Courtesy pays off
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday September 18, 2009
Renting cars to accident victims proves to be a smashing business idea. If you haven't been there yourself, you surely know someone who has. Your car gets smashed and it's off the road but through no fault of your own. What you need is a loan car until it's fixed. This is where Marilyn Smith comes in.I never intended it to get as big as it did, laughs Smith, who runs Courtesy Cars Australia out of Willoughby. She started in 1994 with just two cars and now has 75. In her previous job, working in the office at a panel-beating shop, she realised she could provide courtesy cars at $25 a day at a time when the mainstream car rental companies were charging $75.So how she did build up the business? It's a personal service, she says. We have good relations with the panel beaters and with the tow truck drivers. We'll deliver and collect from the workshops, or even deliver to the accident site, if the customer is stranded there.In the late 1990s, in her quest to make things easier for her customers, Smith chanced upon the legal concept of "demurrage".The term, which originates from the world of shipping, basically states that it's fair to seek compensation for loss that results from someone else's negligence.On the basis of this concept, Smith encouraged her clients to claim on their own insurance, to cover the cost of a courtesy car.She soon found herself doing the claims herself on behalf of her clients and eventually taking the cases to court when the insurance companies resisted.Despite her having no legal training, Smith presented the cases in court herself.After five years of success, her insurance company opponents finally objected to her appearing, insisting that only a qualified lawyer could represent her clients. Fortunately, a sympathetic solicitor then came on board to work on a no-win, no-fee basis."At one point, there was $100,000 of unpaid invoices resting on a [legal] test case," she recalls. "We won the case but it took years off my life. Along the way, Smith was featured on Channel Nine's Today Tonight show, where she was dubbed the "Insurance Angel".Despite her history of run-ins with the insurance industry, Smith's business is a big contributor to it, with the policy to cover her fleet of cars costing about $50,000 a year.Smith has now stepped away from direct involvement in the Sydney side of the business. She recently set up regional branches in Wagga Wagga, Albury and Dubbo and plans to open more.It takes a while to build trust, she says. You have to know the area. (Smith actually grew up in Narromine, near Dubbo.)She's also in the process of expanding into the tourism business, running tours in Dubbo and Lightning Ridge.In 2001, Smith took over an existing luxury-car hire business, renting out Porsches and BMW convertibles for weekends away or special occasions.The business at the time was based in Kings Cross and, with apologies to all the upstanding citizens of that suburb, the clientele weren't always of the highest calibre. People were coming in with $3000 in cash, made up of $5 and $10 notes, says Smith, who has since relocated to her north shore base.
Β© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
