I should have seen it coming

I didnt notice it was the last day of the quarter, always a favorite for deliveries to companies house. Customer informed us it had to be there for 5pm as they close but it may not be ready til quite late, now Companies House London has recently moved to a building behind Victoria Street in SW1 but previously at their old building they allowed submissions to be posted through their letterbox after the office closes at 5pm and right up until midnight after which the post is cleared and all further post is then considered delivered on the next working day Monday.
On our first trip to Companies House we established that the after hours posting is also the case at the new building, and also learnt that the Cardiff office is open tomorrow and submission would still be in time at this office, our customer was very relieved and has now booked a a bike to take documnets to Cardiff tomorrow so a small amount of work on our part has rewarded us with another booked job on a Saturday!

The first call of the day saw one of our motorbike couriers heading up to Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire for some urgent  personal property to go to Yorkshire, an excellent response time was achieved and the biker was quickly en route for Sheffield despite the poor weather he was there and delivered in 90 minutes from collection, customer was very pleased and has now requested to open a 30 day account. Another bike was pre booked yesterday so was already on the road heading to a Lawyers in Mayfair the heart of London's west end, once delivered the biker headed over to Victoria for a visa collection for another of our customers.
The returning bike from Sheffield called into Northampton on the way back to complete one of our long standing regular non cash banking runs which heads into Milton Keynes, conviently slotting in our very short run into the middle of that.


The Van was also busy today with deliveries into London and a collection of the exhibition boards we took down last night, unfortunately the collection time of 4pm on a Friday places the van on one of the major exit routes the A41 from London in rush hour, after taking nearly an hour to reach the bottom of the M1 the rest of the journey back to Milton Keynes was relatively jam free and rolling along at a constant speed and the boards were delieverd into our customers premises  just 2 hours after collection on a Friday evening.

Glad I wasnt at the back of the queue

The rain mostly managed to hold off today and the small courier van headed off for a delivery down to Hammersmith in London, despite being on four wheels this should have been easily achievable within 90 minutes during the day, that is before the elderly driver decided to jack knife his caravan just north of Junct 12 on the M1, luckily he didnt appear to be hurt and we were fortunate enough to only be withina half mile of the front of it and quickly back on schedule. Various jobs throughout the day from regular customers keep our courier bikes busy with only one very urgent rush to a property agent in Essex. As many of our exsisting customers are confident of our high levels of service they have taken to requesting larger vehicles such as Mercedes Sprinters that we dont normally use, as we have a select group of couriers that we work closely with, we are able after a few phone calls to provide this type of vehicle, one of which headed of down to a London Hotel this evening with exhibition boards for an AGM.

We often get enquiries from people requiring their new motorcycle collected from the point of purchase to its new home and today was no different. This is something that should only be undertaken by specialist Motorcycle movers not least for the reasons of insurance cover, standard goods in transit insurance does not cover the movement of vehicles. Many general couriers do often get involved in this sort of work indifferent to this fact nor informing their customers of this.
It is common for people to post their motorcycle movement requirements on certain sites which encourage service providers to enter ever decreasing bids to cover this work, this gets into dangerous territory as when the bidding becomes uneconmically viable to deliver your motorcycle, these providers with the lowest bids then have to scour these sites to fit other items into the run, essentially the lower the bid the longer you can expect it to take your motorcycle to get to you, with many motorcycles costing thousands of pounds it seems foolhardy you would allow someone with little or no experience (& possibly insurance) of handling motorcycles.

 These are the reasons why we would recommend using specialist motorcycle transportation one such transporter is Alpact Couriers, we would highly recommend anyone requiring this service to visit Here for more information.

A quiet wet mid week day

It's been fairly quiet day today at MK BIKES, a late afternoon collection in London yesterday of a van full of boxes bound for a large department stores Milton Keynes distribution centre meant the small Vauxhall Combo van was poised at the gates at 8.30am for the pre arranged booking slot. We were told by the customer that not keeping to this delivery slot would mean the distribution centre would impose a £500 "fine"!!
Surely not? With the way that vehicle journey times can change so quickly in the blink of an eye it seems a little unfair to be penalised to the tune of such an outrageous amount, I suppose that's the power these large companies have over their suppliers, and an essential reason to use a reliable sameday courier.
The motorway users on the M1 late this afternoon are all too aware of how journey times can change so quickly, yet again between the Northampton Junctions of 16-17 heading north bound a multi vehicle collision occurred this time involving 6 vehicles. All 3 lanes of the motorway were closed between Junct 16 to 18, it returned to normal conditions some time around 9pm.
The first motorbike courier job of the day is requested by a new customer who requires legal documents rushed up to a solicitors in Birmingham, despite the collection being almost 20 miles from base our motorbike gets there in under 25 minutes and heads straight up to the destination, the customer is very pleasantly surprised at the speed of delivery when I call to give the proof of delivery (POD) which is the name of the signatory and the time at which it was received.
A supplier to several the F1 racing teams keeps us busy with regular drops several times a week to teams based in the South East, today was no exception with the van heading out with a wait & return job that required goods also heading back to the supplier, then another item heads off by motorcycle courier to do battle with the mid afternoon M25 traffic, two wheels make light work of such busyness (yes it is a real word!) on the outer London Motorway ring road to arrive at the destination in a leafy Surrey suburb.

Slotted nicely in the early afternoon is our daily collection which travels a grand total of 1 mile each day, a run that we have completed on behalf of our customer for the past 6 years.
 We have had several enquiry's today whether that has anything to do when the resurrection of our Google ad-words campaign will remain to be seen, and also a call for a potential customer from yesterday who didn't need a courier in the end but called to thank us for "being there" if she had needed us.

We understand that an urgent same day courier is expensive by comparison to the low cost carriers but these two services are miles apart in terms of service, the term "overnight" is a misleading term as you would be forgiven that it is going to arrive the very next day, many people find to their cost that when it goes wrong with a low cost carrier that mostly delivers the next day it usually goes very wrong with items sometimes missing for days, it is only then that most people find out that these low cost carriers have conditions in their terms & conditions that mean they do not consider the item late until it takes more than  72 hours! Thats a whole 3 days from collection not very helpful when the part needed to be there the very next day. Some of these carriers even have the cheek to add "24" to their name, this doesn't necessarily mean hours in fact it could mean the number of chasing phone calls you will need to make if something goes wrong! Twitter is full of unhappy low cost overnight customers, quite a good way to formulate a decision on whether to use same day or overnight is by searching tweets for them.

Welcome

Hi, decided to begin this blog to document all the trials & tribulations of running a small courier business based in Milton Keynes UK.
Some back ground I suppose I started in the Courier game some 13 years ago in 1999, running around working for TNT, DHL & RICO to name just a couple of the "Big Boys" and a combination of numerous smaller courier companies & courier acquaintances,  with MK BIKES emerging in the summer of 2006. Later that year in late October whilst riding down Vandyke road in Leighton Buzzard heading in the direction of Sheffield with a job on, I managed to collide with a quarry lorry, I was fortunate to just receive a glancing blow to the offside of the bike,unfortunately thats where my foot used to reside whilst on the bike. The aftermath resulted in a trip to Milton Keynes General where I learnt the very next day that the chances of being able to keep my right foot was very silm, however they persevered and after a week of debridement  procedures every other day and a trip to Stoke Mandeville Hospital it became clear that there wasnt any hope and just 3 days later I had the operation to remove my right foot & leg below the knee (as foot amputations are not a common thing these days and a better prognosis is achieved with a below knee amputation). As you can guess this was a devastating blow not least because Alison & I had two small children Campbell nearly 4 and Kenzie nearly 2, not to mention Alan 18, Alison's disabled son from her first marriage.
I spent in total just over a month in hospital and when discharged quickly went to work on the job of selling our house we had only bought almost 4 years earlier due to the financial uncertainty of the situation. The house quickly sold and I continued to run MK BIKES by using 2 biker sub contractors. We moved just a short distance away from the old house and I managed to get fitted with a prosthetic leg some 10 weeks after the amputation, after initial struggles with fitting and tenderness I quickly got used to the prosthesis and even manage to jump back on a motorbike after 20 weeks and managed to do my first courier job almost 6 months to the day after the amputation.

With that back ground it kinda brings the story to very much the point I am at today, still running the courier business with two main biker sub contractors (albeit different ones and a few others in the process) and jumping on my bike or in the small van when the situation requires it, a host of other local sub contractors and several small courier business owners that I work closely with.