What a way to a run a cargo company
Photo: Daniel Lynch
In an earlier version of this life in community / social business, a go-to sources of advice was a little book called ‘What a Way to Run a Railroad: an Analysis of Radical Failure’ – an often humorous account of how businesses set up with an ethical mission too often run aground, mired in disagreement about balancing revenue drive with core purpose.
In one of those curious ways that life revisits the past, an early customer and crowdfund supporter of Raybel had been one of the book’s authors (thank you Russell!), who passed on some advice from that time, still relevant. Rather than obsessing about ‘growth’ in a vague ‘do or die’ way – think instead about the idea of, say, tripling sales. What would that look like? What would you need to do? Are those things you want to do? If not, maybe steady state is better?
Back when we were importing four boxes of olive oil, tripling sales was not difficult to imagine. Once we got to two tonnes of stock bought, and needing to be sold, well – six certainly felt a challenge. A rule of thumb we’ve found is that one tonne of stock equals roughly £10k of purchase cost. Finding £60k to buy stock each year is a tall order when you’re self-financing, relatively risk averse, have a lot other projects going on, and are more campaign driven than money-making anyway.
But filling the ships is the only way to make sail cargo work, so it had to contemplated.
And we have. This year we unloaded 20 tonnes of cargo onto the wharf at Ramsgate Harbour, sailed from Portugal on board De Tukker, which had already delivered to Copenhagen. So more like a ten times increase on previous years. How did we do it? Well – ‘we’ didn’t, really. The great bulk of the cargo was imported by partners Xisto Wines – who have been doing this for a decade or more, usually into west country ports – and Wandlerlust Wines, a first venture for them, with wine distributed to restaurants in Kent and London.
But we learnt loads from organising an arrival on this scale for the first time: getting a big first-hand insight into the actual costs; discovering a Border Control form that needed filling in for the ships’ crew we didn’t know about; finding out there is no way we can import honey post-Brexit until the UK government gets its act together to do a new deal with the EU (please); where to scour pallets around Ramsgate town. And just how long it takes to unload 20 tonnes of cargo with a single crane.
Overall it felt like a big step forward in establishing Ramsgate as a reliable and friendly hub for importing sail cargo, with follow-on coastal voyages for smaller cargoes, into other ports, up to London and along south and east coasts.
And this network is beginning to emerge. We’ve summarised it in a research report that we’ve produced over the past year, funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, and just published as, “A Sail Cargo Network for London and the Thames Estuary”. Download here for a read.
We found a growing sophistication in the sail cargo network, with different types of ship doing complementary things – trans-Atlantic, north-west Europe, estuary trades, coastal connections – and companies like Oree Transport, Grain de Sail, Hawila, Kaapkargo and TOWT joining the now pretty well-established Timbercoast and Fairtransport. What’s important is the growing strength, robustness and resilience in the sector, though partnership and diversity, rather than one or another company’s growth trajectory. We need to maintain a spirit of co-operation between us. There’s still plenty to learn from radical failure.
Gareth on the Quayside