By Keysha Drexel
Journal editor
Millions of college students across the country will head back to campus next month, and a company co-founded by a Vestavia Hills High School graduate is hoping to help the students and their parents with the heavy lifting involved in the back-to-school routine.
Campus Bellhops, co-founded by Stephen Vlahos in 2010, provides the moving muscle for college students and their parents. The company recently expanded to offer its services in 50 college towns across the country.
Vlahos and fellow Auburn University graduate Cameron Doody started the company after being called on several times to help move friends in and out of college dorms, apartments and fraternity and sorority houses.
“We were those guys that everyone always called begging for help to move,” he said. “We were brainstorming about how to start our own company and came up with the concept of a moving company for college students.”
Vlahos, who has a bachelor’s degree in marketing, got his wife, a web designer, to create a website for the start-up business. He asked his younger brother, who was still a student at Auburn at the time, to recruit about 80 of his friends to be “Campus Bellhops.”
Vlahos and Doody said they set an initial goal to have 25 customers that first year. But they were pleasantly surprised when they ended up helping about 250 students move in over a three-day period in 2010.
“We were blown away by the response,” Vlahos said. “At that point, we knew we had a good idea and had to expand it.”
The next year, the company expanded to other southern universities in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Florida.
The company now offers its services as far west as Iowa, north to Pennsylvania and south to Orlando, Fla., Vlahos said.
Campus Bellhops recently received funding from the Chattanooga-based venture capital firm Lamp Post Group, Vlahos said.
“We realized that in order to handle all these reservations that we would need some pretty sophisticated software to help coordinate everything,” he said. “One of the founders of Lamp Post is also from Vestavia and fell in love with our business and said he wanted to help us grow. Lamp Post is a great partner for us.”
Now, the company has more than 2,000 bellhops ready to help students move to and from campus, Vlahos said.
The company charges between $90 and $135 to move one student’s belongings, depending on the number of items that need to be moved.
On the company’s website, parents and students can get tips on how to avoid moving day hassles and view profiles and photos of the two bellhops assigned to their move. Clients also receive this information through email.
“We try to find hard-working, self-motivated students. We get wonderful feedback from moms on how polite, courteous and helpful our bellhops are, and that is what we love to hear,” Vlahos said.
Doody said each bellhop goes through an extensive interview process “so our customers can feel secure they are getting the best of the best.”
Finding the right bellhops and helping them live up to their full potential is another aspect of the business, Vlahos said.
“That’s another thing that is very important to us. We want to be able to give these guys some solid work experience while they’re still in college that will help them down the road,” he said.
The ultimate goal, Vlahos said, is to make sure the bellhops in each college town are providing the same high level of quality service to every customer.
“What we want to create is a brand of student labor across the country where we have the same service in every college town,” he said.
Doody said the company does not micromanage its bellhops.
“If there’s a job at 8 a.m., we don’t tell them to show up at 8 a.m., but instead, we let them jump on those jobs when they become available and really give them the reins of the job,” Doody said. “We put the ball in their court so that the harder they work, the more successful they are.”
Doody said that style of management fits the company well and is something that he thinks more companies will adopt in the future.
“It’s a new way of doing things in that you are trusting people to give their best and to do their jobs well,” he said.
Giving college students a chance to prove themselves is something Doody said he feels is important now that he’s a successful business owner.
“People took a chance on us when we first started this business, and it feels good to be able to give young college guys a chance and empower them,” he said.
During the company’s first two years, Vlahos lived in Cahaba Heights and Doody lived in Birmingham. But with the recent expansion and partnering with Lamp Post Group, the 27-year-old entrepreneurs have relocated to Chattanooga.
Vlahos and his wife moved there in October, and Doody lives, there, too. His wife, an interior designer, splits her time between Birmingham and Chattanooga.
“It’s a really exciting time for the company, and we feel really lucky to be able to do something we really enjoy,” Vlahos said.
Vlahos said he looks forward to getting up and going to work every day and really enjoys being his own boss.
“We’re a very simple service. I mean, we’re not curing cancer or anything, but I know we’re fulfilling a true need that is out there, and that’s pretty fulfilling,” he said.
The company books 90 percent of its appointments in July and August as college students gear up for another school year, Vlahos said.
“We haven’t even hit our peak season, but we already have double the number of jobs lined up than we did last year,” he said.
With its network of bellhops and fully integrated online system, the company is capable of executing hundreds of moves each day in the cities it serves.
That is particularly important, Vlahos said, because about 90 percent of all college students move during the same four-week period prior to the start of the fall semester.
“All in four weeks, student apartment leases expire and thousands of incoming freshmen move to town.” Vlahos said. “What makes us different is that we have the firepower to handle the demand. That, and the fact that everybody loves to work with students.”
Vlahos and Doody said their plan is to continue to grow the company and expand its service areas.
By 2014, the company would like to triple its footprint and offer services in 150 college cities across the nation, they said.
Campus Bellhops offers its services to anyone within a 15-minute radius of the 50 college communities it operates out of, including those who are not students.
For a list of Campus Bellhops locations, services and more information, visit http://campusbellhops.com or www.facebook.com/CampusBellhops.
