What Sort Of Experience Do You Need To Own A FedEx Route?

You’re excited after you’ve heard about a business with ultra low risk relative to other businesses and you go up to tell your best friend about how you want to buy a route.

Then you hear something like this,

A FedEx route?! Wait…have you even run a route before? You’d hate that! 

I know you’ve probably been talking to your friends and asking them if buying a FedEx route is a good idea or not at some point. If your friend has only owned one type of business, or if your friend has only ever been an employee, they will almost definitely respond with this:

I dunno…Have you ever even delivered anything? Newspapers? Bread? Pizza!?

How do I know? Because I’ve been helping people for years, and I know employee mindsets vs business owner mindsets. So, when you answer that you haven’t delivered anything, many times you’ll think that maybe this business isn’t for you. However, I would encourage you to think a little differently. A better line of thinking is this –

Maybe your employee (or single business owner) friend shouldn’t be giving route business advice.

I’m sure you wouldn’t listen to them about getting brain surgery. But they’re your friends, and you feel inclined to listen to them about this whole ‘routes’ thing; even though listening to them about this subject is just as ludicrous.

Everyone has opinions to spout out the second you ask. However, a mentor of mine once said to ignore 99 out of 100 of people’s opinions and find the one person that knows what they’re talking about…and start listening to that one person very closely about that one topic.

Making good decisions, especially business decisions, shouldn’t be based on a democratic vote from your friends.

Leave Democracy To This Guy…well, maybe.

Successful people know where to seek good counsel for a variety of subjects. I’ve helped a huge variety of people ranging from real estate developers, serial entrepreneurs, regular employees, to high tech consultants from Silicon Valley.

Most of these people had never been in a loud, dirty, diesel chugging box truck in their life. But they learned the business and are successful at it,

And very few of them had prior experience in the logistics industry to start with.

Nor did they need or even want to become a driver first. Of course, if you can drive your own routes in the case of emergency, I’d encourage that. But be aware the majority of new owners in this business never drive their own routes – not even for a day (that doesn’t mean owners aren’t working doing other things).

So make sure you’re not putting ridiculous limitations on yourself by asking terrible questions such as:

1) Should I have experience as a FedEx driver before I buy a route?

2) Should I work at a delivery company before I buy routes?

3) Should I get my CDL first to see how I like it before I buy a FedEx route?

4) Should I ask some more friends that don’t know what they’re talking about for their opinion?

5) Should I ask my friend that is an employee at FedEx Express if a route is a good idea?

Questions I Never Ask Myself.

6) Should I ask my local friendly FedEx driver if owning a route is a good business move?

Take a guess what my answer is to all of these questions is. If you’ve ever been paralyzed from making a business decision, it’s likely because you were listening to too many people that have no idea what they’re talking about and not enough time focusing on listening to the few people that do. So, it’s important to realize that success in routes comes from a variety of backgrounds.

“See me at the Kia Motor Mile Sales Event!” said Elon Musk never.

Elon Musk didn’t start off by selling Kias to “see how he liked it,” before he started Tesla. Jeff Bezos didn’t work as a cashier at Barnes and Noble before he started Amazon.com. And you shouldn’t worry for one second whether you’ve delivered anything in your life. And I could go on and on, but the reason why this is the case is because owning and running a business has its own intrinsic joy and reward (and stress and heartache, to be fair), the rest is just noise.

If you’re seriously considering routes, then go ahead and let’s get started. I’ll tell you how to ask the right questions and perform correct due diligence with a route you’re actually interested in. We go through many routes together, line by line, to determine what will be the best route for you. We also can determine what’s actually required from an owner and see how to best manage that so that you move down this path with as little risk as possible.

Hopefully this clears things up about FedEx and how ‘newbie’ friendly this model can be for many people of various backgrounds.