From the EN Magazine, first published Wednesday 22nd April 2009.

He might have a daft name but Parcel2Go’s founder is a proper old-school entrepreneur. EN wrestles with the bubble-wrap as Fil Adams-Mercer reveals…

A 55-year-old former market trader who left school aged 15, Fil Adams-Mercer now runs Parcel2Go, an online parcel delivery service that’s on course to turn over just shy of £9 million in the year to April 2009. And the business, based out of the 100,000 sq ft mill he bought in his hometown of Bolton in May 2007, came about largely by accident.

Always a bit of an independent trader, in 1980 Mercer was one of the first to get into the video rentals game. He built up a chain of four shops (he later sold the businesses, though not the properties, to Ritz) and a ten per cent holding in a magazine highlighting new releases that is distributed among video shops to this day. It was when writing a column for this title that he adopted the pen name “Fil”.

To distribute the magazine (since sold to London-based Focus for £1.6 million) Mercer entered into a contract with Securicor to deliver 4,000 parcels a month to video shops. Upon selling the magazine he retained the Securicor contract, and, “From 1987 we started doing parcels for other people within the video business, which expanded into other companies and sectors.”

Following a failed go at greengrocery in the early 1990s, he decided to concentrate on parcels and, in 2002, set up the Parcel2Go website.

The company, which takes and co-ordinates orders that are then fulfilled by the likes of DHL, Federal Express, UPS and City Link, now primarily serves eBay traders, and saw an overnight 115 per cent rise in business, from 21,000 to 43,000 packages, during the Royal Mail strike of October 2007.

It has held onto, and built upon, this extra business in large part thanks to some clever search engine optimisation (Mercer’s son Richard, business development director at Parcel2Go, also runs a spinout web marketing business, Blueprint, which turns over £1 million).

But, Mercer says, the real key to Parcel2Go’s success is its customer relationship management system, a bespoke tool that was supposed to cost £7,000: “£1 million later I’m still paying him £20,000 a month, because it’s being updated all the time. But what we are is our CRM.” This system, he says, is the envy of the big carriers with whom he works, and probably the company’s biggest asset.

Profit margins aren’t huge yet, he says, because so much money is ploughed into growing the business. He reckons that by spending what he does he generates a much bigger actual profit every year, because a small percentage of a lot is better than a big percentage of a little.

In any event, having no borrowings and owning his premises outright, he has the luxury of being able to do what he likes. Mercer owns 60 per cent of the company, son Richard owns another seven per cent, and the remainder is divided among various staff.

He bought the mill for “over £1 million” using the proceeds from the sale of the properties he had held onto from his video business. Space at the mill costs, he says, just £1 per sq ft per annum to service.

He sublets space to eBay traders, and is able to run all kinds of little sidelines, including storing the 50,000 out-of-date nuclear, biological and chemical warfare suits he bought from the MOD for a pound each and is selling to paintballers and fishermen for £4.95 apiece via eBay at the rate of about 100 a week.

For his best deal, however, Mercer identifies getting into the video business, because of the perks and all-expenses paid trips to the US courtesy of the film distributors.

Not a proper deal in our book, but a story he tells helps explain his attitude: “When I sold the video business I owed the taxman a quarter of a million pounds. A friend of mine sold out and did a much, much cleverer deal and sold four shops. Not for £750,000, like I did – he sold them for £3.3 million.

“He got his cheque on 29 March 1992 and died on 3 April. Since that day I never have a sleepless night over money. Ever since then I don’t care. This is all a game – enjoy it, recession or no recession.”