eCourier

Allason, alongside university friend Jay Bregman, founded eCourier in 2003 after suffering at the hands of unreliable couriers for several years.

The firm’s innovative courier tracking system, unique in the UK, saw the duo triumph in the Best Use of Technology category at the recent Startups Awards. eCourier now has its sights set on being the largest courier company in the UK

But it may have very different had Allason not been enraged by a particularly bad courier experience three years ago.

“I used to use a lot of couriers and things would go wrong, but nothing made me think I should start up a courier company until I had a very bad experience,” he explains.

Wanting to treat 10 friends to a day at the Queen’s tennis tournament, Allason called a courier company at 8am to ask them to deliver tickets to them.

“They said it would be 20 minutes, at 8.30 I called and they said it was only going to be five minutes,” Allason says. “I went into a meeting, came out, and they still hadn’t arrived.

“I called again and asked to hold, but the problem was that they had to call the courier to find out where he was and then call me back.

“They didn’t call me back, this went back and forth, making me furious – the whole point of using a courier was to make my life easier, not harder.

“While on the phone, the courier shows up and he doesn’t look like the sort of guy you’d entrust with a day out for your best mates. But I suspend disbelief and ask him to get there in half an hour, which he says is fine.

“I get a call from my friends an hour later saying the courier isn’t here, I call the courier company and have the whole same conversation again.

“It’s not into the afternoon, the day’s been ruined, I’m furious and get into an argument of the MD of the company, who will remain nameless. I told him I thought I could do a better job, he made the mistake of encouraging me and that’s how it started.”

Allason felt there was a significant gap in the market due to the lack of information between the couriers and their controllers. Control room staff would assign jobs to couriers not knowing where they were, only aware of their workload.

The budding entrepreneur felt that if he could automate the process, it would save an estimated 30 per cent of revenue and alter the dynamics of the whole industry. He proceeded with some meticulous research.

“We learnt a lot about the courier market,” he says. “The market is worth £1 billion, but the largest player had under five per cent of market share.

“There was a diseconomy of scale – the smaller the courier, the more profitable, the larger, the less profitable – that’s why the market was so fragmented.”

Allason could see multiple benefits for an automated courier management system – not only would it allow him to keep tabs on couriers, it would cut operating staff costs as the system would assign jobs directly to the couriers without the need for human intervention.

The technology is certainly impressive – staff and customers are able to zoom in on detailed real-time computerised maps that show the movements of the couriers. Simply clicking on a particular courier give the viewer details such as time travelled, cargo and even the amount of fuel in the tank.

Thanks to this system, eCourier takes 85 per cent of bookings online, compared with five per cent of its nearest competitor. As a result, Allason employs 17 times less telephonists than the competition. 

“Anyone with four mates can start a courier company – there are 600 in London and they offer the exact same service with the same cost structures, with narrow margins,” he explains.

“Because they can’t produce efficiencies on the operating line, the courier is the one getting squeezed – a courier today is paid less than 10 years ago, not even considering inflation and fuel costs. That has impacted on service, because if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

“We’ve got a system that gives us an advantage as we have larger margins, so we can charge customers less and pay our couriers more.”