By Jamie Salter
Lysterfield resident and founder of refrigerated transport company Cold Xpress John Di Losa started his career working at McDonald’s after school for $4 an hour and stacking Coles supermarket shelves at the break of dawn.
John was not from a well-off family and his parents lived frugally.
At the age of 18, John used the money from his two jobs to buy himself a car – already fully understanding the importance of working for a living.
“I had the mindset that I had to save for the bigger things,” John said.
“Dad taught me if you don’t have the money don’t buy it and I’ve lived by that unless it is an investment that will have a repayment.”
John took over his dad’s fruit shop and quickly started value adding the business, bringing in the items people wanted including newspaper, milk and bread.
John eventually renovated the shop to make it three times larger.
He got married in 1987 to his wife Marie who owned a hairdressing salon in Mitcham before joining John at the shop.
“Marie is very underrated in Cold Xpress, she’s my support and I know I can count on her,” he said.
“Back then, we built the business up to $15,000 per week takings which was pretty good for a corner store.”
“We then sold the business to my dad’s nephew who said he would pay me in time.”
But sales plummeted and John was forced to return the store to its former glory, working seven days a week.
In the meantime, John started working as a contractor delivering light poles and guttering for Leader Transport.
He soon discovered he was being underpaid.
John said the owner who was underpaying him asked him to sign a document saying he would not contact any of the company’s customers.
“I said ‘I am not signing this.’ He said ‘yes you are’ and turned the briefcase around and there sitting on top of some papers was a hand gun,” John said.
“I looked at the gun and said ‘is that supposed to scare me? I have gone into the market to buy produce for my shops for the past 20 years and everyone has a gun.
“I left and never got paid for my six weeks – I did, however, take all the work for large trucks he had.”
In 1998, John decided to go into a new venture with refrigerated vehicles out of a friend’s warehouse in Carrum Downs.
Originally delivering to regional areas, the business outgrew its Carrum Downs location and found a new home in Notting Hill in 2000.
But things took a turn for the worse when John discovered he was being embezzled by their bookkeeper at a time when he was struggling to buy food for his family.
“I thought what else can happen? I just focused on how to solve the situation,” John said.
He took over the books and the business continued to grow.
“We sold our house and put the money into the move to Mount Waverley,” John said.
With a new location came new problems as noise complaints from neighbours started a bitter dispute over the next five years between Cold Xpress and Monash City Council.
The business then bounced around to Springvale, then to Rowville – its home over the past five years.
“Originally we were working out of a 20 foot container and today we’re on a site that’s over 26,000 square metres,” John said.
“The growth has never been a factor for me, I’ve always just wanted to keep the customers we’ve got and we have more than 1000 customers.
“When we first started we were 98 per cent Coles and Woolworths but I then focused our attention at independents, and now they are less than one per cent of our business.”
In 2020, Covid-19 hit the country and the business needed to adapt as a number of sites it delivered to shut overnight.
“The Victorian Government contacted us and asked if we could help with deliveries to struggling small business,” John said.
“We then had other expenses we never counted on including providing more toilets, sanitising, PPE to all staff and tripling our cleaning processes.
“Even before mandates, we implemented a lot of procedures in our warehouses to keep ahead of things because we do thousands of deliveries every day.”
Toward the end of 2021, John struggled to get staff as they were leaving for companies offering more money.
“We keep getting challenges thrown at us but thankfully we always seem to find a way to move forward,” he said.
Now John plans to redesign the companies automation to make the business more efficient than ever before.
Johns’ story will also be shared on FOXTEL’s Industry Leaders program and other major networks.
