Javier Gala and Carlos Torres business venture started in the middle of the pandemic. They decided in May 2020 to quit their respective jobs and use their experience in the logistics sector to throw themselves into launching Torres Last Mile. The immediate success of this courier and parcel delivery company has encouraged them to continue with a spin-off focused on advanced logistics in large cities. This second project is T-Box, a company with an ambitious business and expansion plan. To make this a reality and secure the appropriate funding, they turned to Kaizen Consulting.
CFO of Torres Last Mile and T-Box Javier Gala explains how the project came about: “My cousin Carlos and I are partners, and we set up Torres in the middle of the pandemic. We saw a business opportunity because it’s a sector that Carlos knew perfectly well and which we thought was outdated. Within half a year, we had distributed half a million packages. Our success led us to consider a new and different project with a broader service and a focus on advanced logistics.”
T-Box was created at the beginning of 2021 as a spin-off company of Torres Last Mile, financed mainly with its own resources and banking support. In the words of Javier Gala, “T-Box is not an ordinary warehouse. We offer a different service to sellers who work with Amazon or through its Marketplace, with our model that we created and a project that wants to contribute to changing the logistics model of cities by distributing better and more sustainably. The whole project uses non-polluting, zero-emission vehicles, and we want to build a network of load consolidation points. We are still developing certain aspects and we needed cash flow to be able to further develop this project.”
At this point, they contacted Kaizen Consulting to find financing tailored to their needs. “We had good references. Our CEO knew Inés del Villar from the Kaizen Consulting team, and we sought her advice to find the best solution to provide T-Box with the liquidity for its development. As we are a holding company, we are obtaining the financing we were looking for with Torres Last Mile and we are moving money to the T-Box projects”, explains Javier Gala. He also highlights the speed of Kaizen Consulting in providing alternatives and solutions: “it has been very easy to work with them, they have become our link with the banks and have taken care of all the arrangements to successfully achieve our objective in a very short period of time.”
For the time being, their financiers are still traditional banks, “but to continue developing the model, we are open to venture capital or other alternative solutions” says the CIO of T-Box. Javier Gala mentions the advantages of working with a specialised consultancy firm: “The Kaizen Consulting team has opened my eyes to the importance of broadening the range of financiers and having an adequate banking pool. I have experience in managing the financial department, but a specialised knowledge of the entities is necessary to streamline processes and achieve credit objectives. In this way, I can focus exclusively on my work with the full confidence that I leave the other more technical and specialised parts in the hands of Kaizen Consulting, who will find the best solution. Our companies revolve around logistics and we believe that it’s good to have partners who are experts in different areas, who support and complement us, as Kaizen does for finding financing.”
Javier Gala also highlights the difficulty “of raising funds to develop a company that is only a year and a half old, no matter how good the project is. This has been a priority that we have covered for the time being at T-Box with the help of Kaizen Consulting but we will continue to work on it in the future,” as he explains, Torres Last Mile only works for Amazon, “which considers us one of its main players in last-mile delivery, a logistics sector that is very limited. At T-Box our core business is logistics for e-commerce or Amazon sellers. We have in-house services and are developing a new model of urban logistics that will be scalable to any city, and adaptable to the infrastructure and mobility regulations of each location. It’s a groundbreaking model for the future that is attracting great interest in the sector, from both businesses and institutions. This model can be private or developed with public-private partnerships and it can even help to reclaim disused infrastructure.”
