Addison Lee owner Liam Griffin
(Picture: Addison Lee)To anyone dreaming of quitting the sweaty commute and daily grind for a life of holidays, sport, and never working again, Liam Griffin says: don’t do it.
His family sold Addison Lee for £300 million in 2013, with Griffin staying on at the cab firm until he fell out with its private equity buyers Carlyle in 2015. He then retired, aged 42.
Five years of travelling, angel investing, property development, triathlons and Ironman followed — “all those things for when you’ve got lots of spare time” — before he realised: “I missed work.”
“Early retirement means you miss your sense of purpose,” he says. “During that time I read every self-help book going - it’s not all happiness and light to be sat at home at 42 with no job.”
Griffin has spent his career in cabs, starting with childhood summer holidays in the tiny Battersea minicab office of Addison Lee, the business his dad founded in 1975, where “I’d price dockets, fix radios, anything, really.” He joined the firm after graduating from Loughborough University, taking over as CEO from his father, John, in 2006.
Addison Lee’s sale in 2013 was not about the money, Griffin claims, but expansion. He wanted to take Addison Lee to the US and across the UK.
“Then Uber came on the radar. And Carlisle pulled the plug on all of our ambitions.”
It wasn’t an easy partnership: “Going from family business to private equity was a bit of a culture shock. We’d never had a board meeting prior to the takeover. And I didn’t take particularly well to it.”
Griffin quit in 2015, but remained on the board. Addison Lee floundered and by 2018 it was posting a £39 million loss. Carlyle tried and failed to sell it to avoid losing control through a debt-for-equity-swap from frustrated backers. Griffin’s increasingly vocal criticism saw his replacement as CEO banning him from its building (“and I owned it!”).
Then came the unfulfilled millionaire years — although they were good to him. The now-49-year-old is tanned and far more relaxed looking than the average CEO, sporting a collarless white shirt with a wrist of boho bangles.
Griffin finally bought back Addison Lee in 2020 “for considerably less than what we sold it for” — said to be around £125 million. He used his own cash, plus backing led by Cheyne Capital.
There was one wrinkle: he hadn’t phoned Addison Lee’s founder to discuss his return first. “My dad hasn’t been overly supportive ,” Griffin says, looking pained. “I’ve been slightly disappointed by his lack of enthusiasm for me coming back and doing this. I think his view was that we couldn’t do it again without him.”
Griffin’s first day back was March 23, 2020: “A few hours after I walked in the door, Boris Johnson said the country is going into lockdown.” Addison Lee had to park 2000 unneeded cars in a field near Heathrow.
“On the flip side,” says highly-optimistic Griffin, “it meant we had time to cut the business right back to the bare bones. They’d had all these managers there, not actually doing anything. We sold it with 550 people, bought it back with 900 people, but [drivers were] actually doing [fewer] jobs on the day we bought it back. We minimised the cash burn and had to tick along for two years.”
Today business is booming, with journey requests above pandemic levels. Addison Lee minicabs have carried 1.8 million passengers this year so far, and another 630,000 parcels via its courier arm. It posted an underlying profit of just shy of £8 million in the year to September 2021.
But Griffin has a new problem: staff.
“We are turning down a lot of work. We’ve still got 400-500 [unused, parked] vehicles that we could put drivers in tomorrow. People found alternative employment as courier drivers, and for Ocado or Amazon. We were hit heavily by Brexit too. And TfL is making it more and more difficult to get a [private hire driver] licence.”
As a result, Griffin has upped pay, pension contributions and holiday for drivers, who are still self-employed.
Then there’s the ‘u’ word. Griffin almost chokes whilst saying ‘Uber’. His main complaint today is that “it was [Uber’s] predatory pricing that led to the drivers not earning enough money, which saw them challenge minimum wage to get worker status, and as a consequence, we now have to charge VAT on every single job.” That started four weeks ago - so far, only Addison Lee and Uber have started adding VAT but rivals must follow, Griffin explains. London’s £4 billion cab industry could pay the Government £800 million this year as a result.
The minicab price hike is good news for black cabs, which is actually good news for Addison Lee. The company bought black taxi operator ComCab from Singapore’s Comfort Delray last year.
“Once the idea of Addison Lee buying a black taxi firm was outrageous,” Griffin muses. “We used to be the enemy. But times have changed - now we’re fighting a common foe.”
Griffin’s focus now is on “rebuilding our London business, and getting some decent trading under our belt” rather than expansion. He’s up at 5.45am each morning for a run before work before, surprisingly, taking the train and Tube from his home in Essenden, Hertfordshire, into Addison Lee’s Paddington office.
“A cab would take too long,” he shrugs. “It’s amazing how bad London traffic got so quickly after the pandemic.”
He dismisses driverless cars and is adamant both black cabs and Addison Lee’s fleet have a bright future.
But does he want one of his own three boys - aged eight to 19 - to jump into his driving seat one day?
“I think living in your father’s shadow, as I have, is not always easy. I would probably encourage mine to find their own path.”
