A Tale of Two Taxis

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A Tale of Two Taxis - gcfcl.com
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London. Winter coming. You couldn’t find a better time to be in the taxi business. Punters wanting a warm ride rather than a cold walk or a stuffed Tube.

Enter into this scene two taxi businesses, Hailo and GetTaxi. Both offering the same thing: an app-enabled, live-tracked taxi booking service that gives customers the power to book their black cab (from within the comfort of the warm indoors) and watch it arrive in real time, then have it charged straight to their business account. Couldn’t be better.

Except, one of these is a classic case of how to do business in a more conscious way, with your stakeholders in mind, and the other is a classic case of how to destroy a successful business through greed and unconscious behaviour. GetTaxi is my new taxi business of choice. Hailo is, well, going out of business.

Over the year or so that I have been using Hailo, they have pulled some moves like hiking their prices up to £15 per ride minimum fare (London taxi fares are routinely £8-12 for short distances), charged you a fee if you cancel your taxi after one minute has passed, even if it’s because your taxi is stuck in traffic and you need to find another one to get to where you want to go, and routinely favoured the cab driver over the passenger in what is nearly a comedy of imbalance, if only I wasn’t a customer on the receiving end of it. Over the months, the cab drivers have walked (or driven) away from Hailo or jumped ship to rival companies, like GetTaxi. Now you can’t get a Hailo cab for love nor money, and I am jumping ship as well.

With the $17m investment they have just received from Accel, Hailo will now have to work even harder to keep their shareholders happy in a world where their customers and their suppliers are unhappy. Cue a classic case of greed destroying a perfectly good and very successful business.

By contrast, GetTaxi runs the same operating model, but in a vastly more balanced and considerate way. Says my GetTaxi driver today, the company pays the cab driver £5 if the customer is a no show. (Get this, Hailo? You charge me £5 even when I cancel in good faith and I bet you don’t pass this on to your cab driver). GetTaxi’s CEO, Shahar Waiser, takes a different approach. My taxi driver: “You can see by his emails that he cares and wants to do the best by us.” Now, that may well be a PR person writing those emails (or maybe not), but at least he’s aware of the need to show he cares about his stakeholders.  “Used to be,” continued my taxi driver, “that Hailo was set up with a purpose – to win back the business we’ve lost to other cab services.”

Somewhere, in the midst of grasping for profits, Hailo has lost touch with its purpose – and now it’s lost its loyal followers and its profits. Like so many who have gone before it, and so many now (Tesco anyone?), losing your way and focusing on the wrong things can ultimately result in losing your business.

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DMS