Ensure your price is right.
If you do your homework and understand your market, you’ll have a very good idea of what to charge before you get close to putting a car on the road. We all know what we’d like to charge in a perfect world, but a perfect world doesn’t exist! Set your prices to what makes your business viable and appeals to potential clients. There are those start-up’s who make the decision to undercut all their local competition to get work, but they only get away with doing so until they’re faced with an unexpected repair bill, or a need to change their vehicle and the funds aren’t available for either. Added to that, no other operator will cover work for them because the rate is stupidly low.
Vehicle choice.
This is the biggie – the most costly purchase that will literally make or break a fledgling chauffeur business. Very simply, you have to apply sanity not vanity when it comes to vehicle choice. Some start-up’s have a very odd attitude to the cost of purchasing a vehicle, it’s almost as if it’s not real money because you’re buying it for your business, it’s an investment so what can go wrong? Believe me, it’s very real money – as real as those threatening letters from the finance company will be if you fall behind with the payments.
If you’ve already got the work in place for £60-£70k top-of-the-range motor, then that’s brilliant, but if you’ve paid out that amount on work that you hope to get, prepare yourself for some very sleepless nights. You have to buy the vehicle for the work you can realistically get and for most that will, initially at least, be transfers. I appreciate the need for a certain marque but I’d rather be making payments on 20 odd grand worth of badge, as opposed to 60.
Do you really need a long wheel base, top spec motor to do airport runs? Probably not and margins won’t allow for it anyway. It’s really important you fully appreciate just how full of quality work your diary needs to be to keep a new or nearly new S-Class, 7-Series or even A8L earning money. It really is a massive ask for even established operators, never mind a start up.
I would certainly suggest looking at an ex-demo as your first car because someone has already taken the hit on the depreciation and the 4,000-10,000 it’ll have on the clock won’t make a massive dent in the remaining warranty. If you’re looking for a sensible start-up car, many would suggest you could do a lot worse than an E-Class, and whilst £20,000 or more certainly isn’t an inconsiderable sum of money, it’s a realistic amount to spend and expect to make back within a sensible timeframe.
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