Yard notes
Why we still don't have a phone number
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Everything marked with a star is required. The rest helps us quote faster.
We have been in business seventeen years and we have never published a phone number. People find this strange, and they are entitled to.
Here is the honest reasoning, including the parts where the trade-off goes against us.
What a pallet enquiry actually contains
To quote a pallet job we need a footprint, an approximate count, a postcode, whether you are buying or selling, your dock hours and — ideally — a photograph. Six pieces of information, one of which is an image.
On a call, every one of those becomes something written on a pad by whoever answered, and then re-keyed, and then interpreted. The photograph does not happen at all. By the time it reaches a yard manager it is four numbers and a memory of a conversation.
What happens instead
- 1
It arrives written
In the sender's own words, with whatever they attached. Nothing is transcribed.
- 2
It gets a reference and a timestamp
Into a shared queue. Nothing sits in an individual's inbox.
- 3
A yard manager picks it up
The same people who grade and load, not a separate sales function.
- 4
The reply is written
Price, grade, availability, collection window. You have it in front of you rather than in your head.
- 5
The thread is the record
If there is a question later, the original words are still there.
Where it genuinely costs us
I am not going to pretend this is free. Three real costs:
- We lose urgent work. Somebody who needs 40 pallets this afternoon is going to call somebody else, and they should.
- Some people just prefer to talk. That is a legitimate preference and we are not the right supplier for them.
- Complex jobs take more rounds. A five-minute call can sometimes replace three emails. For a warehouse decommission we will come and stand in your yard instead, which is better but slower to arrange.
What we get back
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Enquiries answered within one business day | 99.4% |
| Enquiries answered same day before 11 AM MT | 87% |
| Quotes issued with a written grade standard attached | 100% |
| Disputes about what was agreed | 3 in three years |
| Enquiries lost in an individual's inbox | 0 |
That fourth row is the one that keeps the policy in place. Three disputes about what was agreed, in three years, across several thousand transactions — and all three were resolved by reading the original email.
The wider point
Most of what we do differently is like this: a small operational choice that looks eccentric from outside and is entirely ordinary from inside. Photographing every trailer. Weighing twice. Publishing our grade standard. Refusing blue pallets. None of them is clever. They are just decisions made once, properly, and then not revisited every time they were inconvenient.
Not having a phone is the most visible of them, which is why it gets challenged. If it ever costs us more than it saves, we will get one and say so here.