E90 | Reshaping Fulfilment With Actual Humans with Martin Bysh

In an otherwise bleak world, today’s guest is a success story who just keeps going from strength to strength. 

Martin Bysh is CEO of Huboo Technologies Ltd, a fulfilment company that takes stock, stores it, picks, packs and delivers it on behalf of e-commerce sellers, automatically.

But Martin hasn’t always been in this industry. In fact, this is his first company that has physical things, like people and space. He’s always had companies with no people in them. This 180 degree business model is completely down to Paul Dodd, his business partner. 

“[We figured] we’d do something together in e-commerce. We ran a few shops online to get a sense of where the pain points might be, and immediately stumbled on fulfilment. It's a massive problem for lots of e commerce companies. And so we started to explore it and just gradually found ourselves in this business, which I love, but it is very much a people business. I think we've got about 70 staff now. And it's all about the people, but it's a lot of fun as a consequence.”

But scaling a business that consists of so many people with so many moving parts is a challenge. How do you scale small without breaking small? 

“This isn't about massive sheds and treating people as robots. This is about building a distribution system for e-commerce businesses, based on human beings. How do we take the best of human beings and build a business on that, which drives high margin rather than trying to treat human beings like robots to drive margin into the business.”

This is a fascinating conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. 

On today’s podcast:

• The little known world of fulfilment
• Building the company
• The micro-warehouse/hub fulfilment model
• Staying open during the pandemic
• His plan to turn the business into a billion dollar company
• Integrating last mile as a way to save costs