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Peter Fagence started as PF Couriers in 1978. "A friend
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offered me the chance to finish a motorcycle courier contract for him. I had a motorbike and so it made sense. I enjoyed doing it and after the contract finished I set up PF Couriers as a business because at the time in the Crawley and Gatwick area it was a market that nobody else was in.
"It took off and by the end of the first year I had 17 guys working for me on their motorbikes. It got very successful very quickly." After a few years PF started using small vans as well and everything grew from that until about 1983/84.
Then the company started to get a bit of competition. "By that time we had a few 7.5-tonners as well as vans and bikes," Fagence says.
The company moved into larger trucks when the owner of the haulier that used to run from PFS current premises in Crawley became very ill. "We negotiated a deal and I took over the business from him and that's how I got into the bigger stuff.
"Although transport is really hard work, if I had not got into the haulage side of things I probably would not be in business because people don't use couriers any more," Fagence says.
"We do still have a couple of subcontractors doing courier work for us, but these days you just cannot get motorcyclists to do the work because there is so little work about."
Fagence explains that in 1978 apart from the telephone the only other way to communicate was with a Telex machine and so there was a lot of courier work about. "But now we have faxes, ISDN, email and the internet. Its killed the courier business stone dead."