Episode 98: Can a New Delivery Company Disrupt the Market? With Bob from TripDelivers

TripDelivers is a new delivery company that is ramping up with a completely new model.

TripDelivers has launched their first market in Nashville and are looking to grow.

This is a completely different model, for retaurants and for drivers.

For the restaurant, the restaurant doesn't pay a huge comission. They pay a flat fee. The restaurant receives their money immediately, there are incentives for involving their existing customer base, and even for recruiting other restaurants.

The driver is paid directly and immediately. Drivers receive the entire delivery fee from the customer and the entire fee. They can receive additional income for engaging new drivers, restaurants and customers.

If this goes well, it could really disrupt the industry.

Bob McNulty joins us to talk about TripDelivers and what they're doing.

Thursday night, November 19, 6 Pacific 9 Eastern, Bob will be updating some of the programming. You can find out more here at their YouTube channel. 

For the transcript for today's article, visit the Associated blog page for Episode 98 with our interview with Bob from TripDelivers.

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Transcript

0:02

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 delivering for gig economy apps like Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates, Uber Eats and so many others. Well, hello, Courier Nation, and welcome back for one more week of the Deliver on Your Business podcast. It is awesome having you back and it's and it's pretty awesome being back to. I'm two days late. I don't think I've ever been two days late on the podcast, but I just had the opportunity here to get this interview in and it was something that I didn't want to make it wait until next week. So it was just worth getting it done and getting it done right and everything like that, because I think this is something that could be really special for a lot of delivery contractors, especially for those of you who are just really, really, really serious about actually running your business, about treating this like a business. Because, you know, there are things about when we do our deliveries as contractors for Grubhub and DoorDash and all these others that. You know, you got a stretch sometimes to make it feel like you're running a business because there are just aspects of the way they do things that still make it feel like an employment type of thing. And I think there's something just really special right now because I'm seeing something coming along that, boy, if these guys can get off the ground. My friends, this feels like an actual business opportunity. You know, we've got an interview with Bob McNulty, who has started up a new delivery company called Trip Delivers. Now they are really, really, really on the ground floor. I mean, we're talking. We mean, we may be talking basement. We might be talking sub basement. It's only been a couple of weeks that they started out in the Nashville market, and that's their first market that they're actually up and running with delivery. They've been getting things going, but they've got a very different model. And I'm excited to have Bob McNulty on here to talk about that model to explain about what they're doing different. Because I got to say, I mean, there's there's a part of me that wants to maybe see if I can book a ticket down to Nashville and go check them out and I might do that. And we just found out that my daughter is down with the Rona and she seems to be doing OK and everything like that. It doesn't seem to be hitting her too hard, but now there's that quarantine thing. So it might be a couple of weeks before I can do something like that, but I'm serious guys. This is something that, you know, I'm excited because there are so many ways that you can take ownership of what they're doing here. And so I'm you know what? I'm just going to let the interview go here and let you listen because you can hear a little bit about what this is all about. And I think some of the opportunities here. Well, couriers nation, I'm excited to have our guest on today, Bob McNulty from Trip Delivers and Trip Delivers is a new entrant coming into the delivery scene, and they're really kind of upending things with a totally different model, a totally different approach, both for the restaurants and for the drivers. Everything that I'm seeing on it, it looks like it is really more of a true independent contractor model, almost not even a contractor, but it said, you know, they're going to be working with us as drivers in a way that is much more being like an actual business owner. Then kind of that pseudo half employee, half contractor thing, which you see with a lot of these others on here. So Bob, I want to thank you for coming on and joining us today and for telling us a little bit about it delivers. Well, I appreciate you inviting me, Ron. Yes, OK with you. Yes. Industry and you really know that the you know, the business. Well, I, you know, at least like to act like it. I'm never I'm not sure if I know as much or if I just talk like it, you know? Bob, tell us a little bit about what you're doing with Tripp delivers. You just got launched, I think, in Nashville and looking at some other markets as well. But just tell us about kind of just give us an overview, I guess, of what you're doing and how you got started and why you decided to dive into this market. Yeah, it's a really crazy story about how he got into space. It wasn't by design. I can tell you that it was. I was visiting my son in L.A. and I spent the night with him and he and I had an appointment up in Beverly Hills that morning, but he had to drop his car off in Venice to get fixed. And and I like to be on time. I don't like to be late to meetings and things. And we had to drive through traffic. And, you know, the Beverly Hills for Venice could take anywhere from 30 40 minutes to an hour. So I said to him the night before his Don't forget, just get a town car and have him take us up there so we don't have to worry about getting up there on time. So, yeah, no worry. So we're at the dealership and he's dropping his car off. And I figured they'd pick us up, like, call it, eight o'clock in the morning or something. And so I said to my son, I said, Was that car going to be here? I mean, because usually a car is really there before you're almost there, right? And he goes, Oh, yeah, don't don't worry about saying, I got this. And then about five minutes later, I said, Well, you think the car's going to show up? And he he goes, Yeah, let me show you this. So he breaks out his phone and he says, You see that little car moving. I go, Yeah, I thought it was a game when I first saw. And I go, Yeah, I see the car, he says. That car is going to pull up in about five seconds. And I see your kid because it was on the spot where we're supposed to and we're staying on the curb. And sure enough, this car pulls up. And then we get in and then you get out and you don't have to pay. You don't have to get money out of your pocket and you're flopping around and trying to get out to a meeting and stuff. So that was my first introduction, and I was blown away because at the end of the meeting, before the meeting was over, he also couldn't get a car. So we got done with the meeting, walked downstairs, walked out of the building, there was a car pulling up. So now I had two great experiences with Uber and but I had no no idea I was ever going to go into space. And then over time, I started using Uber and Lyft and over time. You know, it's the same. You get a car, how are you? What's going on, how long you been driving? You know, how is it? You know, what's the big boogeyman, you know, stuff? And it was the same theme. I mean, I took 30 40 rides and the same thing. We're not respected. We don't make any money. We work our buns off. You know, all the all the things that you hear. And then I start thinking about it and then, you know, I started doing some research about the different companies like Lyft and Uber and then saw some of the stuff offshore, you know, Asia and Europe. And I'm thinking jeez. There's got to be a better way to do this because if these guys really aren't making money, they're not respected. You got a real workforce problem. And that translates to consumers. And they're going to they're not going to like it because, you know, they've got a disgruntled guy driving and all he's doing is railing on the company. So that's how I kind of got into the space, but it took me. Over two years before I made a decision to go in it because I did research and it was never research to think about going into business, just research to kind of understand that, you know, the gig economy because I wasn't really familiar with it in the way that they were talking about it. And then just one day I said, God, this has got to be a better way to do this, and that's what I came up with the model we're using today. OK. And then, you know, we're we're going to launch back in January. You know, just before COVID and immediately you could see, you know, the all the numbers start going south, you know, on right here, right? And I said, no, we've got to pivot over to grocery because I do know about the grocery space. Not very much on the, you know, restaurant side, but the grocery space on a pretty well. So I say, let's make that pivot over. So we reshuffled our deck with the software and put that plan into work. And now we're in the delivery business. And I think we're going to really like it. One is it's it's the probably the most profitable side of the business in rideshare, if you do it right, in our opinion. Okay. It's got a lower cost of operating because you're not paying the absorbed in insurance costs and all those kinds of things that you have to pay on the rideshare side. And. You know, it's kind of interesting, you know, how you can, you know. Get into a space, not not knowing anything about it, and then because you spent so much time researching and talking to people and how you start to feel about the business in the industry itself, and I really like it, I think it's exciting. I think it's got just huge upside from the standpoint, just not groceries or restaurant. But these are saying a little bit ago on the general merchandise size you know you got there was a deal with Instacart just announced yesterday. They're doing with Best Buy. So they're going to do pick that could ship orders or they'll be in the stores, you know, doing that kind of stuff. So the innovation that's coming out of this is kind of interesting and everybody's kind of got their own little, you know, they're going down their own track announcer. So but yeah, and we could be in this car business. We have it built into our system. We just elected not to do it right now. We're just going to play happens, you know, start off with. So it sounds like you're starting off with restaurant delivery. And then we eventually move into the retail delivery. Yeah. Well, if it looks like a good opening for that later on behalf of the restaurant, for now, probably in the next 120 days, we'll start rolling into groceries, OK, and then ultimately into the retail system itself. Most one of the things that's interesting, if you look at the the numbers, the grocery business and the restaurant business is almost $2 billion a year in the United States. So it's it's yeah, it's almost it's right, about 10 percent of the GDP of the United States. The other thing that most people know that the retail sector out of like Best Buy and Home Depot and all these Wal-Marts, that's another $3 trillion, three and a half trillion dollars worth of business out there. And if that goes the way where deliveries become more prevalent to use because I know, like here's one of the things that my wife is an avid Amazon user. Get a I'm not getting so I was going to go to Home Depot to get some rose food, you know, for because I have roses around here and it's now this cooling down. The roses are all blooming and coming back. You know, when that's hot, that kind of further up. So I told her, I said, I'm going to run down to Home Depot and get some rose, which is not. I'll do that. Just let me go order. She said they'll be here tomorrow, you know, because we have pride. I said, OK, so order. And then you just it's being in. But yeah, so it's the convenient side. Is extraordinarily great, so what you have to balance out is the Convinent side and the pricing side, so it doesn't get overly priced, so people don't use it as a convenience. And that's why Amazon does so well because even though their prices, whatever 200 bucks, I mean, Miller is for prime now. But you know, they've been able to balance that out because they've got a great service, you know, two day or whatever it is or next day, something this morning that's coming in today. Yes, that's what's crazy. That same day. So what's going to happen, though? And I think what with Instacart doing a deal with with and I think it'll work out. I don't know what the numbers look like. But now you have your back to convenience big time like Best Buy, because I could buy some today and they'll probably delivered in the next hour or two hours, whatever it might be. So they pick it, they pack it, somebody delivers it, you've got it the same day. So it's it's it's going to compete with Amazon at some point. And the point of contention is, you know, how close and this is where Amazon has been brilliant is how close they are to their customer. Like you said, I ordered something this morning, I got it this afternoon and their strategic thinking and how they run their delivery service, which is really logistics. These guys are as good as anybody on the planet, but that's it all kind of gets back around to the same same stuff. You know, how great are you? Do you have great cost controls over your business? Do you have a business model that works, you know, all those kinds of things? Sure. Well, and you know, since you mentioned business model, I mean, you've got really interesting on a you're not kind of another ME2 delivery company coming out of, you know, everybody out there is doing, you know, we're going to charge the restaurant 30 percent and we're gonna charge the customer 20 percent and we're going to get the drivers three bucks and you're doing a totally different approach. So why don't you tell us a little bit about how you're structuring your? Yeah, so basically on the restaurant side, which is kind of interesting, we use the referral business. So if you go out and sign up a restaurant, then you participate in referral income from that a residual income as every delivery through a trip. Driver picks up. You earn 40 cents yourself, so if somebody is really enterprise and they said, Hey, I want to make some extra money, all I got to do is go sign up 20 or 30 restaurants. And if they're getting 10 or 15 orders a day through trip and delivering it, I make 40 cents on all those. So it's a great way for makes it easy because I mean, I just I just think about this, that I walk into a restaurant and there's 10 orders waiting. That's that's four bucks for somebody. Exactly. And somebody is the guy that signed up that restaurant because you, you went to the effort to sign them up. So you get all of that income on the 40 cent site. What people in our business don't really understand yet is also most of these restaurants have 2000 3000 followers. Doesn't mean they're all in the store at the same time, some as many as eight or nine thousand. We're going to teach the restaurateur to send out the app. To their customers, and then they'll make money every time their customer comes into. So it's kind of like a win win for people, but we just took a. A very complex business meeting, rideshare in general or a restaurant business, and tried to look at it from a simplistic view. And the interesting thing is we actually have three customers. We have the driver who is a customer. We have the restaurant, there's a customer. And then we have the customer of the restaurant who's the end user as a customer. So we have to understand all three components to market to them smartly. And that's why we use a referral base business and that'll start getting traction as we start to build the business up. Yeah, that's and that's an interesting way to do it. I've got my son in law had it right before he married my stepdaughter there had been managing a restaurant at Town. He talked about, you know, the problem that he faced was that, you know, he was maybe breaking even on deliveries, and it kind of makes it hard to really push deliveries. How was that different than for you guys? I mean, 'cause if he's paying twenty twenty five percent out to UberEats or Grubhub or anything like that, yeah, a flat $2 or $3. If you're if you become a member with us like a prime member, if you think of it that way. Eight hours, if you're a restaurant to have us pick it up and deliver it if you're nonmembers, three bucks for us to pick up a delivery. So it's pretty easy. Again, this is we know what revenue is coming in. Every time a car picks up an order, we know that 40 cents goes to your 10 cents goes there and the rest goes to the company. And so we just have to make sure we got enough going on and all these restaurants that we can make money. But even if you take it more in a in a a bigger picture, let's say we had 100000 cars out on the road in a day this working. And, you know, because when you're in the US, it wouldn't be unlikely you could have 100000 cars on the road if you want us. So if you said, you know, what's the average, let's say there was eight or 10 pickups, you know, so let's say it's 10 as $20 a day per car and 100000 cars. Yeah, it's a serious amount of money. So that's your top line. So the other thing we don't do is like all the other rights companies or delivery companies, by marking it up 20 30 percent or 40 percent and then they they take control of that money. The order goes through them, they run their card processing, they take 100 percent control that money. So their top line, they're booking all of that revenue income. OK. So us, we only book the two dollars. So that smile is a lot simpler, you know, and but that $2 is almost all margin for us, right? So it's a whole different way of of accounting for what's transacting in your business. The revenues may be lower by significant numbers. On a gross basis, but the earnings will be there and drive the business. So what you've got then, is you've got the restaurant just paying a $3 fee. They get the total amount of whatever is charged to the customer outside that $3 fee. There's no commission on top of it or anything like that. So what happens if we issue the restaurant, their own merchant account and then they get an order through the order actually goes through our system, but not the money. The money goes through there into their pocketbook. And it's it's seamless because they'll get their money the same day. They don't have to wait four or five days to get it from, you know, a delivery company that controls the whole transaction because we have just take it this way. It's a freeway. The money's gone down the freeway and there's an exit. And there's another says, $3 system knows if you're a $2 or $3 person and it just sends us our money as it's going down the freeway and the rest goes into the into the restaurant tours, a bank account. OK, now how does that work for the driver then? You know, since most of my audience obviously is, yeah, 30 driver, the driver gets, so there's still a delivery fee for the consumer. OK. And that is is time, distance, you know, cancellation and wait time. And then the tip. So we have to be very smart about how we price that because you don't want to price it so cheap that it hurts the driver, which you don't want to price it so high that it hurts the consumer to have to look at that. But we think on average, a driver will pick up probably seven eight bucks for delivery, not counting the tip. So if you think in terms of 10, 11, 12 bucks now, the good news is some of our research shows that maybe, maybe it's not that way, but usually if you get an order that's 35 to 50 bucks, the person that's ordered is actually fairly generous on the tipping side, so they'll get a 15 or 20 percent tip usually. One thing I noticed something that you mentioned about the way that works is that sounds like. What the customer is paying. What the driver gets paid is is is based directly on what the customer's paying them says. Did I get that right? OK, yes, he gets 100 percent of the fair seems very different than what we get with Grubhub or DoorDash or Uber Eats, where what we're paid has nothing to do it all. But with what? The other companies pay, which is interesting. So what what we found is because of the pricing models that everybody else uses the kind of play hide the football. You know, it's so the driver doesn't know what the end result is of the total fare. You know, so there's a lot of miscommunications and then you see what you were just talking about, where you see a 50 cent fee for this and an extra two dollars for that. You know, it's kind of banged you all over the place and there's no transparency. Are our receipts are transparent. So the driver rider or the person that bought the food and the restaurant all see the same receipt. There's no hidden nothing. You see it all the transparency found in our research that really upset drivers. They just couldn't see the number. Absolutely correct. That transparency make you everybody's best friend right away. It really was. No. Yeah. You know, there's an interesting thing that I noticed, like when it comes to our taxes as drivers, usually right, 1099 for from everybody. Uber Eats is the one difference where they use a 1099K, which they try and make it look like they use that 1099K because they're acting like the processor that they're just kind of facilitating this transaction between the customer and the driver, and they're kind of more of a middleman. But the problem is is that delivery fees never line up with what we are paid. So it's all, you know, it's it's showmanship, and it's all designed to make it look like it's a distant transaction for misclassification purposes or something like that. But it's not real that it sounds like what you're doing is actually real. What they're doing is actually what we are getting. Yeah, we do everything in real time numbers. It's not, you know, it's if if the. If, let's say the fair was ten bucks, we show every line item on the fair. If the since we don't deal with the food cost, we don't have any food costs. We don't show that, but we show it will show it's an either a $2 or $3 because it's on the same light item. So the restaurant to our considered the consumer can see it and the driver can see it that way. They don't have to think about cheese that I just get screwed for five bucks because that was one of the things I heard almost in every conversation. You know, we don't know what we really make. They say, it's this. But I found this. And that leads to. You know, your driver who's the backbone of your business to be upset, disgruntled, whatever you want to call it. Lack of faith in who is paying them and that needs to be addressed. That was the first thing that we saw is you've got to you've got to have transparency. You can't keep people in the dark and think they're going to be happy campers. And you know, they may have a. A $50 delivery, you know, or $60 delivery, they don't even know what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, it's just I mean, I hear it from really all sides drivers, the customers, the restaurants and, you know, I'm the only one that really knows what's going on with any of that is the delivery company. Exactly. So here's the thing. The delivery companies like I get into a whole discussion about marking up menus and how we how we were going to handle menus as opposed to other people. And then I asked a number of our own people. I said, Why do you think they handle the menus like they handle them? And I was shocked. Even our people couldn't well. You know, they just want to mark up the menus, and I said, no, it's a profit center for them. They will only want to market up. They want to control it. And if they have that kind of control now, they control the restaurant. They can tell the restaurant because they're fearful of losing business, particularly in Covid time. Because every dollar counts. It goes to restaurant right now and they want to control their business. And then essentially they're giving up their own freedom to run their business. They're being dictated to by these small, not small, very large companies and these small businesses, mom and pops, you know, they don't have a lot of choices. That's the problem. Yeah, yeah. This is over 200000 restaurants will close. This full year, 2020 will never reopen. Yeah, well, and it sounds like it could get worse. We just Colorado just kind of amped things up again, and they're going to shut down restaurants again for in-person dining at some of these. Yes, I think, you know, some of these places that struggle to open up, and now they have to close down again or something like that. And. I hate it. I just especially the mom and pop places, you know, the guys, the chains can handle it. I mean, you know, they've got deep pockets, most of them, so they don't have to really worry about, you know, yeah, it's going to look bad on their, you know, quarterly, you know, reporting. Sure, it is going to lose millions of dollars, but they can weather the storm. The the small mom and pop that has, you know, 10 or 12 tables. And you know, and they're in there the morning at working and they're working all day and all night. I mean, they put in 15, 16, 18 hour days in those restaurants and it's going to be devastating for them when they go back up to just a little bit because you talked about the you gave like that freeway analogy where, you know, so the money, if kind of the money's going to the restaurant right away and everything like that. That sounds like that means it's also going to the driver right away. Exactly. We give the driver their own merchant account also, so the money goes straight to driver. So we don't we don't have any access to their account. We built some technology with a couple of different processors we actually architect and we did. And we actually filed a provisional patent on it. So when the driver signs up with us, now you go. He goes through a background check, he can sign up with us literally in four or five minutes. I signed myself up because I don't like to tell people, you can do it this way, and I'm not a computer guy. I mean, my phone is my computer. So when I signed up on the company, I just signed up with my phone. I just made sure I have the documents I need. I took pictures of them and all that stuff. And then we use this really kind of neat software for background checks, and they'll actually give us a background check, probably at three or four minutes now. And it uses facial recognition and things like that. So it looks at your your driver's license and then it says, OK, that's a real face. That's not a, you know, a clown face or some other Face ID that it recognizes it. So we use some pretty good stuff there. And then it's right after that. Then you get you sign up and get your merchant account and gets issued almost immediately and then you're in business. Wow. So then the customer buys, you know, the customer orders, the food they pay for. Yeah, the delivery fee basically goes directly from the customer to the driver, rather than just you guys shelling out whatever you want to give on that. Right, right. It goes directly from the driver. And then the food fee goes directly to the restaurant and then you're two or three dollars delivery fee, then just goes to you. Right? But it's so different. It is so easy. You know, it take a lot of manpower to manage it despite conditions and figure out what, and I'm sure. I mean, I've never seen the other guys have four systems, but I'm sure they're pretty sophisticated stuff. But still, any time you're you're trying to manage a bunch of money, it's just, you know, it's it's laden with cost. Oh yeah, no, that's an interesting way to do things. And then there's something about that then too, that I think that, you know, we just had that whole Prop 22 thing happened out in California. This whole challenge between whether you're an employee or an independent contractor and kind of in this gray area with most of these companies where there's a lot of stuff that kind of acts like an employee, but we're classified as an independent contractor like we're really running a business. Prop 22 or that was trying to say we can still continue to do that model. But when I look at how you guys have everything structured, it really seems much more independent for the driver because you're not, I don't know, you're actually getting paid directly by the customer. That's right. Is that what you think? And I guess what I'm going with this is I got this thing about, I know with what looks like we're going to have a new administration that is much more labor friendly and especially when it comes to the federal side of things they're going to be taking, I think, a lot closer. Look at the gig economy and. But I think that this kind of sets you up to be really more of a true independent contractor or business to business relationship than what the typical model is that's out there. Yeah. We have no worries in our mind because we are really a platform provider. We don't touch the money. There's so many things we don't do that everybody else does right. And then that was by design day one. We saw this coming. Even those two years ago, when we started it, the plan was always to be to put the driver is really the owner operator. Right? So your owns and operates his own business? We give him the tools or her the tools to do that. You know, we give a great platform. We we teach them how to do this. We teach them how to do that. But at the end of the day, they control all their money. None of it. Not a penny comes to us. Yeah. And we thought that was the best way to handle it because I think you're right. I think that there are going to be pressure put on the gig economy because they want to unionize or they want a tax or whatever it may be. And what is really interesting? The drivers themselves don't want to be employees. The vast majority, you know, so you got to figure out, how do I balance that as a as a company like us, how do we balance the things that we could do later down the road as we get bigger and stronger financially? That helps drivers even beyond what they're doing. And we've looked at a lot of different programs, you know, but I think that. Truly, the driver wants to be an independent person, he wants to drive on his own schedule, work what he wants, doesn't want his money messed with, you know, no money, what they want their money, they don't want to work now and see it tomorrow or the next day. They want to see it now. Yeah, and that's what I. That's really interesting, I mean, so. And because of the way you get this set up. You know, you allow us to have more skin in the game because we not only get our delivery fees, but if we go out and we recruit, if we sign up, a restaurant can earn money based on that. If we get another driver, we can earn money based on that. Yeah, you have a residual income of the drivers. So it's, you know, it starts, it starts at 40 percent. If you're just a side hustle driver goes 50 and five. And with this new program, we're going to introduce tomorrow night. It could go to three levels. So you start really churning out some dollars for, you know, the drivers themselves. I mean, if you if you only wanted to. Get two or three of your friends signed up their drivers, you'll never pay another dollar and a monthly subscription fee with us. You'll get you'll be free. That is one thing that is a little bit different is you do have that subscription fee for drivers. Right? I look at it, it's almost kind of like doing a franchise or something. In some ways, and yeah, last model. But the interesting thing is, if you said the delivery driver is going to make ten bucks, let's pay and it's 30 999 for 75 rides. So 75 rides generate seven or 50 bucks. And you paid $40 for it. So that's a pretty good return. Yeah. You're not even talking. You know, it's like, what is that? So it's like five percent, four percent or something like that. And then on the unlimited at 99, it's unlimited rides. So if you want to do one hundred rides, two hundred rides, 300 deliveries, whatever you might want to do, you could do. And you know what, I've seen guys that are really made some serious money that drive when I say serious money where they they had over a thousand twelve hundred fifty fifteen hour bucks taken up for their commissions, you know, to pay Uber. And with us, it's a hundred bucks. Yeah. You know, they just put whatever number it is seven eight hundred thousand bucks back in your pocket, and that's significant. So again, everything else is based on volume, operating efficiencies, logistics, all that kind of stuff. OK, now you guys are right now just got started in Nashville. Is that correct? Yeah, correct. OK. And how has that gone so far? Have you had enough time to really see any of the results as far as like the business keeping the drivers busy? Different things like that. We just we're just getting, you know, amped up. We spent the first three or four weeks signing up restaurants, you know, and then other restaurants are coming online and getting some orders where we're monitoring those to make sure that we get there on time, we pick it up, you know, all the things that we're looking for metrics to make sure we're not going to have any issues, then the next step is getting scaled up to make sure we don't have any issues now right now. Our platform is running just fine. We don't see any issues. We should be able to scale as quickly as we want in multiple markets at a time. So it's a matter of getting the referral partners engaged. That's why we're doing this call tomorrow night, starting to alert people. Here are some of the things that are coming online. These are the things that you should be looking forward to and start really positioning the company. So we went from development technology company, but at the end of the day, we're really are a marketing company. You know, we need to market our business, which does a couple of things. Obviously, it puts more riders and puts more drivers to work, you know, puts more restaurants online. So all of those people have to have touchpoints from some type of marketing. And that's that's the next big step with us. And I just actually working with a firm that is really, really good at messaging for what we want to put some humor in our stuff, you know, sure, we don't want to just be, you know, hey, we're the guy that comes out here and get your food for you, you know, just a little humor so they can see a real human touch to it. So how did you choose Nashville? How did Nashville become the choice? It didn't sound like maybe the logical choice for somebody to launch. You think something a little more glamorous? Or maybe I'm guessing Nashville by any means, but everybody thought the launch in Las Vegas. And you know, one thing I do understand because of being in startup mode for 4 years or plus, you know, the hazards of that and the pitfalls and the mistakes you can make. And I tell everybody, look, we've got to be cautious right now. We don't need to be pouding on our chest. We need to go in and run the business. Let's look at every piece of it. Look under the hood. Look under the tires filled with air. You know, all that stuff. So. The logical choice was to find a small market. Which is Nashville. OK. But what you want, though, in a small market, you still want some of the pizzazz that you get out of a big market. That's Nashville. They have music. They're international. It's called the it's city. So it made really a lot of sense when we chose Nashville to go there. It's really controllable. You know, you have Nashville itself and then you have, you know, some of the other outlying communities within 10 or 15, 20 miles of around there. So it's very easy to manage. So that's why we picked it. OK, so we're going to see a thousand restaurants online to know we're going to have a problem. We want to see, you know, 50 or 100 online to find the problem and then go, let go. Has that worked pretty well as far as, I guess so far in being able to, I guess, fulfill those deliveries? I guess it's probably counterbalanced to and getting enough restaurants for people to order, but getting enough drivers to take care of the deliveries. Right. And we have that because we're not overburdened by anything. The next big step is getting the app out there, you know, to download for the consumer, and that's where our marketing will come in to basically flood the market. And that's another reason why we chose the smaller market because we can find out in a small market as much as we could find out in the big market. But we also have more controllable on our expense side that we're not blowing our brains out marketing to get an effective download, right? So it just makes it much more easier to control for us with the same results. We'll get the same information. Sure. So I want to get you guys in Denver so I can start delivery here. How do we do that? I love Denver. My son actually graduated from University of Colorado there in Boulder. Okay. Sure. So Denver's, you know, part and parcel of our existence and my business grew up spent a lot of time in Denver going back, believe it or not, to the 70s. So, OK, I've been around, you know, I think it sounds like you kind of give give some of us maybe a little bit of power to influence. And I was able to you mentioned you got your video call coming up for your training thing tomorrow night, which is Thursday night, and I'll put a link in the show notes everybody so that you can kind of if if you listen to this before the call. I absolutely encourage you to be a part of it. If not, point you to to the Channel four trick delivers and you can kind of get the replay of it and replay of some of the copies of the bathhouses with drivers on Saturday morning. And I listen this last Saturday morning. You're kind of talking and after that call or something like that, a couple people saying, Hey, we want you to get started here. And some part of that was, well, if we start getting some restaurants signed up, then that kind of moves somebody up on the list there. Right? So the thing is, if if in a market, all it takes is six or seven liters and then motivate, you know, another 10 or 12 people, you can sign up. 500 to 1000 restaurants in four to six weeks. And then you're open for business at the same time, we see that momentum going. Once we understand the marketing side, you know what the message is going to be and how to do it, then we'll just piled on the ad dollars into the marketplace. And it's really our job really is to get the app out there for the user end user customer. What we wanted to and by making it the way we've done it with referral partners and the drivers and everything, it even reinforces that they're working for themselves even more because they're they're going to get paid. But if they took the initiative, then they could have multiple revenue streams one from the recruiting side, one from the restaurant side, one from the driver's side, you know? Yeah. And and that's why we kind of looked at the business. You know, some anomalies, you know, in the in the mix. But so far, the last couple of last week and this week so far, everything's been running fairly smooth. We haven't had a lot of. Big things, the biggest thing for us was could we get one hundred plus menus loaded? And I think we're at right at 100 right now. For Nashville Market. Yeah, because every time you get a restaurant on, somehow you've got to get that information up onto the site. Yeah. And the problem with the restaurant menu is the menu itself as a PDF file, so you can't manipulate it. So it's harder to get in the uploaded. And then and then we have to come behind it with the CSB file so we can adjust pricing if we want to do ultimately as train the restaurant tour to manage their own pricing, you know, do all this stuff that they need to do. The problem is, you know, they're just so darn busy, you know? Are there any other cities that are close to coming online at this point? We're taking a hard look at Atlanta, Houston, maybe Denver now I know some places, so yeah, we got a little traction in Atlanta and a little bit in Houston. The good news about Houston is that. The Shana who's with us, I don't know if you've heard of her, but she runs the restaurant side. She knows that market really well. She actually opened that market for DoorDash. OK, and so she's going to get with the field and start giving them leads and all that kind of stuff and tell her to go to and and then she does the training, but also perfect the training. No, and that's that's that's the part that's just interesting right now. It's it's it's kind of fun just seeing the start of something like this and you kind of wish that it gets started a little faster or something. So those of us that are not in markets that are started yet could take advantage of it. But you you put a group of guys gals together to go up in that market. You had like a said of half a dozen dozen, you could open that market in a minute. We'll just come right behind it, you know? It is. But the market, you know, we have in our database right now, we have about 100 to one hundred and sixty main markets. So Denver would be a main market. But then we had the submarkets within there like Aurora and all those little world and all that. So we have those again. So in our database right now, we have over three thousand cities, OK, out of 160 markets, and there's three thousand submarkets attached to those hundred and sixty cities efforts for getting started with something like that. Especially when you're getting off the ground in a city. Is that better that you kind of get the restaurants that are clustered together? Or yeah, yeah, if you can get clusters, it makes it easier for the driver, obviously, right? Absolutely. I could work a market, you know, like, you know, you might just want to work six or seven miles from his house. So if there's a cluster in there, he'll or she'll figure out how to work those markets, you know? Obama, I want to thank you. Anything else that you want to bring up or anything else you can think of or something like that can tell a little bit about what you're doing or any kind of message you want to leave with drivers or anything like that. Well, I would say this one is I appreciate you invited me to talk about it. Yeah, I think that, you know, the drivers, a lot of smart salespeople, so they're a little intimidated by asking, you know, a restaurant to sign up so they they have to get over that personal fear of rejection, which we all have, right? But I would like to maybe in a month as we start ramping up, getting closer to Christmas, maybe, you know, just hit me up or I'll hit you up and I'll give you an update. You know, like not that the other markets we're looking at or because once we're getting ready to open or whatever and then, you know, just uses a platform to communicate with people and let them see what's going on out there. Because I think once a driver gets involved with us, he's going to like it or she's going to like it. Yeah, yeah, they can put more of that. It's just that simple. Same thing with restaurant like I was with these guys on a call today. I was talking about they're just blown away. Yeah. You know, I know I just when I look at, you know, some of the dryer driver forums or Facebook groups and different things like that. And you always get somebody, they'll come in and they'll talk about DoorDash or they'll talk about Grubhub as we. And of course, most other drivers will then kind of shoot him down and say, Hey, we just acts like an employee or something, you know, they say, Well, we want to go out, maybe try and spread the word, get more people, get some restaurants involved or get customers involved because that'll help us stay in business and. And there's there's some truth to that, but at the same time, you don't get rewarded for that. With most situations like this, but with what you're doing, you can really feel like you're really a part of this thing. Well, yeah, because you know, it's, you know, kind of all these companies, every every company has different leadership styles, what matters to their own internal employees, external, whatever it might be. And I've always been, you know, I came from a blue collar family, so we all worked. And so, you know, you know, the value of working hard and you know, the value your time and you know, you don't realize. You know, if you're off working and you're driving, you're not with your family, you know, so you're still got to support them and you're working your tail off. All those things do matter. So from my perspective, we always try to look at the employee first in the company. That's why everybody in our company has stock options or as a stock owner, every employee. OK, so because at the end of the day, if we do the right thing in the company becomes valuable, then the people that work the hardest are going to get rewarded. Yeah, and that's no more complicated than that. You know, no, it makes sense about I want to thank you again for coming on. And I'll put links up in in our show notes and everything like that so that you can see where to go for a trip delivers. And folks, go check out the go, check out their YouTube channel if you want to really get into the nitty gritty. They've got all their trainings up on right there on the website that you can just get into. You can kind of see how to do stuff and go in on Thursday night to, you know, listen to some of the stuff coming up here or to the Saturday morning coffee with Bob and. Thanks again, Bob. OK, Ron, appreciate it. You bet. Have a good one. What do you think, Courier Nation? I don't know about you, I don't know if you're as excited about what this possibility could be as I am, but I am just looking at this model and I'm very intrigued. I got to tell you, I am really intrigued. Now, the fact of the matter is they're barely off the ground, you know? So I have no idea how well this is going to go. Let me put it this way. I'm a Nebraska football fan, and every year we all think, Hey, the team looks good on paper. And then every year they get out on the field and the execution just isn't always what it should be. But the thing about it is there are those of us who are old enough to remember a long, long, long time where nobody executed as well as they did as consistently. So I tell you what, when, when you got the plan there and you got the execution on top of it, it's an amazing thing to see. And I see something here that. And to tell you what the way it looks and the more that I think about it and look at it, it's like this thing could take off. And if the execution is there and if. If they do as well at delivering on getting the product out to the customers as they've done in delivering, I think, a very intriguing business plan. This could be really, really interesting, really fun to watch and really fun to be a part of. So I just encourage you kind of keep an eye on these guys, pay attention and go check out their YouTube channel. Go sit in on, you know, some of the the videos, the live videos that they put out. And and if you're interested, if you want them to be part of getting this thing off the ground. Shoot me a note because I can. I can get you in touch with everybody here and this is can be fun to see what happens here, you know, and I kind of hope somebody can come along and disrupt the big guys. I mean, if you want to know what kind of geek I am about this kind of thing, you ought to go check out Episode 51 or go to entrecourier.com/51 because I spent a whole episode there talking about, here's one way I think somebody could come in and just totally disrupt this industry. And I'll tell you what, if these guys pull it off? Well, they could really disrupt this industry. And for a guy like me, it'd be so fun to watch. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in here again this week. And let me ask one favor as you wrap up. Is this website is this podcast, is any of this helping you take control of your delivery business? I really hope it is, is what I want to do. I want to help you just think of this like a business, and I want to help you take control of everything that's going on. And so this is the thing if I am helping you in that way, in any way, shape or form, could you spread the word? Could you let people know about the Entre Courier website, about the Deliver on Your Business podcast? And if you're listening to this on any of the sites that you like, Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, anything that allows you leave a review, please leave a review. Let people know just because that helps us get found. And the more that people can find us, the more that we can help other people to be the boss. And that's the thing as we wrap up today, I think that's one of the things that is so exciting about this is you've got an opportunity to be in on the ground floor of something I think would be really special. But I think that Elso is more of a true business to business type model where you're going to actually working, be working as a business. And it's not a charade like some of these others. And I just I love that idea. And so that's the thing I encourage you to do today as we wrap up today is take control, look at what you're doing as a business, look for where you can control the things you can control. Take control of your delivery business, go out there and be the boss.