Today it has over 3.000 buses, operates in more than 300 cities in the Americas and Canada and serves more than 2 million passengers a year.
His regular customers are Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, the country's biggest banks, universities, the Fortune 500 giants, and even the NFL.
In 2017, Shofur was ranked No. 21 of the 5.000 fastest growing US companies, with revenues of $ 12,1 million.
Armir Harris is now one of the hottest names in Silicon Valley, as his app changed the map of mass travel since its inception in 2013.
His startup is now valued at $ 100 million and he is richer than he could ever have imagined, recording growth rates that many out there would envy. Annual growth of 10.448% in the last three years, that is!
It would be another success story that we often see with visionary kids thirsting for greatness claiming and achieving their own place in the world.
Only the "hot" CEO has a different story to tell. That is, how he transformed from a political refugee into a leader of a company of many millions.
How he acquired a personal fortune of $ 13 million, according to Bloomberg, and finally bought a house for his mom…
Armir Harris arrived in the US as political refugee, before transforming into the ultimate embodiment of the American dream. "My first memories are of Albania, it is a beautiful country, but in the 1990s a civil war broke out," he recalled in an interview with Inc. magazine a few years ago.
As a child, he did not quite understand what was happening, but he saw the violence in the streets and the fear of enveloping everyone. And his parents forbid him to go to school, spending 8-9 months locked in the four walls.
In 1996, the mother took Armir and his sister by the arm and sought political asylum in the United States. They finally arrived in St. Louis with $ 2.000 in their pocket. They sometimes lived in hospitality structures and sometimes in parks or under bridges. The mother washed dishes and cleaned restaurants to feed her children.
"Despite the fact that we were homeless and the weather was difficult, we had each other," he fondly recalls those ruthless moments.
A turning point in his life in 1998, when he immigrated to New world and his uncle and they all went to live together in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was a professional driver and worked as a taxi driver in America, but at one point he was busy with buses.
And he hired 15-year-old Armir and his mom. Mom cleaned the buses and the little one did everything else. When he became an adult, he got a professional diploma to fill the buses at the gas station and be ready for the drivers.
But he learned the HTML code himself and set up a website for his uncle for his business. Before all this happened, the helpless young man had loved tennis. The tennis he learned while sleeping in the parks of St. Louis and borrowing rackets to have something to do all day.
By the time he enrolled in high school, he had gone to any tennis academy for free. And he had become quite good. Then he found a coach who agreed to train him without money, as part of a charity event for children. He would soon be taking part in tennis tournaments across the country and in 2006 he became one of the good names in the American federation.
Not that he ever got a high school diploma. He attended High School for 1,5 years, but in his hands he had a paper from a home education program. That's all he needed to get accepted to Boston University, which gave him a scholarship to join the college tennis team.
But he was not good enough to become a professional tennis player. "I was good, but I was not so good," he recalls. With an out-of-frame sports career, he loved real estate.
He got a broker license while studying and now he has turned it into finance. He was really good there! Now he was cleaning even $ 5.000 a month.
"Without the tennis scholarship and despite the financial help I received, one thing was clear: how university it was unimaginably expensive. Loans began to accumulate. It didn't make sense to me. "
When he saw that he would be disproportionately charged, mortgaging his future, he interrupted his studies to focus on real estate somewhere better. In Los Angeles…
The 26-year-old moved to California in 2009. And he fell face down at work. At one point he went to UCLA to enroll, taking classes from Boston. So he was spending his time now, working and studying.
And three courses before graduation, he dropped them all! "I had all the education, I learned what it was to learn, I did not want to continue to borrow money for my studies." On a trip home he went for a walk from the family business with his uncle's buses and limousines and saw that he could help him.
So he finally returned to Charlotte in 2012, just in time for their Conference Democrats that would take place in the city. A member of the faction called his uncle looking for 60 buses for the needs of the conference. No one could find so many coaches at the last minute!
Armir would not miss such an opportunity. He started calling companies and individuals from neighboring cities and states later. They asked him to send them an email. Then they asked him other questions via email. It took 2-3 days to close a bus. It was a boring job that broke him up.
But it gave him a good idea. An online marketplace where you can register your bus and your availability to be found easily and quickly. A national market that simplifies things and situations.
The following year its implementation was ready. Name the startup Shofur, a platform where you book online buses for every occasion and watch their route in real time.
It cost him $ 800, that much he had on hand. And he threw it all in his business. The drivers responded and gave him the necessary liquidity from the beginning so that he would never have to turn to investment funds.
Several thousand buses now roam the US and Canada with their logo on them, while none owns them. It only takes a small percentage of what drivers charge their customers.
In fact, it does a lot more, ensuring the safety of vehicles and the ability of drivers. That is why until today, in the 6 years of operation of Shofur, its accident index is… zero! Despite the 10 million kilometers that the cooperating coaches have deleted.
"It's all about our technology," he told a technology conference recently. Each bus has sensors and GPS, to connect to the system that Armir and his employees scammed and to know exactly where it is moving and under what conditions. An artificial intelligence system that collects and analyzes data from more than 1.000 bus companies in real time.
Its platform serves not only conferences, parties and group travel, but also anyone who needs a bus for something. It is enough to be legal. The readiness of its mechanism and its innovative way of operating proved to be saviors and in fact multiple.
When the US Civil Protection Agency (FEMA) urgently needed to evacuate 10.000 people from Florida, Georgia and South Carolina in 2016, with the devastating Hurricane Matthew that devastated Haiti approaching dangerously fast, it knew what to do. in Shofur!
FEMA knew who to turn to when Hurricane Irma struck in 2017 and Hurricane Harvey a little later. A few thousand people were transported with a few clicks, without fear, without panic.
As for the uncle, he turned out to be a more traditional businessman than the nephew would have liked. When he founded Shofur, he suggested that he liquidate everything and set up the startup together. "It simply came to our notice then Albanian who did not understand technology ".
However, he acknowledges that he was the man who taught him everything about buses and how to do business with them. And despite being an independent company, Uncle Buses often collaborates with the startup of millions.
Armir studied with his sister doctor and bought his mom, "who lives abroad, somewhere very nice", a house of her own. Thanks to her own sacrifices, everything was done…