Taxi Driver Online

The Sunday Times (London)

March 22, 2009

Taxi advertising pioneer hails the drive and inspiration of Victor Kiam;
Asher Moses founder of Taxi Promotions HOW I MADE IT

A VOICE on the radio changed Asher Moses's life. The taxi driver took a new direction after hearing Victor Kiam who, according to his advertisements, liked Remington shavers so much he bought the company.

"I was outside Pizza Hut waiting for my wife, feeling miserable," said Moses.

"Our flat had fallen into negative equity and I was living at my mother-in-law's while we rented it out. Then on the radio Victor Kiam said, 'Look at what you have got and maximise its opportunities.' It was a real light-bulb moment.

I said, what have I got? And I realised that I had a taxi." Moses drove his cab at night. During the day it was standing unused, so he started renting it out to another driver.

With the extra money he was able to buy another cab, which he rented out round the clock. With the additional cash he made he was able to buy another cab, and then another, until four years later he had a fleet of 97 taxis.

Moses and his two brothers grew up in Hackney, east London, where his mother was a nursery teacher and his father worked in a zip factory.

He left school on his 16th birthday and did a four-year apprenticeship as an electrician. Then he started managing properties on behalf of professional landlords, doing repairs and converting houses into flats.

At 25 he started training for the taxi driver's exam, the Knowledge. He then spent the next six years driving his cab until he heard Victor Kiam's message.

While Moses was adding to his taxi fleet, he offered to promote a Jewish charity called Drugsline by advertising it on the side of his cab. He painted the words "Charlie, weed, crack, smack.

Don't let drugs ruin your life. Call Drugsline" on the door and put a skull and crossbones on the back.

A few days later he was stopped in the street by a crew from Channel 4 asking if they could film his cab. Moses realised he had a marketable concept. "I thought, if I can do that for the Drugsline charity, I can do it for any charity," he said. "I realised there were loads of charities that needed to raise their profile."

Fired up with enthusiasm for the potential of his cabs, Moses then had the idea of using them to promote tourism in America by decorating 50 cabs in the style of the 50 US states. As part of the concept, each driver would visit the state he was promoting so he could chat about it with his passengers. Moses called the US embassy and was put in touch with the Visit USA organisation, which agreed to his idea and gave him £385,000 (¤409,150) to make it happen.

Moses also decided that ads on his taxis would work for First Direct, the telephone bank that had just been launched. When the bank refused to arrange a meeting, Moses simply painted a cab anyway, fitted it out with a phone that connected straight to First Direct, and drove it up to the bank's head office. Moses said the directors loved the idea, although the deal eventually fell through because he did not have an established trading record.

By now convinced his idea had a future, Moses brought in a business partner, Leigh Philips, who also ran a fleet of taxis. They put the two fleets together to create a base of 210 cabs and, while Philips ran the cabs, Moses got to work finding more advertising to put on the side of them. He started to focus on the travel and tourism sector and was soon advertising holiday destinations from Malaysia to Greece. "As I sold an ad I would use the money as a deposit and buy another cab," he said.

When Philips unexpectedly died from cancer at the age of 33, however, Moses sold his entire fleet. "I was spending all my time changing tyres and fixing indicators - basically doing anything except the thing I was good at, which was sales," he said.

Moses decided to focus purely on advertising and today owns the rights to advertise on 1,600 black cabs in London, Manchester and Edinburgh. This year his company Taxi Promotions will have a turnover of £3m.

Now 45 and married with two children, Moses said: "Success for me is based on having small successes and then building on that. Once I achieved some success, I doubled the size of that success.

"I had so many hours to consider strategy and talk to people. It was an amazing atmosphere within the cab for me to brainstorm and create my business."

He has this advice for budding entrepreneurs: "If you have the opportunity to have a go for yourself, take it - but commit to it, stay focused and believe in yourself and your intuition. The minute you have doubts is the minute you will have failure. You have to feel positive about what you do. I had always had ideas, but I was always too scared to communicate them. Once I started to communicate them, people began to like them."

Rachel Bridge
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