Bay city rollers

THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW/Ivan Lamont, GoCar Tours:The Irishman with a stake in a San Francisco go-cart tour company

An Irishman, an Englishman and a Scotsman set up a company together but this isn't any joke. GoCar Tours in San Francisco, a self-guided go-cart tour company which they founded in 2004, achieved revenues of more than $1 million last year.

They've also expanded into San Diego and franchised the idea to operators in Miami, Washington DC and Barcelona.

The idea that Irishman Ivan Lamont, Nathan Withrington and Alasdair Clements have turned into a money spinner is deceptively simple. They hire out fibreglass go-carts equipped with MP3 players which play tour information and directions triggered by a global positioning system (GPS) as tourists drive on a pre-determined route around a city.

The idea was so deceptively simple that when Withrington approached Lamont to source the technology to power the service, he thought he would be able to write the necessary software in a matter of hours. In the end it took him eight weeks. The original version was eventually scrapped, with Lamont starting from scratch coding a version that runs on Windows.

Although GoCar Tours has enjoyed fairly rapid growth, it has not been without its teething problems, primarily because it was pushing the boundaries of how GPS was being used. Initially, they located the antennas to receive the satellite signal in the back of each car. It was only after repeated faults when two cars went out together that they figured out that the antennas interfered with each other.

GoCar Tours launched with eight cars but now has 44 in San Francisco, which Lamont says are fully utilised for the 100 days of the Californian summer. Hire is open to anyone 21 or over who holds any international driving licence.

The company charges $44 for the first hour, $34 for the second, with each additional hour $24. After five hours there is no further charge.

The highly visible three-wheel go-carts have proven to be one of the most successful elements of marketing for the company, which is helped by their location adjacent to Fisherman's Wharf - one of the most visited locations in the city.

Despite the fact the go-carts travel on the public highways of San Francisco, which have their fair share of SUVs and other large vehicles, Lamont says no one has yet been injured taking a tour.

"We've lost a couple of fibreglass nose cones and we get about one rollover a year but the cars have a roll-cage and the passengers wear a helmet and seat belt," he says.

A holding company called Open Planet Group holds the patents in the GoCar technology and also licenses the system to franchisees who want to set up a tour business in their city. Miami was the first franchise to go live, and GoCar will make its European debut this year in Barcelona.

"They are currently recording the tour and plan to be up and running for the summer," says Lamont. "We aim to provide a 'business in a box' to our franchisees."

He says this is the start of an aggressive move into southern Europe - the climate in northern Europe is too seasonal, so he says a launch in Dublin is out of the question - certainly with the current car which has an open cockpit.

With the current weakness of the dollar the company is also keen to move into "non-dollar denominated countries" and is looking at opportunities in the Middle East and Australasia.

Open Planet is also developing tools that would allow anyone to create their own tour at low cost. Lamont says the big opportunity for this business will be when all mobile phones ship with GPS as standard.

Given the background of the founders it's only natural that internet marketing has been key to the company's success.

It has a partnership with travel site Expedia, whereby travellers who book a trip to San Francisco are automatically asked if they would like to book a GoCar Tour.

Despite the success to date, the three founders still only draw down modest salaries, according to Lamont - primarily to invest in their expansion plans.

It's that kind of attitude that he says explains why he decided to go into business with fellow expats.

"Americans think they are entitled to a business which means they don't work as hard," says Lamont.

"We have the European/Irish work ethic - we know we have to work at it."