Long Term Steady Growth Routes

You need to consider developing a route business. This is best on weekly and some things monthly.

We used to have a guy ran a rug service, delivered 3 clean store runner rubber backed rugs to us on a regular basis for $20 a month or whatever it was. He had invested in the rugs and a cleaner. Was Nice to have sparkling clean runners down the dirtiest drag in parts of the store regularly. If he had 8 drop offs a day for 20 days a month that’s 160 which gave him $3200 a month. Couple days a month to go out get new customers. Hour or two a day throwing rugs in his cleaning machine.

That is an example of a service route. Another might be the guy who came buy every other week and did the store windows. Window cleaning is a low overhead service. Ten bucks worth of cleaning supplies a month should do It.

Do a hundred or more and your an expert.

Developing a client list will take time but once establish they stick with you. Maybe someone has a window washing route and wants to move on to something else. Buy his customers from him. Have had service businesses where I doubled my customers overnight buying out my competitor, paying him a few bucks. Per customer. Like three months income. After that the incomes from those clients were all my income. (Was not window washing) See a store window washer somewhere; ask if he might want to sell his route. When you decide to discontinue any route business, sell your route, it has value.

those were service routes. Let’s discuss delivery routes. There are many handicapped, old people, no car, rich people who do not want to go to the store etc. or whatever reason have prescriptions at the drug store that need to be picked up.

let’s say you have ten drug stores you deliver prescriptions for. You can deliver from other stores on customer requests but the profitable delivery route is one pick up and many drop offs.

Let's say you have 3 pickups at each drug store and charge 4 or 5 Dollars per delivery, Ten drug stores would give you 30 deliveries and you route these out, At $4 each this gives you $120 an evening And you are free all day to do other businesses. Get the drug store to add it to the customer charge and you do Not even have to take time to collect. Bill the drug store monthly.

this may take months to develop a route worth the trouble. This is to give you ideas. Maybe you deliver something else, use your head. The secret to profit in delivery business is one pick up and many drops that you can then do in an efficient route. (I ran a cab co. and a separate delivery business for years, over different spans of time.)

Next sell and deliver merchandise. I publish a newspaper for diabetics and on the web a lot of stuff on long life etc and if you are not up to speed, many have decided you want to switch to range raised eggs, grass fed meat and butter and organic and non GM (genetically modified) foods. That the grain forced fed hormone and chemical stuffed animals now factory raised meat and eggs is a health problem.

Therefore, I have to go to farmers markets clear across town once a week to buy this stuff. The factory raised Eggs at the super market are $1 a dozen sometimes on sale (on up) Farmers market I pay $5 a dozen and I have to drive across town to get them.

This is also true for organic grown vegetables. Much higher price and not readily available but will pay whatever it takes to get them.

One entrepreneur here calls them self Harvest Basket delivers a whole gob of these vegetables organically grown to your door for x dollars a week Maybe they grow them in their own garden maybe not makes me no difference.

Then there is a couple from clear across the other side of the state. Come to Tempe and Phoenix every six weeks. Go to all the major cities in AZ and have a regular route.

They rent a large U HAUL truck and have it full of freezers.

They sell much of this from other producers but I buy grass fed beef, range raised eggs and goose eggs in season. They have other things I buy but buy that elsewhere.

Grass fed meat is around $6 a pound. When I am overseas, like New Zealand etc I bring back a suitcase full usually of grass fed butter.

There is no grass fed butter readily available locally and is hard to find. That another story the creamery in Red Wing Minnesota saves out the butter made in the spring when cows there are on nothing but grass. They keep that in the cooler and sell that all over the country by mailed year around for up to $10 a lb. Sells regular butter for around $2 a pound. Butter when imported here from New Zealand is around $5 a pound, In New Zealand is about $1.50.

The thing is on the routes is that you buy this stuff wholesale and deliver it retail plus a little tacked on for the delivery feature.

The folks that come in from out of town every six weeks with the U Haul full of freezers take orders on the web mainly and or by phone. You meet them at a church parking lot at 11 am and there will be a line of people there picking up their stuff.

If you could deliver much of this right to your door would be valuable. For example. I am sure you can find someone raising range raised (not cooped up in a building on wire stacked eight high and never see daylight, eat only what fed.) Raised cage free and free to run outside, that’s range raised eggs. You can probably get these eggs for $2. a dozen from the range raiser. You can sell me ten dozen a trip (eggs keep unrefrigerated) so if you made $3 a dozen, that would be $30 income just on my egg drop. If you brought other stuff you can average out a good income per drop right to the door, since you can route it.

Not suggesting you go into this necessarily, just giving you ideas, you make your own niche. You should now see that the more customers you have on your route the less cost per drop. Therefore as your customer list grows you get more and more profitable.

This is something you can replace yourself with an employee doing the route.

One of the biggest route people in the country are out of Minnesota. They started with farm once a week routes, delivering all sorts of foods. One of the main ones is ice cream. A schwa is the name. Around the Midwest you see their trucks parked in a motel with a cord going in for the refrigeration units in the truck. While the driver sleeps.

All of our usual get customer’s methods will work again the internet order site will be key Here if you deliver a specialized thing like organic vegetables, etc you will get your customers telling their friends interested in the same stuff that they can get it delivered from you. Word of mouth will spread the word.

They have hundreds of trucks now, probably thousands, refrigerated small trucks with doors all the way around the outside, They even have routes in Phoenix, over 1200 miles away and in between. So the route concept works, maybe you can start and turn one in to a huge business too. ....or just stay small and make a nice living.