Surely, there can’t be that much to this chauffeuring lark, I hear you say. Simply purchase a two year-old E-Class, get the geeky kid next door to knock you up a website, put a couple of cards up in the local newsagent’s window and wait for the work to come rolling in!
Funnily enough, we probably all thought this, but reality has a nasty habit of bringing you down to earth with a very large bump. Starting up a chauffeur business is just a tad more complicated in reality, as Andy Dubberley explains…
Lets be honest, those of us who’ve been in business a while can feel ever so slightly proud of ourselves – despite the sleepless nights, the empty diary for a week at a time during the early days, the far too common appearance of the dreaded engine management warning light and the local licensing officer in his tan socks and slip-on shoes, we’ve stuck at it and come through the other side!
Quite a few years down the line, I’m considerably older and possibly even a little bit wiser, so it now appears to me that business start-ups in our industry fall into two groups. Firstly, there are those people who have taken the time to understand what is required, both financially and practically and who appreciate chauffeuring for the skilled profession it actually is. Perhaps they already have a background in chauffeuring of sorts, whether it be as a military staff car driver or experience gained from working in the close protection field. They will have researched our industry, asked already established operators the right questions and vitally, they will already have a full understanding of the associated costs.
Then we have the ‘others’. Those with a redundancy payment or pension pot burning a hole in their pocket and want something to “stop them getting bored”. It’s all about having a little earner to give them a few extra quid towards a round of golf on a Sunday morning. These wannabe chauffeurs wholeheartedly consider themselves well-suited to being part of our industry because they, (and I quote), ‘like driving’ or ‘used to work in sales so I know the UK well’. I always find this view of what we do really rather insulting and extremely narrow minded but they’ll learn, oh how they’ll learn!
Whilst I shall leave the latter group to their own devices, what follows is a brief insight which might just be helpful to those of you who are collecting your facts before deciding whether to take the almighty leap into the world of small business ownership.
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