A four day weekend may well have helped us with our warehouse problems. And it looks like our delivery company has done the decent thing and worked flat out over the period to sort out the issues. As well they might given that we had to bung a couple of grand at their landlord to get the doors open. (Who knows when we'll get that back!)
Longer term it looks like they're going to have to go bust and re-appear as a warehouse management business with a man-and-a-van service tacked on to do local deliveries. Then we can use a bigger, national provider for our needs without having to manage our own warehouse.
We looked at this problem in the past. It seems that the man-and-a-van can make a profit and big national services can. But anything in between in this market just can't make money. As ever it's interesting to get a look at other biz sectors and models. And tempting to think that we could do better than the existing providers. But so far we've always managed to keep the saner, less egotistical, side of that line. Just because you think you've got the hang of one business model in one sector doesn't mean you can switch streams and be just as successful.
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If the problem is that the man-and-his-van can't cope with the peaks in business without other drivers and he can't afford the other drivers through the troughs, then the solution to the conundrum might be an online service that allows man-and-a-van type businesses to outsource their deliveries to each other and also fill their vans on return trips, giving them some of the economies of scale that the big boys have without all the overhead.
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