One year ago, on the 1st of October 2020, Chabé opened its first office in the United Kingdom, in London. The Group takes the opportunity to look back on this year with an interview with David Bruce, UK Chief Executive Officer
It’s exactly a year since Chabé London started trading in London how has it gone ?The venture was a bold move.
Launching Chabé in London during a global pandemic, wasn’t an obvious thing to do. However with the benefit of hindsight, it was the perfect timing. We have used the time to hire an amazing team of over 20 experienced professionals. The team have implemented new technology, developed our pricing and market offering and have attracted some fantastic clients.
Our customer base now extends to over 60 clients across all of our niche verticals; Private equity and Financial services, Corporate Boards, Events and Luxury brands and Luxury Hotels. I’m exceptionally proud of the whole team’s progress in the past 12 months, and we have enabled the business ready to scale and September’s trading has surpassed expectations.
We are very differentiated and that has always been the case.
The business is 100 years old this year, and has prospered through delivering high touch, bespoke services to our clients. We are not a one size fits all platform serving the mass mobility market, we are a chauffeur business, which by its very definition, is tailored to each clients’ need. It is that level of focus on each individual client that is our difference. We are hugely relationship driven and our clients trust us to deliver their exact needs. This is very different to an increasingly homogenised app based market.
We have an ambitious business plan for London however never at the expense of quality.
Within 2 years I see London contributing significantly to Group Revenue and Profitability. As well as serving London itself, we will also act as the international hub for Chabé. I would like to see London and International making up over 25% of Group Revenue and margin fairly quickly. It’s a major strategic pillar of growth for the business.
In terms of product offering, I think by the end of 2023 the vast majority of operators in London will be running all electric fleets.
The client demand for low emission travel is accelerating. Today Chabé London are one of the earliest adopters of all electric vehicles in the market and we will continue to work with the OEMs to be the first to bring new technology to market.
We will also continue to digitise the business offering solutions to each of the niche markets we serve.
We already do that for luxury hotels and we are investing in digitising the customer experience in other verticals too.
In addition companies are going to need to demonstrate a strong CSR agenda. Our approach is already strong; we have an employed chauffeur model, a proactive approach to D&I, and are truly able to demonstrate environmental sustainability reporting – there is of course so much more we can do to make a difference. Our clients will demand it.
The market will increasingly diverge between apps providing a commodity based services, competing on price and response times, to truly differentiated high touch service providers with a deep understanding of their clients’ needs and providing bespoke chauffeuring solutions. Our future has always been in the latter.
