Member Spotlight – October 2017: Liftshare

03/11/2017

Q: What is Liftshare?
A: We provide car sharing and travel planning products to help commuters share cars to work and help organisations who want to promote greener travel to their employees. So there’s a strong B2B side but we also help people get to festivals, football matches and concerts and are increasingly working in the area of community transport.

Q: What organisations do you work with?
A:  A wide range from Barclaycard to Astra Zeneca to Cambridgeshire County Council. We operate the largest corporate car sharing scheme in the UK for Jaguar Land Rover with over 5,000 staff sharing every day.

Q: How big is the company?
A: We have a team of 24 people here in Norwich. We’ve grown organically, with the profits from our 700 clients covering our R&D and enabling us to provide the free public service. Over 100k journeys are shared per day by our members.

Q: Tell me a surprising fact about Liftshare
A: We’ve enabled 40 million shared journeys since we were founded in 1998 and have saved nearly half a billion car miles.

Q: What’s next for the company?
A: There is a lot going on. We’ve developed a market leading MAAS (mobility as a service) tool called myPTP that helps individuals to see all the travel modes available to them, it also helps employers to quickly see how best to overcome parking and access challenges. We’re seeing if we can help revolutionise the amazing community transport sector with a new project called HappyCT in collaboration with Nesta and local community transport providers. We’re also testing how we can use sensors and M2M systems to help gamify and reward people for sharing.

Q: Employers are telling us that skills and talent is their number one concern at the moment. Do Liftshare have any initiatives in this area?
A: We’re very committed to being a brilliant local employer. We believe that the winners in each marketplace will be the ones that learn the fastest – so I need the team to keep learning and we support that as much as we can. It felt wrong to me that it was typically only business leaders were the ones to be coached so earlier this year we introduced a mentor programme where everyone in the team is encouraged to find and work with a mentor. We also love having brilliant people join us for internships. – We’ve recently had Ben, a maths PhD from UEA working with us for 10 weeks to make better use of our data. He’s automated a process that used to take 4 days and now takes 4 seconds!

Q: And lastly, why did you join TechEast?
A:  We want to work with others to attract and retain the best innovators and talent in the region. TechEast has increased our awareness of what is going on regionally, given access to great workspace in the London Embassy and is an easy brand for all the team to get behind.