Reinventing the wheel with rideshare app Shebah
The rideshare industry has been a public transport phenomenon. George McEncroe has disrupted the industry and taken it to a new level of service with Shebah – Australia's leading all-women rideshare service.
Necessity was the single-mother of invention when George McEncroe launched her all-female rideshare app, Shebah. Only a few years ago, the former breakfast radio host and teacher found herself the newly divorced mother of four children, whose “bitsy” earning history blocked every home loan application.
“It’s a story shared by so many women. I’d been the primary breadwinner for a few years, but the rest of the time had been devoted to my husband’s career and raising these four monkeys. Everything I did fit in the cracks.”
"When the bank refused my loan for a house, I decided to put the deposit into an app helping women achieve just that – flexible and safe work.”
Her situation inspired her to think about the many other women who are tied to part-time work due to family commitments. Many have no choice but to accept the job insecurity that goes with the territory.
“It’s like when I was a part-time teacher; if I declined an offer of work, I’d go straight to the bottom of the pile. A whole lot of women desperately need work that is flexible and safe. And they need to be able to turn it on and off without having to make an apology. When the bank refused my loan for a house, I decided to put the deposit into an app helping women achieve just that – flexible and safe work.”
Scouting for ideas, McEncroe lit upon the transport industry. She found a glaring lack of female drivers – around six per cent of taxi drivers and 10 per cent of Uber drivers are female – as well as a casual disregard for women’s perceptions of safety.
“My daughter was having a hard time in cabs and Ubers. Every woman I spoke to had an experience where they felt uncomfortable. But there’s such a lack of interest or regulation and data about what was happening,” she says. “We can’t fix what we don’t measure, and we don’t measure what we’re not interested in. The whole transport industry is regulated under the male gaze.”
A successful disruptor
Enter Shebah. McEncroe thankfully jettisoned the original name of Mum’s Taxi (“it was terrible; all my friends said so”) to name her business after the Queen of Sheba, her favourite figure from her study of theology. “She questioned the wisdom of King Solomon. She was the Beyoncé of the Bible – the original disruptor.”
Launched on International Women’s Day in 2017, Shebah has exploited a gap in the marketplace to become a successful industry disruptor.
Designed to combat “transport inequality”, Shebah only recruits female drivers and takes only female passengers, along with children. Passengers can request a vehicle with a baby capsule or booster seat, and all drivers have a Working with Children Check, making it the only rideshare service legally allowed to transport children without a parent or guardian present.
This has been a key part of Shebah’s growth, with the majority of trips requesting a special child seat, and many trips taken with a child riding alone.
“Kids are the best,” says McEncroe. “Parents can text us notes about what they like to talk about, and the preferred driver option means you can request the same driver each time, so you know the child feels comfortable with them.”
Beginning with 120 drivers in Brisbane and Melbourne, Shebah has grown to a national service with about 1300 drivers, who receive 85 per cent of each fare (in contrast, Uber drivers take 72.5 per cent). The app has been downloaded more than 210,000 times, and several rounds of crowdfunding have raised almost $4 million. Significantly for McEncroe, this means about 70 per cent of drivers are also shareholders.
Keeping management’s foot on the pedal is another important part of company culture. Along with Shebah’s general manager and other key staff, McEncroe drives customers a few times a week. “It’s the only way to understand the business,” she says. “It’s absolutely critical to know what being a driver is like.”
You’d be happy to hop into a Shebah ride and find McEncroe behind the wheel. A fast-talking straight-shooter with an arsenal of quips at the ready, she’s a consummate people person who relishes the chance to meet her customers, and isn’t afraid to share a few stories (the one about the mother and daughter heading home after a hen’s night is a doozy).
And you can certainly be guaranteed a more comfortable ride than the clapped-out Kombi van McEncroe drove in her Monash University arts undergraduate days. “It could only turn left,” she says, “Heading out to Clayton was always a pretty interesting ride.”
