big money When the boss of the UK's biggest distributor of toiletries and household goods was contemplating his future at the tender age of 15, flogging shampoo and carpet cleaner did not feature prominently on his jobs I'd like to do' list. Denys Shortt wanted to be a hockey player ­ not just any hockey player, but the best. And he came pretty close. Selected to play for England at just 19, Shortt made it to the last 40 for the Seoul Olympics in 1988, and was only denied a place in the last 11 by Sean Kerly, probably the best centre forward the UK has ever had. Having progressed as far as he could in sport, Shortt hung up his hockey boots and turned his mind to grocery wholesaling ­ the family business in Warwickshire. Pretty quickly, however, he realised that the company's days were probably numbered if its focus didn't change. "Really, it wasn't going anywhere. In fact it was probably going to decline. We were delivering groceries to around 800 small stores, which was unique at one time, but then cash and carries started to deliver and give credit, and Nisa got into central distribution and effectively started taking our business. "They were actually delivering to our best shops, and then other customers of ours began to join symbol groups. The problem was, our unique selling points started to disappear." However, toiletries ­ "not the sexiest part of the grocery sector", admits Shortt, was one area of opportunity. Unlike soft drinks or baked beans, toiletries are high priced, relatively slow sellers for retailers/small wholesalers. Buy them in the sort of quantities you need to get decent terms, or indeed deliveries, off the suppliers, and you are sitting on large amounts of stock, using up working capital. "You can't ring up Procter and Gamble and order five boxes of product," he points out. "We can provide customers with a price that they could not get direct from the manufacturer without having to buy in truckloads." DCS will deliver one case ­ as long as customers order 200 altogether. "I could see a niche in the market," says Shortt, whose business ambitions were as lofty as his sporting ones. "My aim was to become the number one distributor of toiletries and household products in the UK, which today we are." DCS began from the corner of a room in his father's offices, with Shortt on the phone, trading between wholesalers. "I managed to turn over £5m in my first year," he says, matter of factly. The next step was leaving Nisa and tying up with Landmark. "We saw some big opportunities to distribute for some major manufacturers into the Landmark cash and carry group and anyone else that wanted to use our service, and since then, things have gone very well." This is something of an understatement. Just nine years after its inception, DCS is on course to turn over a cool £70m this year. It has also been able to capitalise on a trend on the part of manufacturers in the last few years to focus on core skills, and these do not tend to include making small drops to a cash and carry in Aberdeen, says Shortt. Makro is a key customer and DCS supplies it with a whole range of grocery products as well as toiletries, and has invested a significant sum into packing goods into twin packs. But retailers are also on DCS's radar, with a major tranche of business coming Shortt's way thanks to a chance meeting in 2000. Not content with hockey coaching, running a 60-acre farm and managing a multimillion pound toiletries business, Shortt decided to try his hand at flying helicopters. Here, he stumbled across Dave Tucker, chairman of discount retailer Bewise. Just weeks after their chance encounter, DCS was providing toiletries across the entire Bewise estate of 160 stores. Although DCS deals with all the big hitters in consumer packaged goods from Procter & Gamble and Lever Fabergé to Colgate and Gillette, the trump card is DCS's own En' branded range, which is now distributed in over 60 countries from Cambodia to Turkey, fewer than five years after launch. But it was born of frustration, admits Shortt. "An export customer would pay for goods and we would be ready to ship in five days' time and the goods wouldn't turn up or they would be short delivered. So we made a decision that we were not going to rely on anyone else ­ we'd create our own brand." The En prefix, the brainchild of Shortt's aunt, is now attached to over 130 products all retailing at 99p, from shampoo, toothpaste, and kitchen cleaner to baby oil under a range of names: En-liven, En-visage, En-force and En-Essence. Retail sales top £10m. Although retailers have made huge strides in own label groceries in recent years, own label doesn't always work as well with personal care products, claims Shortt. "You can put Tesco's name on a can of baked beans, but put it on shampoo, and I personally believe it doesn't work quite as well. En-liven was a sort of second brand, but with a brand name." DCS's customers range from P&H, Landmark, Makro, Batleys, Blueheath and Bestway to TM Retail, Poundland, Bewise, Woolworths, Homebase and Savers. The hub of the DCS operation is a state-of-the-art computerised 250,000 sq ft distribution centre in Stratford-upon-Avon complete with radio scan picking, batch tracking and pallet locating technology. Transport is handled by Taylors of Martley ­ a partnership sprung up after another chance encounter, this time with Shortt's former England hockey team mate Steve Taylor, who was running a haulage business. Today, Taylors distributes all DCS's health and beauty products from the Stratford site and also uses the depot for storage and distribution of Coca-Cola vending machines. Service levels are second to none, says Shortt. "There's a federal inquiry if we are anything less than 100%." What customers abroad cannot believe, he says, is that "if they place an En-liven order today, we can load it within 24 hours, 100% service level. No one else in the UK can do that." If Shortt has a catchphrase, it's probably, "making it happen". His wife is American, and her can-do attitude has rubbed off on him, he suggests. They met on a beach in Jamaica, and Shortt proposed after three days: "I can be pretty impulsive sometimes." The only thing he hasn't had a huge amount of success with is farming. Sheep are tougher nuts to crack than shampoo, he admits. "I love them. But I still haven't worked out how to make a profit out of sheep." {{ANALYSIS }}