The founding story of CartonCloud!

We’re super happy with the great work of the team at BizVideo producing our new Story Video. Also very special thanks to my father, Bernard Fletcher for taking the time to film Nic and I doing things back when we had Roving Logistics!

Vincent Fletcher, CartonCloud Founder/CEO

We always start a business thinking, "Oh, man. It'll be so good. I'll have these staff members and I'll be able to go out and play golf. I'll be earning all this money." Then I think for most companies, none of that ever happens. You end up working a hell of a lot more than you ever have ever before for anybody else. You normally take a lower paycheck. It's actually really, really hard. When I was 24, me and my business partner, we actually went out and we bought a freight company. The entire business was all completely paper-based. We had three full-time admin staff when we took over because the whole business was really heavily manually-driven.‍

We were actually losing a lot of money. You're looking at potentially going under completely. It makes you pretty desperate. You start to need to do whatever it takes to make the business survive. In that case, that was we knew that we had to cut costs, but we couldn't cut customers. We had to continue to do the same amount of work with less people. We knew that we needed a warehouse management system. We also needed a transport management system. We started to look on the market. At the time, there was really nothing that was cloud-based and nothing out there that was designed around automation.

We said, "Okay. Well, let's do it. Let's build it ourselves." I got stuck with it. I came from a background of software developers. Then we constructed what became CartonCloud for our own business. We started to call around other refrigerated transporter warehousing companies and actually found ... My god, so many of these have exactly the same problem. They were all really interested in the product. That was where the software became a product itself. Then it was a big light bulb moment where I was like, "Okay. Actually, what we've built is so applicable to these other organizations. We've been through it. We know how to transform a business from being paper-based to running on a cloud-based application. We shouldn't be running a freight company anymore. We should be a software company because this is what we do better."

CartonCloud today is ... It's a pretty decent sized team. We've tripled in size in about the last 14 months. We're adding new developers to the team pretty much every three weeks. Now we've got people all over Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia using the application on really big scales and on small scales as well. Whenever we talk about it as a group, that's the one thing that all the staff here get the most satisfaction out of. It's building out the product to just help more of these businesses and streamline how they operate to give people back significant chunks of their time.

A big push for us now is actually to get the product to a point where it is better than humans making decisions because we really feel like we can get it there and that it has to get to that level, where when it's doing allocations, you look at what are producers and you're like, "Wow. Okay. Yeah, I couldn't account all of that, but that's brilliant." The mission for myself and for the company now is to work with as many of the small to medium-sized logistics businesses as possible and really just help improve them, give back the owners a large portion of their time and really help them get their lives back.

Transcribed from video