How to get corporate clients for a taxi company

Corporate clients don't arrive through a website form. They come from a short list of local businesses, a name at each one, and an owner who keeps turning up until the trial month starts. This guide covers the prospecting half of account work: how to find corporate taxi clients, who books inside each business, how to approach them and how to follow up. Once a business says yes, our guide to winning corporate taxi accounts covers the terms, the supplier forms and the credit checks.

Which local businesses book taxis?

The businesses that book taxis are the ones that move people they don't drive themselves: guests, clients, staff on shifts, visitors and temporary workers. Each kind books at different hours for different reasons, and that matters more than the size of the business.

Pick the rows that fit your cars and your gaps, not the ones that sound biggest. A solicitor's mid-morning court runs fill the quiet hours between the school run and the lunchtime airport jobs. A hotel's 5am airport runs suit a firm that already has early drivers. Our guide to keeping drivers busy in quiet hours shows how to map those gaps first.

Two rows need care. Home-to-school transport for pupils is bought by the council through tenders, not by the school, so that work is in our guide to council school transport contracts. And if a care provider asks you to carry residents rather than staff, agree in writing who travels with them, what the driver needs to know and what happens if nobody meets them at the other end.

How do you find businesses that book taxis near you?

Use the free public registers first, then walk the ground. Four sources will give you a long list in an afternoon:

1. Companies House advanced search. The free search filters companies by nature of business (the SIC code), registered office address and company status. Set the status to active, type your town or postcode district into the address box and add a code from the table. The registered office is often the accountant's address, so check the trading address on the company's own website before you visit.
2. The Care Quality Commission's search. It finds care homes and home care agencies in England by location, within a radius of 5 to 25 miles, and lets you download the results as a spreadsheet.
3. Get Information about Schools. The Department for Education's register lists the schools and colleges in England with their details.
4. Your own eyes. Drive round the business parks and industrial estates and write down every name on the signs and the board in reception.

Then add what you already know. Your drivers know which offices, hotels and sites they pick up from. A passenger who asks for a receipt every time is claiming the fare back from somebody. The local chamber of commerce and business networking groups put you in a room with owners and office managers. And the management office of a business park can tell you who the tenants are, and may want a taxi number to give them.

Keep the working list to 20 businesses at a time. Put them in a simple tracker with six columns: business, trading address, who books, how you'll approach them, date of the last contact and the next step. Twenty names you work properly beat 500 you never get round to.

Who books the taxis, and how do you find their name?

Ask. Ring the main number or walk in and say: "Who looks after booking taxis for the office?" Reception will usually tell you, and in a small office the person who books is often the receptionist.

If you can't get a name at the door, the team page on the company's website and job titles on LinkedIn will often give you one. Companies House lists each company's directors, but directors sign off accounts. They rarely book the cars.

A named person's work email address is personal data, so the UK GDPR applies to your tracker even when the business is a company. Keep only what you need, and delete a name when the person asks you to.

Should you visit, ring or write first?

Visit the businesses with a front desk, write to the ones with an office behind reception, and use the phone to follow up. The right first move depends on where the person who books sits.

Visit hotels, care homes, garages, venues and factory gatehouses. Go at a quiet time for them: a hotel front desk is calmer in the middle of the afternoon than at check-out. Ask for five minutes, not a meeting. Take a one-page price sheet for the routes they're likely to use, a "how to book" card for the desk, and copies of your operator licence and insurance certificates.

Write to solicitors, accountants and other offices, addressed to the person by name. A short letter that starts with their problem gets read. Our guide to the taxi company introduction letter has the structure and a template.

Ring a few days after the letter or the visit, to check it arrived and ask what would make them try you.

Know the rules before you start. The Information Commissioner's Office says the PECR rule on marketing emails doesn't apply to corporate subscribers, but sole traders and partnerships count as individuals, so they need to have consented or fall under the soft opt-in. Before a marketing call, screen the number against both the Telephone Preference Service and the Corporate Telephone Preference Service. Post isn't covered by PECR at all.

What should you offer a business first?

Offer a trial account. One month, fixed prices for 3 to 5 of their regular routes, a named contact in your office, a card on the front desk with your number and WhatsApp, and a short call at the end to see how it went. A trial lets the office manager say yes without asking procurement or the finance director.

Put the trial terms on one page: the prices, who can book, how many days after the statement you expect payment, and a credit limit for the month. Our guide to pricing corporate taxi accounts shows how to build the price list, and the guide to what businesses want from a taxi account lists the paperwork they'll expect from day one.

If the business already has a taxi firm, offer to be the backup: the number they ring when their usual firm is busy or can't cover a night. That's a small ask, and the night you turn up when the other firm couldn't is the night you start being considered for the account.

Bigger companies won't give you a trial from a front-desk chat. They'll ask you to fill in a supplier form first, and our guide to getting on an approved supplier list has the checklist.

When accounts start coming in, you need somewhere to run them. Dispatch AI is booking and dispatch software for taxi and private hire firms. It answers your phone, WhatsApp, texts and emails, books the jobs at your prices and sends them to your drivers on your own app, and it has accounts for your business customers.

How do you follow up without being a nuisance?

Follow up four or five times over about six weeks, then drop to a short note every three months. An office manager tends to change firms the morning after a bad night with the old one, so the aim is to be the name they remember on that morning. A steady follow-up plan does that better than a single clever letter.

Log every contact in the tracker so nobody in your office rings the same person twice in a week. When someone says no, ask whether it's no for now or no for good. If it's for good, or they ask you to stop, take them off the list that day: the ICO says people have an absolute right to stop their data being used for direct marketing.

Can your fleet cover the work you win?

Check your cover before you pitch, not after you win. Account work bunches up: 8am to 9am, 5pm to 6pm, Friday nights and shift changeovers. Those are the same hours as the school runs and the airport pre-books you already have.

Example: a warehouse asks you to take 8 people home at 10pm every Friday. In saloons carrying 4 passengers each that's 2 cars if they all live in one direction. If they live in 8 different directions, it's more like 4 cars tied up for 45 minutes. All of these inputs are made up; use your own.

Saying "we can do 9pm, not 10pm" in the first meeting is better than letting an account down in its second week. If the work is there and the cars aren't, our guide on when to add more cars helps you decide. And if you're up against a bigger firm for the same account, the named contact and the owner who answers his mobile are what a small firm has that they don't: our guide on competing with bigger taxi firms goes further.