The Man Behind RaodBird Fleet Management Software Platform ‒ Exclusive Interview With Aivars Oreniss

Aivars Oreniss is founder and CEO of RaodBird. Aivars is originally from Latvia, where he lived until he was 26. While in Latvia, he started multiple construction, agriculture, and automotive companies. At the age of 26, he moved to Stockholm and started a fleet management company which later helped to develop the concept for the RaodBird fleet management software platform.

Aivars Oreniss, Founder and CEO RaodBird

Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.

My name is Aivars Oreniss, I am married to Liene Orenisa, we have two dogs - Bruno (Jack Russel Terrier) and Jojo (Russkij Toy Terrier) and just recently we got our first baby boy Oliver. I was born in Madona, Latvia and I grew up in the countryside and went to a small elementary school there. My mom has been a dairy farmer all of her life and my dad was a truck driver and supply manager for an agriculture land drainage building company. My dad died when I was 4 and my sister was 2 years old. We grew up with our mum and uncle. At age of 15 I went to Riga to study computer sciences at a professional high school/college. My first job at 17 was to run a music studio which was started by two of my cousins. The Studio offered practice space and equipment for small bands which I had to sell to those services. It was my first “cold calling” experience where I had to find some first 100 leads and call them and make them book practice times. We typically charged some 5-7€ per hour then for those services. I did it well and in a couple of months the studio was fully booked. Over time I was involved in a couple of other ventures with my cousins. At 19 I started a construction and services company which In the beginning took jobs from general enterprises and grew the portfolio with accomplishments to be able to participate in tenders ourselves. And I also started studying Finance at University, but I dropped out after my first study year. By the age of 22, we worked mostly with government entities directly and built small scale projects in sewage systems, water pipelines, road construction and similar projects.

Two years later, I had full-scale construction company with some 70 employees at its peak and we were doing over 1M € in annual revenues. Which was quite impressive for a self made 24-year-old. Unfortunately, the young age, mistakes and dark business environment drove me out of that business and the company went irrecoverably insolvent and I decided to start over everything and by the end of April 2015 me and my today’s wife Liene moved to Sweden. It took me 1 day to get a personal id number in Stockholm and 3 months to get a Taxi license, even though I almost couldn’t speak Swedish. I have been always very fast learner and it’s always been easy to pick up new skills for me. First year I was just driving Uber and one year later I secured Taxi Business license and started my own fleet management company. By the end of 2019 I had 3 cars and some 10 drivers working on different employment grades. Then Covid-19 came and I started thinking about making the app to manage my fleet. Because it was always a lot of work associated with administration. I found developers which could help me but it was not possible to justify the development costs for that small scale business like I had. Then I started RoadBird.

What is your business name and how do you help your clients?

RoadBird is now a software platform which helps fleet managers like myself to manage their fleet and connect them with drivers. The platform does everything related to driver administration, efficiency and productivity tracking. The platform collects the data from revenue data sources, telematics data sources and shifts data sources. We are able to very accurately track driver efficiency and their performance, which is one of the biggest challenges for fleet managers because earnings sources are not able to provide those data on their own, and it becomes even harder to track everything when there are multiple drivers operating the same vehicle using multiple ride hailing platforms. We have built a system which is able to manage large network of drivers and have hundreds of cars under management, the onboarding process is fully digitalised and it will be fully automated over time. The platform is able to track the efficiency and fulfilment of the drivers. Ee also track if they’re properly operating the taximeter and reporting damages to cars. We have training content of 8 different series which helps them in all those different aspects of operations.

What kind of audience do you target your business towards?

The target audience is fleet managers which run taxi fleets and our platform also enables fleet sourcing from rental fleets. Other group is drivers which want to work as drivers under mobility platforms.

What are your current goals for your business?

Launching the platform and scaling to the first 100 cars. Raising our pre-seed round of funding and generating productive KPIs for further growth.

What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?

I would like to scale RoadBird to have hundreds of thousands of cars under management. Yo launched the platform in all the largest cities around Europe initially. I want to organise my life in a way that I can comfortably run my business and develop my ideas into real business. I see great opportunity into the electrification of transportation and it’s potentially a niche where I will spend most of my professional life and career. I want to be able to help my family and to keep close contact with my immediate family and support them. By my nature I am a very practical and creative problem solver with this naturally gifted entrepreneurial spirit.

Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?

Successful people. Steve Jobs, Mike Markula, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos are the names that inspire me most. There are many others which I like a lot but these are people which I truly respect.

What is your work inspired by?

Just because I know that things can be done much better than they’re done now…

Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.

It’s RoadBird, although it is still a very early stage company, but the way it’s foundation is built it makes it really possible to achieve the vision we are going after and even much more. It’s much harder than it sounds but I am very optimistic that it will be a very successful company.

If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?

Ride hailing Pricing algorithms for inefficient trips. They use linear calculation principles which are inefficient for fleet managers for all trips more than 30 km away from cities. We will make proper software to solve this, but adoption by third party platforms is a challenging business development question. If we succeed the mobility platforms will be available countrywide and it will improve their performance and driver engagement to completely another level.

Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.

That was possibly the decision to move from Latvia to Sweden. My life would have been different if I had stayed. I am really happy that I took this decision, although it wasn’t emotionally easy. It took approximately 3 years to adapt to change but my life is much better organised, I am much more mature and spiritually stronger than I was before.

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