EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist: Gavan Walsh, iCabbi

Entrepreneurship runs in the Walsh family. Gavan Walsh, founder of iCabbi, grew up working in the family business, Irish School of Motoring. He has subsequently launched several businesses, in ecommerce, event management and even Christmas tree sales.

He set up iCabbi in 2010 after getting lost while out walking in a remote part of Portugal. It occurred to him at the time that it would be useful to be able to see the live location of taxis on his smartphone and book one without having to speak to someone. When he returned home from holidays, he started building his taxi dispatch and booking management platform.

Based in Howth, Co Dublin, iCabbi now develops software for taxi and private hire companies in the UK, US, Canada, Asia and Ireland, with customer retention levels of 99.2 per cent. The software enables these traditional firms to compete with new entrants such as Hailo, Lyft and Uber.

iCabbi is currently growing by 8 per cent a month. It increased its staff from 22 to 52 in 2015 and Walsh expects to hire a further 20 people to high skills roles this year.

What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?

In June 2009, I was on holidays in Portugal with my wife Joanne. One day while out walking we got lost in a remote area, with no idea how to get back to the hotel. During the ordeal, I thought how incredibly useful it would be if I could see live taxis on my smart phone and then to be able to book one without the need to speak to anyone. I got excited about the concept and the day we got back from holidays I started putting a team together that could turn this idea into a reality.

Describe your business model and what makes your business unique:

We operate a software-as-a-service model offering taxi companies a full suite of products hosted in the cloud, for a small fee per driver per week and no long-term contracts. As the team didn’t come from a taxi background, our system was built by giving our customers direct input, which has been a key element to our success and remains one of our biggest USPs.

What was your “back-to-the-wall” moment and how did you overcome it?

One was realising the consequences of downtime in our industry. Downtime is completely unacceptable. When our first company went live, there was constant network issues causing driver disruptions to service. Aside from this nearly destroying the business, knowing the phone could ring with a disaster at any moment made me very anxious.

What moment/deal would you cite as the “game changer” or turning point for the company?

Early on, we pivoted from B2C to B2B. This change secured our first flagship customer, enabling us to become the leader in the Irish market and giving us the credibility to successfully enter new international markets.

Have you started to feel the effects of the economic upturn within your sector/industry?

We never experienced the negative effects of the downturn as the traditional taxi industry has been forced to invest in new technology in recent years. The upturn, however, has severely impacted the pool of highly skilled talent available to technology companies in Dublin. This has affected our ability to grow our team. ?

How will your market look in three years?

The taxi industry is in a global state of transition. Peer-to-peer apps have entered the market with better technology and more money, offering customers a better overall experience than that given by traditional taxi companies. This has led to major disruption for incumbents, but taxi firms are consolidating globally and becoming technology-focused. In three years, little will separate them from consumer apps such as Uber.