As you read
this I imagine some of you have still to embark on, or complete, the
festive chore of this year’s Christmas shopping. If not, at least
your partners will be as you juggle the task of driving a cab to
cover the costs. Obviously we all have different levels of financial
commitment, but fortunately for the cab trade and our Society in
particular, your earning power this year has obviously been
encouraging - which is nice to see, but - and there is always a but
- how long will it last and once again what effort will you, the
members, be doing individually to secure the continuation of this
buoyant market? And in particular, meeting the exceptionally high
demand when our clients need it most?
January to early Spring has traditionally been a lean period for
the cab trade even before the emergence of PH and there is no reason
to be complacent in thinking it’s not likely to be so in 2006. In
all the years I’ve been involved in selling our services, the kipper
season has always been Sales and Marketing’s busiest period. And the
reason for this? Because of the failure rate being generally
high just prior to Christmas - and in many cases so severe that
clients are determined to look for an alternative supplier in the
New Year. This includes clients of Dial-a-Cab as well as those of
our competitors. So consequently, our first task in the New Year is
to concentrate on damage limitation, which involves compiling a list
of those whom we may have let down most in order of priority, and
contact these people with apologies and placating in all manor of
ways in the hope of retaining their business. Our second task is to
target our competitor’s clients who we believe may have suffered
similar problems, in the hope of poaching them away! So it’s no
surprise to learn that losing and generating new business is at its
most active during the early months of the year and that there is a
considerable amount of work involved by all concerned during this
period.The difference between horses and
cows…
That brings me onto a subject that has reared its head from a
section of our members since at least the first day I joined the
Board and when I set myself the task of developing a Sales and
Marketing department, something which previously didn’t exist. It
was indeed a huge task and fortunately, being divorced and without a
partner, I was able to devote a considerable amount of unpaid time
in attempting to achieve its success. And to emphasise the point,
the unpaid time referred to my working quite often over 70 hours a
week for which I was paid for 40. I didn’t have to do it, I wasn’t
forced to do it, but I had made a promise in my election address and
was determined to succeed – and yes, I enjoyed it.
Butt even then when I was working those long hours, there were
those on our circuit - and still are today - who are paranoid,
jealous or just resent the role of Board members and the time they
put in at driving a cab compared to what they assume they’re doing
in the office. Drivers who because they have the capability of
stringing a few words together in prose or otherwise, somehow take
on the mantle of being experts and knowledgeable in subjects of
which, by the very fact they have not bothered to undertake one
ounce of research before putting pen to paper, they show complete
ignorance. They very much remind me of a quote from a famous
American who, when referring to such individuals, said: "It is
typical of how the person in question has the ability to name a
horse in nine languages, yet is so ignorant that he buys a cow to
ride on."
The comment I refer to - and I take it as aimed at only myself
in this instance - I quote: "In talking the talk, I should walk
the walk and get out driving a cab more often." As a point of
interest, when I got my badge almost 40 years ago, I drove an FX3
with no heating, no power-steering, no disc brakes, no air con and
when it rained it was necessary to wear a Mac and galoshes to
prevent one from being saturated. During those days, most work was
obtained from waiting on ranks - in many cases up to an hour just to
get a local. During the kipper period, if it wasn’t for taking a
liberty by doing the odd stalker, you barely earned enough to cover
the rent! So I would like to say to Mr Walk the Walk, earning
a living today from driving a cab is a dam sight easier and
lucrative than it was when I started. You can teach me absolutely
nothing about driving a taxi that could give me cause to question
what I might say in my Call Sign articles or the hours
I work in the office, which includes being always available at my
desk as and when it suits our drivers to air their grievances or to
give me a slagging-off!
If Mr Walk the Walk wants me to restrict my time in the
office to one day a month for Board meetings only and for a fee,
commensurate with the responsibility of being an elected
Board member - which includes |
losing
everything I possess in the event that this Society went belly up
and which, incidentally, is a situation I have been perilously close
to experiencing once already during my time on this
Board - then make it a proposition. And its worth reminding those
who might agree with such a proposition, that a Board consisting of
drivers meeting once a month to decide on policy with no control
over the up-to-the minute problems of the running of a 24 hour
business - which we all know in a city like London changes from day
to day - would be totally reliant on employed senior managers with
no cab driving experience, under contract to manage the company for
the benefit of our clients and of course the members, but not
necessarily to the drivers immediate liking.
For a start, I could not for one moment see employed managers
tolerating the verbal abuse and constant whinging by some drivers
that I often get and can well imagine the uproar should a decision
be made to have all queries transferred to a call centre in Aberdeen
or India!
Sometimes to achieve success, difficult decisions have to be made
which, given the choice, most drivers I’m sure would reject even if
the decision in the long term was to your advantage.
To choose or not to choose – that is the
question…
For example, many years ago when we still had voice dispatching,
there was a driver on another circuit who drove me mad to join
Dial-a-Cab because, unlike the circuit he was on, DaC drivers were
given destinations and the choice of rejecting. After 18 months, he
eventually became a DaC subscriber. A month or so later I saw him in
a café and he told me he had left DaC and was back on his previous
circuit where the moment you hit the button for a trip, you had to
do it irrespective of where it was going.
He explained that on his first day at DaC - excited by the prospect
of being able to pick and choose his choice of work - he was in
Avenue Road and the dispatcher called a trip nearby and he thought
no, he didn’t fancy that. He then heard another trip called in Swiss
Cottage and again didn’t fancy that or the next or the next! This
scenario went on for over an hour before he realised that he hadn’t
earned a penny. It became obvious that he was being spoilt for
choice and in effect, incapable of being self managed, so he went
back to his previous circuit where money was literally forced into
his pocket by the manner in which they dispatched their work. In
other words, every trip was A/D and non-rejectable.
I have never quite understood why a driver who has just started
work should insist on knowing in which direction his next trip
should take. If you stop to pick up a passenger off the street or
you are on a rank, you take it whatever the direction. Yet when it’s
a radio job, most drivers insist on a choice and I believe the
reason for that is because choice creates selfishness with the
belief that there might be a lucrative trip in the pot, so you just
keep rejecting until it pops up. Of course, we all know that might
never happen and the consequence is that time is wasted, money is
lost and all because of choice.
Recently, a driver rang and gave me an absolute ear bashing because
he believed he was tricked by the dispatcher into taking a £44 ride
at 10:30am from South West London to the City. He wasn’t tricked, it
was an important client who couldn’t get his trip covered and so the
dispatcher made it a non-rejectable. Yet even though the driver had
just started work, he was aggrieved at not having had prior
knowledge on which direction he travelled. We have clients who spend
millions of pounds each year to give you guys a living, yet there
are members who are prepared to jeopardise that living because of a
preference to cherry pick. Clients will not tolerate it, similarly
neither would you if for example you went into your regular garage
where you buy your fuel each day throughout the year, to buy a pint
of oil and the garage refused you because the purchase wasn’t
lucrative enough. You would take your business elsewhere and that’s
exactly what our clients will do if they don’t get a service. I know
it will fall on deaf ears - it always does - and not just because of
apathy or a ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude as I had believed in the
past, but I have now come to accept that in many cases its simply a
case of how so many cabmen simply want to do their own thing, pick
and choose their trips, work the hours that suits them rather than
the Society. I should also add that many seem to be perfectly happy
with the cloth cap and muffler image, which personally I think is a
strange mentality for someone who is not only self-employed, but
considering the length of time it takes to obtain a badge and the
financial commitment in being a taxi proprietor, that is such as to
demand the same recognition and respect as the educated business
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people you carry in your cab.
It reminds me of a driver who used to frequent my regular watering
hole in Kings X. He
mentioned that he took a bath every day, yet dressed like a tramp
and when I asked why, he said it was to give the impression that he
was a poor cab driver trying to scrape a living, causing punters to
take pity and give him a large tip! This worked until his garage
decided to buy a fleet of new cabs of which he then drove one and
which most punters assumed was his. From then on, he got more and
more legals!
The public are not fools, they know an awful lot more about the cab
industry now than they did years ago, because many of those coming
into the trade are too willing to boast about the 35 grand they have
just paid for their cab, their big houses in the sticks and regular
holidays to Disneyland. And with the publicity in the press every
time a fare increase comes, there is this ridiculous assumption that
all cabmen earn mega bucks. So where once dressing like a schlock
was acceptable, today it’s treated with contempt and a lack of
respect for the person paying for your services. And that’s not my
view, because I hear it time and again from people whom I know are
using minicabs.
Nudge, nudge – you like photography!
As for driver attitude, I’ll give another example. I am not
denigrating this particular driver because on the surface he was a
very pleasant chap. Being the time of year for the producing of our
Annual Report, it necessitated the updating of our graphic library
and I decided on some shots of the latest model of taxi together
with the driver. I asked dispatchers to put out a call requesting a
clean new taxi with a presentable driver for a photo shoot. And the
request for a presentable driver was because it would involve
several shots in various poses outside of his cab - one opening the
door for a female passenger.
When the cab arrived, it was in dire need of a clean and the driver
was dressed in T-shirt, shorts, trainers and no socks, not exactly
the image I wanted to portray on the front cover of our annual
report, which apart from our own shareholders, is seen by many large
companies whose business we are trying to obtain. Needless to say I
was disappointed, particularly as there had been a delay in getting
the cab and I had a professional photographer standing by ready to
shoot. But I wasn’t so much disappointed by the driver’s vehicle and
appearance, as I was by his perception of what he constituted as
being presentably dressed, because he honestly believed there was no
problem. He considered his vehicle as being OK to be photographed
and the way he was dressed he believed was perfectly adequate. After
all, he said, how many of the 25,000 cab drivers out on the road did
I think were dressed any better? I was speechless, and to be honest
I really had no answer, except to come to the conclusion that he was
probably right.
The fact that you will rarely see a minicab driver going into a
senior client dressed that way and because of it, why we lose so
much business to them, had no effect on him whatsoever. He had his
opinion, which he believed was shared by most cabmen he knew. He was
not rude in any way, even when I made reference to his appearance -
although he did appear to take umbrage at having to clean the grime
off one window so I could see through it to film. Had he been an
exception, I could have put it down to experience. Unfortunately,
that was not the case. Over the years, I have seen far too many
similar examples and have come to accept that his attitude is shared
by many and no matter how much I emphasise the importance of image,
being a friendly society of almost 2,000 independent free thinking,
self serving drivers, all with the power to do their own thing, I
cannot see how we will ever be classed as a professional body in the
true business sense of the word.
When you see articles in the trade press insisting that we retain
this status, it emphasises how strong the feeling is of wanting the
trade to stay as it was 30 years ago and why there are continuous
battles with the authorities who feel that more should be done to
bring the licensed taxi industry into the 21st century.
That is unfortunate because the more professional we can prove to
be, the greater our influence over the powers-that-be when changes
are being discussed and especially against the increasing demands of
the PH industry, who in actual fact have only one commodity when
selling their services… and that is professionalism.
Allen Togwell
DaC Marketing
allent@dialacab.co.uk
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