Six months ago we decided to rebuild mtvan totally from scratch. We set out to build a business networking site, with a freight exchange, location tracking, Proof of Delivery, and customer invoicing. We wanted to bring the networking benefits of sites like Facebook to the courier industry, to make it easier for small businesses to make essential business contacts, as well as a freight exchange to cover work efficiently. We looked at everything we had been doing, and if it wasn’t working we threw it out, and if it was working we improved it. And we made a list of all the things our users had always said they wanted us to do, and we’ve done all that too. So it’s been a busy time for us here.

Is it going well?

Well our users tell us they like it. It’s complete, it’s working, and people are signing up and networking with each other and trading work, so that’s what’s important.

What problems have you faced?

We’ve really stretched some of the new technology to the limit, so some stuff has held us up a bit. Google maps and directions, for example. It’s brilliant what you can do with it, but once you get past the point of just wanting a simple map with a dot on it, it’s quite complicated. Our users told us they wanted validated postcodes, and accurate mileages, with automatically generated ETAs, and full directions. It’s all there now, but it’s taken a bit of working out. Plus of course, it works in every country that Google has maps for, so we’ve spent a while making it work with the Euro as well as with Pounds, so we’ve had to get exchange rates to work like on eBay.

What’s good about it?

I think the best thing about it is that it’s not just the same old tired freight exchange model, but it includes things that people are used to having to help with the rest of their lives on the internet, such as Facebook-style networking tools. We’ve tried to make it so that you can do everything on it, from booking to invoicing, including PODs and location tracking. The great thing about the internet is that it keeps making your business cheaper to run. Not so long ago it used to cost £1 a day to track a vehicle. Now it’s free to our users. And it’s the same with the customer invoicing. Courier software used to be such a big deal. Now you just sign up, log in, and get stuck in.

What’s different about it?

It loads much faster now. It offers much more to the user, both vendor and courier. It’s quicker to book work. The alerts system is really accurate. There’s a neat xml feed if people want to connect it to their existing software. And people love the social and business networking side. We’re also totally independent of any courier company now, so it’s much clearer what we are offering now.

Have you had good support from your colleagues in the industry?

Yes, we been really pleased with the way people have stuck by us, and said they wanted us to produce something really modern, and above all something that was good value. That doesn’t just mean cheaper, but refreshingly better and more in line with how their business is now. It’s not just the recession driving that. The plain fact is, people are used to the internet being free. So if you’re going to charge, you have to set the price at a sensible level, and deliver stuff that really impresses them. Ten years ago you could charge what you liked. Now people are rightly demanding much more for a lot less.

What’s next?

We’re going to carry on encouraging our existing users to make a habit of using mtvan every day to cover their work more efficiently, to get more work and to make more contacts. We’re also talking to lots of other people about taking a fresh look at what we’re offering, and asking them to see how that compares with their current courier work exchange.

We’re also launching a separate end-user website, www.DeliverySupermarket.com, to introduce new customers directly to our users. It offers a uniquely wide range of services to the end user, based on the services our users are happy to quote for. We don’t get involved in the job or the money, it’s a straight introduction, to bring more work and customers to mtvan users. We’re aiming mainly at the under-35s using couriers now, the Facebook generation, who are completely at home on the internet when buying business services, and who see the old phone-based business model as rather quaint. They don’t want quaint, they want slick web services that deliver them results and value. That’s what we’re all about.

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.<!–more–>

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

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?

www.prontodespatch.com

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

“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.

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

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.”