Are you the right person?
If you’re under the impression anyone with a driving licence will make a good chauffeur, it’s fair to say you’re rather uninformed to what it takes to be successful in what is a skilled profession. The need to be a good driver is obvious, but does passing a driving test ten years-ago automatically qualify you? There are various courses on offer from the basic to the comprehensive, so it’s worth considering investing time and money to actually learn how to do the job properly. You wouldn’t dream of starting a plumbing business without training, so what makes you think you can start as a chauffeur a week next Monday with no knowledge or experience?
You must be a people person, you must be an excellent communicator and you must be a patient listener. Forget it if you don’t possess an attention to detail or hate wearing a suit! The job consists of unsociable hours, ridiculously early starts and late finishes and short notice changes to your plans which may well upset family life at times. As you begin building your client base, turning work down isn’t an option as customers will go elsewhere and probably won’t ever bother trying you again. Customer service is everything and if you don’t ‘get it’, don’t start a chauffeur business!
Know your market and clientele.
The first and most obvious question; is there even a market for a chauffeur service where you are? The biggest misconception is there will automatically be an endless stream of potential customers queuing up to use your services from the second you have your shiny executive motorcar on the road… a misconception that has wrong footed many a new business.
Whilst we chauffeurs would all prefer to think local taxis are sheds on wheels driven by beer bellied, football shirt wearing, sixty-a-day smoking hooligans with ‘love and hate’ tattooed across their knuckles, there’s more often than not one or two who don’t remotely fall into the above category, (these are the ones sporting a polo shirt and only smoking forty fags a day)! Seriously though, high quality taxi services most certainly do exist in most areas and those operators who have enough pride to smarten themselves up whilst driving their very recent Octavia estate are not to be underestimated and will give any chauffeur firm a run for their money.
Those of us already in the game have all heard horror stories from clients about taxis they’ve used in the past, but we’ve also heard much the same about the odd chauffeur outfit – so irrespective of what car you run, many customers will always choose reliability, safety, professionalism and value for money, even if it means travelling to the airport in something with a sign on the roof. For many clients, it is more about the person at the wheel than the car they’re sitting in, (within reason), so keep in mind that an eighty grand car doth not a chauffeur make.
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