Since April 2007 Daune Fraser has been operating Pedal Foot Cycle Courier Service, an urban mail and package delivery service that seeks to provide a quick, reliable and, she emphasizes, a “totally trustworthy service” to a small but growing number of clients in and around the capital.
Cycle and motor cycle courier services are not uncommon in the busy capitals of North America and Europe and, increasingly, in the Caribbean. Time was, when these services sold themselves with a high degree of success on account of their speedy delivery amidst the traffic congestion in busy urban capitals. These days, technology has significantly changed the preferred means of communication, removing a sizeable share of the courier service market.
What Daune has done is to structure Pedal Foot to capture a small share of the remaining market. The need for confidentiality and the size and importance of some documents still makes hand delivery a viable service. What she has done is to design her business to embrace just that range of services – transporting packages, doing the shopping and delivering invoices, flowers, chocolates – which, she says, people either still prefer to do “by hand,” or else, cannot be done by technology, for all of its formidable accomplishments.
These days, the slight 28-year-old works alone, receiving assignments on her cellphone then challenging the busy city traffic on her cycle to respond to the many and varied demands of her clients. The boundaries of her delivery service extend to Turkeyen on the East Coast Demerara and Houston on the East Bank. Not surprisingly, she has, over time, become an expert cyclist.
Since last February when Stabroek Business first met and spoke with Daune there has been some measure of growth in her business. Confidentiality, she says, precludes her from disclosing either the names of her clients or the range of tasks usually assigned to her. “I can tell you that all of it is entirely legal even though sometimes there are jobs that require me to be discreet. “
It is, she says, a seasonal job with slow periods and busy ones. When she spoke with Stabroek Business just before midday last Monday she had already made six deliveries that morning.
Amazingly, Daune has found time for two other part-time jobs one of which takes her out of Georgetown at least three evenings each week. Pedal Foot, however, is her primary preoccupation, “I believe that there is a great deal of potential for the kind of service that Pedal Foot provides and my focus is on building it into a successful courier service.”
Daune says that she has been sufficiently encouraged by the potential of the service to acquire four new cycles. In the short term she is currently seeking to employ one person to work the streets with her. By the end of 2009 she hopes to find riders for the remaining cycles. “My goal by the end of 2009 is to be off the road and managing Pedal Foot as a viable business from an established base.”
Like most small and micro businesses operating in Guyana there are challenges to the growth of Pedal Foot Courier Service. Daune’s base is her home and, once she hits the streets, her cellphone. She is, she says, currently examining the prospects of support through microfinancing, primarily to finance the creation of a formal base, to support the acquisition of additional equipment to expand the service and to market Pedal Foot more aggressively. “I really do believe that marketing Pedal Foot is the key to its expansion,” she says.
Her longer term ambition is to own and manage Pedal Foot as an efficiently structured and viable business venture with a sizeable share of the courier service market. “Anything else that I do is either to support Pedal Foot or out of a personal interest.”
When you ask Daune what she believes has been her primary accomplishment since the establishment of Pedal Foot Cycle Courier Service she responds without hesitation. “I believe that the fact that I have been able to establish a lasting relationship with some clients is my most satisfying achievement up to this time. It tells me that my clients, some of which are important business places and organizations, are satisfied with the quality of service that I provide. That encourages me.”
