Michael Willis

Based in Scotland, Michael travels around the country securing and managing vital sponsorship from supermarkets such as Asda, Tesco and Morrisons, for various charities including the NSPCC and Child Line. Planning routes is a vital part of Michael’s day.

I’m a busy man, on the go 14 hours a day. I spend much of this time on the road, performing site visits. I deal with people at the top levels of business, and being attentive and organised is crucial.

Time, for me, is such a precious commodity. Sometimes I never get a minute to do anything, and planning my routes by hand only made things worse. I used to take a list of addresses and spend a couple of hours every night putting them in order for my journey the next day - pins in one hand and map in the other. To travel ten hours a day, come back home and do two-and-a-half hours of IT work, and then another two hours planning routes for the next day – it started to get too much.

Planning routes on your own, you think you can arrange the stop-offs in a reasonably logical order by looking at their positions. But I started to wonder if there was a better way to plan my journey.

Route Optimiser has saved me so much time I couldn’t believe it. There is only one word for your product: ‘fantastic’

I was up one night suffering from insomnia, thinking about all the postcode areas I had to visit, when I wondered if a product such as Route Optimiser existed. Within a few minutes I’d found it on Google - and it seemed too good to be true. I felt dubious at first, but the free trial convinced me to try it. I had a chance to see if I could improve the way I work and I took it – after all, I had nothing to lose.

Route Optimiser has saved me so much time I can’t believe it. I type in my postcodes and within a minute I have my route. My productivity has doubled: before using Route Optimiser, I’d be lucky to fit in six site visits a day. Now I make 12-13. When you represent charities, that difference means a lot. Head office want to know what coffee I’m drinking!

If I had to pay for it myself, I would, because the service makes my life so much better. I can safely cover my itinerary in 20-25% less time than before. What’s a £50 credit pack every now and again compared to what you save in time and fuel?

What used to take two hours now takes 20 minutes at the most – and those two hours are precious to me. Now I can catch up on life outside of work; maybe just watch some TV. For me, it’s all about the time saved, and my quality of life. Once people discover the power of Route Optimiser I can’t see them planning routes any other way. Anything that saves you this much time and money has got to be good.

There is only one word for your product: “fantastic.”

– Michael Willis, Service Innovation Group