As the recession, or ‘downturn’ to put an optimistic slant on it, starts to bite, particularly in the building trade, we’re starting to see more and more new entrants to the same day courier industry. It seems an inevitable feature of every economic slowdown that the industry is swamped with out of work tradesman and redundant factory-workers, keen to put their unused van (or their redundancy payment) to use starting a new business for themselves.

It’s an easy enough business to get into, just a van and a mobile phone required. Nowadays it’s apparently not even necessary to have a collection of maps, or even any map-reading skills; just spend £75 on a satnav and you’re ready for work. That’s the theory at least.

There will no doubt be no shortage of local and national same day courier companies waiting to take advantage of these naïve new starters – high fuel prices, low rates and a general downturn in business has pushed many of their existing subcontractors out of the business and they will no doubt be wishing to put a few more vehicles on the road in the run up to Christmas.

There’s often an (incorrect) assumption that the rates offered by the well-known national courier companies will be the ‘going rate’ and that it must be possible to make a reasonable living at those rates. The reality is that some of the larger and better known courier companies pay their subcontractors mileage rates that haven’t changed for many years. I’ve read recently of one national company paying their subcontractors as little as 44p per loaded mile. That’s £88 for a delivery from Manchester to London, with fuel for the journey costing over £40.

As well as the courier companies wanting to cash in on this new source of fresh meat there’s the internet based scammers circling, all waiting to make a few pounds selling manuals on how to be a freelance courier or charging hundreds of pounds to be a member of their non-existent network.

A quick search on Google brings up a multitude of such dubious offers: ‘How To Become A Courier’, ‘Earn £250+ per day as a freelance courier’, “Make £1,500 a week as a courier’, ‘Join our courier network for just £150’, ‘Become a Freelance Courier’, ‘Want to be a courier? Buy our manual for £50’. It’s all a load of bollocks. Nobody makes £1,500 per week profit driving for a living, even after they’ve been in the industry for 10 years. Most experienced owner-drivers of small vans in the same day courier industry have a TURNOVER of less than £800 per week, often much less than that, for long hours and with high expenses to come out of that figure.

I’d recommend that anyone wishing to become a freelance same day courier should first visit the free forums at www.codforum.org.uk (that’s Courier Owner Driver forum, nothing to do with fish!), whatever your question it’s probably been asked and answered on the forums before. There’s also a lot of useful advice on avoiding the scammers.

I might be giving the impression that it’s not possible to make a decent living as a self-employed courier, but that’s not the case at all. It certainly is possible to earn a living but it’s not as simple as buying a manual or paying £120 to join a network or a web-site. Neither is it as simple as writing a few letters to your local courier companies. It will never be an industry where it’s possible to make untold riches with little effort – you’re driving a van around after all, nothing else, and if it was cheaper for these courier companies to employ drivers rather than using subcontractors then they’d do it. Hard work and dedication can build up a reasonable business, but as a get-rich-quick scheme or as a two month stop-gap venture it’s unlikely to give you the financial returns you’re looking for.

So to recap: DON’T pay for advice that you can get for free, DON’T pay registration or enrollment fees in the hope of receiving work and ALWAYS ask for advice on a forum like Codforum before parting with any money, signing on the dotted line or committing yourself to any new business venture. Oh, and don’t call me looking for work – it’s advertised on our website when we have any.

Somewhat of a self-proclaimed courier industry guru, Tim is quite profuse with his advice to other, less experienced, businessmen on how they should run their same day courier businesses. Some would say that he was well qualified to give such advice, having started Speed Couriers from scratch (along with Martin Rutty) and then apparently playing his part in steering it through its troubles in 2001-02.

The collapse of OnDigital, one of Speed’s largest customers, and their foray into the home delivery market caused severe problems for the business back in 2002, so it might be expected that Tim would be more wary than most of allowing a single customer to become too important to the business, of allowing a business with no history of profitable trading to run up a significant (and potentially damaging) amount of debts and of tying the fortunes of his business to a company that specialises in home delivery, particularly at a time when consumer spending is falling and the home delivery market is contracting.

Nevertheless, and despite already having had a warning about Amtrak’s stability and potential profitability when they went into liquidation in January 2007, Tim (or at least CFL) were willing to provide credit to the newly-formed Netfold Ltd, who had bought Amtrak’s business, and apparently continued to supply them with credit after they failed to file their first set of annual accounts at the due time back in March 2008.

By the time that Netfold Limited t/a Amtrak went into administration on 22 August 2008 they obviously owed Courier Finance Ltd a considerable sum, causing them to apparently ‘cease trading’ on 10 September 2008. These debts presumably didn’t date back to the period before Netfold was due to file their accounts – in fact it appears that CFL were still carrying out work for Amtrak/Netfold right up until the time they went into administration. What the hell were they thinking of?

With all this muppetry in mind I was astonished when somebody brought the latest edition of Courier Direct magazine to my attention. On pages 18-19 of issue 1045 there’s an article written by Tim Gilbert “Don’t let the credit crunch crush your courier business underfoot – Tim Gilbert suggests a few measures to recession proof your courier business”.

The article includes some good advice such as “Regular, up-to-date and accurate financial information is the first priority”, “The right action may involve painful decisions, especially for you and your staff, but it’s always better to face the pain than to lose the business”, “To avoid running out of cash you’ll need to be on top of your credit control”, “In the good times, you may have been able to take money out of the business. In the bad times, the bank, or arithmetic, may dictate that you have to put some back in to enable the business to continue to trade”, “insist on good financial information, keep on top of the cashflow, keep debt to a minimum, and put away some personal money for a rainy day”. The phrase Physician, heal thyself comes to mind.

The one piece of advice that is sadly missing is to keep an eye on your major customers’ financial situations on a daily basis – they’re exposed to recession in exactly the same way as you and they might not have taken the necessary steps to recession-proof their businesses.

Presumably the article was written shortly before Amtrak/Netfold’s demise and published at this entirely inappropriate time a few weeks later. It would be very cynical of me to imagine that this important piece of advice was left out of Tim’s article because he wasn’t too keen on CFL’s many suppliers looking too deeply into their obviously precarious financial situation. No, I think that would be to overestimate his intelligence. I think the plain fact is that he’s an arse, a muppet, a fool, and that he spent so much time advising other people on how they should run their businesses that he lost sight of what was happening to his own.

And on that note I’m off – I’ve got a business to recession-proof.

Not content with lying to their original members about their membership fees giving them life membership, they sneakily bought the courier forum www.link4couriers.com while hiding its ownership from its members, saturating the site with advertising for their associated (and I think highly questionable) business ventures and claiming for two years that it was “by far the largest independent forum for couriers and courier owner drivers”. Independent my arse, about as independent as their courier exchange site that was actually run by a company that was quietly in competition with many of its members.

Anyway, it seems that events have overtaken me and I won’t get the chance to launch the scathing attack on their business that I had intended to. It turns out that the experienced businessmen at Courier Finance Ltd decided that after Amtrak had gone into liquidation in 2007 it would be a good idea to extend credit terms to the newly-formed Netfold Ltd, which bought the business from the liquidators. It also appears that they didn’t notice when Netfold failed to file its first accounts on time in March 2008 and seemingly continued to provide credit to them until they went into administration at the end of August 2008.

Visitors to mtvan.com this evening have been greeted with the message: “We regret to announce that Courier Finance Ltd has ceased trading at the end of Wednesday 10th of September 2008.

The closure of Netfold t/a Amtrak owing Courier Finance Ltd considerable money was just too much.

This in turn has brought down MTvan.com.

To those of you who have supported us in the past, our sincere thanks.

To those of you who are owed money our sincere apologies.”

So that’s alright then.

I wonder if we can we expect a new book in the near future - ”Tony’s Guide To Phoenix Companies”?

That may make new members feel that the system doesn’t work, or that there aren’t any jobs, but that isn’t the case at all. Every ‘trusted supplier’ that we use today was once a new ‘Network’ member and had to go through the same thing as you’re going through now. I suspect that’s why ‘Network’ has such a long minimum subscription period – to allow you to work out how to use the site to your best advantage without you just giving up after a couple of months.

As for the posting of RJs FROM your area, I personally wouldn’t put an Essex to Scotland job on unless I was going to Scotland. If I’m looking through the Directory for your area I can see your ‘See My Journeys’ button lit up and it looks to me as if you’re loaded to go to Glasgow. So I’m not going to ring you with a Basildon to Plymouth. Posting the local RJ is (I think) fine, but I’d suggest that you set the start and end points to where you are and put something in the notes like ‘Available now and ready to go anywhere’ and make sure you list it as an open-ended RJ.
 

If not, why not?

Agreed that it’s a total ballache having the same company issuing two different invoices, pure stupidity really. If they’re going to send their own invoice then why raise the ‘Network’ invoice to start with? It’s easy to avoid the double payment problem though – just match the invoice against jour job reference or purchase order when the invoice comes in. You can only pay for each jon once, so the second invoice goes in the shredder.

I’m not sure what the “not technically legal” refers to, apart from the absence of correct business names on some of them. That’s just as common with companies’ own invoices though.
 

If not then maybe we could come up with something for new members to let them know how to get the best out of the ‘Network’ and how to operate to our unwritten ‘standards’. Perhaps that would stop some of the recurring problems?

Just a thought. Any comments?

With up to TWO supplier invoices to handle a day we really don’t see why we should accept invoices delivered in any other fashion.

Oh and you can stick your £40 late payment charges where the sun doesn’t reach because in our opinion a message on a chat page is service of our notice to you that this is how we require our invoices delivered. Despite this it goes without saying that delivery of invoices by similar means is unacceptable.

Someone wrote:

Quote:
‘end users’ should not use trade sites

there’s no law against it,

If a website is open to all users, either trade or end-user, then that’s up to them and to their users. If on the other hand Cheapskate Ltd pass themselves off as a courier company in order to gain access to a ‘trade only’ website then it’s what used to be known as “obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception” and is a serious criminal offence covered by Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006.

On the original question, end-user access to sites like CX would undoubtedly be good news for owner-drivers and small companies with limited time/money/effort to expend on advertising, sales and marketing.

It wouldn’t be very nice though for capitalist bastards like me, getting fat from other people’s hard work.

Legally, unless you’ve agreed that cancellations will be charged for on a different basis, you can claim your identifiable costs plus your loss of profit on the job.

If they’d had a genuine cancellation an hour before the collection time I’d be tempted not to charge them anything but as they’ve taken the pi** and cost you money I’d charge them.
 

Can anyone guess the end of the sentence?

Now then, don’t take this as a criticism, I’m just wondering if you’re a bit confused about something. Yesterday you were stuck with a ‘Backload’ from (if I remember correctly) IP3 to IP4 with (I think) a 1 hour delivery deadline.

Now by posting that as a backload I would say that you’ve virtually guaranteed that most people would ignore it.

Could you share your thinking about posting it as a backload? Presumably you were hoping to save some money, but how much could you hope to save on a minimum charge job like that?

I’m not having a dig, I’m trying to help and being a little bit nosey.

So the shipper pays Shitly a ‘deposit’ which is equal to the ‘success fee’ then the ‘service provider’ (you) has to collect your payment from the shipper.

So basically they’re offering to match you up with a load of ebay punters wanting sh*te moving for peanuts in return for a 10% payment.

If you’ve dropped in Glasgow and you’re heading back to London what difference does it make to you whether the backload you’re bidding on is going to Carlisle or to Warrington?

I’d never heard of anyone charging a mileage rate for backloads until I joined our courier ‘Network’, it’s just bizarre and illogical.