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
