Ep. 111 Corey Liebrecht from Zippity Zip Courier

Barb 0:01
Are you ready to make the phone ring the website ping and the till ding? One of the best kept secrets in any community is its network of local businesses, businesses that rely on delivery, foot traffic and phone calls. Those same businesses that support your kids sports teams, donate to your fundraising efforts and provide the expertise to get something from location A to B, but no more secrets.

From those skinned knee lessons that will make you wince, to the tell all exposees. These everyday people are doing extraordinary things in their business. Welcome to The Secret Life of local. I’m your host Barb McGrath, Google girl and founder of the Get Found Digital Marketing Program for local businesses.

Today, we’re sharing the secrets of one local business on how they went from day to day grind to local business owner and now they’re helping other local businesses get their merchandise from point A to point B in a hotshot manner.

Today’s guest is Corey Liebrecht from Zippity Zip Courier, a local courier that can get your package from A to B fast, cost effectively and efficiently. So tune in and let’s hear from Corey.

Welcome, Corey, tell us a little bit about yourself. And Zippity Zip Courier, which I tried saying that seven times fast and that did not go well.

Corey 0:09
Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. A little bit about myself. I’ve grown up in Regina, I lived here all my life, went to high school here graduated and pretty much started at that time, but was Ipsco, went straight out there to work and spent the next 33 years out there doing various jobs, and then decided it was time to retire. But I was a little too young to actually retire, retire so to speak. So I decided that, you know, it was something else that I had to do out there and starting Zippity Zip Courier was something I came up with and decided to do, and I’m actually quite enjoying it. And it’s my first time ever, you know, doing something like this, becoming an entrepreneur, so to speak. And starting my own business. I just kind of dove into it. Both feet first. And it’s learned along the way. So.

Barb 1:14
Excellent. So you went from being a heavy equipment operator, which is a very skilled trade to being a courier. So you’re using literally different muscles, different sides of your brain. What like, what was the impetus behind? Hey, you know what, I want to be a courier for the next number of years. What was that impetus?

Corey 1:34
Well, it was actually my wife telling me that if I didn’t do something after I retired, she’d divorced me.

Barb 1:43
So ay to go.

Corey 1:44
It turns out to starting your own business is a little cheaper than getting a divorce, I guess so.

Barb 1:49
Yes. Way to go. Mrs. Corey!

Corey 1:51
Yes, so actually, it was you know, I thought that coming out of like, I started it right in the middle of the pandemic right of last year in 2021. And I kind of figured there was a need for this type of service, right? Ours is a little bit of a different service as a courier, we specialize in same day delivery, and hotshot one hour or less service. So if somebody gets a hold of us and says we need something, you know, by, it’s, it’s 10 o’clock, and we need it before 11. We can actually assign a driver to that immediately, and get that delivery done. So it’s, it’s in that kind of direction that I thought we could go, you know, and that little bit of a specialty was missing here in Regina in the courier service. So that’s why I started it.

Barb 2:45
Awesome. So do you focus on the business to business market or business to consumer, or even consumer to consumer? Like, if I as a resident of the city, call you? Can you do a delivery for me as well?

Corey 2:58
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we we concentrate on a little bit of everything, right? So consumer to consumer, if you’re somebody in the city that’s just looking for simple delivery, you know, hey, I need to get these papers somewhere or a letter somewhere or parcels someplace, in, give us a call. And we’ll come and pick it up from you and take it where it needs to be.

Barb 3:20
Okay. And because you started the business during that COVID time period, did you find that it was particularly busy because for a while there, we had you know, contactless delivery and all those sorts of things.

Corey 3:34
It was and it still kind of is right. It seems to be picking up even a little bit more now that COVID is, you know, so much over I guess you’d say. But during that time, it was more, we were just people were just getting to know us. And that’s one of the things that we’re still kind of struggling with is getting our name out there and making sure that people know who we are and what we’re doing. So but yeah, we we did find it was, you know, fairly busy for us.

Barb 4:09
Okay, let’s talk about that for a second. So you talked about getting your name out there. So how do people find you? What are they googling for? What are they searching for? How does someone actually find you?

Corey 4:21
Well, they’re searching if they you know, they’re searching for Regina, courier or courier in Regina. They can certainly look us up, you know, online on Google. We have a website, we have a Twitter, we have Instagram account and Facebook is normally where we see most of our traffic from right now. So that’s where people can find us.

Barb 4:44
Okay, so that’s where the majority of people are coming from. So what are some crazy things that you’ve delivered over the years then?

Corey 4:52
Well, let’s see. One of the one of the craziest things I did deliver was a I trailered not my trailer, but I trailered somebody 10 sheep! Yes, I actually went out to the farmer and we loaded up 10 sheep with the back of a trailer, and we took them to another farmers place. So that was one of my strangest calls that I’ve ever done so far,

Barb 5:22
You know, and that is, that’s a really strange one, because farmers are usually pretty good with having their own trailers and equipment and, you know, being able to move livestock.

Corey 5:31
So it just seemed to be that day that they were stuck. And they called me and said, Hey, do you have a truck to haul this trailer? We have the trailer? And I said, sure. I’ll do that for you.

Barb 5:39
Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s a very interesting one. What about the most expensive delivery you ever made?

Corey 5:49
The most expensive delivery I’ve made so far. It was. It was. I don’t know if I should say it or not. But it was a check for over a million and a half dollars. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. And the reason I seen that it was because it was in an envelope. Okay. And it was being delivered from a lawyer to a bank. So okay, that was probably my biggest one yet that you know, money wise. Yes.

Barb 6:18
You know what, I was actually expecting that you might say something like diamonds or something, you know, like that I wasn’t expecting? Oh, no, usually, you know, checks are in an envelope, and then they go wherever.

Corey 6:30
That’s what surprised me about it. It was like, boy, you guys are really trusting on this one, obviously.

Barb 6:37
Yeah, no kidding. Oh, isn’t that an interesting one? So Corey, how are you feeling about the leap from manual labor? To like, now you’re, you’re really using your brain on a daily basis to schedule how many of our drivers you have. And you know, just being an entrepreneur, you know, what, at a time in your life, where lots of people are just gonna say, I’ve had enough. So are you feeling about that?

Corey 7:04
You know I feel good about it. It’s actually keeping me really busy. Some days, I actually say now that I put in more time and more hours than I did when I was actually working. It just seems like the day doesn’t stop at five o’clock. There’s always something to do. And as I’m going sometimes, still, you know, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night, answering emails and doing all the busy behind the scenes stuff, so to speak, right. So I do love getting out there, though. I love driving. I love meeting the people. And, you know, getting to talk to people. One of my favorite things to do is I deliver for a couple of bakeries here in the city. Okay. And it’s always fun when you can take a nice big cake to somebody, like from Queen City cakes I deliver for and, you know, it’s nice to take it to the door and say happy anniversary year. Happy birthday to you. And you get a real nice reaction from that. So it’s one of my one of my favorite things to do. And it’s also nice to surprise husband sometimes when they don’t know their wife has delivered something and you’ve delivered it to the door. And you’re like, oh, okay, thank you very much.

Barb 8:21
Or vice versa? Because, you know, sometimes a husband orders something for boat or the truck.

Corey 8:29
Hey, can you pick me up these bumpers, please. But don’t tell my wife about him just kind of set him in the garage?

Barb 8:34
Exactly. Oh, yeah. I could just imagine, you know, it’s funny that you mentioned clean city cakes, because I was wondering if one of the things that you were doing was some of those types of food deliveries? You know, maybe not an I don’t know, like, if somebody decided to get a pizza and they didn’t want to use Uber or skip the dishes, can they call you?

Corey 8:57
Well, normally we try to stay away from that kind of stuff. Because other deliveries that are doing that, you know, we tend to stay away from those kinds of deliveries and let those guys do that stuff themselves. And you know, what will tend to stay with bakeries, or we can also do stuff like if people need groceries picked up, or something like that. We’ll do that for them.

Barb 9:23
Yeah, that makes sense. Um, oh, I lost my train of thought I was going to ask you one more question. Okay, let’s talk about how everything comes together from a logistic standpoint. How many drivers do you have right now?

Corey 9:35
Actually, there’s just myself and a couple of temporary drivers that we have. We’re still growing right now, like I said, so. I shouldn’t say they’re part time not temporary. But yeah, that’s we seem to be able to handle our volume of what we got right now with that. But we’re, you know, we’re always looking to expand and the more that we can expand the more business that we can get The more drivers will be able to hire right?

Barb 10:03
So yeah, exactly. And I’m guessing that one of the things that you really enjoy doing then is just driving.

Corey 10:10
Oh, it is. Yeah, it was something I did for 20 years as a heavy equipment operator. I mean, it wasn’t all over the place, but it was still driving. Right. And I really enjoy that. Yeah, it’s, you have to enjoy something like that. And you have to have the patience for it. You’re out in the road over the city, and you’re in traffic all the time. So it it’s challenging, but you know, it’s rewarding at the same time too.

Barb 10:36
Yeah, absolutely. Have you ever thought of I have thrown on the bike shorts and doing bike courier services in the nice months here that we have, as short lived as they are.

Corey 10:49
I’m sorry, I didn’t catch on. Yeah.

Barb 10:51
Have you ever thought about doing bike courier services?

Corey 10:56
You know, that’s something that I has crossed my mind. And maybe someday we’ll step into that. Because we do have short deliveries that we do downtown for for lawyers offices, and, and things like that. So, you know, sometimes we’re going downtown, and we’re picking up from one place and walking down the block with it or across the street. Right. So that might be something to look at for later deliveries in the future. It would be certainly that somebody else isn’t doing so it would definitely be a first I think

Barb 11:29
Yes, exactly. You know, it’s funny. It’s something that I’ve often thought about in terms of, you know, just delivery and just in general. So, you know, I think back to when my kids were little, and my kids are in their teens now. But I think back to when they were little we used to have one day a week where we weren’t allowed to use the vehicle. So if the kids wanted to go someplace, it had to be in the bike trailer, or if they were old enough, you know, they had to be able to bike. And it was a great learning for them. But be from a fitness standpoint, it was a you know, really good commitment on my part. And then of course, they get bigger and older and busier. And so some of those sorts of things start to slide by the wayside. And, you know, I often look back at, you know, the couple of years that we did that. And like we went some distances, we live in the far south end of the city, and I would bike up to the RCMP to go to the museum, just for example, with the bike trailer behind me. So fitness wise, it was a fantastic thing.

Corey 12:33
Oh, yeah, definitely. There’s a lot of advantages to it other, you know, fitness wise, it really you can’t be surprised at how quickly you can gain that, you know, go farther, go farther, go farther all the time. Before you know what you’re doing. kilometers, you know, lots of kilometers.

Barb 12:52
So exactly. And I would think, especially when you’re in that downtown core, a bike is probably faster than a car, finding a parking spot plugging a meter, right, doing all those sorts of things.

Corey 13:07
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that’s a challenge right there in itself. Some days it’s finding parking downtown and always having to plug the meters. And we don’t charge our clients for any of that stuff. That’s just kind of you know, it’s coming out of your business, it is the cost of doing business. Right knows. And that can add up to after a while. Sometimes we’re downtown, you know, 8-10 times a day, right. So if you’re always bugging and we’re driving around looking for a parking spot, and trust me, the commissioners and parking enforcement people downtown, take your job pretty seriously.

Barb 13:40
They do. Absolutely. Sometimes I wonder if they’re on commission?

Corey 13:44
Yes, almost right.

Barb 13:48
So like gas prices, that must have had a huge impact on your business, and I’m just talking about gas prices must have had a huge impact on what you do and the rates that you needed to charge that it did,

Corey 14:03
Actually, we did have to increase our rates, because the gas prices were just going up enormously, so fast. And to tell you the truth, it really was a struggle for for us to do that. Because we want to stay competitive, and we want to stay fair to our clients as well, right. We’re not trying to gouge them or overpriced them or anything like that. So when we did it, we informed all of them that we were doing it and the response back was actually very positive and understanding from all of them, right and which made it a lot easier to do. And so we feel right now that we’re at a rate that we can live with and that they can live with and that is you know, that we can do it with the gas prices and inflation where it is right now. So the good thing about our businesses, we don’t have a lot of overhead to gas prices, you know, maintenance of vehicles, you know, some office supplies and stuff like that is our biggest cost, right? So in that way, it’s good for us, you know that we don’t have that many costs. So we can kind of keep our rates down to right.

Barb 15:20
And I suspect at the time that you needed to contact clients and let them know that rates were going to go up, I expect you weren’t the first one to have to do that. Anyone who is doing deliveries, I think nowadays, whether it’s that pizza driver, Uber, like any of those guys are being impacted by those prices. So you probably weren’t the first.

Corey 15:44
I don’t think we were and we found some of our clients actually, because they already established their rates and their prices and stuff like that adjusted to it as well. So they kind of knew what was coming. And they just went and adjusted their side of what they had to do as well to, to do with it. Right.

Barb 16:04
So when you’re planning out your logistics for delivery, are you using anything fancy, like Google Map to plan out your routes?

Corey 16:19
We depend on Google Maps quite a bit right to get us around the city. And after a while, you get to know where you’re going and places that where it is right, pretty much. But basically, we don’t have a big system where everything is tracked or anything like that. We keep it pretty simple. I mean, you’ve given us a phone call, tell us what you need, if today or even tomorrow. And we’ll schedule a time when it needs to be picked up. And we’ll come and get it get all the information from you that we need to get. And then we will get it to its delivery. And yeah, and once it’s there, we make a phone call to make sure that we will let you know that the delivery has been made. And it’s made it to where it is. And we try to always make unless it’s, you know, non contact delivery or something like that, we always try to make contact with the recipient, because we don’t like to leave packages anywhere where they can be taken or stolen there. So we always try to make sure that we make contact with the recipient, we do everything that we can to do that, you know, even if we have to phone them. So and if we can’t, well, we just try our best to leave it in a safe place for them right? Yeah, so yeah, we keep it pretty simple for everybody.

Barb 17:47
And, you know, keeping it simple is probably something that clients really appreciate nowadays, because I think for a lot of, for so many of the things that we do nowadays, there’s so much technology involved, and it’s become so complex. So whether you’re buying something online, and then you have to wait for the delivery, and you’re getting confirmations and and even when you’re shopping locally, you know lots of local businesses are shipping, but then there’s a bunch of text involved. And you need to confirm this. And there’s something to be said for simple, right?

Corey 18:21
Yeah. And we’re finding our customers really liked that. Like we’ve even had some customers that are switched over from other companies, right? And told us that like the simplicity about this, it’s just so easy for us. Yeah. And we don’t have to go through the computer system. And we don’t have to, you know, to enter a bunch of stuff, and then wait for replies and everything else like that, right. So simple. It’s fast. It’s easy. And that’s the way we like to keep it for everybody. So

Barb 18:49
yeah, exactly. So when you’re looking at a day’s worth of delivery, do you find that most often you can, you know, 24 hour turnaround? You said you even have a one hour hotshot service. Are you just kind of planning out your day, knowing what you’ve got? And if you have to slot something in, you know, how do you make sure you get everything done in that day?

Corey 19:09
That’s pretty much what we do is that if we know ahead of time, we’ve got everything scheduled and slotted in and figured out ahead of time of what we’re going and what we have to do. And yes, we do get those phone calls or texts, where people are like, Hey, can you do this for us? And it’s not always a rush delivery, right? They’ll give us a call and they’ll say, you know, can you have it there by three this afternoon? It’s in the morning, right? So that’s easy for us to slot somebody in and pick that call up and do it for them. We don’t find that we really have any kind of problems or or overlap in that regard where we’re rushing, where we got two or three deliveries all in one hour to do we find that we were pretty good with getting everything organized.

Barb 19:54
Good. Yeah, that’s awesome. And I know it might seem a ways away still but Christmas is not that far away. So I, you know, do you think you’ll be busier at Christmas time? Will you be doing some of those last minute delivery?

Corey 20:08
Always busier at Christmas? Yeah, like Christmas time is always one of our busiest times of the season, right? So we even expect to have to hire another couple of drivers for that time of season, right. And already, our customers are telling us that they expect it to be busy this year. To be prepared for, you know, for us to have a lot of deliveries for them to do. So. That’s nice. That sense being that it’s, you know, still summertime, and they’re telling us that they expect to be busy already for Christmas. So

Barb 20:46
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that’s, you know, that’s so true. Because as we watch the business cycle going into and out of COVID, you know, we’ve seen the up, we’ve seen the down. And I know a lot of folks had an initial bubble when masks came off in Saskatchewan back in March. And then, you know, there was a little bit of a business. People were holding their breath, because consumers didn’t initially come out the way businesses were hoping. So then a number of businesses started to slow down again, kind of June, July and August. But knowing that retailers are expecting that the Christmas season, maybe even Black Friday, for those that do participate, you know, will be a good season for them. You know, I think that’s a very good thing, because businesses have been on a rough road, these last almost three years, right? Probably three years since this started.

Corey 21:52
Yeah, definitely. And we’ve seen that up and down curve too in ourselves, right with them. We I mean, we ride the roller coaster with them when they’re busy. We’re busy. When they’re not busy. We’re not busy. So we like to see the uptick, obviously, in are hoping just like everybody else, that it’s going to be a great fall and a great Christmas for everybody. And we can all look forward to something a little more positive, right?

Barb 22:19
Yeah, exactly. I agree. So does the missus help with some of the deliveries since she was, you know, holding business or divorce over your head?

Corey 22:29
Oh yeah. She’s involved in the business quite a bit. She does do deliveries. And she works on I guess you’d say that the inside of the back end of things, right. So she looks after the business with all the accounting and planning and scheduling and stuff like that. So she does a lot of work herself. Yeah. She’s, she’s a big help. And my right hand person, so to speak. Without her I’d be probably 10 times as busy.

Barb 23:00
Exactly. So she’s kind of that Chief logistics officer or chief financial officer.

Corey 23:07
Well. She’s in charge of keeping our poop in a group here.

Barb 23:12
So somebody’s got to you know, somebody’s got to look after those details in a business doesn’t matter who does it.

Corey 23:22
There always has to be somebody looking after the business on the other end, right.

Barb 23:26
Yeah, exactly. Corey, we’re almost at a time here today, can I get you to share with our audience, where they find you on social media and your website so that if anyone needs a local deliver, they can give you a shout?

Corey 23:41
Sure, you can find us on our website at www.zippityzipcourier.com. Or you can go to our Facebook page to zippity zip courier and you can find us there. And we also have a Twitter account. It’s zippityzipcourier2021. Or sorry, that’s our Instagram, and our Twitter is @Courierzip my goodness. Yeah, but yeah, You can find us on the web page and a Facebook page, we get a lot of traffic there. And, you know, we always appreciate that if you leave us post and you know, whether you’re appreciated our business or if you even have something that we can help you with, you know, we appreciate any kind of comments on there. So

Barb 24:30
Awesome. Well, that is fantastic. So on that note, if you want to sell your story, then you need to tell your story. And there’s no better place to start than being a guest on The Secret Life show.

If you would like to be a guest you can email me at Barb@abovethefold.live or reach out on our Facebook and Instagram pages at Abovethefold.ca.

I’m your host Barb McGrath, Google girl and local business cheerleader. Remember you worked hard for your success don’t keep it a secret bye for now.