How To Start And Run A Profitable Car Hire And City Wide Cab Service in Nigeria

There is a growing demand for car hire service whether for airport shuttle (pick up and drop off) or intra city car hire by visiting businessmen, executives or tourists within a city such as say Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan or Lagos which are key destinations for business travelers to Nigeria. 

The Car hire service can be classified both under transport and tourism sectors of the Nigerian economy because of the very nature the services are delivered and to the target market which are mostly foreigners on visits to Nigeria.

The Market and Opportunity

The market for car hire service is quite huge worth over N10 billion in sales (based on present and continuous basic research in Nigeria) and it is very flexible as you can combine several related ventures with your business enabling you to have more than one source of income. 

It is a little difficult to compute the exact figures for this market, but according to a report monitored on a Nigerian Newspaper about 10% to 15% of Nigerian business travelers now use car hire services whereas not less than 400,000 people visit Nigeria annually for business and most of them have a budget to cover their stay while here in Nigeria. 

Part of that budget would go into airport shuttle service and car hire service which many hotels have taken advantage of. Once you arrive in Nigeria as a visitor and have booked a hotel to stay in, naturally you’d inquire about cab services within the city you’re visiting but not all hotels can provide this service and even those who can, may charge much or may want to focus on providing core hotel services that they’ll rather outsource the service to more competent companies. 

Some companies already having this advantage include the popular Uber, Bolt and others, while in the motorcycle business is Gokada, Opay and others. That is where you come in as a savvy business person of which there is enough profit to go round.

The Car Hire Industry in Nigeria – Regulators, Operators and Associations

The main operators in this business airport shuttle service, car hire and cab services who on behalf of clients provide mobility and convenience to tourists and business travelers within key cities in Nigeria.

 One of the requirements for anyone intending on doing this business is registration with relevant government regulatory agencies such as Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) for airport shuttle. 

If you want to operate a cab service you need to be registered with the regulatory state government agency for intra city transport and that varies from state to state within Nigeria. It is also advisable to join the Taxi Drivers and Cab Operators Association within your resident state. 

Alternatively you may want to instead partner with reliable taxi drivers to provide this service instead of operating a taxi yourself. 

Some Challenges in Car Hire Business

• Armed Robberies and Car theft – there have been reported cases of armed robbers holding car hire and cab operators hostage while they perpetrate their crimes within the federal capital territory for instance. Although these are isolated cases they have a way of preventing the business from running smoothly whenever they occur plus your company's reputation may take a hit if your clients are unlucky to be robbed while using your service.
• Bad Roads - this can affect efficiency and cause some inconveniences for your clients, Know your way around it.
  
• Uncooperative customers - Some customers are very difficult to work with. They might make unrealistic demands or set unreasonable targets for you to meet.
• Dishonest employees - some may go behind your back by giving out their own numbers instead of the company's number to potential clients and pocket the money they receive from such clients without informing the company.

Startup Costs

• Fairly Used Salon Car (preferably Toyota, Nissan or Peugeout 2008 model or later) – N1,500,000
• Office Space – N250,000
• Furniture – N150,000
• Marketing – N50,000
• Other expenses (including car tracking, insurance, operational costs etc) - N300,000
• Total – N2,200,000

The profit payback period is about 8 to 9 months depending on how well you manage your sales efforts.

Grow Your Online Business Into A Convertible Automated Vehicle (Part 1)

For starters, how do you deal with emails? Now as you grow successful and start getting exposure online especially if you're in a the niche and the more popular the niche is, like Blogging, Tech, Health, Business, Internet marketing and self-improvement where you have a lot of people talking and making communications, you’ll slowly realize that you’re getting quite a number of emails that are counter-productive and they don’t necessarily require your attention. If you start sending out emails through your mailing list and you start getting questions coming back to you from people who are unhappy with their lives or telling you their problems but you know very well that they can’t convert into customers, these are the kind of emails that you want to prevent from getting or even replying to them in the first place. For starters, you’re going to centralize all of your emails into one place where you can just read everything from one account rather than log in to multiple web mail accounts. You can use Gmail to centralize all emails to one place. Signing for an account in Google is free or alternatively, you can use POP3 email accounts where you can do the same thing from your computer. As for email addresses that you know you’re not going to check like no-reply addresses and default email accounts that comes from every web hosting accounts you get, what you can do is that you can login to the cpanel (control panel of your web hosting accounts). Go to the webmail options and configure to forward all of these emails addresses to the black hole so that you don’t have to login to clear the email addresses or see if there are missing emails anymore. Go to the cpanel and enter :: Black hole :: in the forwarding address and any emails being sent to these addresses that you know very well you’re not going to read will now go to a black hole. So you don’t have to waste time checking them out anymore or clear your email accounts just to free up some web space. So this part is already automated. The next thing to do is to automatically forward customer queries to your help desk. So if people start replying to your support email addresses, you’re going to put an autoresponder message or make it known to them through your websites that you do not answer emails through that particular email address and they are required to go to the help desk to get professional assistance. At your help desk, you’re going to have frequently asked questions database so you start writing out questions that your customers or potential customers may already have without taking up on spending your time on the process. Then you start putting in popular questions and answer them right away through your knowledge base and even for those who still use your help desk, you do not want to ideally use the help desk to answer queries anymore because you want to free up yourself from all these tedious process. Therefore, I recommend you to hire virtual assistants or VA’s in short.  Do not deal with emails that waste your time. Questions like people telling you “I’m broke. Please help me” or “I can’t afford it. Can you please sell it to me on a discount”, things like that. You’d want to definitely avoid answering these kind of emails.  I’ll be talking to you more about virtual assistants shortly. If you do not want to use a help desk, I advise creating a support email addresses. Your address is going to go something like: Contact@stayjid2000.com
 So you can totally outsource this to your virtual assistants when you’re finally going to free yourself from doing all of this. More about virtual assistance and how you can outsource your support.
What some people do is that they get virtual assistants and pay them $5 -$10 an hour in a day but they do not necessarily require them to work 8 hours a day.
Sometimes you can ask them to come online at a specific time and work to 2 or 3 hours a day just to answer some emails. This is something I would recommend. The idea of paying $5 - $10 is not as expensive as you think it is. You don’t have to get them to work full-time for you, depending on how big or small your business is. In fact if you ask them to work 2 hours a day at a specific time and work only 5 days in a week, you’ll definitely clear yourself out from a lot of unnecessary support issues already. Virtual assistants can be trained to understand your business. There is this one website that I advise you to check it out. It’s https://ivaa.org. Something you definitely want to check out and learn more about getting virtual assistants and engaging them. A very critical component to making all this as automated as possible is by having a help desk script installed in your website. I recommend that you get a domain name just from installing the help desk script. Maybe your site name could be like a company name or yourbrandname-helpdesk.com. And then you start signing virtual assistants to staff access to the help desk script. So that they do not have full admin access. They just have staff leveled access. Ultimately, you’re the master administrator and you hold unrestricted access to all of the help desk features, Your virtual assistants are only allowed to open and modify the status of your help desk tickets and close them and that’s about it. Don’t ask them to do anything else and do not give them any further authorizations in what to do in the help desk. I recommend that you use the help desk script e.g. UVdesk Open Source An Enterprise Level "FREE" Helpdesk Ticket System at https://www.uvdesk.com/en/opensource/ or Agent Scripting at https://www.happyfox.com/agent-scripting/. Get more here at Pat Research and PHP options on Tutsplus.
Now if you’re not into using help desks as mentioned before, you can use this alternate method in
creating a support email address and give access to the virtual assistants. Make sure that you do not have sensitive information going into these email address because this is where trust issue is really involved. You do not want VA’s to have sensitive information like your merchant account or things like that. So make sure that this support address is strictly for handling customers and potential prospects. The truth is that virtual assistants come and go just like in real life where employees come in and out of a company. So this is something that you have to be prepared to deal with no matter how good or bad the virtual assistants you get, they will always be coming in and out of your business. So when they leave (not if and this is certain), you do not want them walking away knowing that they have sensitive information about your merchant accounts and other private logins. Also be prepared to train the VA’s to answer queries and close sales on your behalf. You have to be prepared to set aside a few days or even weeks to teach them the basics of your business and make sure everything is alright before you can truly automate it. Wishing you success and have a nice day.