From the ashes: Allpa’s recovery from devastating fire offers lessons to all
In late September, Allpa – a maritime wholesaler in Nijmegen, Netherlands – had its entire company headquarters destroyed by fire. MIN sits down with CEO Jarno Berkhof to find out how recovery is possible.
Everyone’s heard the cliche about the phoenix rising from the ashes, reborn. But cliches often come from experience. And in Allpa’s case, the ‘rising’ has been impressive. The company has flexed its experience muscles, leveraged its strong relationships and is now operational again – with all this happening while the fire investigation is still ongoing.
The incident happened on 24 September 2024. Jarno Berkhof (CEO of Mercator Marine Group, which includes Allpa) was at the Genoa boat show and was rudely awakened at about 4AM.
“I still don’t know what exactly happened,” he says.
“Within 15 minutes we heard there was nothing that could be done to rescue things. Within a couple of hours everything was gone. We don’t have any products anymore, the whole history is gone.”
According to onlookers quoted in local media, flames several metres high loomed over the premises, and there was a huge amount of smoke. There were no reported injuries.
The fire department allowed the fire to burn down in a controlled manner until the morning and spent the whole next day putting out the fire while Berkhof was putting out fires of his own.
What Allpa did in the first week after fire destroyed its premises
Berkhof admits “The plans were not there” for a fire that destroyed everything. In fact, as an ex-Brunswick man (for six years as CEO of Lankhorst Taselaar BV), he had previously been on many site visits. “They [Brunswick] always do an evaluation on risks, and sometimes I was laughing,” he says ruefully. “I said, ‘This is so stupid, this is not going to happen’, and if it happened, we would have a plan, etc, etc, etc.”
And although he didn’t have a ‘big’ plan in place, he lays out what happened – by creating ‘a small, clear plan’ as he went along.
Immediately after the fire, Berkhof defined a crisis team, with each member having a defined activity or responsibility.
Everything was in the Cloud, so within one day, the company was operational again.
At this point, Berkhof says: “We don’t have stock, we don’t have a location, but we can do the business European-wise from home.”
The operational aftermath of a fire – utilising suppliers’ goodwill
Meanwhile, a former owner of Allpa, Markk Rutgers, was also in Genoa when the news broke. As Berkhof immediately returned to the Netherlands to manage the operational work, Rutgers began the process of communicating what was happening.
“Markk walked around to all suppliers at Genoa to tell them the news personally,” explains Berkhof. “He notified all suppliers and asked for help. Which made it easier for me when I came to contact them.” That contact looked like asking suppliers to deliver against advance payment terms.
The support has been crucial, says Berkhof, “That’s the good part of the long-lasting relationships we have with suppliers because that’s really helping.
“And that’s the reason why I can push the button to order the product. They are willing to help with drop-shipments. We had the processes already in place for drop-shipments and so that’s nothing we had to define, we just speeded it up with more suppliers.”
“They’ve acted in a really good way, and sometimes I’m even a little bit surprised about it. They talk about business from everyone, and if we don’t deliver products, it means sometimes they can’t supply a customer, but they are willing to wait to give us some big orders which we can combine with a drop-ship from other suppliers, and that’s really helpful.”
Within a week, Allpa had a new temporary office and a new location for receiving and shipping products.
Benefits of rebuilding from the ashes
“Soon,” he says, “we will have a solution for the upcoming two years where we have enough space to do the work and in a better way than we did before. We had a nice office, but it wasn’t really a logistical premise.
“Now we are looking at fresh processes and nice aisles with 12-metre high structures where we can easily store and replenish and ship everything in the same day.
“Allpa is ready to deliver and even improve our services because this for us is a clean sheet. No history means no products and processes which weren’t working. We see that our service internally is more improved, and we can show that to the customers. That’s really helpful already.”
A month later, Berkhof talked positive after positive.
“It’s a sad period but we come back stronger. We are still there, we are already operational and we will improve our services. We are positive and we are learning from it. We have confidence in getting everything clear again.”
He says there have been three different components to it all the financial, operational and emotional.
Coping with the financial aftermath of a fire
“Thank God we have a good insurance policy,” he says. Berkhof will be forever grateful that he followed the insurance company’s rules to the letter.
“We had clean processes within the organisation,” he says, emphasising that he has no doubts about the warehouse adhering to the rules in terms of stocks’ storage location. “I can’t say where it happened yet – and we’ve heard that the fire probably started with our neighbours in the building.
“But I knew immediately that we didn’t have products in that area which were not allowed [to be there]. There were no hazardous products which are easy to go on fire. It was helpful in this situation to be able to focus on building again instead of defending the organisation and its history.”
The emotional rebuilding has also been hard. “We have had people working for us for more than 30 years, they were there at the start – and now they are bicycling around that spot.”
Leveraging experience to rebuild after Allpa’s fire
Berkhof believes that the most challenging part of the rebuilding process has been time.
“I have 12 years of experience in wholesaling and building up a new warehouse and in making effective choices and process and ERP systems etc,” he says. “The processes – building a new warehouse, ordering or making processes more clean, ERP implementation system (enterprise resource planning) for example – all these things by themselves are not new. But everything combined in the short term, defined in two, three or four weeks, is, of course, killing.”
Advice for companies rebuilding after a fire
Although he appears sanguine about what happened and where the company is now, Berkhof cedes there are lessons he has learnt.
“You always think about contingency plans. I am more or less a Brunswick guy as I worked for them for six years. They are really into the details.
“But the funny thing is, I’ve now learnt how important it is to really mitigate those risks. For sure we will have a better plan for when it happens again, but on the other hand, we learnt major things.”
Those major lessons, which he is willing to share, include communication.
Berkhof cautions on focusing solely on internal challenges because it’s his suppliers and customers who’ve helped see Allpa through the worst.
“When it happens to people, try to be as personable as possible, just telling the story as it is – you can say I don’t know yet.
“All our sales guys grabbed the telephone and called their loyal and good customers immediately. They told them the story and asked them for help.
“When the shit hits, go back to your colleagues and your biggest customers, and your suppliers, and try to define plans together. We depend on their willingness to help, and if a customer is going directly to a competitor if they want the products, I understand. I need them. But I understand.
“It’s a similar thing for suppliers. If a supplier has ten products, and they can sell them to another distributor who wants to pay immediately, it’s always better than giving ten to me and me paying in three months. But the good thing is that based on history and confidence, we were able to overcome this and tell the story of what happened. And we created teams and bonds to get over this.
“We sometimes still receive calls from customers looking to order things, but they don’t know about the fire. We needed to be more broad in communication,” he says. That said, Allpa’s website has been reworked so that customers can see the current stock position when they’re ordering.
“The changes on the website could have been faster and easier, but we learnt from that. Now [we] communicate every week and adapt our website.”
His final advice to anyone is to always: “Follow [insurance] rules and don’t do anything you’re not allowed to do.”
Jarno Berkhof and Allpa, which expanded in Europe in 2022, will attend METSTRADE in November 2024. He’s looking forward to it.
“We will tell the story of the fire but we will show our improved website and new products and try to go back to normal. METS is there not for sad stories, it’s there for business right?”
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