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Business

19th Aug 2019

“Any problem that could ever hit us, hit us,” iCabbi Founder Gavan Walsh

Jamie Concannon

“It’s been an incredibly difficult path that will test every fibre in your being.”

If setting up a business was easy, everyone would do it. Getting things off the ground can in itself seem like a monumental task, but after that there is the matter of keeping it going.

There will be some days where it seems like you’ve come up with the next “big thing,” and there will be days where you’ll question why you even bothered.

Speaking on The Architects of Business, in partnership with EY Entrepreneur of The Year™, iCabbi founder Gavan Walsh spoke about his journey in business. As he said himself, it’s something that will push you to your very limits:

“Every day is tough. It’s a cliché but it’s an absolute rollercoaster. We have, and I’m sure every entrepreneur or anybody running any company would have similar stories, but we’ve ran out of money.

“We’ve had to put people on half wages. Luckily we’ve always been growing but I would nearly say any problem that could ever hit us, hit us. We’ve had shareholder problems.

“It’s been an incredibly difficult path that will test every fibre in your being, really. But they continue to happen.”

“In the dark times you need those little glimmers of light.”

These warnings should in no way serve as a deterrent. There’s always a way through those challenges, and really it’s just a case of figuring out what works for you.

Sometimes one simple piece of advice from a friend can be something that influences your business choices as a whole.

“Somebody that I really value their opinion, they just said ‘Business is about solving problems,’ and everyday you’re going to have a new problem. It’s your ability to not get knocked down too much.

“In the dark times you need those little glimmers of light to keep you going and luckily we’ve always had them in iCabbi.”

The idea that it’s all about problem solving is a simple outlook on business that is often overlooked. Both in the sense that businesses must externally solve problems for customers and internally for themselves, it’s true in more ways than one.

Now running a business that solves problems for hundreds of thousands of taxi drivers all over the world, Gavan certainly took that advice on board.

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