Stand and Deliver

Though she's only 24, Vicki Whiteford was already a veteran of the brutally competitive courier business when she launched All-Ways Courier, last year. But how long can she keep substituting energy, sales talent, and street smarts for capital?

Imagine starting a company in downtown Los Angeles, a city racked by recession and discord. Imagine that it's a courier company, in an industry beset by brutal costs for everything from insurance to workers' compensation. Many local courier outfits that have weathered the fax revolution and corporate cost cutting are hurting; others are in bankruptcy. Competition is cutthroat. And there you are, 23 years old, a woman in a male-dominated field, with little capital, limited credibility, and no clientele to speak of.

Such was the battleground Vicki Whiteford faced last year, as her tiny All-Ways Courier sallied into the fray.

Whiteford entered the messenger business at 18, as a route driver, to support her then-husband. But she enjoyed it. And she was good at it. In five years she worked her way through the ranks of three delivery companies. She eventually landed a management job, running the L.A. office of Orange County-based Executive Express, where she showed a talent for managing people, winning clients, and keeping something as hectic as a courier operation on an even keel.

Disregarding the troubles of the industry in L.A., Whiteford decided to launch her own venture. "I was tired of making money for somebody else," she says. "If I could run an office for Executive Express, I could do it for myself."

On October 9, 1991, Whiteford incorporated All-Ways Courier and began laying the groundwork for the business. For starters, that meant getting a license to operate statewide from the California Public Utilities Commission, which required that she obtain the mandatory insurance policies and bonds.

It also meant getting hold of some capital. She had saved $5,000 and had $25,000 in a trust fund, but she needed much more. Banks were out of the question. Who would be crazy enough to gamble on a first-time business owner of 23? To bankers, her venture would look like a surfer paddling into shark-infested waters.

Then there was the small matter of obtaining customers. That was where Whiteford concentrated her efforts. Even before she was fully funded and licensed, she began landing customers -- and forging her credibility -- through sheer force of salesmanship.

At a film festival in Palm Springs, Whiteford met someone from Hemdale Film Corp., a Hollywood producer of such movies as Platoon and The Terminator. Hemdale sent packages all over L.A. -- press kits, scripts, promotional materials. It used six or seven courier services, paying them $10,000 to $12,000 a month for mediocre performance.

Not one to miss an opening, Whiteford pitched a proposal to Hemdale president Eric Parkinson, claiming she could save the company about $4,000 a month and provide superior service to boot. Parkinson was intrigued. And impressed. For someone so young, he thought, Whiteford possessed a levelheaded business acumen and plenty of chutzpah. Parkinson signed a one-year contract giving All-Ways exclusive rights to Hemdale's messenger traffic. It would start in March 1992, when Whiteford planned to commence operations. But it was in late January that lightning struck for Whiteford. She had bid on a job being offered by Associated Distribution Logistics (ADL), a large outfit that handled a lot of transportation work for Eastman Kodak. Kodak needed a place near downtown L.A. that could deliver parts to its field technicians doing repairs on its copiers, X-ray machines, and photo-finishing equipment. It made no sense for Kodak or ADL to handle the deliveries in-house. A courier company could do it far more cheaply. And pulling a part off a shelf and dispatching it to an office building or a hospital was not unlike taking blueprints or legal documents around town.

Ed Young, an ADL executive, solicited bids for the work, and one came in from Whiteford. She'd learned of the opportunity while still at Executive Express, which already had a Kodak parts depot near Santa Monica. Hungry as she was, willing to meet whatever demands ADL and Kodak made, Whiteford landed the contract. "If I'd hemmed and hawed, I wouldn't have gotten it," she says. As it would turn out, the concept of All-Ways' adding value to its service by being a "parts depot" would be one of the key competitive advantages upon which Whiteford would hang her hat.

Obviously, it was risky for ADL. Ed Young was gambling on a company with no existing operations -- not even an office -- to fulfill a critical need for a huge client. But he had confidence in Whiteford. "Vicki was the best option for that area," he says. "All-Ways was new, yes, but she had a strong background in the business. And good people have to start somewhere."

ADL and All-Ways inked a contract on January 27, 1992. Kodak wanted the depot up and running within a week. Still operating from her home in Venice, Whiteford scrambled to find a location, settling on a 1,600-square-foot warehouse space. Although it was in a "marginal" part of L.A., Kodak executives from the Rochester, N.Y., headquarters approved the site. Two of them had flown out to make sure the project got off to a good start.

Given the tight deadline, they, along with Young and Whiteford, spent days and nights putting up shelves and organizing parts, in a place leased so suddenly it still had no electricity, no phone, no water in the cooler. "It was a nightmare," Whiteford recalls. "Here were these heavy-duty players from Kodak putting shelves together in an unlit warehouse. We brought in lanterns. Everyone was in a panic. Ed Young had 'This is a mistake' written all over his face." Nonetheless, by early February Whiteford was sitting on $1 million worth of Kodak parts, thousands of them. She had no dispatcher yet and no employees; some friends volunteered to make deliveries for the first weeks. But she was in business. Under the contract, All-Ways was on demand for Kodak 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Not that she needed to have her offices staffed around the clock. Off-hours calls would be routed to her cellular phone.

The terms were tough but worth it. At $9 a delivery, the deal would yield sales of about $3,500 a month. All told, between Kodak and Hemdale she'd have monthly revenues of $8,000 to $10,000, a reliable base.