Taxi Driver Online

I am looking for any advice that anyone can give me in regards to setting up a fully functioning taxi office.
The area i live in is Wrexham, there are 8 offices working the town centre, all of different size and driver numbers. There are about 8 offices on the outskirts in the little villages so as you can see there is alot of competition about.
I would like to know:
1. Would you be able to setup just a call centre with no walk in trade and become a busy office, has anyone done this?
2. How do you reduce costs. The biggest cost i can see is paying receptoinists so how do you reduce this without compromising on staff and wages?
3. How do you get drivers to come and work for you if you are just setting up and have little work to begin with?
4. What is the best way to advertise?
5. Does anyone know the cost of getting an advert in Yellow pages?
Any advice that anyone can give me would be great and i would especially like to hear advice from someone who has setup there own office.
Thanks.

1. our office is purely call centre based and we are the busiest and biggest in this neck of the woods. we recently took over a city centre walk-in office but thats only open at the weekend nights. although small companies usually have the traditional office based site where the drivers go back to the office for a cup of tea if its quiet.

2. offer controllers and tele-op jobs to drivers in return for money off their rent. but watch out for feeding their mates and pocketing the good jobs for themselves.

3. best to built up slowly and advertise for drivers when you find your self turning work away. if you try to get too many drivers too quickly you may find they could get fed up waiting around, especially in the week. and if theres not enough work at the weekends to go around, they'll be off to other offices. or giving your company a bad name in the trade by touting to try and make ends meet.

4. radio ads are good but expensive, handing out cards in pubs and hotels is ok . but the best of all is to give a level of service better than the rest of them and let the word of mouth and return customers do the work for you.

5. yellow pages is over rated. a simple box ad starts at £1500 and about £10K for a 1/2 page colour ad. plus the areas the book covers keep getting smaller every year (depending on your areas) so you may need to put ad's in more than one book. dont get suckered by the sales patter, get a price, and stick you a budget. many punters will call all the ad's on the same page regardless of how big the ad is.

what is worth every penny is an easy to remember telephone number. its better to have an easy number that the punters remember off by heart and dont have to look you up in the phone book every time(where they will see all you competition), when you set up the phone ask BT for a list of availble numbers. try to get one with double or tripple numbers or the same numbers repeated. (like streamlines 202020 or ours taxifast 222 222) even the most minging p*ss head wont forget that one. it makes me laugh when i see some of the numbers around here. i've been in this game a few years now and even now i still cant remember some of our competitors numbers.

I have been onto BT about a catchy number and they said that when i get a line connected that i can choose from a list of numbers that are available for no extra charge.
The thing that i am trying to work out is that it will cost me roughly £900 to make an office run 24/7, that figure covers receptionists wages and other costs and is only a rough figure.
So if it is possible to build a firm with no walk in trade how do you get started?
I will need to be a driver but would not be able to work 24/7 so how do i make the £900 and enough to pay my mortgage when starting out in the face of all the competition?
I know alot of people complain about the other firms being unreliable so i have been looking into starting with a GPS system, something like the PDA Cordic system, i know its not cheap but it seems the best way forward, any feedback on that booking system?

I would hope that they would.

Rather you than me.

1. In the main you can operate from where you like. If I was you I would just work from home. Provided you don't allow all your cars to park up outside, or there's a big f*** off sign outside, the neighbours will neither know nor mind.

2. You start very low, therefore you have hardly any costs to reduce. You could do call divert to your mobile, then you have no receptionists.

3. Very hard to get drivers to take a wage cut, so I wouldn't even go there. Start small and grow with the work. You could of course buy into another firm.

4. I'm not a fan of yellow pages, but everyone else seems to be. Maybe get a freephone number and send loads of cards out to hairdressers, shops, pubs if your desperate, big business, in fact everyone.

5. In my opinion too much, but give them a ring. the problem is that they only come out once a year, so if you have missed it, then its a long wait for a job.

But good luck and welcome to this wonderful trade.

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IDFIMH

I already run my own taxi firm via the web but i only do a few jobs and most are airport runs.
Due to having a nightmare of a neighbour living in the close where i live i cannot get planning permisson to run more than myself from my house. The neighbour in question thinks that i will have lots of cars calling at my house etc, even when i explained that there would only be myself calling at my house she still complained to the council saying that i would spoil the place.
Because of these problems i need to start somewhere else in an office somewhere and build up from there, its just getting stared thats the hardest problem.
I have looked into buying firms but they want too much money and still run on the old paper and pen system.
Does anybody know what the cordic PDA system is like?

Haven't you some sort of Business Centre, where you can rent a small room, in your locality?

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IDFIMH

The only place where there are offices where there are not really any restrictions of parking is in an industrial estate which is about 2 miles from the town centre, i have thought about getting an office there as it is cheaper than the town centre.
Ideally i would like an office in the town centre but it is all taken up by the other firms and the council would not allow another office to opne up in the town centre.
A call centre is the way forward but its the getting started part that i am struggling on i.e. starting costs, getting work and the system used.

You don't need to park your/their cars at the office, so really all you need is somewhere like above a chip shop.

What's wrong with the out of town place, surely its only a place that's going to answer the phones. You don't need somewhere in the town centre unless you are looking for walk in trade.

It's worth noting that the largest cab firm in England has their phone offices in a different country.

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IDFIMH

I don't know about your area but in the city of York, the council will not allow planning permission for PH offices in the city centre, all PH offices now have to be outside city centre, or rather outside the walls of the city in this case, only one PH firm remains inside the walls due to long term lease commitments and they own the building.

A condition of the granting a PH operating licence is that of the ample vehicle parking for the firms vehicles, ie. off road,out of sight, ie. 2 cars today could be 25 cars tommorrow

There's nothing to stop you setting up at home, base stn equipment needed, your cars don't need to come to the "office", spare land as you get bigger for the PH vehicles to sit, as you get bigger talk to some of the local firms around you, example you may have a small wheeler dealer selling cars business, this could be his security, he might even put you up a portacabin and allow you to base there and the PH vehicles rank there when nowt doing. The council should not refuse this

when you open an office you will find you have what we call homing pigeons these are cabbies who sit in the office drinking tea do one job and return to the office this goes on right through their shift, many do not know what a rank looks like, this could cause you problems if you pick the wrong location to start your taxi office, a new office just over the boundry from dundee had problems from day one http://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/outpu ... 715t0.shtm
even a year and a half later they are still getting complained about,( third letter down)
http://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/outpu ... tters.shtm
all the offices in dundee have numerous parking places for their pigeons,
all planned in advance

Funny enough but this sounds like me, I often visit my friends in the PH trade, a bit of relief after sitting on a cab rank or in between jobs, the coffee is cheap tho