18:44] Bill Mulligan: Because the truth is, if you get two or three of those top 20 groups in the course of a year, you are going to significantly move the needle. So most of your effort is not going to be on that list of 400,000, whatever it may be. It’s going to be on those 20 names. And in a subsequent webinar we have, I think it’s in two weeks, we talk more in detail about account-based marketing and how to really try to work your way into an organization you have not worked with before.

[19:11] Bill Mulligan: And then the third step. This is where we want to make sure that there is muscle, that you’re practicing, that you’re systematizing the communications that go out. That list of 20, they hear from you on a set schedule. Not when you have availability. There are tools that can help you pre-draft emails and set them on a schedule to send. They can help you generate content for them.

[19:35] Bill Mulligan: When you do this, you’re going to send them communication that’s not about, “Hey, I’m from Summit Stage Lines, and we think we’d be a great operator to take your football team to Missoula University.” You’re not going to send that. You’re going to send information to them that’s valuable. You need to give them a reason to read it. Talk about trends. Trends in availability, trends in routes, capacity, dates. Talk to them about what affects the market, whether or not they choose to partner with you. And you’re doing that because you’re going to build trust, and trust over time ends up making you a preferred candidate. It might not happen in the first month. It might not happen in the second month. But over time, providing them content that they want to read, not necessarily what you want to tell them, is what will make the difference for you.

[20:25] Bill Mulligan: If you have lapsed customers, as we call them, those are groups that booked and haven’t rebooked with you in probably over a year. I should say, those are customers that have booked with you regularly but haven’t rebooked in over a year. We connect with them deliberately, structurally. Reconnect with them, and don’t reconnect with them with, “Hey, do you have anything coming up that we can help you with?” Reconnect with them at more of a personal level, more at a level that they would value rather than that you would value.

[20:56] Bill Mulligan: Follow the quotes that went quiet. You’d be surprised at how many quotes, and we see this all the time, people are putting in quotes for 2027 and you don’t hear anything, and you’re like, “Oh, well, that didn’t go anywhere.” They didn’t necessarily choose someone other than you. Yes, sometimes they chose not to take the trip. But often all they really needed, a couple months later, was a second touch. So have a structural plan to follow up on quotes that went quiet.

[21:24] Bill Mulligan: Some of the service tools, The Bus Network and others, have some automated communication based on when quote requests are received and when the trip actually occurs. It can also be valuable to have a human touch in there as well, because you’d be surprised at how many folks will say, “Oh, thank you for reaching out. I meant to, I got busy, I meant to finish this up. Can you tell me what it might take to complete this booking?”

[21:48] Bill Mulligan: And finally, make sure that you have some sort of CRM, one system that’s holding every lead. So one, it isn’t in just one person’s inbox, and maybe they’re on vacation, or maybe they left the firm, or whatever it might be. Two, there aren’t many places to look for what’s going on. It is very easy and very inexpensive to have a CRM in place, a customer relationship management tool. HubSpot offers free tools that are good. Zoho offers free tools that are good. Implement them and make sure that you’re controlling the activity of these leads at the organizational level, not necessarily at the salesperson level.

[22:24] Bill Mulligan: Next 90 days, here’s what I want you to do. First 30 days, really assess yourself honestly. Make some of these lists that we talked about, by organization and by type, and then do some market research and see what comes up through Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera. Use some deep diving on this. Don’t do what’s known as a one-shot, where you just ask one question and are satisfied with your answer. Really deep dive on these two. This is where you start to build your visibility. Make sure there’s no friction to quoting on your website, and no friction, as we discussed before, if someone calls in. Make sure that your online presence is current, up to date, and accurate. [Check audio: source reads “First 90 days” at 22:26; the plan’s structure indicates the first 30 days.]

[23:05] Bill Mulligan: Ask Claude to do an audit of you as an organization throughout all websites on the internet, and point out any discrepancies. You will find that there are misspellings, the wrong addresses, there’s wrong phone numbers, there’s contact people with their personal cell phone who no longer work there. Get that list and start working to correct it. That’s month two. Then month three, and moving on from there, this is when we’re really going to start to get into some of that account-based marketing. Really rank and decide who those 20 top targets are. Know them intimately. Know who makes the decision in each, who the stakeholders are, who the influencers are.

[23:46] Bill Mulligan: And you’re going to make first contact with all of them. You’re going to make contact with the receptionist, and you’re going to make contact with the sales coordinator, and you’re going to make contact with the assistant scoutmaster, not just the scoutmaster, or whomever it might be. You’re going to be making contact with multiple people at each organization. You might be having contact with ten people at each organization and building relationships with them. Because if you’ve got your list of influencers right, you know who’s going to move the needle and who’s not for you over time.

[24:21] Bill Mulligan: And then put the outreach cadence in writing. That means you start and begin the process of scheduling how you reach out to them. And then as you’re making progress, get to know that cost per booked charter. Not cost per quote. Cost per booked charter. And then score yourself on that caffeinated level at least quarterly, and let’s move you up from one of the oranges, or into the yellows, and into the green.

[24:43] Bill Mulligan: So here’s the Sleep Score. You’re going to download it. You’ll fill it out yourself. I’m not going to know what you filled out there. There are nine questions, rather than just the one that I’ve shown. We’re going to talk about each of those questions over the coming weeks. But really take a minute. Go to drinkcaffeine.com, take a minute, work with your leadership team, sit down, and make that honest assessment of where you stand. From there, you’ll be able to determine what the appropriate next steps are.

[25:16] Bill Mulligan: Finally, if you do have any questions or challenges, I always like talking to operators. Sometimes I learn. But I’m always happy to share my knowledge when talking to operators about what challenges they’re seeing in terms of their charter growth. There are many obstacles to charter growth. It’s not necessarily an easy road to drive, but there are also some great opportunities in front of us.

[25:38] Attendee question (read by Bill Mulligan): What should I do if I operate in multiple markets? [Check audio: confirm whether questions were read aloud by Bill or asked by a moderator.]

[25:41] Bill Mulligan: Well, I think there are a couple of facets to that response. One is, is the sales function still driven by one central organization or team, or is it decentralized, perhaps by market? If it’s decentralized by market, at that point you should probably do the assessment for each sales team, because we’ve seen cases for bigger enterprise-level organizations where some markets’ sales teams are very structured and disciplined; I’d consider them yellow or green on the Sleep Score, and then some different markets are red, yellow, and orange on the Sleep Score. So keep that in mind.

[26:23] Bill Mulligan: But if they are centralized, you can go through the exercise and do it just once. However, as we look at that account-based marketing, you’re probably going to want to have a top 20 list for each market. Even if it is a centralized sales team, you’re probably going to want a top 20 list for each market, and I’d make an argument for a top 20 list for each yard, because the goal here is to keep those idle assets from sitting in the yard.

[26:48] Attendee question (read by Bill Mulligan): Should brokers be part of our top 20?

[26:51] Bill Mulligan: I have my personal feelings on this, and I’m trying not to share them. They can be. Rank them in terms of the value. I would say for the long term, you don’t want them to be on your top 20 list. But for the short term, depending on where you currently sit in the Sleep Score, if you’re in that red or orange and you feel as though that is an immediate path to business, you could put a broker on that account-based marketing list and keep them. But know that your goal is to move past the brokers, because that’s ultimately where you’re going to be able to get higher margin and have increased profitability. So just keep that in mind.

[27:27] Attendee question (read by Bill Mulligan): What happens if the organization is in multiple parts of the country?

[27:31] Bill Mulligan: All right. So a quick thing I should say about account-based marketing. Your list should not include someone that is beyond your reach. I know there are some folks on this call that have six or seven buses in their fleets. I see some that I know have thousands in their fleet. Don’t try to reach out to Coca-Cola or John Deere if you are not capable of servicing their business. The worst thing you can do is lose trust by overreaching. Try to determine on that top 20 list who is attainable, who is desirable for you, and reach out to them.

[28:07] Bill Mulligan: I actually don’t know, and if you want to put in a message to me, whether or not you’re a larger operator or a smaller operator. Forgive me, I don’t know you. If you are a larger operator, it is okay to try to serve multiple markets. Usually what we see, not all the time, but usually what we see is there is some central decision maker at more the national or regional level to reach out to. And it is okay to focus on multiple markets within one organization. Having that sort of attack on many fronts can be helpful.

[28:36] Bill Mulligan: I appreciate you all joining. And again, feel free to download the Sleep Score, the nine-question self-diagnostic tool. I think you’ll find it valuable. Appreciate you joining. I hope to see you in two weeks. [Check audio: source ends mid-sentence at “see you in two.”]

Motorcoach Marketing Strategist Bill Mulligan Reveals How Operators Can Turn Idle Coaches Into Structurally Built Charter Demand