Tim Gilbert visits Royal Mail Sameday’s national control centre in Peterborough.

“We’re doing 75% more work than we were this time last year”, says Mike Marjoram as he hands me tea in a Royal Mail mug. I’m sitting in his office in the national headquarters of Royal Mail Sameday on the northern outskirts of Peterborough. From where I’m sitting, I can see through to the national control room where a team of 8 control staff are busy handling the work.

Mike, 49, is General Manager, having been appointed following the demise of the joint venture with BSG. The joint venture arguably had some success, in that it showed the potential for the Royal Mail brand to attract same day courier work. Although there were some problems with the business model, it all added up to enough for Royal Mail to be happy to acquire the business assets of BSG, to pay off the creditors, and to start again with a wholly-owned new company in November 2007.

With Royal Mail now the sole proprietor and investor, and with a new management team in place, it’s Mike’s job to see to it that the potential is turned into reality.

Although there have been some redundancies following the change of ownership, the company still employs a total of 14 staff, and is due to recruit two more sales staff imminently. “We are really ramping up the sales effort now”, Mike says, “and have changed our approach entirely. We were putting a lot of effort into recruiting sales franchisees, with some success, but our policy has shifted towards employing our own people directly from now on”, Mike explains.

The power of the Royal Mail brand to pull work in is felt particularly strongly at the top end of the market, where major brands tend to choose their suppliers with at least half an eye on the strength of the brand of their key suppliers. “We really get noticed whenever companies are short-listing in the tender process”, says Mike. “We’re seen as a safe choice, as in the old expression, no-one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.

Mike also sees lots of potential for growth from within Royal Mail itself. “Now that we’re wholly owned by Royal Mail, other people within the wider organisation are happier to talk to us about opportunities. It’s a cultural thing, and we are happy to make the most of it.” This is opening up opportunities, Mike says, both in terms of Royal Mail’s own internal spending on same day courier work, and in terms of approaching Royal Mail’s existing corporate customers on the letters and parcels side, to offer same day as a natural extension. “The opportunity just within Royal Mail is huge” Mike says, “but we won’t be limiting ourselves to that. We’re out there, selling in the open market”.

The service offering is also changing, with flexibility being the key word. “You have to be prepared to adapt to what the customer wants nowadays” observes Mike. He points to a newly-won contract offering same day home delivery within Greater London on behalf of a major e-tailer. “It’s a long way from traditional same day courier work”, says Mike “but it’s a good example of people wanting extend the work they place with Royal Mail to create an exciting new service for their consumers. And our ability to provide real-time PODs online was also crucial”.

The new approach is also changing the way the company gets the work done. “We’ve made a total shift away from seeing the couriers as a profit centre.” Mike tells me. “We used to put huge amounts of effort into recruiting licensed drivers, who paid us a fee to cover an area, and of course if we didn’t yet have enough work in their area, they left quite soon. Now, we’re much more flexible in our relationships with our drivers. We only consider experienced couriers, and just look to recover the relatively low cost of the POD and GPS tracking equipment we give them. We still put everyone through the Royal Mail vetting system, of course.”

It’s a business model that sounds like it makes sense. A clear focus on sales effort and account retention, a national control room, a flexible well-equipped workforce, and invoicing and collections services provided by the parent company.

I ask Mike whether he is optimistic about the future of the market. He is emphatic. “We are optimistic enough to be investing in new sales staff, and in a new headquarters building in which to house all this growth”. There’s a note of caution, though. “We do have to be flexible, and we do have to respect the trust people place in us, and get the job right”.

You get the impression that this is a company that has now found its feet, after something of a false start, and is now confident not only that it has found the right low-cost national business model, but that also it is sitting on massive sales growth potential from the power of its trusted brand.

All it has to do now, is go out and make the most of the opportunity.

You can find out more about working for Royal Mail Sameday at: http://www.royalmailsameday.com/ or call their driver recruitment line on 0870 6093051.

You can book a courier online at http://www.royalmail.com or call 0845 8505522.

If you would like Tim Gilbert to come and profile your business like this, you can call him on 01480 309347.

Tim Gilbert catches up with Brian Penrose, now out on his own at Independent Logistics in Milton Keynes.

I last interviewed Brian Penrose for Courier Direct Magazine in 2006 when he was heading up GL Transport in Milton Keynes. When I heard recently that he had set up on his own, it seemed like an ideal time for one of my occasional update interviews.

The relationship with his former partner at GL came to a natural end in summer 2007, and Brian looked around for premises to make a fresh start. Hearing that the Rockwell building in Third Avenue was being turned into shared office and warehouse space, Brian decided it was the obvious place to go.

First impressions on arrival say it’s an ideal set-up. Trailers in the yard, a shared forklift, a shared security and warehouseman, CCTV, and a flexible approach to space. “I rent a basic 2000 square feet in the warehouse”, Brian tells me, “and if a trailer turns up and I suddenly need more, I can rent more by the day”.

Brian’s business model for Independent Logistics is an evolution of what he had begun at GL Transport. There he was mixing conventional sameday courier work with fixed price direct delivery of mainly palletised freight.

At Independent Logistics, Brian has shifted almost completely away from the B2B sameday work, and has added 2 man home delivery to the mix. He uses the phrase “non-compatible freight” to describe the work he is focussing on. Non-compatible with a parcel or pallet network, that is.

Hot coffee in hand, I walk round the warehouse with Brian. There is an extraordinary mixture of freight, from running machines to domestic doors. “The running machines are not just for humans either”, Brian points out, showing me a pile of definitely two man boxes marked ‘Fit Fur Life’. “These are the treadmills for dogs that were on Dragon’s Den last year. The lady heard about us and gave us a ring. It was just a few at first, but now we’re delivering dozens of them to vets, kennels and people’s homes all over the country”.

Brian’s advertising budget runs quite high, he tells me, and involves some very obscure publications, most of which are published in China. But it appears to be worth it, as the resulting sales enquiries tend to lead to freight arriving. “The thing is, people try to put this kind of freight into a parcel or pallet network, and it gets all smashed up. Either that or it’s just too heavy and the network won’t take it. So by the time they find us, they’re often pretty desperate”.

It’s all handled from the single premises in Milton Keynes, with owner drivers’ vans going out fully loaded to cover particular parts of the county on particular days. Orphans, which can’t viably be added to any of the regular runs, are put onto MTvan.com. “Anything going outside England automatically goes on there” Brian tells me, “and we specify on each job what we can afford to pay on it.” Payment is made within 10 days direct from the website. “It’s not courier work in the old ‘pound a mile’ sense of the word, but it’s worthwhile extra money for a sameday courier heading home empty”, Brian points out, “and with a seven day delivery window, it’s genuine backload territory”.

Everything that leaves the warehouse goes out with a delivery time convenient to the courier, and agreed with the recipient. “That way we keep the ‘Not In’ rate to almost zero”, Brian assures me.

Back in the office upstairs, clean and modern, we find Brian’s daughter Janine busy handling queries from customers, and the day to day admin. All of the invoicing is done online. Brian shows me the online stock control system. “As a matter of policy we keep stock to a minimum here” he tells me, “as we don’t want to be responsible unnecessarily for a single piece of customer stock. We’re not a storage company, and we make sure that everything is in the warehouse only for as long as it needs to be to allow us to optimise the delivery runs. In practise, everything is usually in and out well within a week.”

Pricing is strictly fixed price. “It works out less than a sameday courier, but more than a network”, Brian tells me, “which makes sense because the customer is not getting the speed of a sameday courier , but is getting more care than in a network. Customers also like it because they can budget accurately”. I ask Brian whether he sees it as a volume business, or a margin business. “In a way it’s both”, he smiles, “you definitely need the volume to make it work, but every van that leaves here goes out making us a margin, having paid the courier a decent rate”.

As yet another Sprinter turns up to collect a run of consignments piled neatly in the warehouse, I thank Brian for the coffee and take my leave, making a note to revisit him in another year’s time to check out the progress of fixed price non-compatible freight. It’s courier work, but not as we’ve always known it.

www.indlogistics.co.uk

If you would like Tim to come and profile your business like this, please call him on 01480 309347.

Tim Gilbert visits Cambridge’s innovative two-wheel delivery company.

“It’s mainly stuff we carry, not documents” says Pete King “which came as a bit of surprise when we first started our business”.

I’m in the control room of Outspoken Delivery in Cambridge, talking to brothers Pete and Rob King, partners in the firm.

It’s the end of a busy Monday, it’s dark, it’s been raining relentlessly since about two days ago, but these guys are still fizzing with energy and enthusiasm about their business. To get through the door, I’ve had to pick my way around several of their 8ft wheelbase cargo bicycles, which are the only form of transport used in their courier operations.

The aluminium bicycles are equipped with a pressed-steel cargo box behind the rider. The boxes are huge, but no wider than the handlebars. This width allows the couriers to make full use of Cambridge’s cycle lanes, so beating the city’s notorious congestion.

“We actually found that the traditional bicycle courier market, served by guys in lycra with a bag on their back, had actually declined almost to nothing, thanks to broadband, by the time we started up in November 2005,” Pete continues, “but we soon found out there was lots of demand when we described ourselves as delivering around the city centre on a van that’s really a bike”, continues Pete.

They’re a healthy-looking pair, turning 30. Before starting in business together, Pete had spent seven years travelling the world as an officer in the Royal Engineers, and Rob had done much the same, without the guns, as a teacher and guide in Africa and India for an outward-bound travel company for kids. When this all came to a natural conclusion, they looked around for something else to do.

“We realised we knew nothing about business and money, which was a bit of a handicap in life, so we decided we’d better go and set up a business”, Rob tells me. They were, for a while, just in need of an idea, until on a cycling holiday in the Lake District, they met a chap who was doing rather well with cargo bicycle couriers in the North of England, and it seemed like just the thing.

Borrowing a Cambridge student friend’s spare bedroom as an office, the business was soon started up on a shoe-string. “We spent the first year trying to work out what worked and what didn’t, and getting more self-confident as we went along”, says Pete. “We both did lots of cold calling, in between jobs, and made sure we talked to everyone we met”. As the business grew, a team of part-time couriers were recruited, mainly people moonlighting from their ‘proper job’, and more cycles were bought.

Initially, the brothers focussed on small local business customers, who understood the distribution problems created by Cambridge’s traffic, and who welcomed the innovative and green solution presented by the cargo cycles. Everything from cakes to payroll print-outs was soon filling those big steel boxes.

With a hundred or so regular customers under their belts, it was soon time to move to a proper office, and Outspoken has now joined mainstream business, to the extent that it operates from a small industrial unit, run by the council, on the edge of town.

“We’re now looking further a-field for our work, and we’ve been successful in selling our services to TNT, says Rob. “They give us stuff like their bank runs, which used to take 90 minutes while their courier parked his van and walked between all the city branches. On our bikes, the same job takes us 10 minutes”.

I ask them whether they plan any further expansion, and Pete tells me that they’d like to persuade other parts of TNT, such as the express parcels division, that cycles like theirs can knock out city centre parcel work quicker than an 11 tonner. They’ve also looked at running an electric van to operate in the city centre, and would still like to go in this direction, though at present this seems prohibitively expensive for them. Other possibilities include setting up in a neighbouring town with the same traffic nightmare as Cambridge. “We’ve proved that the idea works, so we just need to work out how and where to go from here” says Rob.

With more and more UK cities presenting barriers, such as access time limits and even plain old congestion, to vans trying to operate in their crowded centres, the idea seems to be perfectly timed.

And for the customer it’s got everything. As one of their customers remarked: ”Efficient collection. Speedy delivery. Big warm smiles and green as grass. What’s not to love?”

Now how many diesel powered courier companies can point to a customer testimonial like that?

You can contact Outspoken Delivery LLP on 01223 719594. www.outspokendelivery.co.uk

If you would like Tim to come and profile your courier business like this, you can contact him on 01480 309347. tim@MTvan.com.

Tim Gilbert speaks to Adrian Gray, of AJG Parcels in Inverness.

Adrian Gray is standing proudly in from of his new depot building in Inverness. “I get the keys on Wednesday” he tells me, “the builders are snagging it just now”. Judging by the sheer size of the place, it’ll certainly take them a day or two to do a full final test on a project which started over four years ago when Adrian bought the land. At over 90 metres long, covering 14000 square feet of deck area and offices, it’s an impressive sight.

Adrian is managing director of his company, AJG Parcels. He’s 52, and comes across as a no-nonsense entrepreneur. Though rooted firmly in Scotland, his accent reveals traces of a childhood partly spent further south.

AJP Parcels’ main business is green field deliveries in the impossible bits of Scotland for the overnight parcel industry. That’s the top half of Scotland, and most of the west coast. “Most of our work arrives in double deckers from the Birmingham area, for delivery to the north and northwest of Scotland, including the islands”, he explains. “On the new depot site, these trunkers will load straight onto the deck from the three doors at the end of the building. The freight will then be sorted and loaded onto the 18 loading bays designed for long wheelbase vans along the side”. AJG employs 23 people to do the sorting. AJG’s couriers are all employed by the company, and all drive company vans.

To the rear, opposite the loading bays for the vans, there is space on the site for a parcels railhead. “I’m working on the rail operators. There are train operating subsidies available if you can prove you’ll be taking freight off the roads, which we can, but at the moment the subsidies are based on the weight of freight such as coal and timber, much heavier than our parcel traffic. When I get that resolved, we’ll move forward on that”.

The new depot, 448 miles north of Birmingham, will ease some of the pressure of handling over 3000 consignments a day at the current depot, a load which is also shared by a mini hub 134 miles to the south west in Arrochar. These distances go some way to illustrating the sheer scale of the task involved in rural distribution in Scotland. “It’s a real problem area for the networks” points out Adrian. “As everyone knows, their business model depends on being able to make money on the collections, and cover costs on the deliveries. But up here, there are virtually no collections. There’s no manufacturing to speak of, it’s all just tourism and farming”. Adrian’s aim is to take a problem area for the industry and turn it into a routine part of their operation. This requires emphasis in three areas; coverage, customer service, and technology.

AJG’s coverage, despite the huge distances, means that the networks can promise that a parcel collected in Land’s End at 4pm one day, can be in the Inverness depot by 10am next day, and delivered in John O’Groats that same afternoon.

Customer service means having a team of 10 customer services people sufficiently in touch with the situation to be able to answer queries, progress reports, and POD requests in real time. This is in turn helped by Adrian’s investment in his own IT systems to deliver POD information in to the servers of his main customers in the West Midlands within 5 seconds of the delivery being made. “Our scanner is programmed to recognise from each barcode which is the sending network, and to send the POD data to them automatically”, Adrian tells me.

An increase, nationally, in home deliveries from internet shopping has been reflected in AJG’s business in the last 12 months. “We’re doing about 70% of all the parcels traffic in the area we cover, and of that, we seen an increase to over 50% in home deliveries”. Of course, people not being at home is the biggest problem, in an area where the courier may have travelled 15 miles or more up the side of a loch to reach the village. “The shippers need to be talking more to the consumers on their websites” suggests Adrian, “to record their preferences for what we should do if we turn up when they’re out”.

This repeated emphasis on customer service stems from Adrian’s background in retailing. “I was managing a DIY superstore, when I decided I needed a change of scene” he recalls. “A friend in the courier industry offered me a managerial job, and when that came to a natural conclusion, my wife and I set up on our own in 1992. It was her, me, a car and a van”. Adrian set out to persuade the major networks to put work his way, and this gave the business the traffic it needed to provide the coverage. “Now we have quite a few local customers of our own, mainly in farming, which for us are the icing on the cake. It’s a balance, covering our costs with the delivery work, and working hard to secure profitable local business on top of that”.

Adrian is optimistic about the future of the industry and of AJG. “We’re benefiting from the growth in home shopping, especially, and from health of the Scottish economy, so the future is reasonably secure as long as we keep the service levels up and keep our technology and services in line with what our customers need”. With an eye to the future, alongside his plan for rail-based trunking, Adrian is also planning an air link from the West Midlands, as part of his investment program to improve service to the networks.

It all adds up to a philosophy of investment in constant improvement, and the depot behind Adrian is certainly solid evidence of it.

www.ajgparcels.com

Swindon’s one of those towns that feels like it should be a city. It has suburbs, a busy motorway, a major car plant, lots of household names in financial services, and loads of shopping. City status has as yet eluded the town, but perhaps on the basis of numbers of courier companies alone it should qualify. “There are 80 that I know of” says Mike McCartney, MD of Road Runners, who is showing me around his Swindon base.

Two of those 80 courier operations share just over 60% of the courier market in the town, Mike tells me, and they are both members of the National Courier Association. Mike is on the board the NCA, and sees the Association as becoming a kind of quality standard, like the Corgi standard for gas fitters. Swindon’s courier market appears to prove it works. “It has made all the difference on lots of occasions” he tells me “when pitching for work”.

The Road Runners office nestles comfortably in an industrial estate which houses many of the service businesses for the city. Outside, a couple of courier vans in full Road Runners livery are waiting for a job. Inside, there’s a generously proportioned control room, running CMS software, where Mike introduces me to the two controllers. They handle work right across the region (“We see our patch as being Swindon, Bath and Bristol”) and the all important regular shuttles into London.

Mike’s office, where we’re having a coffee, is solidly corporate-looking, with certificates on the wall, and some nice courier technology. “I’m a bit of a gadget freak” he admits with a smile “and I’m confident that the future of this business lies in investing in better and better technology as it becomes available”.

At 48, Mike’s already had one career, running sales teams all around the world for 21 years for the American giant Honeywell Bull. This big-company background really shows in the way he manages Road Runners. As well as the NCA membership, Road Runners’ quality accreditations include Investors in People (“we’re into training in a big way”), ISO9000 (“everything is fully documented in a procedure manual”), and a Green Apple Award for Environmental Best Practice (“LPG vans, and a lot of work to reduce our fuel bills by 15%). All of this, he insists, is well worth the time and expense, as “it helps me win contracts”.

For Mike, this all adds up to differentiation, really important when the competition is so fierce and so numerous. It’s about being better in ways that matter (“We’re one of the few genuinely 24/7 operations in the town”), and being able to prove that superiority when it matters, when new work is up for grabs. Together, those awards and accreditations get Road Runners through the first stage of every tender that lands on Mike’s desk. This is important, as 95% of all Road Runners’ customers are what Mike describes as Blue Chip. Is there anyone he won’t work for? “Printers”, he says, without a moment’s hesitation. He says they all want it too cheaply, and they all take too long to pay. “It’s a great way to get rid of your competitors one by one” he says, “to leave them with all the work for printers who go bust on a regular basis”. Mike recalls an American sales manager he knew in his former life, who despised anyone in business who could be described as a “VDA”, roughly translated as a Volume Driven A**hole, with more focus on turnover than on the profitability of that turnover. Not a mistake anyone is going to make at Road Runners.

Mike now runs a sales team of three, including himself, with one person working on account retention (monitoring each customer for sales decline), and one person out looking for new business. Mike does mainly major account sales. It’s a high proportion of the company’s staff headcount, which also includes an accounts person/telephonist and Mike’s wife as FD. It’s this dedication to sales and marketing which has helped to double the company in size since Mike bought it in 2000. He saw it advertised, purely by chance, in The Times while flying back to the UK to take early retirement. Having looked it over, and studied the market, it looked like a solid business (established in 1983) with a sound reputation on which Mike could build. He points out that there are in the courier industry very few companies which are worth buying, as many are too dependent on key relationships held by the departing owners. It’s a problem that will have to be dealt with by the industry, he points out, as many of the original entrepreneurs in the industry come up to retirement age. Talking to Mike, you get the impression that there’s a lot of big company thinking going on, with ideas flowing fast and easily. In particular, Mike has an uncompromising view on how the industry will survive the recent changes brought about by broadband, and by increased competition from the overnight parcel and pallet industry. “I have no patience for anyone who says the same day courier industry is in decline” he tells me. “Only people who can’t sell blame the market for their lack of success”.

It’s a tough attitude, but look who has doubled in size.

You can find out more about Road Runners (Swindon) Ltd at +44 (0) 1793 421660.

If you would like Tim to come and profile your courier business like this, you can call him on 01480 309347.

Tim Gilbert grabs a quick cup of tea with Paul Bocking of PB Express.

Some people drive out of necessity, some people drive out of sheer love of it. And some people drive for both reasons. Paul Bocking is one of them. “I used to have a nice lifestyle on the tools” he tells me, “and I miss that sometimes. But nothing beats driving as a courier”.

The tools, of course, were his building tools, deployed in half a lifetime of doing up rental properties for wealthy landlords in London. “I haven’t had a proper job for 30 years”, he laughs. Now Paul is a full time courier owner driver. I ask him how he got into it. “Through a relative, actually, who had a couple of customers, and he used to ask me to help out sometimes. It fitted quite well with the building work. You could tell the customer you needed to let the mortar dry or something, and nip out for a few hours in your van and earn a crafty 50 quid.” Gradually the lure of the open road took a firmer and firmer hold on him, and he left the building trade for good. “I just love it”, he insists. “I really like being on my own, as well, which helps.”

Paul shows me around his Citroen Relay, parked outside the Speed Couriers franchise office at Stansted Airport, where he does a bit of work for Rob Wells. To be kind, it’s a vehicle with a fair amount of courier experience, but it’s in immaculate condition. Clean, well-equipped with a hi-viz jacket and other courier essentials on the front seat, a cradle for his SmartPhone, and a brand new fire extinguisher in the load area. “I can get a blue in there comfortably, up to about 600kg”.

I ask Paul about his choice of this size of van. “To be honest” he tells me, “it’s mainly about the work available your area. Round my way in Braintree, most of the work is small loads, so I gave up my Transit. I really miss it from a driving point of view, it was a great drive, but there was no point in lugging it around, when the work was for a smaller van. Plus it caught fire on me”. Paul recounts the story with a smile, even though it caused him several months off the road. “I switched the ignition off at South Mimms services, and noticed the engine was still running. I went to open the bonnet to try to make it stop, but before I could get to it the wiring loom around the engine was on fire”. Hence the fire extinguisher, I realise.

Nowadays, Paul gets the majority of his work from courier work exchanges, mainly MTvan.com. From these sites, he has about five regular customers, controllers in courier companies who use him for their excess courier work. He has watched this change in the industry with mixed feelings. “In many ways, I couldn’t do without these sites. They’re where pretty much all my courier work comes from. But on the other hand, if every controller has a choice of hundreds of couriers around the country, where does that leave the locally based subby like me?” He is, however, not against progress, and embraces new technology enthusiastically, though not uncritically. “When people offer me something that’s too complicated, I just give it back. If I’m going to invest in it as a driver, it’s got to be simple, affordable, and it’s got to work”. He likes text alerts from the exchange sites, (having tried and rejected some more technical mobile solutions), and particularly likes the gps tracking from MTvan.com. “I think that’s the future” he tells me with apparent sincerity, “as long as controllers look at the map and call us when they have a job”.

Most days, Paul wakes up not knowing what the day holds for him. “Occasionally I’m pre-booked for the next day, but mainly people call me during the morning when they’ve run out of their own couriers, or when they have a collection near me. If the phone doesn’t ring first thing, I go online and look for work. Once I’m started with one job, I’m usually out all day”.

Paul is reasonably positive about the industry, though a little uncertain about the current state of play, having had this month both his best ever week and his worst ever week. “The only thing that gets me depressed is having nothing to do, so I always go and find some courier work one way or another” he says.

Paul’s particular concern, in common with many owner drivers I meet, is the rates people are charging and paying. “People are struggling to offer me 60p per loaded mile nowadays, which really isn’t enough. I mean, I’ve got to earn enough to run and replace this old girl, haven’t I?” He taps his van affectionately on the bonnet. “I suppose I could earn a bit more doing something else, maybe go back to the building work, but I just love it too much to leave”.

You can call Paul on 07976 798345.

Paul can be tracked here.

If you would like Tim to come and profile your courier business like this, you can call him on 01480 309347.

Tim Gilbert catches up with Stuart Barton, two years on.

Stuart Barton, freelance courier, has been trading for two years now. Soon after he first started out, readers may remember, I wrote a profile of him for Courier Direct Magazine. At that time, he was fresh out of a job at the Automobile Association, and totally new to courier work.

I caught up with him again when, by coincidence, he was delivering in my home town, which presented a convenient opportunity to talk to him about the progress of his courier operation.

His white Astra van is still looking tidy. Stuart bought it slightly second hand with a warranty, and it now has 170,000 miles on it. It’s still got a year’s finance to run, which should coincide nicely with the need to chop it in. “It’s been great for me”, says Stuart, “and I rent a larger van from Norflex by the day as demand dictates”. He insures through One Business, which, he says, gave him a substantial saving over his first year’s policy, bought when he was still new to the market.

Looking at the Astra, my main impression is that Stuart is not afraid to invest in technology to make life easier and more productive. He shows me his TrafficMaster SmartNav system, fully wired in to the van, which gives him navigation, traffic news, speed camera information, and a concierge service. It is truly impressive. Stuart demonstrates by entering a postcode in Guildford into the system. It goes off and consults TrafficMaster’s server somewhere, and comes back with a route and a series of known traffic incidents on route, and proceeds to read them to us over the built in loudspeaker. The first instruction is shown on the touch screen fitted next to the driver’s air vent. Next, Stuart calls the concierge service using the one-touch button next to the gear-stick. “Good afternoon, Mr Barton, how can I help?” It’s a real person. Stuart asks her to find a pub he knows. The concierge has it immediately. “Do you want the route?” she asks. It’s downloaded in seconds to Stuart’s van. He just has to start driving.

Near to his left hand, in a cradle, is an M3100 mobile phone from Orange. It’s Stuart’s latest investment (actually a free upgrade), having tired of his Sony 910i. “I didn’t like the new 990 when it came out, so I thought I’d try this one a try. What’s really nice is that it’s like having a pc in the van, but it’s not a huge brick of a thing. Small enough for my pocket.” Stuart shows me how he has all his PODs scanned and filed away on it, together with his invoices, so he can answer POD and invoice queries as they arise. “People don’t want to wait till I’m back at home to get an answer, so it’s good to have the information with me in the van. I’ve got every POD I’ve ever done filed on here, right back to my very first job”. For just £15, Stuart bought 1Gb of storage space on the phone. He also saves his scanned POD sheets onto a memory stick for a pc, so one of his courier company customers can download them when he’s in their control room. It’s all part of making life easy for everyone.

Also installed on his M3100 is the new GPS tracking software from MTvan.com. Stuart is an early adopter. It’s tracking us every 120 seconds while we sit in the car park. “I can really see the value of this to controllers, in terms of reduction of phone calls just asking where I am” he says, “and I’m hoping that as it rolls out I’ll get a lot more work as a result of people being able to see where I am on a map”. Having joined MTvan.com in the first few days of starting out, Stuart now counts about 15 solid regular customer relationships from the membership. “I soon realised that you can’t have business relationships with hundreds of people, so I soon started to focus on contacting a much smaller number”, he explains. “Now I get work on a daily basis from 4 courier companies, and I hear from about 10 more on a weekly basis. This makes up my core income. And when I’m empty, I’m more likely to drive to areas where I know people with work, and call them, rather than call dozens of people in an area where I don’t know anyone.”

www.stuartbarton.org.uk

Tim Gilbert talks to Dode Fraser of Pronto Despatch in Inverness.

Dode Fraser is a man with a mission. Several missions, in fact. From his base in Inverness, he aims to be the man to call if anyone in the UK courier industry has anything delivering from, to or in Scotland. “Why lose your own driver for two days coming up here?” he asks “When we can sort it out for you at a really great price”.

Dode is an immediately likeable man, dressed for the job in a way that suggests he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. A grafter, and an intelligent one.

The first floor offices of Dode’s company Pronto Despatch in Inverness are a hive of control room activity. On the ground floor, there’s storage for a carpet distribution contract, complete with a forklift with a spike welded to it to help with the unloading. The carpets are trunked up from Edinburgh, to be co-loaded with other work around the extreme north of Scotland. Outside, in the smart-looking yard, some of Pronto’s vans are marked up “Fraser’s Van Hire”, which gives a hint to how the business started, and to the business flexibility needed to survive in this remote part of the world.

But as many people in the industry know, Dode’s influence stretches far beyond his home base. His six controllers deal in courier work not just throughout Scotland, but in vehicles collecting, delivering and empty throughout the UK and beyond. He even has busy full time couriers based in Stoke. Quite an achievement for a business based over 400 miles to the north. To put that in perspective, from Stoke, Brussels is closer.

Pronto’s huge fleet of full time and occasional subcontractors couriers can be found covering courier work for Pronto all over the UK. The work is mainly subcontracted to Pronto in the first place by other courier companies, by hauliers, and by freight forwarders. “They know they can call us, and the problem is solved, whatever the job”.The success lies in Pronto’s huge list of contacts in the industry, both of owner drivers… “Do a good job for us, and we’ll remember you, and call you again”, and of courier companies. These lists are worked hard, to build a constantly updated picture of where people are empty, where people have work to cover, and to put the two together.

The controllers make heavy use of the courier work exchanges on the internet, together with a system of faxing list of known courier availability for the day to hundreds of courier companies around the UK. And of course, they’re on the phone constantly.It’s all designed to eliminate what Dode clearly sees as the evil of empty mileage in the courier and light haulage industries. Another mission. “Nowadays the customers don’t want to pay for all that empty mileage. If you’re pricing a job to be loaded one way, and to drive back empty, you’re increasingly likely to be too expensive. And the customers are voting with their feet. Just look at the growth in the pallet networks, which have taken a lot of work from direct vehicle couriers. To compete with the networks we all have to give a better service and find ways of getting the prices down to a competitive level. That doesn’t mean working for less. Quite the opposite, it just means working a lot harder to be loaded more often.”

Dode believes firmly that working this way means that the customer benefits, the drivers benefit, and “you’re doing the right thing for the industry and for the environment”.

He is optimistic for the industry, and firmly believes that there will always be a need for direct vehicles. “We go for what we call non-compatible freight” he explains. “Stuff that won’t or can’t go via a network, either because it’s too fragile, too valuable, too big or too urgent”.

On the walls in Pronto’s computerised control room is a mass of maps and lists, with notes on whiteboards, all designed to help in the huge job of matching work and couriers across the country. “This information allows us always to be flexible, and always to be able to give a price for a job, whatever it is”.

In fact, this is another of Dode’s missions in life. “No-one in the courier industry should ever say ‘No’ to the customer”, he insists. “Even if they think they’ve tried everything to cover a job, they can always call us. With so many courier vehicles running around empty in the industry, it’s a crime to say no to a job. You just have to know where the empty people are, and use them”. Dode thinks that the Government should do more to encourage co-loading and back-loading. “They should be helping us all to utilise vehicles better, rather than just taxing us to death”.

Dode explains how this works in the control room when taking on a job: “Rather than always relying on having a vehicle empty in the traditional sense, we just say ‘yes, not a problem’ to the customer, knowing that there’s always a way of getting it covered at a price to suit them. We take the job on, and tell the customer we’ll call back within 10 minutes with a time and a price”.

That price, explains Dode will not always be the same each time, and Pronto’s customers have come to understand that. The price is based on availability at the moment the job needs covering, not on a fixed price list. “If they want a price list, I tell them I don’t have one. Just call for a price at the time”. And this flexibility in pricing extends to his subcontractors. “I don’t expect to be able to hold people to the same price each time for a job. It will depend on their own availability at the time”.

It’s a very modern way of working. It all adds up to a kind of “spot price” dealing system, where the prices are flexible according to availability, very much like the way the local Inverness commodities of fish and oil are traded by dealing rooms many miles from the fishing and the drilling.

Dode believes he is doing the right thing, and with so many using his services, to cover and to get work, who is to say he’s wrong?

http://www.prontodespatch.com/

If you’re stuck on a job, or are empty, call Pronto on 01667 452155.

If you would like Tim to come and profile your business like this, you can call him on 01480 309347.

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