Saturday 17 December 2011

The Great Recession 2008 to 2015

The Great Recession

A downturn of truly epic proportions occurs about once a lifetime. In modern history, this is around every 80 years. In the 19th century, it was around every 60 or so years, due to generally lower life expectancies then. It seems that it happens when all those around us who could advise us (and especially the banks!) not to take out huge amounts of credit are dead, we are convinced that we live in a new world with all our technological advancements and that our forefathers who just live on in photos cannot possibly understand the nuances and complexities of the modern world, as we are so sophisticated and they were so primitive. In the 1920s, they too lived in a whole new world with the mass availability of electricity, cars and telephones. It was the “roaring 20s” with the economy roaring ahead. The U.S. President stated that we have “perpetual prosperity”, somewhat similar to Gordon Brown “abolishing boom and bust" in the global economy in painfully recent memory! If you hear a politician utter similar statements in decades to come, run for the hills!

I study economics, so I have a fair idea of what is to come. Harry S. Dent, who is my favourite economist, predicts a second recession lasting until around 2015, then slow growth until the early 2020s. The next boom, as was the “normal” economy we were accustomed to, will happen in the 2020s. All these years of poor economic performance will then be ignored by our children and their children who, of course, will not be remotely interested in the ancient experiences of us old fuddy duddies from a bygone age, convinced that everything is different for them in 2080! How could a person in 2080 whose flat is going up from £2,000,000 to £3,000,000 heed the warnings from history? Everyone is buying..all the banks have relaxed their lending and billions and billions are flowing…as the boom will last forever, it is all totally safe…!!! (and on and on, as it repeats itself again and again!!)

With my daughter born in 2004 and my next baby due in 2012, they can thank the stars that they have avoided this downturn and will be old when the next one happens. I mentioned this to my father recently, that due to being born in the 1930s, he had avoided both of the great recessions, as a small child and later in his life. He just smiled!

Thursday 1 December 2011

Motivation for sport and business. Is it similar?

During my reading over the years of over a hundred books about entrepreneurship and starting a business, I came across the interesting observation that there are strong parallels between success at competitive sport and running a successful business. I think it was Alan Sugar who wrote it, as he is quite forthcoming in his books.

Personally, I would agree that the internal motivation to be the best you can and the daily discipline to achieve this would propel people forward in either endeavour. As a teenager, I studied Taekwondo and kickboxing, reaching a black belt in kickboxing. I told my Taekwondo instructor who had tutored me from the beginning that I was now training in kickboxing due to the greater opportunities for actual fighting there against just gym practice, as I felt I owed this to the man who had coached me. He told me I had to make a choice between Taekwondo and kickboxing, as some of the junior students were starting to copy my new style which he did not like. I said I was sorry, but that I had to choose kickboxing for the excitement of the tournaments and he did not allow me to take my black belt in Taekwondo which I was due for, so I missed the opportunity of having 2 black belts, but I do not regret it, as I morally had to tell him I was training at a different club, rather than cheat him. (I was the U.K. under 16 Taekwondo champion, but the transition to kickboxing was a hard one!)

So, I would have to say from my own personal opinion, that the desire to be the best you can be in either sport or business is definitely similar.

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Busy autumn for leaflet delivery

The phone seems to never stop ringing for leaflet distribution at present. Charities, car dealerships, alternative energy suppliers, boutiques and kitchen designers are all new orders taken this week. With nearly 8 years experience of doing this every day, with meticulously screened leafleters, so that we only hire the right people in the first place, and carefully checked deliveries, we among the top UK leaflet distribution companies.


You can listen to the short audio recording on either of the websites below which explains crucial information you need to know before choosing a leaflet delivery company. Avoid being ripped off!


www.leafletsdelivered.co.uk
www.leaflets.tv

South London

AnerleyBatterseaBeckenhamBromleyCamberwell,
CheamChislehurstClaphamFarnboroughHayesKingston,
MitchamOrpingtonPetts WoodPutneyRichmondSheen,
SuttonSwanleyTeddingtonThornton HeathTootingTwickenham,
WandsworthWest WickhamWimbledon and surrounding areas.

Call Alex on 020 8778 1260 (Weekdays 9:30 to 5:30)
Email: richmond@leafletsdelivered.co.uk

Please leave a message at other times, as calls are always returned.


Southeast

CrowboroughEast GrinsteadEdenbridgeForest Row,
HorleyLingfieldOxtedSevenoaksTonbridgeTunbridge Wells,
Uckfield and surrounding areas.

Call Dermot on 07779 262109 (Weekdays 8:30am to 6:30pm)
Email: southeast@leaflets.tv

Please leave a message at other times, as calls are always returned.


Surrey/Sussex (Head Office)

Ashtead, Brighton, Bookham, Burgess Hill, Coulsdon,
CrawleyCroydon, Cuckfield, Dorking, Epsom, Ewell, Fetcham,
Hassocks, Haywards HeathHorshamHove, Hurstpierpoint,
Leatherhead, Lindfield, Merstham, Patcham, Portslade, Purley,
RedhillReigate, Tadworth and surrounding areas.

Call Peter Munro on 01293 404422 (Weekdays 8:30 to 6:30)
Email: info@leafletsdelivered.co.uk

Please leave a message if there is an answerphone, as calls are always returned.

Thursday 8 September 2011

Jogpost London

Regarding Jogpost leaflet distribution in London, first of all, as the owner of a leaflet delivery company, I must confess I did not actually see the program on Dragons Den, but just heard about it and looked at the Jogpost site. I have been doing this for 8 years since 2004, not 1 year like they have and am a bit bemused by jogging whilst leafleting! Funnily enough, I did try jogging and delivering leaflets myself a few years ago. Bearing in mind that in order to deliver many hundreds of leaflets a day, you need to move for hours, running for several hours would be exhausting to put it mildly. Then, you would need to get up the next day and do it again...Forget your tiredness, aches and smashed up knees and shins from running on tarmac! As a lawyer could predict that it is reasonably likely that a leafleter would acquire injuries from repeatedly running on tarmac, as evidenced by numerous medical reports, Jogpost could well be facing a host of litigation in future for potentially huge sums, though even a million pounds would not be equitable in respect of the pain and disability that could be suffered by a leafleter in his 20s whose knees are gone and is in pain on a daily basis forever.

Regarding potential injuries, I would never ask any leafleter to do anything that could risk his health. I am not saying this primarily from a legal perspective of liability, but as a member of the human race! In the written information I give them to keep, I strongly advise leafleters not to push their hand through a letterbox and I will deal with any complaints from house owners, explaining the rationale behind it. This may leave leaflets sticking out of the letterbox, but I have seen what can happen if the hand or fingers go all the way through. I was once leafleting in Horsham with a very attractive young woman who, coincidentally, was my favourite employee(!), when she came up to me with her hand covered in blood. I mean there was a lot of blood. A dog sitting silently behind a door did it. I can't blame the dog, as it was just defending what it perceived as an attack on its territory, but it was an accident waiting to happen. The exact same thing also happened to a very experienced leafleter I had in Haywards Heath, so you cannot defend against it, except by  not putting your hand through at all. If a leaflet distribution company insists on delivery staff doing this and someone has a tendon or nerve severed by a Rottweiler with lifelong damage to the movement of their fingers, I would imagine the company would be wide open to a massive damages claim and so they should be, though this would obviously never compensate the poor leafleter fully. As a new flyer delivery company, I wonder how much Jogpost has thought all this through?

I actually run for pleasure, but I do it on grass and for short distances. Several hours would be horrendous and I am quite fit! I delivered somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 leaflets personally when I started out, but you do feel pretty tired after 3 hours walking. I did not count, as it would have driven me crazy, but some leafleters do! Bear in mind that hills make the work much harder.

Another major problem would be the reliability of the staff. From their photos of the delivery guys on their site, they are all young men which is not at all surprising. However, young men are also the group that are by far the most likely to dump the leaflets. Early retired people are much more responsible and you can sleep at night without wondering if you will get a call that bags of leaflets have been found behind a hedge! Reliability is number one. Speed is not and it is that simple. The fact that there are supervisors does not reassure me that much, as the supervisors may not do much supervision and might reach an agreement with the leafleters to do some of the drop and then just go to the pub. If you are hiring men who are teenagers or are in their 20s to deliver flyers, you either need to feel very lucky or follow them around with a gun! I am speaking from experience, but I am afraid I do not have a gun!

The owners of Jogpost seem very keen, but then all new business owners are until they hit a wall. One of the owners has already started complaining about tiredness and the long hours while he wants to take 3 months off to travel. Still, I have serious doubts about the business system. My personal feeling about Jogpost is that they have opened Pandora's Box by trying to expand so fast in an industry where the main concern is reliability and every new leafleter is a risk. In leaflet delivery, selling to acquire new clients is very easy, in stark contrast to other industry sectors. The achilles heel is in the execution of the delivery which requires substantial skill and experience.

Anyway, I wish them all the best and at least they had the courage to go on the Dragons Den which I admire them for. Hopefully, they can prove me wrong, as it would be good to have another decent leaflet distribution company in the UK, as most of them are cowboys and I can count the well-organised, quality operations on the fingers of one hand from those I have encountered.

Out of interest, leaflet distribution is an industry that solves a problem that becomes worse in a recession, namely finding clients. Victor Cheng, the author of "The recession-proof business", recommends this approach. We have actually been in contact by email and he has provided me with some advice.

I like the articles on health and nutrition on JogPost's blog. I read "Why we get fat" by Gary Taubes which was shocking to me. I am vegetarian myself, but with the amount of evidence he has assembled and that I have read from other books that by eating steak 3 times a day you can lose a ton of fat is a bitter pill to swallow! You can buy it on amazon.

Sep 12 update - From the number of leaflets per hour I have heard that JogPost deliver, it seems that their leafleters are walking like everybody else. They did not hire Superman after all! Jogpost is miraculously transforming itself into Walkpost.

Thanks

Peter



Peter - Leaflet Distribution (tm)
leafletsdelivered.co.uk

Tuesday 24 May 2011

software for leaflet and flyer delivery companies

Some flyering companies boast that they possess software enabling them to calculate the exact number of properties in each street, as if that actually guarantees that their staff are going to deliver your leaflets! Knowing the number of houses in each road is not what the business is. It is about ensuring reliable leaflet delivery and no software in the world is going to facilitate that. I worked as a computer programmer for 5 years, mainly in banking in the City and also for a Swiss bank in Basel (...casual name dropping!), but I cannot see the value of so called "bespoke" software for leafleting. It is unnecessary, as you are running a leaflet distribution company, not a Swiss bank, and you will never be dealing with millions of rows of data. Also, new software created on a small scale without extensive testing will have bugs in it which will be a real pain to sort out. A spreadsheet like Excel is fine for recording information and it has the advantage of having been used by vast numbers of people, so the problems have been ironed out. It is very simple and does not need specialised skills to operate. The numbers of properties in each postcode and town are available for free on the internet for anyone with the skill to move a mouse and click! Don't laugh, as I once hired a new office administrator who on her first day just sat in front of her computer which was off. I was bemused and eventually broke the awkward silence by asking her what the matter was. She did not know how to turn the computer on! It was not an auspicious omen and she didn't last long!

leafletsdelivered.co.uk

Flyer response rates and the best flyer design

It is funny how the response rates from flyering vary from place to place and industry to industry. For example, fast food restaurants obtain most of their enquiries from lower end housing, whilst sectors like domestic cleaning and new kitchens concentrate on average and higher end properties. Some areas you imagine would be good turn out to be worse than you thought and vice versa. For example, Maidenbower in Crawley gets deluged with leaflets, so whilst at first glance it appears to have some of the best houses in Crawley, you may well be better hitting nearby areas that are not hit so hard with a mass of leaflets, such as Three Bridges, Ifield and West Green. Our franchisees can advise you on this, based on experience, thereby saving you a significant amount of money in wasted marketing. In Surrey, Sussex and Kent, there is a wide choice of towns with high incomes, such as Reigate, Redhill, Horsham, East Grinstead, Haywards Heath, Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks, Oxted and Brighton, so there are plenty of potential clients with the funds to buy your product or service. The trick is to have one of the few decent, trustworthy door to door delivery companies making sure all your leaflets actually hit hallways, not skips or hedges!

Regarding the leaflet itself, please don’t use very thin paper, especially for larger leaflets, as they crumple in draught-excluders in letterboxes! They also look bad. Additionally, the paper absorbs water, so if there is even very light rain, it can turn them into mush! 250 gsm (grams per square meter), A6 (postcard sized), full colour gloss both sides is my favourite. It is rigid enough to go through a letterbox easily without being damaged, light to carry for leafleters, it fits into a hand well and the gloss finish is water-resistant. We can organise your printing for you.

My early days, starting out years ago

Running a company delivering leaflets actually requires a fair degree of skill. When I started out, years ago in 2004, I made all the classic mistakes that new businesses make in this field. It took me a long time to discover the fundamentals that provide a guaranteed, successful leaflet drop. It is rare that a leaflet distribution company lasts for very long. I watched a good, hard-working man approach this business wrongly and complain to me at the end that “I have wasted 2 years of my life.” It was in my early days and I couldn’t help him, but now I would offer him a management franchise and teach him how to do it properly. The cost of the franchise would be more than paid back via avoiding all the typical errors that lose an amateur leaflet business (and its clients!) so much money.

Most leaflet delivery firms are frankly pretty awful! It won’t take you long ringing them at random based on a google search and entrusting them with your money to find that out! I also run a cleaning company, the management franchise www.nationwidecleaners.co.uk , and one of my first experiences of hiring a leafleting firm to drop my cleaning leaflets was that they definitely did “drop” them, but nowhere near any letterboxes! I was shocked at just how bad they were. After trying several, I decided I could do better, as I already had experience of managing my own leafleters delivering cleaning leaflets. How people applying for a job as a leafleter can try to lie and steal if they sense weakness and a lack of experience in managing leafleting would shock you. For example, a lady wanting extra income for her holiday spending money worked for me when I had just started up and I was a novice at it. In the beginning, I was just too trusting, telling her how I needed my new business to be a financial success for my new baby and wife who didn’t work. She listened attentively. At the time, I was driving an old VW Polo and she turned up in her husband’s fairly new Mercedes. She dumped my leaflets and demanded the cash. Stealing money intended for baby food is one of the most despicable things I can think of and I will never forget this. What I should have done is to have screened her reasons for leafleting initially which would set alarm bells ringing that she is just doing it for money, rather than additionally for weight loss, fitness, exercise, fresh air, to get out of the house etc. Then, if I decided to hire her, I should have made it very clear that I need a full list of streets done and that she would only be paid once the checks have been successfully carried out. Also, I should have stressed that if it is not done properly, there are penalties. She would then have thought very carefully indeed about dumping the leaflets, balancing her greed with her fear! Still, this knowledge only comes with experience and practice.

Reliability, not price, is number one in leafleting!

23 February 2011

If you are new to leafleting, there is a very important point I would like to make. For businesses that have never utilised a flyer service for their marketing before, they often assume that price is the main deciding factor. This is very far from the truth! I have put a 3 minute audio presentation on the website explaining this, as I have repeated it about a million times to potential clients…! Reliability, in the sense that your leaflets will actually reach letterboxes, is number one. This is the main concern of experienced clients, such as estate agents, who have used leafleting for years and it is my foremost priority.

Our head office covers Surrey and Sussex:

Ashtead, Brighton, Bookham, Burgess Hill, Coulsdon, Crawley, Croydon, Cuckfield, Dorking, Epsom, Ewell, Fetcham, Hassocks, Haywards Heath, Horsham, Hove, Hurstpierpoint, Leatherhead, Lindfield, Portslade, Purley, Redhill, Reigate, Tadworth and surrounding areas.

Call Peter Munro on 01293 404422 (Weekdays 8:30 to 6:30)
Emailinfo@leaflets.tv
Please leave a message at other times, as calls are always returned.



Our southeast office covers Kent and parts of Sussex

Crowborough, East Grinstead, Edenbridge, Forest Row, Horley, Lingfield,
Oxted, Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells, Uckfield
 and surrounding areas.
Call Dermot on 07779 262109 (Weekdays 8:30 to 6:30)
Email: southeast@leaflets.tv
Please leave a message at other times, as calls are always returned.



Our London office covers:

We cover Anerley, Battersea, Beckenham, Bromley, Camberwell,
Cheam, Clapham, Chislehurst, Crystal Palace, Hayes, Kingston,
Mitcham, Norwood, Putney, Richmond, Sheen, Sutton,
Teddington, Thornton Heath, Tooting, Twickenham,
Wandsworth, West Wickham, Wimbledon
 and surrounding areas.

Call Alex on 020 8778 1260 (Weekdays 9:30 to 5:30)
Email: richmond@leaflets.tv
Please leave a message at other times, as calls are always returned.

Welcome! Leaflet Distribution (tm)

Welcome to this blog about running a firm delivering leaflets door to door. My name is Peter Munro and I am the managing director of Leaflet Distribution TM  which operates in numerous locations across Britain. Our delivery staff are carefully screened, experienced and reliable compared to the vast majority of our competitors. I have tried to include some interesting stories and observations into the blog from time to time to make it a bit more entertaining, as when dealing with large numbers of people, you are guaranteed some incidents!