As InXpress Franchisees of the Year, Doug Lawson and his business partner Wendy Jerrard were recognised for their achievements across the spectrum of their business from turnover to customer retention. They were also welcomed into the 500K Club for generating more than $500,000 worth of gross margin last year and awarded Highest New Margin for the biggest annual increase. 

Now they’ve set their sights set on the Million Dollar Club – and they’re confident it won’t be long until they join the other members.

“That’s the nature of the InXpress business model,” Lawson says. “Once you’ve onboarded a new client they can use the webship+ platform to arrange a shipment and the courier company picks up and delivers.”

“The speed and efficiency of this system means franchisees build a recurring income as their client base grows,” says CEO APAC Marcel Lal. “Our management software also makes it easy for franchisees to control their own business.”

The support of a franchise

A chartered building surveyor by profession, Lawson had been self-employed in the UK before moving to Australia 13 years ago. 

“I didn’t want to go back to working for someone else and, as I had no network here, I thought buying a franchise made good sense,” he says. “I was also really keen to take advantage of online retail, which was booming in the US and UK but still in its infancy in Australia. InXpress was perfect because an increase in online shopping would increase the amount of freight. It also had a low entry point and the overheads were next to nothing. All you need is a laptop, a phone and car for visiting clients. So I went ahead and opened the business in Chelmer, Brisbane in September 2013.”

A year or so into the business, Lawson heard that Jerrard, the mother of one of his daughter’s friends, was ready to get back into the workforce after 10 years at home with her children. 

“She liked the sound of InXpress and she and her husband ended up buying half the franchise,” Lawson says. “That was a brilliant move on my part because she’s very organised, very diligent and customers love her. For the last seven or eight years she’s had full charge of the operational side of things, keeping customers happy and running the business while I bring new customers on board through sales and marketing.”

The business has mainly grown organically, though they have acquired a couple of smaller franchises 

“That gives you an instant boost,” Lawson says. “I keep my eyes and ears open in case someone with   one of the smaller businesss wants to exit for some reason but, generally, we focus on attracting more clients of our own.”  

State of the art technology

Lawson saw a big change in InXpress two years ago when a US private equity firm bought the brand.

“They had 20 years’ experience with people like PayPal and Uber so they were used to working with big platforms,” he says. “They immediately started investing millions of dollars into new technology and now our software is state of the art. There are also impressive new features coming out all the time. We’re number one in the marketplace and we’re now owned and run by a very smart crowd of people who are investing very, very heavily to make this a half-billion dollar company in Australia.”

What it takes to succeed 

InXpress franchisees are drawn from a range of backgrounds.

“When I talk to colleagues at conferences I find that many have business or corporate experience, often at a managerial level,” he says. “Now that the platform is becoming increasingly sophisticated, I think it will attract more people from an IT related field.”

He believes the best franchisee have drive and, above all, persistence.

“I once heard one of the InXpress founders tell an audience of franchisees that one piece of advice led to his own success,” Lawson says. “That was the phrase, persistence pays, persistence pays, persistence pays. I think that’s true. The more you persist and persevere the more money you’ll make.”

Looking back, would he invest in an InXpress franchise again? “Absolutely,” he says. “I still love the model. Right at the beginning I brought in a lot of customers who are still shipping with us today. The amount of the amount of money we’ve made from them over eight years for doing very little work is amazing. And now the new technology makes it easier than ever to attract new clients.”