Let’s start with the most important part – finding work.
The vast majority of you reading this will be self-employed owner-drivers, or run a small courier business with probably 2-3 vans at most. And we’ll also make an educated guess (from our own experience) that whilst you have a couple of your own customers, a good portion of your work is made up from ‘load exchange’ services. You know the ones. CX, SDCN… maybe DeliveryApp – although that’s not technically an ‘exchange’.
If you’re not already using any of those, our reviews are a good place to get started to learn whether they’re right for you. If you don’t have time to read the full reviews right now here’s a quick TL;DR for you;
- CX – Very expensive, but has the most work usually
- SDCN – much more affordable, but typically less work available
- DeliveryApp – Free, but we really struggled to get any work from it in H2 2024
The simplest / easiest and possibly the best return for your time and money is to research your nearest courier companies and ask to get on their books as a sub-contractor. Some of them will operate ‘old-school’ where you let them know you’re available and they just ring you when a job comes in. Others will have their own apps that you can download to get notified of their work (such as HBC Logistics’ SmartLM Load Dashboard)
Whatever path you take, this is the best time of the year as a self-employed driver to be making an effort to network and connect. There will be less work around usually from January to March, then things tend to pick up again at Easter all the way to the summer.
We’ve heard rumours there are some new projects in the works that could have a big impact on delivery work this year, but we’ll update you as and when we get more concrete information about anything.
If you struggled throughout 2024 then the biggest point to understand is that you need to change something if your previous efforts weren’t yielding results.
Save money and life gets easier
One thing that can make a huge change when you’re a self-employed driver is to take a good look at your expenses.
When you start to spot the difference between an essential cost and a luxury expense, you’ll make your money go further. That way when the work comes in everything gets easier. We realised that the cost of our mobile phone bill had crept up over the years and was ridiculous. £60 per month is not necessary for most people, and we’ve trimmed that to just £10/month with almost the same amount of data by not upgrading the handset.
Make sure when your insurance renewal comes around you research and get as many quotes as possible. It really is amazing how much money you can save. Courier insurance is a challenging market for insurers and some are able to offer much better premiums than others, it just takes time to learn which ones. We’ve seen completely crazy quotes of over £5000 for a single owner-driver operation before, but we’ve also managed to get our own quotes down as close as just £1000 on a small van.
The devil is in the detail when it comes to insurance, make sure to check they know exactly what you do, and haven’t made any assumptions. We known from experience that sometimes they will just automatically assume you do parcel multi-drop instead of same-day, or vice-versa.
Use any delivery work down-time to sort the other stuff
If things do go quiet, make sure to get any admin or van maintenance done while you’re off the road. Sometimes this industry can be like a light-switch and one minute you’re sat on your backside doing nothing, the next you’re driving London to Manchester 6 days a week and barely have time to grab a Greggs sausage roll.
So check your oil, tyres and water. Give that van a clean and tidy your ratchet straps up so that when the phone rings or the app notification goes… you’re ready to dive on it.
