Bullet Express’ David McCutcheon left school at 16, and he has been working for all but a six-month period ever since. McCutcheon has had various jobs, from selling steel to furniture to working in his cousin’s taxi garage, until one day he got a job at Parcel Line, the company that is now DPD.
“After a couple of years there, I came back from holiday one day and got the salesman of the month in the morning and sacked in the afternoon,” McCutcheon remembers.
At the time he thought this was the worst day of his life, but he would later look back on it as the best thing that could have happened.
“I had the flat, my own car and the company car which I owed money on, and a mortgage. It was a pretty scary moment,” he says. “Then later that week a former colleague met up with me and said, ‘You’re a sales guy, I’ve got a van, let’s start a courier company!’”
The first thing McCutcheon did was bring on board his cousin and closest friend, Gary Smith. This proved to be a shrewd early move, as McCutcheon found his approach to the business differed from his initial partner’s.
“I loved the job, but my partner’s way of running the business was different than mine. So, I went back to Glasgow to run the company from there while he ran operations in the south,” McCutcheon says. “At the same time, my partner approached Gary and offered to let him buy him out. So, Gary became my business partner.”
Together they developed a same-day delivery company in Glasgow with a fleet of 15 vans and began to enter the heavier freight sector. The company moved laterally into the storage sector and international transportation, leading Bullet Express to service the full supply chain.
“We bring products from abroad, palletise them, store them, and pick pack them. We have a wide range of services, covering everything the customer needs,” McCutcheon says.
One Step Ahead
This was only the beginning of Bullet Express’s trajectory, however. As McCutcheon points out, logistics has always been a rapidly evolving sector, and the company has had to evolve just as rapidly to stay competitive.
“We have always been able to keep ahead of the competition, but our unique selling point keeps changing,” he explains. “When we first started every courier we knew just had a white van, t-shirt and jeans. So we made sure we always had a uniform on, tie, ID badges, and liveried vans. As the internet became important we introduced online booking, then tracking. When we started out we had no mobile phones, which seems hilarious now. We had pagers and operated from the office. We have brought in different kinds of vehicles, moved into heavier freight, and began offering same-day deliveries to London overnight with a price offering from £400 to £50.”
The company has established a presence throughout Glasgow, with depots at Bothwell, the city centre, London Road and Glasgow Airport.
“We can bring goods to China from the port, we can store them, pick pack them, and get them dispatched anywhere in the UK or worldwide,” McCutcheon says.
Evolving Technology
It is no surprise that technology is one of the areas Bullet Express has to work hardest to keep up with.
“IT has always been a big part of our business. We use it to give customers good access to information on where our vehicles are,” McCutcheon points out.
As the industry has developed, so have the technology and customer expectations.
“When ISO 2000 came in, companies improved what they could do. incoming work became a bit more stop-start and it was hard to maintain an iron cashflow,” McCutcheon tells us. “That was a challenge.”
It was a challenge that McCutcheon was more than ready to address. When the company launched his office was his own bedroom. He needed to acquire storage, and finding the right property at the right size was a challenge. But first and foremost, the company needed to keep up with the latest technology. Over Bullet Express’s lifetime, the company has seen the transition from pagers to CB radios, to mobile phones.
“Even when phones came in, we had no texting, nothing like that. It seems hilarious now,” McCutcheon says. “Then the internet opened up, and suddenly drivers had an office in their car, so we had to adapt again.”
Today Bullet Express sends bulletins to customers on the weather their deliveries will be travelling through. McCutcheon tells us about a recent whiteout in Aberdeen, and how Bullet Express was able to keep its customers updated throughout.
“We keep an eye on what the marketplace is doing so our drivers and customers can get ahead of it or move with it,” McCutcheon says.
The Next Stage
It has been a long journey, and that growth is only set to continue.
“We went from 2,000 pallets to 20,000 in the space of a year and a half, we’re now at 50,000 pallets,” McCutcheon says. “Gary and I felt we had taken the business as far as we could. We spent a year looking for a new Managing Director, somebody with more knowledge internationally and of the corporate world. We bought in John McKail.”
Learning from his experiences at the birth of the company, McCutcheon was sure to bring on board someone he knew and could trust. McKail set up pallet networks in Europe for Pallet Force and has spent time at UPS and the Maersk group. He joined Bullet Express three weeks before the Covid pandemic hit.
“We joke that his first three-to-four weeks in the job halved our turnover,” McCutcheon “But he has certainly performed. It was a terrible start, but we have turned it around. Business is very good at the moment and a lot of that is down to John. Growth is fast. We are getting a bigger sales team in and building a customer service team. It is not about finding customers. It is building the infrastructure to suit their needs.”
McCutcheon is now looking forward to the next generation of the company.
“One of the great things we have got in the business is the longevity of our staff. I’m 60, Gary’s 58, and we are starting to see staff retiring from the business, which is incredible,” he says. “We have grown extremely fast, but the average staff member here has in the region of 18-to-20 years at the company. We have a lot of people with a lot of years in the business.”
McCutcheon is keen to find people with passion and drive for the business, but at Bullet Express, “the next generation” can mean, literally.
“We are seeing staff members’ kids starting to appear in the business!” McCutcheon marvels. “We remember those kids being born! It has been a fantastic journey.”
