The Birth of 505
In early 2005, co-founders Pete Ruggieri and Dan Ranck were working as Mortgage Brokers and frustrated with the social and business networking organizations in the Lancaster PA area as they were generally stuffy, overpriced, and most importantly -- ineffective. They came up with the concept of an informal group with no dues and no official membership that would meet at local restaurants or bars every other Wednesday for Happy Hour.
Beginning as a networking/happy hour club with the concept of people working until 5:00 and wanting to get to a social setting ASAP, i.e. by 5:05. We adopted 505 as our brand name and the rest is history.
Thus, in the Spring 2005 the "Lancaster 505 Happy Hour Club" was born. In 2007 Central Pennsylvanian Lyndsay Bahn was transplanted to Myrtle Beach South Carolina and founded the "Myrtle Beach 505" Chapter. In April 2008, the Dallas 505 was created by Brian & Sondra, who are also transplants to the Lone Star State from Southeastern PA. What's next? 505 Down Under perhaps?
Each week the numbers of attendees would grow so the 505 created a simple website and mailing list to keep its "members" informed of the date and location of the next function. After a while, local restaurateurs, bar owners as well as beer/liquor reps took notice that 505 was drawing decent sized crowd to bars on a typically dead Wednesday night and started requesting to partner with 505.
Today the "505 Happy Hour Club" sends out a weekly newsletter via email to over 3000 subscribers and has a great new social networking site called www.505Space.com where folks can create their own profile and mingle with other 505ers worldwide. 505 also works with partner restaurants, bars and businesses to help grow their businesses. Oh, and they still go to Happy Hour every Wednesday. ;)
In early 2008, Pete and Dan adopted 505 as our brand name (or number), created 505 Marketing and continued to grow from there with our marketing, advertising and promotion within the Hospitality Industry and have now expanded our service to include creation of websites, providing professional voice-over services, providing discjockey entertainment services and now our newest service, Text Message Marketing. The Text Message Marketing service is so versatile, that it can be beneficial to many types of businesses outside of the Hospitality Industry as well.
With the launch of 505 Text Marketing, we are in the process of expanding our footprint to grow outside of the Central Pennsylvania Region. We believe that 505 Text Marketing will be a valuable tool in the growth of business revenues for our clients for the remainder of 2008, as well as years to come.
