Good afternoon All
In my last post, I said I'd talk about how SCL (Straightforward Consultancy) came to life, so here we go.
It must have been mid-August 2009 and my wife and I had taken our touring caravan for a week's holiday in Southport. At this point I was on what's called garden leave, and I was required to stay at home and have no contact with my staff/colleagues or customers for the entire redundancy process from April 2009 onwards.
The job hunting wasn't going well and all of the time spent challenging the redundancy had been very tough. It seemed that pretty much every day since early May, I'd either been in contact with DHL Global Forwarding's HR department or my employment lawyer. Although as I'd said earlier, even though the appeal against my redundancy was probably going to end in my leaving the company, I felt it was a poor business decision and I would challenge it every step of the way. This took its toll on me and so this holiday was a great boost, just getting away from the negativity of the redundancy process and a time to relax and indulge in some free thinking.
I remember this part quite well now I come to think about it. I was outside the caravan in the sunshine with a sketch pad and was wondering how I could possibly offer my expertise to UK importers and exporters and help them to reduce freight or duty costs, solve logistics problems and guide them through the logistics maze.
It's fair to say that many small-medium sized companies (SMCs) find it difficult to communicate with or understand freight forwarders and the industry terms (EXW, SSC, BAF, Value For Customs, Demurrage, Free Time, FSC...I could go on). As a result of this, they are not in the best position to negotiate with freight forwarders, and even if they did decide to go out to bid, they might not pick the most appropriate forwarder to quote on their business.
Most likely they'd contact forwarders whose sales people had popped in in the past few months and call them. Truth was that many companies of this size didnt have in house expertise and this was the best they could do.
They would then ask these forwarders to quote on their traffic and they'd get a range of different quotations, all of them pretty much impossible to compare on a like for like basis (service/price/routing/transit time etc).
So I thought that this had to be worth exploring, and more than that, one thing I really enjoyed from both my operational and regional sales roles was working closely with customers and establishing a long term partnership with them.
Furthermore, when I'd worked at Burlington Air Express, Kuehne & Nagel or Danzas/DHL, I could of course only offer our own services/pricing and of course our goal was to focus on our own company's development.
At the same time, I learned a great deal about our competitors, how the freight forwarder's business model actually worked and how we made money on either air or ocean freight forwarding.
This put me in a very good position as I had an opportunity to not only create a company with a great value proposition, I would be able to be totally objective, unbiased and neutral, seeking out the best freight solutions for my customers and managing their business for them. I'd also be able to communicate with freight forwarders in their language (which they do appreciate) and striving to build relationships with freight forwarders who shared my values in terms of customers, quality, responsiveness, service reliability etc.
So, back to Southport and the sunny afternoon and the sketchpad - and the company name. I remember many people over the years describing me as a pretty straight talking person and the fact that I would always be open and honest with my customers. We'd would be involved in freight forwarding and so Straight and Forward came together!
More tomorrow
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