Episode 96: How to Avoid Deactivation from Doordash Grubhub Uber Eats - 7 Steps

Deactivations seem to be happening like crazy for Independent Contractors with gig delivery companies like Doordash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and others.

What do you do if you rely heavily on your food delivery business income? How do you avoid having that taken away from you, especially for something you didn't do?

We walk through three different categories of reasons people get deactivated. And then we talk about seven steps you can take to protect yourself from deactivation.

These are not a guarantee. But if you follow these steps you eliminate most of the chances of such a deactivation happening.

You can visit the blog page related to this episode at the EntreCourier site.

We played a couple of clips from interviews from Episode 94 with Bryant Greenling of LegalRideshare, and from Episode 95 with Leah Chasser of Kover.ai.

I mentioned this article from Gridwise about reasons people get deactivated.

I also talk about Doordash's deactivation policy, where you can see more information here.

We mention Episode 7 that talks about having an exit plan.

Affiliate links of note:
As an affiliate, I may earn money when items are purchased from the following links.

We talked about the Rexing V2 Pro, the dash cam that I use personally. You can add GPS to it. Movable cameras allow you to point the camera out the side window and document your deliveries at the doorstep.

One of the most important steps you can take to get protected in the event of a wrongful deactivation is to sign up with Kover.ai. Kover provides income protection if you are deactivated and has a legal service that can write a deactivation appeal letter on your behalf. Use this affiliate link and you can get the first month at no cost.

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Transcript

0:03

Well, hello, Courier Nation. Welcome to the Deliver on your business podcast, where you are the boss. Each week we talk about how to make the most of your business as an independent contractor, as a courier delivery for gig economy apps like Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates, Uber Eats and so many others. Like Orientation Nation, welcome back for another week. It is great to be back again this week. It's wonderful to have you back as well. Looking forward to another week here on the podcast as I record this this week. It's November 3rd and I'm excited about this for a couple of reasons. One. My wife and I just closed on some property out in the mountains. That just is just some land. So nothing we're going to be able to do with that just yet. But it's it's still land. It's kind of cool, you know, and to it's Election Day. I'm not excited about Election Day. I'm excited that all of these commercials, all of this crap leading up to Election Day are done with. Tomorrow, it's over with. May not be over for a little while, who knows well, long it's going to take with this, this election and whatever the fallout is from the election, and I'm not even going to try and touch all of that, you know, of course, one of the big ones that I'm watching, I'm probably watching this more than the presidential election is Prop 22 out in California. And I got it. I got to be honest with you. I could go either way with that one, you know? You know, if you've listened to me much, you know that I'm not a fan of AB5. You know that I'm not a fan of taking away people's ability to be independent contractors. And especially because I think AB5, it was not written for the benefit of independent contractors. Honestly, I don't think we matter that all that much. This is about power. This is about a power grab. And that's just that's just the way I see it. But I'm glad I'm not in California, you know? So there's going to be a reason that I'll be happy if AB5 passes because it allows people to continue acting as an independent contractor. But here's the other side. If AB5 fails, I'm not going to shed a tear for any of these gig companies. I look at the things that they do and we're going to talk about some of the stuff they do here today. We get into deactivation and things like this. They use that as a way to bully drivers. It's just that's just the way it is. That's that's just the way I see it. And I'm not going to shed a tear for any of these companies if they're forced to either go out of business or lose money because of the business model that they're using. So I don't know. I'm not going to get heartbroken on either side of this. I can strongly see great arguments for both sides of the issue. I'm just going to be glad it's over with, you know, and then we can figure out what to do from there. So with all that said, let's get into today's topic. I want to dive into this here, how do you avoid contract deactivation from DoorDash? Uber Eats, Grubhub, Postmates? Want to talk about seven steps that you can take. And the thing is, folks, if you rely much at all on the income for your delivery business, you want to stay on top of how to avoid deactivation from your contracts with all of these delivery gig apps. How do you avoid deactivation, though? Because there's a lot of unfair deactivation going on? I think I don't know what's going on with it, honestly, but you know, I'm going to dive into depth on a few things that I think you can do some steps that you can take. But. The most important thing you can do is to remember you're running a business. Treat your relationship with these great companies as though they're your customers. And how does a business keep its customers? If you think in those terms, you're going to so greatly reduce your risk of deactivation. The bottom line here, my friends, is DoorDash owes you nothing. Grubhub has no obligation to keep you as a contract in this hamster with Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, any of these gig companies. They can walk away at any time. And the thing is, lately they seem to be doing a lot of walking away. You know, when I look at the different forums and Facebook groups and all of that, a lot of people have been deactivated and I've had a couple of articles about that. But I don't know if it's that there's such a need that things are going so bad on the customer service side that they've got to crack down on the bad couriers out there and there's a lot of bad couriers out there. Unfortunately, a lot of innocent folks get caught in the mix because they all do this by algorithm. They all do this by, you know, instead of actually going out and finding the bad apples, what they do is they programmed their computer to go, look for the bad apples, and they just cut everybody that looks like they might be one of these bad apples. And if you know how well these apps work, well, you know how much I trust the way they programmed these computers, right? But you know, the question is how much of it is because they've got to kind of get rid of some of these folks that are causing problems. And there's there's a need for that. There's a place for that. There honestly is. And how much of it is because they hired so many people when the pandemic was in its peak and when there is all this extra stimulus money and everything like that. And now that a lot of that money has dried up and things are slowing down, they've got to cut back. And so they don't care how they do it, they'll just, you know, find some kind of excuse to cut people loose. I don't know. I don't know what the reason is, but there's a lot of people being deactivated. So how do you avoid being one of those people deactivated from these things, especially if you rely very heavily on this income that you make with your delivery business? Let's talk about this. Why do couriers get deactivated from these companies? There's a lot of causes, there's a lot of reasons. You know, they range from, you know, you're violating the contract to maybe you have an altercations with customers or there's unexplained violations that a lot of these companies, they just kind of want a nebulous they call it a fraudulent activity. And there's a good article that I put a link in in the associate, if you go to entrecourier.com/96, that'll take you to the page for episode 96, which kind of has all the same stuff in a written out format. And over there, I linked to an article by GridWise, which is an app that's got some interesting things for drivers, and they had a blog article that went into a little more depth on this topic about why people are. I think it's one of the best articles that I've seen out there. A couple things I don't totally agree with, but for the most part is a good article, so I'll put a link in the show notes. Or you can go over to entrecourier.com/95 and you can find the link over there. Now, here's the thing I'm critical of DoorDash on a lot of things. I'm critical on all these companies, on a lot of things, but there's one thing that I will give DoorDash credit for and that they tend to be a little more transparent about how they do their deactivation than anybody else. You know, they've got very specific information on certain things that can get you deactivated. Nobody else is doing it like that that I'm seeing now. But I mean, they've got very specific numbers of 4.2 customer rating or lower on a five point scale and or. Lower than 80 percent completion rate. And in my opinion, both of those metrics, they leave you plenty of room for error if you're doing things the way you ought to be doing them. I don't think you're going to run into a problem on either one of these. Lately, they've also been doing a lot of stuff about what they call contract violations, and those are usually things related to either extremely late deliveries or food that wasn't delivered at all. And you know, you mark the delivery complete, you didn't deliver the food and they call that a contract violation. Well, that makes sense. It's it's a contract violation if you're extremely late, if you're later than you should have been based on whatever your situation is, you're not doing what you agreed to do. So I don't have an issue with those things. And again, I'm going to give DoorDash credit because I have seen them do an awful lot more of saying, here's this specific violation. This is when it happened. So when you've got an accusation of something, you can answer to it, you know, you can say, Yeah, you know what? Yeah, I screwed up there. Or you could say, No, this is not what happened. This is what I did, and I've got documentation to back it up. So I'm going to give DoorDash a lot more credit about this. I am not a fan of the way a couple of these other companies are doing things, which is, you know what I would call the fraudulent activity cop out. I think lately Uber Eats and Grubhub in particular are the worst at this. They just seem to love to throw out that term fraud or fraudulent activity as the reason for their termination, rather than describing exactly what that activity was, what exactly the fraud was. They just kind of threw out this term and say, OK, that's enough. We're done. We're investigating you for fraud. We're investigating for you for this. But they don't tell you what it is they actually did. Now, two weeks ago, I want to play a little clip from two weeks ago on episode 94, where Bryant GreenLing. He's with legal rideshare. We were talking and we got around to this issue here, so let me play this clip for you. And I think that's one thing that would be. Maybe a little more helpful on the part of the companies is if they were more forthcoming to begin with, with what what incident was it? And I think that's that's the thing is I read in, you know, a lot of forums and different things like that as people can't get an answer as to where did it happen, what exactly was it? And you know, it would help, I think, if they knew, I kind of wonder if part of the reason that they're not as forthcoming and this is just the conspiracy theory tin hat wearing guy in me here is that if they start giving a lot of specifics that they're kind of putting themselves at risk of being more controlling and part of that whole misclassification thing. Yeah, I think that that's certainly part of it. I also think that it's quicker to just write the word fraud. And yet so often there's a lack of a human element humanity to how the companies treat their workers that I think they don't in a lot of regards care whether they're providing closure to a driver, but rather they're just kicking them out the door. And that's why so many drivers get frustrated. And that's why the letters that we're writing with cover are helpful. One, they might get the driver's account back on in two, they might just get the explanation that they need. I really appreciate, Bryant, coming on a couple of weeks ago here, and you know, you can you can probably tell it's one of the things I get frustrated with is when these companies play these games like this and they don't tell you exactly what it is. And this is part of the reason that I think they're that they're facing things like AB5 and Pro Act because they are bad actors in a lot of different areas. All right, well enough of that. Let's talk about some of the different causes, the common causes for deactivation. I'm going to run through a list. This is by no means an exhaustive list. I'm sure there are some other things that are missing here. These are maybe some of the most common ones, and I kind of grouped them up into three different categories or three different areas. One has to do with delivery issues and contract violations. This is basically it boils down to. You didn't do what you agreed to do. OK. Accepting offers and then cancelling out of them. Too often that's used by a few different ones. And one of the reasons that they do this is if it happens too frequently, what happens if you accept an offer and then you're going to be going over there and then you cancel that? Well, now they've got to find somebody else, and it makes the order run really late. I think there are places where you need to be able to cancel out of things. But when you do it too often, it really does create some problems. And so I kind of understand that one, you know, extremely late deliveries that are your fault. Eating or tampering with the food, you're not delivering the food to the customer, you're stealing the food seems like a no brainer, right? You'd get deactivated for that kind of thing not keeping the food in the best condition that you can keep it in. During the delivery, you get the food to the customer, and it's either it's all beat up or it's cold or whatever and you didn't protect it as well as you should have protected it. Sometimes that can be a reason and or just general in general, a poor customer service record. You know, we talked about that for point to that DoorDash uses 4.2 is really low. It's so you got to be doing pretty bad to be down that low. You got a lot of wiggle room with that one. Here's another area that just talked about that a moment ago fraudulent activity. You know, in the conversation with Bryant, I said, I do believe that a lot of them, they use that fraudulent activity as a copout. It's a mask. It's an excuse. And a lot of cases, I think it's an excuse to deactivate people for things they're not really allowed to deactivate you for. They're not allowed to control the way you do your work. They can expect the results, but they can't control how you do the work. And I do think that this whole use of fraudulent activity is often it's a code word. It's a mask word to make it look like it's your fault. But ultimately, they don't tell you what it is. And that said, I think there are a number of things that are fraudulent that can lead to deactivation. If you're attempting to use payment cards for your own purpose, you know, having multiple driver accounts, if you're gaming the referral system, in other words, you're making a fake referral, you know you're referring yourself and you're collecting the money for it. The kind of ties in sometimes with that multiple driver accounts, if you're letting somebody else use your account, are you not allowed to do that if you're masking or you're faking your location on the GPS? There, there are tools that you can use with your phone that'll make the GPS look like you're somewhere that you're not different, things like that. There are also behavior and safety issues. You know, if you fail to pass a background check. Now one of the interesting things is that a lot of drivers have been deactivated lately, that they've been delivering for quite a while. They've been through some background checks before. And there something that happened several years ago that would have been there whenever they had the checks before, but now it was enough for them to be deactivated. That one's kind of sketchy, but you know, the other side of things is, you know, if you got a record of violence or or unsafe driving or a lot of different things like that, that's enough reason for them to say, Yeah, we're not really wanting to work with you. Unsafe behavior when you're delivering or while you're driving, reckless driving, unsafe driving, all sorts of things like that criminal activity while you are on a delivery. Unprofessional or threatening behavior with the restaurant staff. Unprofessional or threatening behavior with the customers. And sometimes I think even that kind of behavior with some of the staff from the gig companies themselves. Now, are these legitimate causes for deactivation from DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates, any of these others? I would say in normal situations. I don't have much of an argument with most of these. Like I said, no emphasis is on normal situations. The bottom line is you made an agreement, you made an agreement to do work. And most of this stuff kind of falls into this. A lot of this stuff falls under very much common sense types of things. Now, there are some things that fall under these things that that they may deactivate people for, but it's not the fault of the people. Now some of these areas where that could happen, yeah, they do provide some wiggle room. Like I said, I think there's times where you need to be able to cancel out of an order. If you agreed to take an order, then you made an agreement. But there are times you get there and OK, you made the agreement based on normal circumstances. You get to the restaurant and guess what? They haven't started the food. It's going to be a half hour. It's going to be 45 minutes. You know what, if you cancel out on that order, you're not going to make that order late because it's still going to take time. By the time somebody else gets there. So there's things like that. But you know, the thing is that they do give you, it's not like one time and you're done. So generally, they give you some room if your customer service is really bad. It's got to be really bad to get down low enough for DoorDash to cut you off. Sometimes there's stuff where they're not making a whole lot of room, you know, for example, if Grubhub dispatches you to a restaurant the moment they receive the order, you get there. You know what's going to happen? Did you get there anyway? And you got a half hour wait at the restaurant. But the problem is, is if you decide that, OK, I've got a lot of time, I need to take this other delivery. I'll get back before the food's ready anyway. But they penalize you. They say you're intentionally delaying the order. And so either they're going to take the order away from you or if it happens too often, they could deactivate you because you're committing fraudulent activity by intentionally delaying the order, even though you're not making the order late, you know. And when that kind of thing happens, there's a problem when Postmates will stack a second or third, sometimes a fourth order onto your queue when you're at the restaurant and then say, Oh, by the way, you got to go deliver these two or three other orders at the same time, and they don't even give you the chance or the opportunity to accept or reject those additional orders. And so you decide, no, I did not agree to these. So I got to cancel in the end up having to cancel all of them. And then they deactivated you for canceling too many orders, that kind of thing. There's a problem, and it crosses the line into controlling the work. And so there are some problems sometimes with the way they do some of these things. Well ask this question, since we're talking about causes for deactivation. Is acceptance rate a legitimate cause to be deactivated? And I'm going to say, no, absolutely not. Now I found it interesting and you know, I mentioned the grid wise article is said. There are a couple of things I don't totally agree with them. One of the things that they threw out there was they kind of took a look at some of the different platforms. And when they said, Grubhub, you know, one of the things that can get you deactivated with Grubhub is not accepting enough orders. Well, the first thing I'm going to tell you is I've had a very low acceptance rate with Grubhub that has not been an issue, you know? And but the other side of it is. I do think that they tell a lot of people that this is the reason or that you could be deactivated for its part of the bullying, it's part of the intimidation thing. But the bottom line is. You never see it in writing. And there's a reason you never see it in writing, because if they put it in writing, then it's evidence because requiring somebody to accept a certain percentage of orders is clearly very clearly crossing the line of controlling the work of the contractor. And it is a great way to lose a misclassification suit. So they're going to tell some people that stuff verbally, but they're not going to put it in writing. And it's just it's one of these things about these companies trying to bully people into accepting more offers in into acting like an employee. They want you to act like an employee. They don't want to pay for the right of having you as an employee. But they cannot legally require you to accept a percentage of orders or particular orders, any of that stuff. OK, so what about Multi-prong is working multiple apps at the same time, a legitimate cause for deactivation, and I'm going to say No. Absolutely not. But maybe. How's that for being definitive, huh? Look, I know that there's a prominent theory out there right now. A lot of people feel like this. A lot of these activations are them cracking down on multi--apping And I can't prove it one way or the other. My theory is it's not so much about cracking down on multi-apping happing, it's cracking down on the results of multi-apping. Here's the deal. A company cannot prevent you from delivering for more than one company, even if it's more than one company at the same time, because you're not being paid an hourly wage here. But isn't that what they're cracking down on? Isn't that what they're trying to do is stop you from delivering for more than one company at the same time? And I think that that's one of the things like I said, I think, you know, a lot of people feel like you can be deactivated for doing that because that's the perception that is out there. But technically, no, they cannot prevent you from doing that, it is your business, they cannot control whether or not you pick up a delivery from somebody else. But the thing that happens here and the reason that it's an issue is. They can deactivate you based on the results. And here's the deal is if you pick up an order from Chipotle and you pick it up for pick up another one from Chipotle for a different app and they're going to different directions, you need to deliver one. And now that makes the other delivery really late. What you have done is you have failed to meet your end of the bargain on that second delivery. And that is the thing that I'm talking about when I say that it's they're cracking down on the results of multi-apping. You see where I'm going with that. It's it's not the issue that they're cracking down on the multi apping itself, but because of the way that a lot of people are doing their multi apps. If they're making other deliveries later, if they're making their own deliveries late. That's the reason for the deactivation is the late deliveries, not the multi-apping itself. So having looked at all of that, you know, here, I want to get into the seven steps, seven steps that you can take to avoid being deactivated by Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates, any of these delivery apps. I cannot guarantee these steps. I can't say that if you do all of these things, you absolutely will not be deactivated because these companies are scum and they will deactivate you even if you didn't do anything wrong sometimes. And sometimes it's just the luck of the draw. Okay. Even the best couriers get deactivated through no fault of their own. But if you follow these steps seven steps and think you stand a much higher chance of avoiding it, and you keep a much higher chance of keeping your relationship with your customers intact, and that allows you to stay in business. And who are those customers? DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates. You're trying to keep that relationship in place. So the first step, I just put it this way, because it's an appropriate first step on any kind of how to video or something that's gather your materials. I love working on bikes, and so I've learned a lot from YouTube instructional videos, and usually they kind of start out that here's how you do this, that or the other thing, and it always starts with getting your materials together, right? So let's do that here. OK? The tools are not tangible things, but they're very important, I think. And here are the two things you absolutely have got to equip yourself. And one is you've got to develop a business attitude. My friends, we are running a business here. You're not an employee. And in a lot of cases, we want to use that when it's in our favor, but sometimes it's not in our favor, it doesn't feel like it. Although I still think it is. And here's the deal when you're running a business, nobody owes you anything. You've got to understand this. Grubhub and DoorDash and Uber Eats, none of them owe you a penny. Until you've delivered and they don't owe you the privilege of continuing to deliver for them, it's just like running any kind of other business. You cannot force your customers to stay with you. And so there are no guarantees. Well, OK, you know what? I think there's one guarantee. There's one guarantee. And that guarantee is these gig companies. They're going to try and screw you over. They're going to take advantage of you. But my friends, that's true of any kind of business you want to run. Your customers are going to try and screw you. That's just part of running a business. It doesn't make it right. It doesn't excuse the behavior of these companies. But if you understand this ahead of time and actually embrace it, I think my friends, that's a difference maker because what that does is when you understand that, then you can take control, you can make decisions. You can figure out the things to work within that relationship. And you can decide when does it make sense to do the things that they want you to do and when does it not make sense you get to make those decisions? And is there a time that's best to assert your rights? When is it better to kind of play the customer's always right card? That's part of running a business. You've got to make those decisions. One of my favorite quotes I've used this a number of times is from Gary Vaynerchuk, when he said, Everything is your fault. That's a good thing. It means you're in control. When you take accountability, when you take responsibility for running your business, when you realize that everything that happens is on your shoulders. You can't be victimized by what these companies do because it's up to you. Instead, you adapt, you make decisions, you take control. So you want to develop a business attitude. And the other thing that you want to do here, the other material, the other item that you need to have and that is a customer centered mindset. You got to think about this, folks. Who's your customer is the one that you contracted with, the one who send you your payments. And that means DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates. You cannot force your customers to buy from you if you open up a store. If you open a restaurant, if you open a consulting business, you cannot make them do business with you. You've got to build a relationship. You've got to keep their business by being awesome at what you do. So you can't force your customers to buy from you. In fact, you can't even force them, to be fair. Nor can you control what they're going to do, but you can control what you will do if your relationship with the customers profitable. Then you can conduct business in a manner that encourages them to continue doing business with you. And if it's not a profitable business relationship, why would you continue to do business with them? You know, you get to make that decision, though. Is the customer a jerk? Well, welcome to the business world. Do you still want them as a customer? If you do, then you've got to learn how to work around the customer being a jerk and then you need to look through the eyes of the customer and you got to start thinking things like What does the customer need? Why are they contracting with you? What do they need and what are you doing that helps them out? What is it that you're providing that helps them in that relationship? And there's two things. There are two things that the customer needs from you. They need that food delivered quickly and in good condition. And they need it done in a way that protects their relationship with the restaurants and the diners. And that is what they are contracting with you to do. Now you can't control what the customer does. You can't control how Grubhub or DoorDash or any of these companies behave, but you can look through their eyes trying to understand what it is they're looking for. And then you make decisions as far as how can you meet that need? And so maintain your independence, and when you start doing that, when you start looking through the customer's eyes and you start making the decisions is you're going to do things that make sense from a business standpoint. My friends, that gives you incredible power. Step two is do what you agreed to do. I'm sorry, but there's too many folks out there that think that independent contractor means I can just do whatever the hell I want to do. My friends, that is not being an independent contractor. Independent contractor means you're running a business and running a business means there's consequences for bad customer service. There's consequences for not doing what you agreed to do. What did you agree to do? It's the same things we just talked about. You agreed that you would get the food from the restaurant to the customer in a timely manner in as timely a manner is you can reasonably be expected to do. And you agreed to get them get that food to them in the best reasonable condition that that you would be able to do so under the circumstances. They are the very things that the customer needs. And if you take your integrity seriously, if you're serious about the fact that you're going to do which you agreed to do. You eliminate most of the issues that we just talked about that get people deactivated. Now one thing I'm going to point out you did not agree to accept every offer. Now, if you think accepting every offer helps your relationship with your customer, well, that's your choice to make you get to make that decision. But it's not part of your agreement. OK. But remember this your agreement is on a delivery by delivery basis. That agreement goes into effect the moment you accept an offer. And it stops when you complete that offer, you're done with the agreement until the next time you accept an offer. So it's during those moments that you should be awesome at what you agreed to do. And if you're awesome at what you agreed to do, you avoid a lot of the problems. Step three. Just don't do stupid stuff, OK? Most of the legitimate causes for deactivation that don't fall under that step two are definitely going to fall into step three. Some causes fall under both, you know, don't eat the food. That's pretty obvious, right? Don't get into arguments that the restaurants. I know it's frustrating when they seem to be slower, incompetent, but don't throw your business away because you don't have any patience with the restaurant. I don't care how insulting that tip is or that lack of a tip is or whatever. Getting into a fight with a customer over how much they tipped is as dumb as dumb can be. It's a great way to not have to bother about that tip anymore, because you won't be able to deliver anymore. If the pay wasn't enough, don't get mad at the customer point the finger at yourself. Remember when I talked about you're taking control, right? Well, if that pay wasn't enough, you accepted it. So why did you take the offer in the first place, you know? I mean, I can go on and on and on and on about this kind of. Don't be stupid stuff. Because really, most of this stuff is commonsense. You know, use common sense out there, my friends. Step four is be aware of the traps. Because there's times, you know, we all know that there are times that people did everything that they should have done and something still sneaks up on them, you know, that customer that said they didn't get the food. The restaurant missed some of the order and you get blamed for stealing it, and sometimes the apps believe you. You know why they believe because they don't want to put the time into it to investigate. They avoid putting time into the management here. And so it's just easier to accept it and say they're done with you. Well, what you want to do is you want to be aware of those kind of situations that can sneak up on you like that, you know, you want to pay attention to when things seem just a little bit off. You want to pay attention to what's going on out there and just be aware of things like that. And when you're aware of things and you can take care of step number five, 10 or whatever, but you know, most restaurants, now they're sealing the order, so you can't check off all the items. But you know what? When you see a dozen items and I'm not talking about a dozen packages, a hot sauce at Taco Bell, but you see a dozen items you're supposed to pick up and they come out with a small bag of food. You kind of know that something doesn't look right here, you know, pay attention to things like that. You took a low tip order and you got a a real bossy set of explanations or something like that. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that can maybe be a red flag that says, you know what? There's a possibility someone's kind of playing a game here and so kind of be aware of those types of things. Here's one that you might not have thought of. I think this is one has bitten some people in the butt there that they had no idea was coming up here. You arrive at the restaurant and somebody at the restaurant says, Oh, somebody else already picked up that order. And I know Time's Money and I've done this before where it's like, OK, I got to move on. I know that calling into support or something like that is going to take a long time. So you cancel out of the order and you move on. OK, well, the problem is then the next order comes along. They get the same report they call it in. Well, now support looks at all the records. Oh, you were the last one there. You must have been the one to steal that order, you know, so you've got to be careful for those types of things. You've got to look out for things like that. And when there are things that you think, there's maybe a possibility something could happen. Slow down, take the time. Do what you need to do to cover you behind. All right. Step five is document, document, document. If you've got a record of what you've done, if you've got evidence that you didn't do any anything wrong, you've got a stronger chance of overcoming a deactivation. You can say I've got the dash cam recordings that show exactly what happened. I've got this recording of the customer actually getting the food when you've got that kind of thing. It's a lot harder for them to deactivate you, you know? And this is why, you know, you start with number four, you kind of be aware of those traps and especially when you see things like that, that's when you document you make sure that you've got, you know, make sure that you're behind is covered. I'll give you an example, I've had times where I go to drop off a delivery and something just seems off about the place and I can't find the customer or I had one one time where the customer didn't leave any information about the apartment number or how to get in or anything like that. I call the customer and it was a bad phone number. Actually, it was a phone number that went out of state somewhere to some business. And so I couldn't get through to the customer at all. And there was nothing. You know, it's like, where do you take the foods or apartment address? But there's no apartment, no given, and the phone number I've got is bad. Well, you know what I did there was, you know, the first thing that I did was I actually started sending a text. Now I know the number is bad. And so when the numbers bad, I know that they're not going to get that text, that text or isn't for their benefit. Their text was for my benefit and their text was for the benefit of DoorDash, who is who was doing that delivery for at the time because it was a written record. I sent a text, Hey, I tried calling your number the numbers bad. I don't have an address. And I just, you know, put a couple of different things in. Every time I tried to do something to contact the customer, I'd send a text because it was a written record of what happened. And, you know, at the same time, I ended up contacting support and everything like that. But it was like, I'm going to make sure that I've got myself covered in case somebody is trying to do some kind of stupid little deal where they're trying to get free food. You know, any time you've got any issue that you've got any question at all. Make sure you've got that documentation going on. And here's one of the biggest things I think you can do, especially if you do very much of this at all, if you ever get very much income at all. I went for the longest time without doing this, and I even got to the point where, you know what? I've got to cover my my behind myself, and that is find ways to record your activity. And you used to go with just, you know, doing the stuff like I talked about and taking pictures and and any more, it's just kind of feels like you got to ramp it up a little bit if you got any question in your mind. That seems like it's off at all. Find a way to record what you're doing. If nothing else, turn on the video on your phone so you can kind of track everything that's happening or so that you can kind of tell the phone, Hey, this is the situation I'm walking in here. This is like this and you can show where you're at different things like that. I really recommend I. I'm just getting more and more this way that you've got to get a dash cam, you know, and. You know, in the last two episodes, I talked with Bryant with legal rideshare, and I talked with Leah with Kover.AI, who are both involved with helping drivers get their ability back to deliver when they've been deactivated. And both of them said me, and one of the most important things you've got to do is have a dash cam. OK, now I got a it's V2 pro made by rexen, and I got this one because of a couple of things. One, it's got two cameras, one points forward, the other into the passenger compartment. But I chose this one because the cameras I can turn. And so when I go to make a delivery and you know, I go to get out, I point one of the cameras towards where the customer's house is so that I've got a video record of actually making that delivery. And at the same time, I also got little GPS attachment on that. So my recording is going to show you not only dropping off the delivery, but it's also going to show exactly where I was at when I dropped off that delivery. So I really recommend and I'll put a link to that particular one, it's an affiliate link. So if you buy from that, I may receive a commission or something like that, but it is, you know, to me, I chose it because of that capability, and some drivers are going to get like a body cam and the body cam. It works better in some ways because it gives you more of a close up recording of the transaction. And the thing with body cam is you got to kind of you take a risk of making people uncomfortable because you got that camera going right there. You know, that's a decision that you've got to make. But. Some drivers will use they call it the time stamp app. It'll take a picture and then it shows the GPS information, the address when you drop off. Now the problem I've got with that one or relying on that one, sometimes I think it's in trouble, actually, because GPS, especially when you're between buildings, doesn't always get things exact, you know? So it might not have the address, right? And I'm just not comfortable with that for that reason. Now, one thing that I do in conjunction with the dash cam instead of messing with a body cam or anything like that is I have a screen recording app on my phone. Mine, the one that I've got is called X Recorder, and it's a free app that is on Android. I can set it so that it'll keep recording even when the phone goes dark or whatever. I don't know if that one is on Apple, but there are a lot of these screen recorder apps and what it does is it just records. Everything that's happening on your phone will get one that will record the audio as well. It takes up. I'll tell you what, it'll fill your phone up fast, so you got to stay on top of, you know, the memory management and pulling those records off on a regular basis and either stick it onto a hard drive or or just pull them off after a couple of weeks because you just aren't going to need them, probably by then. I don't know. But what happens is that I've got with that. It shows I've got the record, I've got the offer details, I've got the customer instructions. I've it shows you know what's happening on the GPS as I'm getting there. And it's also recording anything that I'm saying while I'm going there. And of course, my dash cam is doing the same thing. But as I go and drop the food off, it records the sound so you can hear the customer coming out and getting the food or whatever. So I've got two different things that are documenting what's happening while I'm delivering. So if anybody ever accuses me of taking the food or not delivering the food, I've got documentation. And then the other thing I do is I talked to my dad ask him, it's kind of crazy, but any time I think anything is off, I'm talking, I'm saying, OK, here's the order and and the restaurant was really late and you know this and this and this. And because what you've got then is you've got a record of actually what is happening. You're able to tell your story as opposed to you get something. A couple of days later said, Hey, this customer made this claim, and now you got to go back and try and remember. So document document document. One of the thing I'm going to say about documentation here, and this is another thing that I kind of give DoorDash some credit. For now, DoorDash has been maybe one of the most aggressive about really cracking down on late deliveries, and they call it contract violations. But at the same time? You know, you arrive at the restaurant and they're way behind or they haven't received the order yet, and if you end up deciding that you're going to wait or even if you'd end up deciding that you got to move on. There's a little feature that pops up that says, Hey, what's what's the issue? Why is it taking long? And you can actually tap on the different types of issues or you can actually at the bottom, there's something for other and you can actually describe what the issue is. It's another form of documentation and man, especially with as much as they're kind of cracking down on late deliveries. You want to stay on top of that if it looks like the food's going to be delayed in any way, shape or form. Get on that right away and let them know. And sometimes if you're in doubt at all contact support. And my suggestion again is because you've got a written record, do it with the chat because you can keep a record, you can get screenshots of it. All of that document document document. Step number six. Sometimes you might just want to re-evaluate the relationship with the customer, because where is the point where you just have to ask, is this worth it anymore? If you don't trust the customer? And they're just constantly trying to screw you, there's a point where you just say enough. These apps, they're not supposed to control the way you do your work, but we all know that they try, they all try and cross the line as much as they can. And do they deactivate people for things they're not supposed to? Absolutely. I do not ever hide the frustration that I've had with front with Postmates, and I even mentioned it earlier in this this episode. Their practice of stacking orders on drivers without your approval, without you having to accept it, they're not supposed to do that. But the problem is, is that when they do that? You can't just cancel one, you got to cancel all of them, and they're one of the ones that cracked down the most on cancelling too many orders. So now you're in danger of deactivation. There's a problem there. Well, where's the point? Now you put up with it, and where's the point where it's just not worth it anymore? That's the reason I don't do Postmates anymore. In fact, I sat out of Postmates too long and now I can't get back in, so I probably waited out too long. I don't know. I don't know if they've changed that or not. But you know, does does Grubhub drop people for rejecting too many orders, like the grid wise article said they just might. They're not supposed to. But you know what, if they call it fraud? How do you prove that that's what it was? You know, and that's that's why I really hate the way they do that. But where's the point where you decide, OK, I'm going to accept more offers because I'm afraid of that happening? Or at that point, is it no longer profitable enough? Is that at that point? Is it just too frustrating? And you decide, you know what? I'm done playing your games. I am firing you as my customer. You can do that. And sometimes I think it makes sense to do that. You know, where's the point where you say, OK, it makes more sense to go to DoorDash or Uber Eats? And maybe I'm just going to put Grubhub on pause for a little while. You know, always, always, always keep evaluating those relationships. Always evaluate. The delivery gig business overall, does it make sense if you do things the way they want to do things in order to keep being able to do things? Or is there a point where it's just like, No, I can't make enough money anymore? And it's time to close up the business. There's a time for that. And there's nothing wrong with that if it gets to that point. There's times I'm pretty sure I know if push the limits with some of the things because of the way these companies come, especially when it comes to acceptance rates. But I'm not going to change it if it doesn't make business sense to change it, there's a point where I'm better doing something completely different than playing their games. And that takes me back to that whole thing about that business mindset. Last step, step seven. Have a backup plan. No matter what you do, there's always a possibility of a deactivation. A lot of times it's for something that you didn't do. Sometimes you can't control it, I can't guarantee that if you do all these other steps that you're going to completely avoid it because these companies. They managed by algorithm, they managed by computer. A customer lie so that they can get free food, and they say they didn't get their food. And you know what? It's easier and faster for them just to believe that and deactivate you than it is to actually put time into investigating it. And so you didn't do anything wrong, but you still got that email. You still got that deactivation. What do you do now? That's why you want to have a backup plan, don't wait until it happens. Have your plan in place, be ready for it. You set yourself up so that you can handle this. And my first step would be to say, keep your options open. You know, we were just talking about these companies, your customers will do not rely on just one customer that is dangerous in any kind of business. If you lose that one customer, where does that leave you? So I really, really, really recommend get signed up with multiple delivery apps. Even if you want to focus on just the one, take a delivery every once in a while for one of the others. And that keeps your account active in the kind of helps you stay on touch of what's happening because then if you need that. You've got something that you can do as a backup. Now I'm going to play another clip, and this was from last week's episode, episode 95. I talked with Leah Chasser at Kover.ai and Kover provides income protection for independent contractors who can get into that in just a moment. But I asked her about her experience and what she recommends for drivers who are deactivated. Her best advice, make sure that you have the other options available that you can fall back on. If that legal letter is unsuccessful, do you have any suggestions for anybody, what is there anything they can do next that you guys know of? At the moment, I don't have a suggestion for that, but if if I was in that place, I would definitely have more than one app. I would not depend on just one gig in case something like this does happen, and for whatever reason, they're not, it's not able to be you're not able to be reactivated. You still have multiple ways of maintaining an income. I just think that would be. Be wise. Sure. No, I totally agree, because here's the thing, I mean, guises as independent contractors were running a business and this is something that I say a lot of times is that because we are contracted as a business, it's the people that you contract with that are actually your customers. And that means Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats and any of these companies are actually our customers. And any business that is relying on just one customer is is setting themselves up for trouble because you could lose that customer. And it's kind of what happens here? Really, really appreciate it having Lila on, and and that brings me to kind of the second part of this keeping having a backup plan and that would be I really recommend you want to look into cover and that's what really works with. And she was telling us about their program. Having an income protection that comes with them covered that I and. If you go to entrecourier.com/kover K O V E R K, not a C. That will take you to their site, and we've got a they have an offer where they're offering one month free for listeners of this podcast and I really recommend you check them out and cover is they describe themselves as a benefits program for independent contractors. And the thing is, if you're deactivated, there's two things that they're that their membership will give you. One is they've got a partnership with legal rideshare and a reference that right at the beginning of that last clip where I talked about it, that legal letter was unsuccessful. What do you do? Well, what happens is legal rideshare will actually provide you a consultation at no additional cost to you, and then they take the information that you have. They find out what kind of documentation you've got all those things. And then to put together a legal letter on your behalf to send these gig companies to say, Hey, this guy didn't do it. He's got proof. All this stuff and what they do is they get to the right people so they can get some eyes on it. Now there's no guarantee, there's no guarantee with that, but they have been so happy with the results that they've been seeing so far. They've had a lot more results of what they thought that they would get of people getting their accounts back. So that's one thing they'll do is they'll fight for you there. OK. The other thing that they will do is they've got an income protection program, and what they do is they provide income replacement for you based on your program level, and it's up to 80 percent of you know what you've received from these gig apps. If you're deactivated and they've got three different program levels as like from $7 to $49 a month. But if you sign up through my affiliate link and if you end up doing a paid version of that or something like that, if you stay on for more than a month, then I do make a commission off of that. I just want to give you full disclosure there. If you sign up, you'll get the first month of that membership for free. Now I've signed up for kover myself, and I really do recommend you check them out, get on now because it gives you your protection if the unthinkable happens. The other part of having that backup is you want to have an exit plan, my friends, as I write and I record this right now. You know, the polls are going to be open for a few more hours in California and across the nation. You know, we're waiting on the results of Prop 22 to vote in California, but we're also waiting on the results of the presidential election. And both of those could have a lot of repercussions on our ability as independent contractors because of the stances that different people take on things related to employment versus independent contractor. I don't know. I've been doing this for two and a half years myself. I'm not sure how long I'll keep doing it, maybe another year or two, whatever, and I'm probably very long term compared to a lot of people and doing this delivery gig. But if it all went away tomorrow, I've got a backup plan. And so I want to ask you, I want to really encourage you to ask these questions. What would you do next? Where would you go next? If you'd done with delivery, what would you do? If something happens to your ability to deliver, where do you go if you don't know yet, start thinking about that, start mapping that out. And part of that would be maybe to ask yourself this other question Where do you want to go with your life? What do you want to do next in life? Think through those things. You got to a hell of a lot of time driving around between deliveries and pick ups and all that stuff. Use that time to start. Putting yourself in a position, you know, and put together your exit plan, then start thinking about where you're going next. I go in a lot more detail back on episode seven of the podcast Andre Courier dot com slash seven going to a lot more detail about having an exit plan for your delivery business. One last thing that I want to mention as we're wrapping up here about deactivation, and that is don't stress, OK? How do you not stress after all this talk about deactivation and all this, talk about how things could happen and you can't do anything about it. Here's the reason this, I really believe, is the reason that there are a lot of people that get deactivated when it's not their fault, and that's because people talk about it and when people talk about it, people get scared and when people get scared, then these companies can control you, they can bully you. They can intimidate you into thinking that you've got to act like an employee. You are not an employee, OK? And I think they want you to be freaked out. And the more freaked out you are, the more likely you're going to just be like a good little employee. And they're not the boss. You are the boss, and that's why I'm really emphasizing take control here, because when you make the decisions and you get to decide what's going to happen and you going to be prepared if something happens you don't like, you know. But if in your eyes, doing a bit more business with your customer makes sense for your business, then adapt and do some things that just keep you from maybe being as worried about deactivation. But you know what, if in your eyes, it makes more sense to do things the way you feel? It makes sense to only accept the offers that make sense to you, then don't let the threats. Don't let the fear keep you from running your business. Don't stress about it. My friends take control, and here's the deal. Take your steps, OK, and the first two especially do what you promise to do and don't be stupid. And those two are going to handle most of those possibilities, and the rest of them were really about being proactive. And if you do those things, you really eliminate a lot of the issues. But the thing is. It's just like that quote from Gary Vaynerchuk, who said, you know, everything is your fault, but that's a good thing because you're in control. Be in control. Be the boss.