The shipping company that just needed a bridge

Morris Yudu has been starting businesses since he left school. A shop. A cab office. A security company. The motor trade. But the first one he ever started,  shipping goods from the UK to West Africa, is the one he kept coming back to.

Collect, load, ship

TDSS UK picks up goods from exporters and importers across the UK, loads them into 40-foot containers, and ships them to Nigeria, Ghana, and the rest of West Africa. 

Morris has one van and a team of hired drivers. A shoulder injury picked up years ago means he can't handle the bigger vehicles anymore. But there's a gap in the operation: when customers call with lighter jobs, he sometimes has to turn them away because his drivers are busy elsewhere.

"If it's something light, I can do it myself," he says. "But I need a small van for that. The bigger ones I can't manage because of my shoulder, but the little ones I can pick up."

A smaller van would mean fewer missed jobs and less waiting around for drivers to become free. It's a simple fix that would make the whole operation quicker.

6 weeks between loading and getting paid

The challenge with shipping is timing. Morris collects goods from customers and stores them in his warehouse. Containers then take around four weeks to reach West Africa. Invoices would go out two weeks after loading, then another week or two would pass before payment landed. 

That's six weeks between doing the work and seeing the money.

Morris needed to bridge the gap; he found iwoca and applied. He has taken multiple rounds of funding, each one bridging the same gap: outgoings landing faster than incomings.

Now, Morris uses his iwoca Flexi-Loan to pay upfront to clear and store goods, loads the container, and sends the invoice the same day. The turnaround on payment dropped from weeks to days. Now Morris can repay early with no fees, and he doesn’t pay a penny in interest on the money he doesn’t draw down.

Back to full capacity

At his peak, Morris was loading four containers a month. When he returned to TDSS UK, that dropped to one. Now he's back to two, with a target of getting back to where he was.

"I’ll be thrilled if we do two times a month," he says. "That shows we’re getting back to when I was on it properly."

Morris recently moved into a new office and loading space in Grays, Essex. He’s also hired a part-timer who handles admin and is building a new website. Facebook ads are already bringing enquiries; people calling, asking questions, sending messages. The infrastructure is catching up.

"We’re also creating a new website," Morris ads. "People are getting in touch, so it's working for us."

A shop, a cab office, a security company, the auto trade; Morris has tried them all. But shipping is the business he started with, the one that always paid, and the one he trusts to grow.

Instead of chasing something new, he's doubling down on the thing that works, with a little help from iwoca.

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