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As a courier or removal company, why should you bother looking for work?

April 30, 2010 By

It should come straight to you, right?

Sadly life is not like that, with good marketing you will get some work and you will find you still have to go out and get customers, you can sit back and wait for them to come to you BUT you will run through all your money first.

Being a self employed courier means if you don’t find the work you don’t get paid. If you own the removal company or are a self employed mover, then you don’t get paid. You need customers and you need to find them. You need to find profitable customers for your business.

Another white van
Image by jovike via Flickr

So what types of courier work are more profitable?

Local delivery jobs are good for a courier looking to increase their local customer base. As they are local you can complete more of them throughout the day and therefore become profitably quickly. The downside is that there will be more wear and tear on your vehicle when you complete local delivery work so you need to factor that in to your prices when you look for this type of work.

Long distance jobs can be profitable for a courier especially if they can get a return load back to their home area. Make a point of calling courier companies in your delivery drop area so they know to contact you if they have a load going your way.

Specialist delivery jobs can also be profitable to a courier. Jobs such as delivering dangerous goods (when correctly licensed) can pay a premium as this type of courier service is rare, so do your research and see what type of specialist courier services are required.

Whatever delivery work you have locally, nationally or specialist remember to calculate your costs and expenses correctly so you do not underquote on your prices, if you fail to calculate your costs properly you will quickly eat into any reserve that you have built into your business.

Source: How to deliver and profit

Attracting customers can be done a variety of ways and a blend of marketing activity is good, it enables you to reach more potential customers.

As well as an online presence, you need an offline one too. Believe it or not there are some customers who don’t use the internet, they prefer traditional media.

In conclusion, get off your backside and look for the work you enjoy delivering or get a job.

Sarah

Thanks to Graham Hunt for flagging up the removal company and their attitude in this blog, Spain is not Greece

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Filed Under: Courier Blog, Get More Customers Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Looking to save money? Why bother with your courier insurance?

April 8, 2010 By

Why bother with courier insurance? Really, with bother with it all – even if you are a safe driver and have never had an accident.

With end users driving down the costs of their transport services some couriers are looking at ways of cutting their overheads. Insurance is one area where they think they can make savings.

Lowering the premiums by lowering the the amount they insure.
Instead of a courier carrying £50,000 worth of goods in transit cover, many are lowering their costs by slashing it to £10,000 worth of goods in transit cover instead. As a customer it’s essential you check how much cover you have and as a courier you should be responsible and ethical and let your customers know of any downgrading in the insurances that you have.

Not declaring accidents
There will always be some that don’t declare accidents regardless of what the financial climate is like. It is thought by some, that not declaring any accidents will keep their premiums low and thus their customers happy. These things have a way of coming back and biting you when you least expect it. We recently heard of a courier owner driver being hauled into court for reckless driving, the first account of the incident the police and insurer heard were the alleged victim’s. Honesty would have paid off 10 fold in this case, instead it’s costing lawyers fee’s and increased their premiums anyway.

Not having any insurance at all.
Yes you did read right, there are some couriers finding their jobs are so infrequent and their income is so low, that insurance is a financial liability to them. Never mind that it’s illegal, there are some that are just cutting back wherever they can to save us much money as they can. This is another false economy.

As a courier you shouldn’t put yourself in a vulnerable position and drive illegally – it’s your livelihood you are losing and a criminal record you are close to gaining.

Work safe, secure and legally.

Sarah

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Filed Under: Courier Blog, Driving Tagged With:

Are same day couriers a dying breed?

April 6, 2010 By

You may read in your local papers that local transport companies are struggling and although you have a passion for driving you could feel some what reluctant to start a courier business as it’s all doom and gloom.

With the rising costs of fuel and the banks slower to lend money you could think that same day couriers are becoming a dying breed.

If working long hours deters you from working as a same day courier,it’s a good job that they are becoming a dying breed – there is no room in the industry that moves time critical goods for people who don’t understand the nature of the business and who want to work to set hours.

Same day couriers are the emergency delivery services, and as such there is a premium in the price when you use one. They are often skilled drivers and know their local area very well.

Customers understand that when they want something delivered in a rush they have some options

1.Deliver it themselves
2.Call a taxi company
3.Call a same day courier

Deliver it yourself has problems right from the get go, with insurance and corporate manslaughter implications to be taken care of. Then there are your local taxis, do they have goods in transit insurance (can you see it) or do they just insure passengers? Double check before you book. A same day courier company will have all these in place already, and will advertise the fact they have them in place. A courier that cannot produce evidence of their insurances etc should not be booked.

Are they a dying breed? The good ones are growing their businesses, increasing their market share and the bad ones are slowly declining and going bust, but no they are not a dying breed as such, evolution and the survival of the more sustainable is taking place.

Sarah

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Green wash in courier businesses

March 11, 2010 By

You may be thinking that it’s good to be green and it is. Any colour you like so long as it’s green would Henry Ford’s new mantra. In fact, it’s the mantra of many courier companies these days. From pale green to dark green, environmental awareness is essential in all businesses let alone a courier or transport business.

But it has to be done properly.
Using LPG or Electric vehicles do not make you a greener more environmentally aware company than Joe Bloggs down the road, you see there is more to your business being greener than what fuel you use. I have had courier companies ring up and moan about not getting a green business award (we got ours in 2007, one of the first in the UK). I ask them what else they offered as evidence in the awards application… “err nothing else, I run on electric I am green, that’s enough”. Well that’s why you didn’t win. You need to be doing more.

I have recently become aware of what I call Green Wash in couriers. For example I share subcontractors with a proclaimed leading courier company, the subcontractor was moaning about having to read and sign that he understood our green policies and green driving techniques – the real green courier company whom he also worked with didn’t offer or ask for this.

Damning with faint praise…
He went on to say they have electric vehicles and he was annoyed that the electric vehicles didn’t actually complete any deliveries – they just sat there and switched on for the media and they are getting heaps of work from being green!
Well, that’s not being green and it’s not ethical. It’s a start, a step in the right direction but the lack of ethics completely negates the positive – what good are their electric vehicles if they don’t get used?

So how do you become a green courier business?
You start with the end in mind and lower everything that has carbon emissions. You start with the office and finish with the customer.
Some couriers seem to think offsetting their carbon emissions absolves them from doing anything else, which is sad in a way – their policies need to be more joined up and so does their thinking. Or they stop servicing their vehicles, highly maintained vehicles run more efficiently, but all that is forgotten when it comes down to what fuel is used.

You may like this article here, that talks about waste and other aspects of making your business greener. The biggest enemy of green is waste, the vehicle that don’t get used – waste, the packaging that doesn’t get recycled – waste, the mobile phones that are out of date and kept in a box ‘just in case’ – a waste.

When proclaiming you are green remember there is more to being green than the fuel or vehicle you use. Remember what could happen to your reputation if you are found out to be green washing. It would take more than a few well prepped press releases to get you off the hook – just ask Primark and Mark’s and Spencer.

Sarah

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Filed Under: Courier Blog, Driving Tagged With: , , , ,

If you met you for the first time, would you do business with you

March 3, 2010 By

Here at the courier shop we are lucky enough to work with leading sales trainer Linda Mattacks on how to grow sales for our courier businesses, in a nutshell – how do we find more courier work?

DEDHAM, MA - SEPTEMBER 30: AT&T Area Retail Sa...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

If you are looking for a quick fix solution then go and join a freight exchange – there are enough of them, but that doesn’t fix the underlying issues that you may have and doesn’t improve things long term.

One of the things that Linda does best (and believe me she can do a lot of fantastic things) is Elevator Pitches, she wrote mine and it works. An Elevator Pitch is where you explain what you do within a minute without selling, and quantify what sort of leads/prospects you are looking for. This makes it easier for the person you are talking to to understand what you are doing and how they can help you.

One of the easiest ‘pitches’ for me to remember was a magician – he demonstrated a quick trick and said he was available for parties, weddings and corporate events: Job done! Or so I thought…

What do you want?

The magician example leads into the fact that it seems many of us (Brits, anyway) when networking not only fudge what we do, we won’t say what we really want: we prefer to say what we’ll settle for! How daft is that?

Linda Mattacks Source: Birds on the blog

If you cannot talk about what you do with with passion and enthusiasm then quite simply you are dead in the water – you are not worth remembering and you are certainly not worth recommending to.

Now, before we get lost in the intricacies of a pitches and introducing ourselves to other business people remember every business situation is an opportunity to talk about how you and your business can help other businesses. If you are attending event after event and getting no where fast, you need to examine why you are there.

If you met you for the first time, would you do business with you? And why?

Sarah Arrow & Linda Mattacks

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