How did you overcome those challenges?
At the outset, when the business was small, I had to make it look bigger so that I could secure clients and have them feel confident that eStore Logistics could fulfil client requirements and expectations. I went out and had another set of business cards printed with the title “Solutions Specialist” and also used this title in my email signature.
This slight tweak made it look like I was just the sales guy (who also seemed to know a lot about IT and operations). This did wonders for my sales meetings and meant that I sailed past the initial meet and greet without the prospective client losing interest and enabled me to progress further and talk in more detail about eStore Logistics services and how we can add value. Using this method I quickly picked up new clients, and today I have dedicated sales staff.
Most of our clients are online retailers. However, we also service a handful of traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers.
Our clients, big and small, come from a diverse range of retail sectors selling products such as brown goods, health goods, apparel, lifestyle goods, books, furniture, homewares, technology, artwork, home fixtures and fittings, hardware, wine etc. Among our clients we service Australia’s biggest name in health and weight loss, Australia’s largest online retailer of electronics, and a global apparel company which sells in 44 countries.
We first attracted clients by getting up a nice clean website and doing work on SEO to get at the top of Google searches for specific keyword terms. This still works today and drives dozens of sales enquiries every day.
After a while I realised that the best client enquires that we received were via word of mouth, and that it was important to build the eStore Logistics brand. Big companies that have a logistics requirement don’t spend time Googling for logistics providers, instead they pick up the phone and call logistics brands which they have heard good things about.
Therefore, we have always ensured that we maintain the best possible levels of service to clients so that only positive things are said about eStore.
The business was started with one client and we still service that client today. In the four-and-a-half years since the business started we have grown the client list to over two dozen.
I started out with one-and-a-half employees. I was one employee and the other half was a casual who worked about 25 hours per week. Today we have over 50 full-time, part-time and casual staff.
Main drivers for growth include:
What do you think has been the key to your success?
The key to the success of eStore Logistics has been the in-house development and implementation of our proprietary warehouse management system (WMS), which has enabled us to provide customised, cost-effective and accurate solutions to clients.
A WMS is the brains of a warehousing operation and dictates whether a warehouse is run efficiently and accurately, or whether it’s a failure. We ran our own analysis of off-the-shelf WMS solutions in late 2008, and at the time everything we looked at was geared toward business-to-business sales order profiles instead of business-to-consumer, and cost upwards of half a million dollars.
Since nothing on the market was suitable for our needs, and I certainly couldn’t afford anything that was available, using my information systems background I embarked on developing the eStore WMS, which we still use today and is continually undergoing updates.
We are running a project to set up an interstate facility on the east coast which has a target go live by the first quarter of 2014. By 2018 we plan to have facilities in all major cities in Australia.
