Hi, I'm Pete The Courier Driver. And this video... an important one... how to go about
getting your own customers. What we refer to in the game as end-user customers, or end users.
Because it's all well and good if you're doing the thing, if you're doing the haulage, like me, or
if you're doing the multi-drop. And you're out there and you're banging away doing 100,
200 drops a day. And you get home, and you're having a drink or you're talking to your mate.
And your mate goes, "Oh, how many drops did you do today?" And you go, "Oh, 250". And you go,
"Oh, I only done five". And then he tells you how much he got. And you went, "Hold on.
You're getting more money for doing five". He goes, "Life is easy. I was home at three".
And you think, "I want a bit of this. How do I get into this?"
The truth. It's not an easy thing to get into. Because what you've got to
bear in mind with your own customers, your end-user customers, for a start,
they are the Holy Grail, because you're getting it both ways. If someone gives you a job,
someone rings them up to say, "I've got a job", and then they give you a job, they take their cut
out of it. So say the job is worth 150 quid. They might give you it for £100 and keep 50 quid for
themselves. But if someone rings you and says, "I've got a job", you get the full 150 quid.
Hence the reason it's a lot easier. Hence the reason you're going to get more bang for
your buck. You're going to get more money, less running around, driving yourself mad.
So the ways to go about it. There's the advertising. The Facebook advertising,
the Google ads. This can work out very expensive. The Google clicks and stuff like that,
you can limit the amount of clicks, and you can suddenly realise that you've torn for 100 quid
in three days, and you've got very little out of it. I'm not saying it doesn't work.
But if you are going to use it, be selective about the keywords that you use.
And also certain keywords cost more money. So you want to be specific.
Again, I would tend to err away from that one.
The other thing you can do, carding. Get yourself cards, go around the local estate. Local is handy
because then they're going to ring you up and you're not going to be far away from them.
Put the cards through the doors. Or if you can't do it because you're too busy running,
get someone else to do it. Get your husband, get the wife and kids to do it.
Get them out there. On the way back from school, we're going to do some cards for dad.
And then when we finish, we're going to go and get some icecream.
And then you might get that phone call. It's everything you can do to go,
oh, I need this moving. And you give them a quote and you think, right,
this is it. This is me moving forward. This is me on my way to better things.
Cold calling on the telephone. The difficulty with that one is trying to work out who you're
supposed to ring. It's not that easy to get numbers and it's not easy to
get directories. But if you sit there, and you study, and you do the Google, you can buy lists
of people that might be interested. But then again, the lists get expensive.
And when you're starting off, it's not always the thing that you want to go out with the big money.
And finally, it's the shoe leather, where you do it yourself. If you finish early one day or you've
got a day, you walk round the estate. You put the cards in. You walk through the door and go,
"Can I speak to your transport manager? Who deals with your deliveries?
I'm a local guy". Don't tell them you're a family business. Tell them you're streamlined.
We're a streamlined business. We're efficient. We're close to you. We can do the job. We'll
do the first one for free, or the first one, up to a certain amount, is for free.
Please give us a go.
And then once you get the build on one, you can get to build on
others. Because then they'll tell their mates. "Who are you using?" "Oh,
I'm using Barry. He's really good. He's really good. I use him all the time."
And then you start to build a business, and then you get your own customers. And then,
once you've got your own customers, then you can start putting vans on,
doing stuff for you. You move into the office, you move forward, you get bigger.
Also something else to consider that, if they're your own customers,
no-one's going to be giving you a manifest anymore. No-one's going to give you the beepy gun.
When they turn around and they say, "I want one delivered to Canterbury,
one delivered to Whitstable, one delivered to London, one delivered to Oxford",
you've got to work out the best and quickest way forward to move those parcels.
And you will need a decent routefinder. Because if you deliver them in the wrong order or it
takes too long. And you've, "Oh, I've got to Whitstable and the place is closed",
then there's no more jobs for you. It's like, "Well, you didn't even deliver it on time".
Or they're ringing you up, going, "Where are you?" Get yourself a decent multi-drop app.
Get yourself Circuit. It's really, really good. I go on about it. It works really, really well.
It's a good app. And it will save you money and it will save you time in the long-run, I promise you.
But that is the way. And like I say, if you can get your own customers, it's a way of moving from
just one guy in a van doing the multi-drop, to be one guy, hopefully, your own business.
That shutter is open. It's time for me to go to work now. So there's plenty more videos on my
channel, Pete the courier driver. And also more videos coming to the Circuit channel,
which hope will help. And you guys, take care, take money.