I set up Forklift Agency in the October of 2004, the idea was to help my stepdad out with extra work. Jeff was a qualified Forklift Truck Instructor and he worked for several different agencies, but found that he had a few days spare every month, and of course being self employed the days you don’t work, you don’t get paid.
I did a bit of research and found that most of the forklift training agencies and companies still did their advertising the old school way. Very cheap and nasty website (if at all) and/or a yellow pages advert that cost the earth and didn’t really do much.
I offered to create the website for Jeff and pay for the marketing. The website went live and the phones went mad. To the point where I was actually in a full time job and the phone was ringing so much that I couldn’t really answer it every time.
But, with in the first couple of days I had booked the first job in for Carpet City in London. Within a few weeks I realised that I couldn’t take the calls so I needed Jeffs help. We started to divert the calls to his mobile and the Forklift Agency concept took off.
The idea was to just get Jeff work, but now we have over 35 instructors up and down the UK. And due to the way we do this we can keep our charges down to a minimum and not have to pass or traveling and accommodation costs.
Once we got to the January of 2007, we realised that we had to take it seriously. So we became a limited company in February 2007. After the first year we turned a healthy profit and have done ever since. Even with the recession on, due to the cash reserves we were able to keep our had above water.
