Bespoke courier services for startups and small businesses

For any startup, new or existing small business, cashflow and financial resources are critical elements of any future success. In particular, we are talking about working capital, money that is necessary for both the day-to-day running of the business and also any potential growth and expansion

SMEs and startups have to allocate resources carefully

There is a term used in business which is referred to as ROE, which stands for ‘return on investment’. In ‘non-business’ language, we are referring to any financial benefits accrued from expenditure for the business. Examples of this include advertising, sponsorship, buying new machinery and even taking on a new member of staff. The idea behind a good ROI is that if you invest, say, £10,000 in new machinery, it helps boost your profits by 20% and pays for itself inside two years.

Because every business has unavoidable running costs – premises, equipment, services, rates, etc., any additional expenditure has to be justified and, in many cases they can’t be, so an alternative solution has to be found. One of the key areas is staffing, as wages can be one of the biggest drains on a business’ financial resources, and it is very difficult to find staff who will work on an ‘as and when needed’ basis that are also 100% loyal to the company. Zero-hours contracts aren’t really the solution. Yet, if you look more closely at the situation, there are many situations where you don’t have to employ someone full time simply because you need their services from time to time.

Courier services provide you with full-time availability, but without paying a full-time wage

Every business in the UK has to provide HM Revenue & Customs with an annual tax return. However, how many startups and SMEs employ a full-time accountant? The answer is very few, if any. So, what is the solution? They go to an accountant to do their tax returns for them, and occasionally for business advice. As the business grows, so those demands on their accountant grows, until such point that the business requires its own accounts department to deal not just with tax returns, but the day-to-day running of the business in terms of invoicing, payroll, etc.

And the point we are trying to make?

You don’t need to tie up money buying a van for deliveries and pay wages for a driver who can’t be used full time. Until such time as the business can afford to, you have the perfect option, a bespoke courier service that can be adapted to meet your needs as you grow.

How a dedicated courier service can help a new business

Here at Distribusha we want to help small businesses grow, and the best way we can do that is to let as many people know that you don’t have to use us every day or week in order to establish an effective long-term working relationship. If it is just one consignment a month to begin with, we can and will be there for you.

In addition, unlike standard courier services, we can handle a wide range of goods and products that you may not have realised a specialist courier can easily handle, such as:

• Technical courier services for both suppliers and end users, where we can handle not just the delivery of technical equipment, but also its installation

• Medical courier services where we specialise in the careful transportation and instillation of a variety of medical equipment for dentists, private hospitals, osteopaths, dermatologists, and a wide variety of healthcare practitioners

• Same day courier services for time-sensitive deliveries for products with a short shelf life, such as fresh flowers, or the delivery of parts as after sales service where we can deliver faster than a standard parcel courier

Helping to make local courier services more affordable for startups and small businesses

Because we are so aware that it can be very difficult to become profitable early on with a new business, here at Distribusha we try our best to help when it comes to keeping the cost of specialist courier services as low as possible. We can do this one of two ways, either with a contract courier service or a scheduled courier service.

What you may not realise is that you can take full advantage of our contract courier service whether you require five consignments a week or five consignments a year. Because we specialise in providing bespoke courier services, we work with businesses where sales are not high volume but more specialist in nature.

Similarly, if you know when you are going to need a consignment collected or delivered, you can take advantage of our scheduled courier services. So, because we can plan deliveries and collections in advance, this enables us to more efficiently allocate resources and as a consequence, reduce our costs to you.