Do you know about - So You Want to Be a bike Courier?
Online Laboratory! Again, for I know. Ready to share new things that are useful. You and your friends.I'd been mental about becoming a bike courier for a while and then at the end of 2009 along came the postal strikes, my opportunity. They say a stepping back is a good time to start a company and after all how hard can it be? I used to deliver pizzas nearby Exeter in the late 80s on Honda C90s and Melodys but a broken leg put an end to that quite quickly. To be honest, a broken leg was not a bad outcome inspecting how I used to ride those things! After 15 years off bikes while I wasted time with death defying car crashes and a death defying marriage I now had a Honda Pan European St1100, ideal for long trips to those far flung corners of the Uk from my base in rural Devon.
What I said. It is not outcome that the actual about Online Laboratory. You read this article for information on that need to know is Online Laboratory.How is So You Want to Be a bike Courier?
My main role in life is as a singular parent carer for my disabled son but while he was at school I was left to fill the days, which I seemed to do by riding somewhere random and then riding back again before he got home. Wouldn't it be great if I could ride to different places but get person else to pay for the petrol, tyres and servicing? I live near Exeter and there aren't a lot of bike courier companies nearby me so I had a niche market. Then again, you need to ask yourself why there aren't a lot of bike couriers around. I wasn't finding for a 24/7 job as I can only work while term time and not absolutely at weekends so the lack of potential query didn't put me off.
In October last year I spent about three hours on the 'phone getting the basic necessities, bike insurance which covered me for being a courier and Goods in Transit (GiT) insurance. Just the bike insurance was a headache, some companies quoted me over £1,500 per year Tpf&T and some wouldn't even think offering me such insurance. Finally I went with Swinton Bike who seemed to offer me a good deal and by now I was bored of talking to citizen in call centres. I Googled GiT insurance and found a very helpful company called Coversure Rubery in Birmingham. Their man Mark sorted me out with a procedure which gave me up to £10,000 cover. Goods in Transit insurance covers anyone I, as a courier, am transporting. So if I was taking a £10,000 laptop to person at Heathrow Airport and it fell out of my top box onto the M4 and was crushed, I would be covered.
So, with no real planning and my usual jump in with both feet and make it up as I go along attitude I was now a bike courier, albeit one with zero experience, Devon bike Couriers was born. Good start but how do citizen find me? Where do citizen look for a courier? In this day and age everybody uses Google. If you want something in a hurry use Google. That is what I assumed and luckily I seemed to be right. First thing to do, find as many free online company directories as you can and get yourself registered with them. It is a slow and laborious process but you'll be glad later. Don't be surprised if you get lots of calls over the next few days from the directories request if you would like to upgrade, for a price. You speedily learn how to say no and hang up. Then what? Sit back and wait? No, keep pushing it! There will all the time be somewhere you can list your company that you hadn't concept of before.
Within three days of starting the company I had a job from a financial services company based hundreds of miles away who wanted me to print out some forms they emailed me, ride to Plymouth, get them signed and post them back. Yes, they called me a) because of the postal strikes and b) because they found my whole in one of the free directories I'd put myself on the day before. By now I was finding it inconvenient to ride somewhere and check Google Maps on my 'phone so I invested in a Viper helmet with an integrated Bluetooth headset and a second hand reconditioned Garmin Zumo Gps unit. Now I had my 'phone, my Gps and my head all connected. I could take calls on the move and listen to directions from the Gps.
I found freeindex.co.uk a free online company directory which didn't payment me to list my company, they make their money out of adverts on their site. I registered the devonmotorcyclecouriers.co.uk domain and had a redirect set up to my page on the freeindex site. finding their site made me look into GoogleAds where you pay only when person clicks on your advert and comes to your site. Like cheesecake this appeared to be the future. GoogleAds is not for the faint hearted and you can absolutely haemorrhage a lot of money for no real return, so be warned.
For the next few months work trickled in but not regularly, at this stage I was lucky if I got one 'phone call a week. I didn't panic, I was just testing the water to see what it was all about. My children kept me busy and I didn't have a mortgage so it wasn't a make or break situation. I took some marketing advice and ultimately got nearby to development my own website. Luckily I was a web developer in a previous life so I built a easy one page website instead of directing citizen to the somewhat confusing arrangement I had before.
I had the steady trickle of jobs in the first few months of 2010 ranging from documents from a local accountants up to companies House in Cardiff to a box from a local manor house up to the owner in London and other things in between. The last few weeks of March were good, as citizen wanted paperwork delivered to their head offices nearby the country before the end of the financial year. In April I wanted more than a few 'phone calls a week so I fine tuned my advertising strategy on Google, upped my advertising allocation and things absolutely started to take off. Realising that there was query for a bike courier in Devon I also arranged some collective Liability insurance, again through Mark at Coversure Rubery. This covers me for example, if I put a box on the ground and person trips over it, breaks their leg and then decides to sue me.
It was nearby April that I had my weirdest job to date - transporting a live fish from a farm near the M5 in Devon to a testing laboratory just South of Boston in Lincolnshire. It had to be alive when it got there for some tests to be done. Nobody complained so I assume it was still Ok. The hardest part of that job was trying to stop the water sloshing out of the fish tank strapped to my seat. (Only joking, it was in a a special fish communication box about the size of a shoe box). It is now July and I'm probably doing an average of 800 miles a week. Being tucked away down in Devon means most of my work involves distance. Exeter to London and back is practically a 400 mile round trip. Motorways might not all the time be the shortest route but they will invariably be the quickest, due to the higher average speeds and they do mean easy money. Tailbacks, should you be unfortunate sufficient to get one, can give you invaluable filtering practise though. Miles and miles of filtering will make you tired, so stop and enjoy the sight of all those car drivers stuck in their cages before filtering a few miles more.
So what is the St1100 like as a courier bike? Mine is a 1999 Abs-Tcs model and I find it ideal, low centre of gravity and the 28 litre petrol tank helps. I can cruise at 90mph from Exeter to London without worrying about stopping for petrol on the way. citizen say the Pan European is all day comfortable and compared to a lot of modern bikes it is but after 8 hours sitting on a thorough seat in the rain, it isn't! I've recently invested in an Air Hawk inflatable seat pad which makes the world of difference. citizen might think I have piles but it does transform my comfort. I bought the bike in April 2009 as an MoT failure with 69,000 miles on the clock, I rebuilt the calipers, changed the brake pads put new tyres on and it was good to go. It has now done over 85,000 miles and I've found the traction control system (Tcs) especially beneficial on wet Lincolnshire roundabouts. There seem to be a lot of roundabouts there! If you have big feet you will rub the soles of your boots a lot in corners. You have to move your toes onto the footpeg and see if you can grind the hero blobs instead.
The St is nearly 300Kg fully fuelled so if you push it, the front end will slide, just relax, ease off the throttle and let it do it's thing, you will get nearby the corner. The only major failure I've had has been the alternator which let go on the way back from Thruxton Bsb last year. This was not long after I'd bought the bike and David Silver Spares had one in stock for a lot less money than Mr Honda wanted. It was fitted by Bridge Honda in Exeter who I use for my major servicing.
It is a very good bike for getting to London but riding it nearby the centre of the city on a sweltering hot Friday lunchtime will make you sweat, lots. Don't try and ride like the other couriers, they ride in London every day. Take it easy and join in where you can, you can't get a Pan European through that gap you just saw a scooter go through! If you are too aggressive in the traffic your clutch will slip and the cooling fan will pump out so much excess heat you'll think you are in Dubai. Slow and steady wins the race and all that other stuff your Mum told you when you were younger. I've had one incident since I've been in company and that was when person on a roundabout put the front of their car through my pannier as I rode past. I didn't come off but I had to ride home from London with three quarters of my pannier strapped to my seat. I'm now practised in the arts of fibreglass, body filler and florescent yellow paint. I'm just waiting on the new subframe to arrive which I'll fit in the summer holidays and then nobody can claim not to have seen me.
If you don't like riding in the rain don't become a courier, you haven't got a choice, especially in the Uk. Motorways might be a bit boring but they are a good way of getting to major cities quickly. The days can be long, it might be fun riding to the other side of the country but don't forget that you have to ride home again practically immediately. If you have time after a delivery you can all the time ride home cross country on A roads to keep yourself amused.
I'm no bike courier expert, these are just things I have learnt in the last 9 months which other citizen might find useful. I've lost count of the whole of citizen request me for a job since I started the company and I am steadily construction a list of hopefuls. If you do get other citizen to work for you, make sure they are self employed, employing citizen yourself costs too much money. There are a lot of citizen out there finding for a free lunch and a company bike.
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