Why zero tolerance on drink driving will never happen

March 15, 2010 By

Over the weekend it has been announced there will be an amendment to the amount of alcohol you can consume and legally drive. Every time something like this comes up, there are calls for scrapping a legal limit and having zero tolerance. Zero tolerance meaning no alcohol in your bloodstream at all.

If you are a self employed courier or you drive for a living in a self employed capacity, every day you are on the road is a day you are earning money.

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So what happens if the law is passed that if you have any alcohol in your bloodstream, you automatically get a years ban?

If you are ill and you take cough medicine, one of the ingredients is alcohol along with mouthwash, toothpaste and other everyday products such as Krispy Kreme Donuts, Dunkin Donuts, Red Bull, Ritz Crackers, Butterfingers, 7up, Dr. Pepper, Lucozade and Ribena soft drink, Rubicon Fruit Drink, Ice Cream products and some Vanilla essences.

It’s pretty hard to avoid and you could be driving under the influence without even realising it. Some products are by products of alcohol or it’s used in the process of making the product, not enough to be listed as an ingredient but if you add in the mouth wash and cough medicine you are over the limit and without your livelihood without knowing.

How long before it becomes a legal defense for someone speeding and over the limit -”no I haven’t been drinking officer but I have just had a Red Bull and Krispy Kreme…”

It’s not just food and drink products, or oral products. If you look in your kitchen or bathroom you will see you are surrounded by alcohol based products – facial toners, cleaning products, shower gels, shampoo, bubble baths. Can it be proved you don’t absorb even trace amounts?

Of course the cost of breathalysing will go up, and so will the amount of false positives. The amount of alcohol on your breath being enough to trigger a breathalyser to say you are over the limit, when followed by blood tests that show negative. Increased costs involved here will increase costs elsewhere as usual.

Ask any practicing Muslim or recovering alcoholic what lengths they have to go to to find products without alcohol in them and you see it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Reduce the limit by all means, driving under the influence of alcohol isn’t something to be proud of, and we do not condone drinking and driving but to reduce the limit to zero? That’s foolhardy and there will be no one left on the roads to deliver your goods, especially in cold and flu season.

Sarah

Article Sources: Sunni Forum

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Boosting your sales in your courier business

March 12, 2010 By

If you have a courier business you can measure your sales a variety of ways, but it will always boil down to money and how much of it is coming in and how much of is profit.

So what do you do when you don’t have enough? How do you grow your existing client base?

When you don’t have enough business, that is the time you review your business plan. If we are being honest, you should review it at least quarterly. You can see where your business is compared to your targeted sales projection. You can then start looking at reasons why your sales have dropped off. In this article we shall touch on a few, but it’s not a comprehensive article, let’s face it it would be the size of a library as there are so many variables.

1. Change of staff, staff who move on in key sales roles may cause a sales dip this can sometimes be avoided by forward planning.
2. Change of vehicles. If you have upgraded or downgraded your vehicles capacities recently you may find that has a significant impact on sales.
3. Change of a website, changing your website or email address if done by an amateur can cost you sales simply by not being found.
4. Competition – in two ways the competition can affect your sales. Your failure to differentiate from it and your failure to notice it.

Competitors can actually help grow your courier business, if they have different methods of business don’t think by copying them you will get their business – it doesn’t work like that. But there is nothing to stop you subcontracting their work and helping them grow, as you will also grow. Love thy competitor should have been the 11th commandment.

Talk to your customers, find out what their market conditions are like, if they are having a tough time think on what you can do to help.

* Promote them on your website, write a customer profile about what they do and promote them to your website’s readers.
* Think about who you interact with that may be looking for that kind of service and make an introduction.
* Be genuinely interested in their business, they are your customer after all and helping them where you can creates a stronger bond.

Of course the easiest way to grow your courier business is to sell to your existing customer base additional services, the fastest and most economically viable way is through a newsletter – when was the last time you sent one out?

Hopefully this article will have given you some ideas on how to boost the sales in your courier business. Let me know how you get on.

Sarah Arrow

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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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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?

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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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The white van man – the game

December 16, 2009 By

New  game from Y8, they have come up with a game playing the stereotypical white van man driver.
The object of this simple game is to ram the other cars off of the road and complete the course… of course :-)

Y8 New games

What do you think? Will it catch on?

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Filed Under: Courier Blog, Courier Shop Admin, Driving, Fleet Information
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