A JOURNEY THROUGH PROVENANCE

WHY BUSINESSCARE? :: We let our results do the talking

Express Delivery
A large parcels delivery company – so famous that in years gone by its lorries were produced in miniature as “Dinky Toys” – fell on troubled times within a short period after being sold by the family to a management team. With 760 employees, 14 depots and a deficit of millions, our objective was to maximise recoveries. Rather than follow the established route of “running the parcels” we adopted a reverse strategy. An analysis of previous “parcel company” failures revealed a picture of virtual impossibility to control a disciplined delivery service once word is out that the company is insolvent – for reasons never satisfactorily determined, parcels simply seem to go astray, never to be seen again.

In this instance there was an outstanding debtor-book of around £2.5 million, which historically was likely to produce only about £0.75 million in any ongoing trading operation. We placed two team members at each of the 14 depots across the country and when the articulated lorries arrived at around 6am bearing the area's parcels, we simply “turned them round” and sent all the parcels back to the central “hub” where they were re-sorted for ultimate return to the company's customers.

Each customer was contacted and invited to come and collect their undelivered parcels, but advised to bring with them their cheque books as we were exercising a carrier's'lien on their parcels against earlier outstanding accounts. We may not have been flavour of the month with a number of former customers, but we did recover £2.5 million in book debts.