Corporate contracts are the difference between a taxi business and a taxi income. Retail work fills the day; a contract pays for the year, survives a slow month, and finances the next vehicle.
Most operators bidding for their first one lose it for the same reason, and it is not price.
What they are actually buying
A transport manager signing a staff contract is not buying rides. They are transferring a risk they cannot transfer — their duty of care — to a supplier who must make it small.
Everything procurement asks follows from that. Read every question below as a version of “if something happens to our employee in your vehicle, what will we be able to show?”
The four documents that decide the shortlist
1. Your compliance file. Permits, fitness, insurance and driver licences, current, for every vehicle you intend to put on the contract. Not a promise — the documents, with dates. Many operators are eliminated here before price is discussed, because they cannot assemble it quickly.
2. A sample duty slip. What will they get for each trip? If your answer is a handwritten pad, you are bidding against someone whose answer is a numbered, signed record with distance, timings and a PO reference.
3. A sample invoice. One consolidated monthly tax invoice per account, with GST treated correctly and every line supported. A finance team looks at your sample invoice and knows immediately whether billing you will be painful.
4. Your incident procedure. What happens when a driver raises an alert at 11pm? Who is called, in what order, and how do you show afterwards that it was handled? “We would call the driver” is not a procedure.
The questions that catch people out
- Can we see where a vehicle is, right now? — Not a screenshot. Can our desk see it.
- Can you tell us who was in a specific vehicle on a specific night, three months ago? — This is the real question, disguised.
- What stops a trip being billed twice?
- What happens if a driver leaves you mid-contract?
- Who owns the trip records — you or us? — Increasingly asked, and the honest answer matters.
- What is your vehicle age policy? — Frequently stricter than the law.
Why the cheapest quote usually loses
Because the person signing carries personal risk, and the saving is not theirs.
A transport manager who picks the cheapest vendor saves the company money they will never be thanked for. If something goes wrong, they chose the cheap supplier. That asymmetry is why “we are the lowest quote” is a weak position and “here is exactly what you would be able to produce if you ever needed it” is a strong one.
Price still has to be defensible. It rarely has to be lowest.
Price it so you can still deliver in month nine
The trap in a first contract is winning it on a rate that only worked in month one. Before quoting:
- Dead running to and from the site, on their actual shift timings
- Waiting time their schedule will genuinely produce
- Occupancy you will realistically achieve, not the roster
- Payment terms — thirty to sixty days, while you pay drivers weekly
- The cost of their paperwork, if you will produce it by hand
That last one is worth pricing explicitly. If satisfying the contract’s documentation costs someone a week a month, it is a real cost and it belongs in the rate.
What to do before you bid
- Get your compliance file into one place, current, exportable.
- Produce a sample duty slip and invoice you would be happy to show, using a real trip. Not a template — a real one.
- Write your incident procedure down. One page.
- Decide who owns the records and be ready to say so.
Do those four and you will be shortlisted for work you would previously not have been invited to bid on. They are also, not coincidentally, the same four things that make the contract profitable once you have it.
Our page on employee transport is written from the client’s side of this table — worth reading before you bid, because it is what your prospect is thinking. The trip sheets and corporate billing pages cover documents two and three.