Brexit and 2020

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Company Director

The decision by the UK to leave the EU created a lot of uncertainty.

When dealing with international payments and clients making high-value purchases, uncertainty in global markets is the last thing you want.

Uncertainty rattles the foreign exchange markets and it certainly did on 23rd June 2016 when sterling fell 19% in value. Where one pound could buy us $1.49 the night before, it could now only manage $1.37, with it continuing to fall below $1.20

This made paying for invoices in USD much more expensive which meant we had to increase our prices.

It also had the immediate action of putting doubt in people’s minds “should I really be thinking about spending £x on a Corvette right now”

However, for us, things remained fairly busy for a while, the real slowdown happened later on when the risk of a no-deal Brexit became a possibility. This really did affect things and the whole market slowed right down.

Brexit delay after delay meant we had to really work hard to keep costs down and shipments coming in. Then on 31st Jan 2020, the UK left the European Union.

Following that, things became busy again, really busy.

GBP had recovered somewhat trading at over $1.30/£ and people had started to get going with those overseas car purchases.

This was 2020, and it seemed like this was going to be an exceptional year. February proved to be one of our busiest months for over a year, but cases of a new virus coming from China (you may have heard of it) started to appear in the UK. This was worrying.

Shipments that were booked started to cancel, corporate relocations to the UK ceased and overseas car purchases put on hold. The car shipping tap turned off again.

On March 23rd, Boris Johnson announced the UK lockdown. We were going to have to shut the doors temporarily and spend 24/7 with the children. This just got real.

We made the decision to furlough our staff. At that point we could not guarantee we could keep everyone safe in the office / workshop environment and so it was the right and only thing to do.

UK logistics had to keep moving, containers arriving at sea ports had to be moved otherwise the backlog would create delays for more essential goods passing through the supply chains.

Myself and Kingsley took it in turns to visit the warehouse, along with our latest member of staff who could not be furloughed, in order to keep things ticking over until the day we could re-open the doors.

I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that all good stories come full circle, and these last couple of months we have indeed come full circle in our working life.

If you recall in Chapter 1 this all started from us valeting cars, and here we are again valeting cars (and unloading containers).

Being hands-on again with the processes has actually been quite enjoyable, but nothing else in regards to Coronavirus has been.

We have found ourselves in very unfamiliar times, everything has changed.

Luckily for us logistics have largely continued and car shipping has remained steady, albeit at a lot lower volume, throughout the last couple of months.

Our office environment has changed from a peaceful open plan setting, to a kitchen surface, a fold-up camping chair, and even a bouncy castle.

Assumed silence for important calls has changed to the ever-present threat of a “DAAAADDY!” or the screams of children squabbling over the last chocolate button.

Working around home-schooling and having to physically be in the office to unload containers has been very difficult. Thankfully over the years we have always invested in IT, with in-house CRM systems and remote working setup which means that in reality very little has changed to our operational processes. We are still able to provide our usual high level of customer service which is so important to us.

I am amazed every day with how well children have adjusted to this ‘new normal’, they quickly adjusted their expectations and came up with many new and innovative ways to entertain themselves.

Schools quickly adapted and now utilise all kinds of different media to provide an ongoing education to our children.

From a business perspective this is how we have to see things, we have to adapt and move forward, in order to make the most of this terrible situation we have all been thrown into. We must develop new processes to make sure we can safely and effectively provide our usual service.

Firstly we had to make sure the staff returning would be as safe as possible. This was the most important thing for us and so we spent time putting new processes in place to ensure this.

We now look to ways in which we can continue to work in this contactless world, to increase the safety of how vehicles arrive and leave our premises to make sure everyone involved can feel secure and confident doing so.

Periods of remote working may become more common so we are investing in a Gigabit connection to our facility, from a customer point of view we aim for remote working to be as seamless as if you called us in the office, and so far this is working very well.

On the 11th May we re-opened our workshops and have office staff in full operation both in the office and remotely. Our services across the world are still moving, cars are being purchased, trucked and shipped all as before.

There are some delays with UK government testing and registration but even there we are starting to see things slowly returning to usual in some capacity. These delays have meant our workshops are busier than ever as containers do not stop arriving!

We have had lots of exciting new possibilites open up with new routes and shared container lines meaning a more competitive offering to clients looking to ship.

I don’t think there is anybody in the world who hasn’t been affected by Covid-19 in some way, and our sincere condolences go out to anybody who has lost a loved one through this horrible disease.

Having seen the incredible efforts of keyworkers and NHS staff who have been keeping things going and keeping us safe, plus the amazing community spirit the UK has, I am sure things will get back to normal at some point, but from all of us at ShipMyCar we wish you all the best.

The post Latest Chapter – Brexit and 2020 appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

Containers

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Company Director

Being based in Milton Keynes and almost the furthest point from any sea port makes handling sea containers seem like a strange idea, however quite often the cost of moving a container from a port of arrival to here is not much more than say Tilbury -> Felixstowe.

Milton Keynes is in a perfect location to get to easily, we have the M1 motorway, Luton airport and Milton Keynes train station all close by.

Combining those two factors makes our central England location actually quite an interesting idea.

It certainly makes for an easier journey to collect your car than some of the sea ports, plus on arrival here you get to be put through advanced roundabout training with over 130 roundabouts to practise on.

Unloading a container with some cars in is easy right? Well, if you are thinking that, let me give you some information on how cars are loaded into containers and why handling them safely takes investment and training.

First let us look into the different methods of shipping a car by sea that we use:

Roll on Roll off

This often seems the cheapest method, it involves driving 6,000+ vehicles onto a giant ferry. Main drawback for us unloading these in Milton Keynes is that it would be impossible due to our distance from ports. Sadly, the canal network was not built to transport a 740 ft vessel, otherwise we would be able to unload them too!

20ft Container

This is how I used to imagine cars being shipped in containers before we started doing this. One car, lashed down and chocked in a metal box. If you have the money, it is the safest and quickest sea freight option

40ft Container

This is the method you may not have realised existed, 4-5 cars in one container, loaded on racking to fit them all in. Traditionally this is done with wooden racking but more recently this is replaced with metal racking such as Trans-Rak’s R-Rak system.

We had experience of seeing wooden racking systems being used and knew it was a huge operation to unload the cars and dismantle the wooden racks. You need forklifts, power tools, cutters, ramping and disposal solutions in place to move the discarded wood. We went shopping for all of the above.

Here was our first in-house unloaded container, it was a proud moment.

Most wooden racking systems are OK, they follow a standardised approach and therefore you can get into a routine of building an off ramp, lowering the cars and dismantling. Some however, are not so easy and take a lot of effort to plan and offload the cars.

We had followed Trans-Rak long before we started unloading containers in-house. We love innovation, and wooden frameworks to unload cars seemed wasteful and time consuming. With metal racking systems you hoist the cars down, and drive them out.

Using metal racking systems, the safety aspect and return of racks to the owner requires some planning and training. Luckily the people at Trans-Rak are some of the most helpful in the industry and so we set up a session of on-site training with them, they even came to assist with our first container.

Using R-Raks is a dream, and being able to offer the unloading of R-Raks opened us up to other shippers looking to have a UK depot to handle their containers.

Things got busy again so our second warehouse was born. Just two doors from Unit 20, it could store vehicles unloaded and prior to collection by the clients

As always, it didn’t take long until this was full as well….

So now we could load and unload cars all in-house! Things just kept getting busier and busier, and it felt like we needed a bit of a re-vamp.

The clipart logo was a bit busy and the website was getting a bit tired. ShipMyCar v3.0 was launched, new signage, new logo, new uniforms and a full redesign of our instant quote system.

Now we really were flying, with over ten years experience in the world of car shipping we were now the best in the UK. If it had wheels, we could ship it, anywhere, anytime, and get it registered here in the UK.

Then in 2016, seventeen million four hundred thousand people voted to leave the EU.

Now this is not the place to get political and argue the wrongs and rights of this decision, but for us it made the future much more difficult to predict.

We had had some tricky global situations to get through during the last ten years yet had seen year-on-year growth, will this continue?

Find out in the next chapter, Chapter 11 – Brexit and 2020

The post Chapter Ten – Containers appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

Buying Bits

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Company Director

Being based in Milton Keynes is great for automotive connections, just here on our trading estate we have a selection of vehicle related businesses who can cover everything needed, let alone throughout Milton Keynes where you can find many specialist industries operating in the automotive field.

The ability to get everything done locally is great, but there comes a point in the lifecycle of any business, where bringing services in-house is the only way to progress forward. We had reached that point and had many areas we wanted to bring under our roof, including:

• MOT Testing
• Tyre Fitting
• Wheel Alignment
• Welding
• Container Unloading

First we had to get some more ramps, we were MOT’ing almost 50 cars a month and the subsequent work from that was more that our one ramp could cope with – we invested in a couple more two poster ramps and started to begin the process of becoming an MOT test station.

Having more ramps meant we could also start to work on some bigger projects such as engine rebuilds, this enabled anybody importing a vehicle into the UK, to also have it restored mechanically before collecting it from us.

Getting the extra ramps installed was easy, we purchased them from Bullworthy and they made the process of installation and commissioning very straightforward.

The next step was to become an MOT test station. This involved a bit more classroom time for me to become an MOT Designated Manager, essentially learning how to ensure tests are carried out correctly and all equipment is maintained and calibrated in the right way.

Once the paperwork was sorted we got digging. Our beautiful new floor was cut up and filled with cement

It was a huge undertaking but everything was installed in a few days and ready to be signed off by the DVSA. This took a little while but then we were open for business, the first car was a nice little Ford GT to get things going in the right direction

Now we could manage most of the UK process in-house. We could collect the vehicles from port, bring them straight here for MOT, carry out any repairs needed and then get the application off to the DVLA.

Managing the logistics of that meant more upgrades to our in-house software. We developed a workshop management solution to enable us to log cars into the workshop, add required repairs, track labour times, list parts required etc and enable the client to see all of this via their online ShipMyCar Portal.

We further developed our lighting control systems to meet new models of vehicles arriving to the UK, including an option to have a switchable UK/USA lighting system

Some further investments in Wheel Alignment (from the excellent Absolute Alignment Ltd) and tyre fitting meant we could offer not just a wide range of garage services, but also to be able to carry out the work in much quicker times.

The next big step was to get involved in unloading containers in-house. This was going to require not just training, but a lot of equipment and likely more warehouse space.

Keep Reading – Chapter 10 – Containers.

The post Chapter 9 – Buying Bits appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

Expanding Fast

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Director

Our new larger premises were filling up with cars very quickly, this was a nice problem to have, but nevertheless a problem which we had to solve!

Two issues were becoming apparent with our warehouse, one was obviously the fact it was not quite the ‘huge workshop that would never fill up’, but secondly it did not have the ceiling height to enable us to move into unloading containers in-house.

Unloading containers would be a giant leap into the unknown, and something we needed to do straight away, but it would be nice to find somewhere that we could feasibly start doing at some point in the future.

Luckily where we are located, there is a wide range of industrial units from small warehouse / office spaces, to larger multi-level buildings. This is where we found Unit 20 Tanners Drive.

Just a short walk from our current Unit 74 – it offered office space upstairs, and over 12,000 sq ft in space, this would certainly be all we will ever need….

We took a drive over to check it out (in a Mercedes 190SL obviously)

Now this really was a ‘proper’ warehouse. With huge ceiling space, vast open warehousing and two upstairs offices. We would have more space than we could possibly know what to do with.

Slight problem was that it was painted in the old, dated colours. Having just invested a lot of money into Unit 74 and changed everything to grey and white, it was a pretty painful prospect to have to go through that all again on a much bigger unit, but it was something we would have to factor into the costs of the move.

The deal was done with the landlord and Mayfair Decorating were once again instructed to paint the entire premises in the modern grey / white colours. It was a huge undertaking as we also invested in having the floor properly prepared and painted, this was going to look incredible.

In the meantime we managed to secure a short term lease on another unit just to help with the overflow, and what an overflow it became, we started to wonder whether even Unit 20 was going to be big enough!

The works took a couple of weeks to complete which is testament to how efficient and professional Jay & Theo at Mayfair Decorating are – they never stopped until it was finished!

This time around we decided to get professionals in to plasterboard and prepare the offices

In an ideal world we wanted to change the office to have floor-to-ceiling windows, this would enable us to look out across the workshop and see all the incredible machines we had in at any one time, unfortunately the Landlord said that was not going to be possible, so instead we installed a large TV with a feed to a camera

We were so keen to get into our new office we even moved the desk there before it was 100% finished (to be fair BT made a whole pile of problems in regards to the move so we pretty much had to)

Next and finally was the floor preparation in the workshop. First it had to be completely sandblasted to give the new paint a good surface to bond to, then the paint went down manually, and looked fantastic

The new signage was all installed over at the new Unit 20 and final office decorations took place. New furniture arrived and it felt like a dream office to be working in – much like the visits to Gumball 3000, now we had our own.

The offices were finished, the workshop was complete and so started a Gone in 60 Seconds style transfer of vehicles from our old unit to the new one

We had the ramps moved and could finally see everything under the new roof, now there was one slight problem and once again that was space! Expanding so fast is a nice problem, but it is so hard to know how much warehousing to go for. Over stretch and then you could be left with an expensive overhead, but if you don’t – it becomes a bit of a squeeze.

In the short term we figured the new space we had was just about enough, it will be a pain moving cars every morning but it was possible to keep going without further overheads.

While all this was going on I welcomed my first child into the world, nothing really prepares you for what is coming when you have a baby and I could write a whole separate book on the challenges of running a business and parenting, but it did mean we could extend our working hours to almost 24/7 as sleep just wasn’t happening. Handy with an international business.

With things so busy we wanted to look into bringing as many services in-house. We were paying people to carry out MOT’s, fit tyres, wheel alignment and more. It was time to get shopping..

Stay tuned for Chapter 9 – Buying bits.

The post Chapter 8 – Expanding Fast appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

Chapter 7 – Gumball

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Director

Gumball 3000 is undoubtably the biggest and best rally in the world. The cars, the history and the way they can literally shut down cities makes it the dream ticket in any supercar enthusiast’s bucket list.

The call from Gumball HQ inviting us to discuss assisting them in shipping vehicles to and from the rally came just as we were preparing the move to our new larger premises.

We prepared some ideas of costs from the most obvious locations and took the trip into London.

As soon as you step foot inside the offices of Gumball 3000 you realise the passion that the founder, Maximillion Cooper, and all of the members of the team have not just for the rally, but everything that revolves and spins off from the rally itself.

Gumball 3000 was started in 1999 and now is an iconic brand which has led to succesful clothing lines, books and even the movie following the annual rally. The following on social media is huge with hundreds of thousands of followers.

In the office, pieces of Gumball 3000 history were dotted around, some of Maximillion’s previous cars were also garaged here. It was quite inspiring to see how an office can be so much more than just a place to work, but somewhere to show off the brand and to be more than just a white walled box.

Having seen Maximillion in the media, and seen the most incredible things they get up to on Gumball, we expected it to be quite nerve-wracking actually meeting them in person. We couldn’t have been more wrong, everyone was really down to earth and laid back.

At this point we had been shipping high-end cars a few years and knew the worries and requirements that supercar owners have in regards to their pride and joy. After a discussion with the management team about our history and experiences, we got back in the car to head back to Milton Keynes, a proper ‘back to reality’ moment.

We never really discussed prices with the team at Gumball 3000, it was more of a service we would be offering the participants directly, all Gumball 3000 wanted to know was if we would represent their brand effectively and get the cars safely to the start grid on time, and back again to the owners residences following the rally.

The 2011 rally was to start in London, head through Europe and end up in Istanbul

Getting cars to London shouldn’t be a problem and we didn’t see any issues getting cars back to London, and then repatriated following the rally.

Well our confidence must have paid off as we received the call to say we would be the shipper for the rally. This was epic.

Planning begun – now we were pretty happy with getting cars to London from most places across Europe and further afield by road / air / sea, but coming back from Istanbul was looking to be a tricky one, we decided we needed to bring in a third party who had experience of working on large scale rallies.

We had done some work already with CARS Europe and knew they had an amazing fleet of trucks and the experience of managing rallies across the world. We gave them a call and they agreed to work with us on moving the vehicles.

The Gumballers started contacting us directly for rates and information, which is when we started to get a feel for the truly incredible array of vehicles we would be handling and the diversity of the Gumball participants from sports people to hugely successful entrepreneurs.

More on the cars; we were talking about Aston Martin One-77’s, Bugatti Veyrons, Ferraris, Lamborghinis and more. Basically every dream supercar you could think of, we would be working with.

We started to take deposits and make the appropriate bookings. Getting cars into the UK on time and customs cleared properly for the rally was key, and with a few days to go to the rally start, all was on track.

The cars started to arrive and we had them all delivered to the hotel in London ready for the start grid the next day in Covent Garden, this was the first time we got to see these fantastic machines in the flesh, and to meet our clients who we had moved them here for.

Trying to work in the hotel reception while the likes of The Hoff are walking around you made for quite a surreal day in the office.

That evening we had the official pre-party at the London Playboy Club, that was an experience in itself with celebrities dotted around and plenty of expensive drinks on offer.

The next morning was the big day, the whole of London seemed to be shut down for the rally, the noise and amount of people that flocked to Covent Garden was incredible.

It all seemed to happen so quickly and straight after we had to get back to the office to start putting the wheels in motion for getting around fifty supercars out of Turkey.

Watching the supercars crossing 3,000 miles was like a giant countdown for us to get everything together, catch a flight and meet the CARS Europe team ready to load up cars for the return journey.

We checked into our hotel and started to plan where we would be based in the hotel in order to catch each of the Gumballers we were assisting when they arrived following the final stage of their trip.

The tricky thing with getting cars out of Turkey is that each driver will have their passport stamped showing they have ‘imported’ a vehicle into the country. They must then receive another stamp to say the car is OK to be exported again.

Due to the huge rally that was entering Istanbul, Turkish customs said they would provide us with an agent at the hotel to make this a much easier process, the Gumballers could arrive at the hotel, get their passport stamped and then enjoy themselves.

Unfortunately this was our first experience of how doing business in Turkey sometimes doesn’t go quite as smoothly as you may think. On confirming all of this with customs officers, we were told the day before the Gumball arrival, that this would now not be possible, and each Gumballer would have to present their vehicle at the customs offices to have passports stamped.

We needed a new plan very quickly, and decided that we would set up a desk at the customs offices to greet Gumballers and assist with ensuring passports were stamped ready for us to load the vehicles. We could then park up the cars in the car park there with the lorries ready to load.

Time to relax, have some dinner and get some sleep ready for what was to come in the morning

What was to come was the most amazing display of cars that I have ever seen, something about a supercar that has just done 3,000 miles at speed, covered in fly splats makes it even more of an impressive machine to look at.

All the cars were parked up in Taksim Square, and we organised a local taxi driver to lead our clients across Istanbul to the customs office.

I made it very clear to the chap that he just had to drive slowly, ensure the procession behind was keeping up OK and then to come back in order to repeat the process with some Gumballers who were arriving later.

Sadly, this plan went slightly wrong when the taxi driver decided instead to accelerate faster than many of the supercars could probably achieve off into the distance. Perhaps that seemed an easier way to earn his freshly handed fifty Euros, who knows, but luckily the Gumballers were now well used to navigating across a city and all managed to get their passports stamped and ready for loading.

The cars were all parked up next to the trucks and we waited for customs to give the green light to depart. We waited, and waited and waited, a good few days in fact at a huge cost to ourselves for them to finally say we could depart.

Cars all returned safely, loaded back on various flights and containers back across the world – what an incredible experience.

Everyone was happy and we worked as official shippers again the following year from New York to Los Angeles before it was taken more in-house by them.

It was time to re-focus on ShipMyCar and to expand again, it was time to move into even bigger premises.

Carry on reading – Chapter 8 – Expanding Fast

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Moving House

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Director

So Unit 62 was full, we were having to store cars at UK sea ports in order to delay their arrival to our facility in Milton Keynes, this was a problem we needed to solve ASAP.

We wanted somewhere local, the great thing about our local trading estate is that everybody here is involved in the Automotive sector, if you need anything there is always a local company that can assist.

Milton Keynes was working out well for us, we had great links to the M1 motorway, Luton airport just down the road and national rail & coach stations within a short taxi ride.

Searching for commercial property was not easy, nowhere likes to disclose how much they are actually going to charge and many units needed so much work it would cost a fortune to move.

On top of all of our searching we received an interesting call from the organisers of Gumball 3000, a huge motoring event that takes place each year. They invited us to a meeting to discuss assisting the ‘Gumballers’ with transport to and from the event. More on that later…

Luckily at the time the estate was managed by a very helpful fellow Paul, who advised there was a vacant unit just a few doors down the road.

After a fairly long process of sorting ‘dilapidation repairs’ on Unit 62, and plenty of paperwork, we were on the move to Unit 74 Tanners Drive.

This place felt huge, we could fit three times as many cars into the warehouse, we imagined being able to line the cars up and drive around easily inside, this was going to be so spacious.

To save money we thought we would decorate the offices ourselves. As it was just breeze blocks we quickly slapped some adhesive on the walls and plasterboarded the whole place, it took a long long time but looked great.

Sadly what we didn’t realise was that the walls had been painted in some kind of waterproof paint which meant the adhesive failed, just as we were packing up to leave, all the plasterboard fell of the wall. “Ha ha ha” we chuckled happily.

We never like to see a job unfinished, so after a call to Dominos we had dinner sorted and worked through the night to get it all redone again, firstly by scrapping off little areas of paint to stick the adhesive again, good times.

Then we were good to go, our white boards were re-hung, a branded meeting desk put in place and we started to move cars into our new huge space.

The level of cars continued to rise, we developed a custom CRM to manage the increase in vehicles being imported, an information screen was installed instead of the whiteboards and some further tweaks to the quote system meant we could now use the figures from our database of costs to estimate much better the full service cost for importing a car to the UK.

These small tweaks and the bigger premises, started to make a real difference to our conversion rate, with almost two thousand quotes being entered each month, even our new warehouse started to get busy.

We decided to have a car ramp installed, this would enable us to better work on minor repairs to vehicles in-house.

The amount of cars within a few months was ridiculous, our dreams of a spacious workshop and easy movement of vehicles within became out of reach, we had cars everywhere.

Cars seemed to just keep arriving all the time, we were constantly driving to and from the ports, so much so that our trusty wagon decided enough was enough

With the transporter down we tried using a third party to organise the collections from port instead, this worked very well and even worked out cheaper than keeping it in-house. Economies of scale were starting to work for us, and now deliveries were 4-6 vehicles at a time

We decided to invest some money in decoration of the warehouse, we had the entire warehouse painted white and grey (great work from Jay @ Mayfair Decorating) to remove the dated red pillars, new skylights installed to allow more light to brighten the place up. It really looked the business now.

New signage was installed to the front of the building and a lovely new entrance rug, new staff were taken on to bring more servicing and fabrication work in-house.

While all of this was taking place we were in talks with the organisers of that rather large motoring event we mentioned..

Carry on reading: Chapter 7 – Gumball

The post Chapter 6 – Moving House appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Director

Growing Up

The shock of everything coming to a sudden halt and the time spent in the transporter gave us a chance to re-group and come back stronger. The leads coming from the new ShipMyCar website were growing in number, but we had to find a way to convert more of those into shipments.

The fact we could provide people with an instant quote for their car shipping needs meant we were already ahead of most of the competition, but we lacked a brand identity that reflected our vision of the company and where we wanted to be.

A new logo was created and our photoshop skills were tested to the very maximum in order to get the name ShipMyCar to bend round that arrow

Our first proper rebrand begun, and once we started, we couldn’t stop – we branded everything that moved and became obsessed with ensuring the brand remained consistent across all online / offline media, uniforms, paperwork, in fact anything that could be ‘ShipMyCar Blue’ was repainted, reprinted or resewn

The website was moved onto a WordPress setup, which meant we could keep posting regularly and keep the site looking dynamic. The Instant Quote System had a couple of tweaks to fit with the new site but still largely remained the same

The new logo and brand identity started to pay off. Clients felt more confident that we were a reputable and established brand that they could entrust their vehicle with, and we started to work with some very high-end machines

Things started to get busy again, only this time we didn’t have the worry of our funds being tied up in purchasing vehicles and waiting for their arrival. We were becoming the place to turn to if you needed to ship a car to the UK and didn’t want to have to get involved with any of the process.

We were shipping a much wider range of vehicle now, rather than just Mustangs and Corvettes and every iteration of each make, we were starting to see classics, European marques, supercars and more. The learning curve for modifying each different model was steep but we ensured that for each vehicle we worked on we added imagery, details and costings to a new database.

We also started to come up with even more innovative ideas in ways to modify imported vehicles, our goal was always the same – to keep the original look of the car intact whilst ensuring all modifications did not affect the vehicle’s original and sensitive electronics.

When a car is imported from countries such as the USA, the lighting systems have to be heavily modified to satisfy UK requirements (the IVA test, formally SVA), each car under ten years of age has to go through testing to check on these lighting systems, some of these are extremely complex to achieve and can badly damage a car’s ECU if done incorrectly.

We developed a custom Light Control Module that could safely control new circuits needed to add new lights, for example on a US import we need to separate the brake lights from the indicators and change the indicators to amber – in the US, the indicators flash red and the brake light flashes when the indicators are on!

Developments like this gave us even more kudos within the importer community and the workshop started to fill up, overflow and become a problem.

We needed bigger premises, which is never easy to organise, especially once we received a call from the offices of Gumball 3000….

Keep reading – Chapter Six – Moving House

The post Chapter 5 – Growing Up appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

NIck Roach – Company Director

Chapter Four – Global Recession and Selling Cars

Our Cervinis builds were popular, not only could we now build and sell full Cervinis cars here in the UK we could also create hybrid Mustangs with the Cervinis look but with Roush Performance upgrades.

We took our selection of Cervinis vehicles to all the big motoring shows and from this extra media visibility we started to become one of the trusted American car importers here in the UK.

While exhibiting at one of the annual shows at Earl’s Court, we were spotted again by the team at Top Gear, this time for Top Gear Live. After some brief discussions we lent them one of our cars to use in the live show.

The C-300 Cervinis was the one with all the bodykit, suspension, wheels and exhaust but on a standard engine performance build. Shame at the time we did not have a spare IMV800 that they could have put in the show, still the shots we obtained and the publicity helped to grow our brand.

At this point we were busy, we were constantly having cars collected from port, driving them across to London where we used to have them modified for the SVA test, getting the train back, answering emails, valeting cars, driving to London, getting the train back, developing the website, and on and on.

We needed to bring services in-house, we employed a valeter, an auto electrician and started taking cars more locally to Leighton Buzzard test station. It worked well, the modifications to each car could be watched over by us much more closely – ideas we had for lighting systems could be made into reality.

A permanent demo car was purchased and full Roush kit fitted. This car had a very brief appearance on Pimp My Ride UK.

We purchased our own transporter, this would allow us much greater flexibility and efficiency to collect cars from the port. One problem, due to the weight of the cars we carry, we needed a HGV, which meant we needed an operator’s license and somebody to drive it.

I had always fancied being a truck driver, so took myself down to a HGV training centre and spent the next couple of weeks taking extensive HGV lessons in a huge ‘proper’ lorry, all to enable us to drive a Citroen Relay, much to the amusement of my HGV instructor.

Kingsley went back to school to pass the necessary exams so that we could obtain our operator’s license.

Licenses obtained and we hit the road.

Moving cars around ourselves made life easier. We knew exactly when they would be with us, and we could deliver vehicles personally to clients.

Becoming a HGV operator should be one of those happy times in your life, sadly in 2008 there was a situation developing that may put the brakes on our ability to sell imported cars. The following graph gives a good clue:

The credit crunch. Now let this be a lesson to anybody starting out / experiencing a nice growth curve with your business. One day, the revenue stream can just stop. Not just start to slow with some slim hope of recovery, but literally just stop. Like a tap being turned off, but instead of water was the ability for our clients to find finance to purchase a Mustang / Corvette / any vehicle we were trying to sell.

It really was that sudden.

We were faced with a good few months of payments for contracted advertisements in magazines / online popular car purchasing sites with our main source of income gone in a flash.

In order to survive we stopped paying ourselves, the staff and rent had to come first in order to keep going. We branded the transporter ‘TransportMyCar’, got a website going, and won a few contracts with local car dealers to move their stock.

This helped, we could be on the road before the sun came up, deliver some cars to pay the bills and get back to the office to work on the promising ShipMyCar site.

They were long, hard days, with all that time cooped up in the truck it was hard not to get frustrated that we were so close to making it, but it was a great time to think up new ideas, eat McDonald’s breakfasts and consume coffee.

ImportMyVehicle had slowed to the point where we could do no more with it, we gave it a shiny new logo but focused all of our attention on ShipMyCar

Was it going to be enough to keep the ship afloat? Keep reading, Chapter Five – Growing Up

The post Chapter 4 – Global Recession appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Company Director

Roush and Cervinis Dealers

So, we had been on primetime television, the phone will be off the hook, right?

Well sadly as Top Gear is on the BBC, you are not allowed any marketing therefore our plans to cover the car in ImportMyVehicle.com stickers just weren’t feasible. Sure, through a bit of digging it was possible to find who supplied the Stage 3 Roush for filming, but from a direct marketing perspective it didn’t help as much as we had hoped.

As fate would have it Roush was, at the time, consolidating their activites and was operating from a facility in Essex. This meant we could have Roush vehicles built in the UK (at the time we had no workshop to speak of).

We focused our efforts on raising awareness of our ability to organise the whole process from sourcing a standard Mustang in the USA, shipping it and upgrading it with specific Roush options.

This was popular, very popular, and Roush gave us usage of their demo Stage 3 to help sell even more. We hit all the shows again, from the smaller Owner Clubs to the bigger venues, this time with much bigger stands and a selection of Roush vehicles, including the loan of this awesome Ford GT.

We were putting superchargers, suspension and bigger brakes on anything that moved. The Roush Performance products were and still are the best around in our opinion, so it was very easy to pursuade people to use our services.

Through our growing experience of modifying and registering imported cars in the UK, we started to get interest from people looking to just ship a car they have purchased themselves.

This was quite interesting, we could essentially do the same as we currently were doing but without the risks associated with purchasing cars.

We had everything in place to do this, a large whiteboard to write down details of the few extra enquiries we would get each month and all of our network of trusted hauliers and shippers we had built up over these couple of years. It was 2007 and nothing was going to stop us now.

While we were planning the new sideline shipping company another company came on our radar, Cervinis Auto Designs. Their product was essentially an Eleanor Mustang bodykit, but on a new shape Mustang.

We decided to use their kit to build the most insane looking, sounding and performing car we could manage and sell them as a branded model, the IMV800.

We did this by taking a standard V8 and removing the 4.6l engine, it was too small for our purposes. Instead we had fitted (by Sean Hyland Motorsport in Canada) a GT500 5.4l V8 , and a supercharger that conservatively was putting out 800bhp.

Now at this point we had driven some pretty fast cars, but nothing even came close to this thing. The changes to the suspension also meant unlike a standard GT500 it could actually get some traction. We sold a few of these and decided to buy a container load of Cervinis stock to sell quicker to the UK market.

A few weeks later, a 20ft container of bumpers, hoods and spoilers were with us and we quickly set up an online shop to sell them.

Now back to our new shipping sideline. We would love to say we had a premonition of the looming 2008 global financial meltdown but in reality it was a business concept that interested us. We decided that not only should we provide an all inclusive package, but we should also be able to give people a full quote and breakdown of everything instantly on our website.

We got coding, we had a bit of PHP knowledge and spent many long days & nights drinking coffee and creating a database and front end quote system. As part of our MyCar domain collection we managed to secure www.shipmycar.co.uk – the beautiful design above (sorry if you have just eaten) went live and we got working on SEO.

Well it didn’t take long before the lovely algorithms at Google decided to put us top of the tree for ‘car shipping’ and things got a little bit busy. We went from a few calls a day to non-stop calls, a few quotes a day with the ability to track them all on a whiteboard to 50 a day. We needed staff and automation.

Automation was easy for us, we had picked up enough coding skills to link the quote system to a database, a new backend built up meant a lot of the process from collection of quote details, to booking transport / shipping / DVLA forms needed could all be handled automatically through our custom CRM and new Client Portal.

It started to get very busy, we were fielding calls, driving cars to tests and valeting all ourselves. We took on some staff, we even had our own named mugs and commissioned an artist to draw the below awesome sketch. Life was good.

It became so busy we couldn’t help thinking ‘this time next year Rodney’ – but as all thirty-something UK based entrepreneurs know, when you think things are about to sky rocket, a global disaster is always waiting in the wings…

Keep reading, Chapter Four – Global Recession and Selling Cars

The post Chapter 3 – Roush and Cervinis Dealers appeared first on Car Shipping and UK Import Specialists.

“While the UK is on lockdown from Coronavirus measures, I thought I would take a look back through the history of our company. I hope all of our clients, staff, friends and families are well and stay safe during these difficult times”

Nick Roach – Company Director

Chapter 2 – The White Roush

If you haven’t been to an American main dealer, it is like nothing you have ever experienced in car sales. They are vast, hundreds and hundreds of cars over acres of space, with sales people that seem to pop out of anywhere.

For two car entusiasts, we were in heaven. Seeing Mustangs, Corvettes, Ford Trucks etc in the flesh was eye opening. We had enough funds to buy a few cars to stock up our anticipated new showroom (more on that later), so a difficult decision had to be made.

Do we go for basic V6’s to suit the UK market and have more available to spec up options? No, that didn’t sit right when we heard the V8’s rumbling past.

So V8’s it will be, we could get three sensible GT’s with a good spec and sell them in the UK fairly quickly….. Then we saw it, a brand new Stage 3 Roush Mustang – it was white, it had blue stripes. We needed it.

Realising this one was the first, and signed by Jack Roush made us throw out all of our previous sensible plans and decide we should buy this one, plus a standard GT with what we had left. The “man maths” agreed that the marketing potential was huge.

The deal was done with the fantastic people at www.brandonford.com and at an exchange rate of nearly $2/£ we were happy boys. Time to head home.

The Showroom

Now we had a couple of months while the car was being shipped and SVA (as it was then) tested. The race was on to find a suitable premises for a showroom.

Unit 62 Tanners Drive in Milton Keynes was the one. It could fit around three cars in a showroom, a few out the back for valeting. What more will we ever need?

At the time we were still out and about with CleanMyCar.com so it was tricky sorting solicitors etc, but finally we got hold of the keys. We decorated the warehouse and built a wall to section the valeting bay from our showroom. Just in time, the cars arrived from the USA and it looked magnificent.

The Publicity

So now it was time to get out there to some shows, Earl’s Court and the NEC shows looked the place to go, we made up some signage, packed the Roush and drove to a weekend in Birmingham. Then we realised, events are hard work, hard on the feet and hard keeping cheerful for that length of time, but it worked – we got the call from BBC Top Gear

BBC Top Gear

The crew at Top Gear wanted us to bring along the Roush so they could do a feature comparing it to the Shelby GT500, we happily agreed and spent a great day filming with Clarkson, May and Hammond. Seeing the Roush being driven round, and round, and round, and round the track by The Stig was a worrying time for us but it looked stunning.

Once they were done, we drove away – almost into a wall the brakes were that worn, but almost as soon as the show was aired, we received a call from somebody who wanted to buy the Roush and just like that, it was gone.

Time to restock and move forward.

Carry on reading: Chapter Three – Roush and Cervinis Dealers

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