You may have noticed a change on the Sheffield roads recently. The familiar City Taxis logo, long a part of the fabric of the city, has recently been replaced by Veezu, following a buyout by the national taxi operator earlier in the year. This month, we sat down for a chat with original City Taxis founder and current Veezu Regional Managing Director, Arnie Singh, to talk about life after the acquisition…
Hi Arnie. City Taxis was bought out by Veezu in February but continued to operate under the City Taxis name until September this year, was there always a plan to rebrand?
When Veezu buys a company, they try to leave it as is by keeping it pretty much business as usual.
Having said that, there was always a plan, at some point, to rebrand to Veezu. When we were acquired, there was no fixed dates on when that would happen.
There’s strategic value to rebranding the sub brands into Veezu because in the bigger picture, our competition is Uber and Bolt, so having a national brand may help us to compete with the big boys.
“We’ve always tried to be a big part of the community. We’ve tried to be there whenever we were needed and, at the same time, I think our community has been there for us when we needed them. It’s always been a partnership and that will not change.”
The theory being that the people who instinctively lean into Uber or Bolt, will hopefully have a relationship with Veezu because it’s a national brand and they might have used it before they get here?
Absolutely. If you go back to pre-Uber days, we still had a very good relationship with the universities, for example. we would go along to freshers’ fairs to engage with students, who we would then adopt as customers.
That’s now shifted, because they’re probably already Uber customers in their home city, so when they come to Sheffield, they just use Uber. That’s a difficult thing for us to compete with because our business as City Taxis pretty much only worked in South Yorkshire, whereas there is an opportunity now, as Veezu grows through its acquisitions, to create this national footprint.
We have definitely lost business to the fact that the Uber app is so mobile and can work in multiple locations. It’s taken a long time to get here, but we’re finally going to be able to compete on that level.
How much of the market share does Veezu currently have and what’s the goal going forward?
It’s still very small. We’ve got around 11,000 active cars and the UK industry is around 180,000. Our business plan is to drive to 15,000 private hire vehicles and then 30,000. There’s an opportunity for Veezu because the market is very fragmented. There are 1000s of operators and it’s a market that is consolidating and we want to be front runners in that.
There’s two or three other players that are also trying to consolidate the market but the good thing about Veezu is that they’ve become a very trusted buyer.
When we’re in these conversations with other businesses, that is standing us in good stead. Me being involved in that acquisition team also helps because I can say with confidence that once we agreed what the deal was, it’s worked out great.
It’s quite an exciting time to get involved in the business.
How has the rebrand gone down locally?
We’ve got two types of customers: we’ve got account customers and we’ve got our cash customers. With the account customers there’s no real issues. We’ve explained the rebrand, and businesses understand.
Then from a cash customer point of view, I saw some negative comments around it being another Sheffield brand that’s disappeared, and that’s because City Taxis has been around a long, long time and we can be proud of the job we did investing and building that business.
I think it’s important to get across that everybody that was involved in City Taxis is still here. It very much is business as usual, just with a new wrapper on it. Our team isn’t going anywhere. We’re just part of a bigger brand now.
“There’s strategic value to rebranding the sub brands into Veezu because in the bigger picture, our competition is Uber and Bolt, so having a national brand may help us to compete with the big boys.”
We’ve always tried to be a big part of the community. We’ve tried to be there whenever we were needed and, at the same time, I think our community has been there for us when we needed them. It’s always been a partnership and that will not change.
Whether it is with the football clubs, local charities, or theatres, Veezu will attempt to strengthen those partnerships.
How has your role changed personally?
From a personal point of view, I was ready for the next challenge in my career. We’d done a lot with City Taxis, getting it to a certain stage, and it was a case of, do we continue doing that in our local area, or do we do we take the opportunity to get involved in a much bigger play?
I spoke to Nathan Bowles, who’s the CEO of Veezu and our businesses were quite aligned in our thinking and how we wanted to not only grow our business, but also our responsibilities as a business within the community. It felt like it was the right home for us to go.
It’s still early days, and it takes time to integrate a business like this into a group like Veezu but I think we’re now in a position where our staff feel as though they’re part of Veezu.
I would say it’s been a successful transition.
