If you want to be an entrepreneur, then presumably, you’re going to come up with a company idea. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to make money, and that probably means company and product creation. If you’re not creating and selling products, then your business might offer a service instead.
Let’s assume that you want to create a company and make products that you’ll sell. You have an idea you feel strongly about, and you have the funding in place to get the whole thing off the ground. You have hired individuals who you feel can help you achieve your mission as well.
You’ll next need to come up with a way to distribute those products. There are a few different ways you might do that, so let’s talk about some of them right now.
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Ship Your Products by Truck
The trucking industry is a vital part of the economy. As an entrepreneur, if you create products in a workshop or factory, hiring trucks and drivers to get those products to stores that carry them potentially makes sense.
The pandemic showed many individuals who didn’t necessarily understand it before how trucks tie into supply chains. Trucks shipped items like toilet paper and canned goods across the country to where people experienced shortages. Without those trucks, communities could not have accessed what they needed.
If you partner with a trucking company, you should soon find that trucks can move your products easier than many other vehicles can. If you’re planning on taking your business national, partnering with a well-known trucking company might very well be the best option.
Ship Your Products by Plane
If you hope to take your company overseas, plane is one of the most obvious ways to do that. You can create your products here in the US and use planes to take them to other countries where you’re trying to establish a presence.
You might also make your products in a foreign country already. For instance, maybe you have a factory in Japan, but you’re trying to introduce your product line to the UK.
Plane shipping isn’t cheap, but it may be the best way to go international. You can partner with a cargo plane company that will make sure you get your products where they need to go.
Just know that shipping fees can vary as gas prices fluctuate. We have seen quite a bit of that lately.
Ship Your Products by Car
If you’re an entrepreneur and you just started your company, you might only make a few select products rather than a large variety. Also, you may not have a significant product demand yet.
If so, don’t feel bad about that. Every company starts somewhere, even huge ones like Walmart or Old Navy. You might only have a few stores willing to carry your products at first. You can gradually grow from there.
If you don’t have many stores willing to carry your products yet, you might not need planes or trucks. You may only produce a few hundred of your products at one time.
If so, you might drive a car and deliver those products to the stores yourself. You can use your personal vehicle for this if you have one, or you can hire someone to do it for you.
If you do this yourself, you’re using your vehicle for your company’s sake. If you do this, you can claim the gas mileage on your tax return.
In time, if you follow this business model, you might hire additional car drivers to help with product delivery. If you expand even further than that, you might go with trucks at some point.
You Can Ship Products by Boat
If you’re trying to break into the overseas market, you might use a boat for transport help instead of a plane. That’s sometimes more cost-effective, but shipping by boat can take longer.
If you have customers or stores that carry your products, and they want what you have to offer them faster, plane is likely the best transport method. If your customers or store owners don’t have such an urgent need, boat shipments become a more viable option.
You Can Deliver Products by Bike
Of course, maybe you’re an entrepreneur who starts out with a modest idea. Perhaps you create small, bespoke product batches, and you have a single storefront out of which you sell them.
Some companies start like this, and that’s fine. If that’s your situation, you likely won’t need to worry about boats, planes, or trucks yet.
You might employ a few bike messengers who deliver your products. If you’re just starting to deliver, this might be the way to go.
If you want to do this, though, you’ll need to factor in the weather. For instance, if you have a New England-based storefront, you can use bike delivery in the summer. You probably can’t do it in the winter.
If your store is in California or somewhere that doesn’t often have harsh winter weather, you might do year-round bike delivery. You can do this for a while until you grow large enough to abandon this model.
Maybe you don’t plan to expand all that much, though. You may want to dominate a particular geographic region, but then you feel satisfied. If so, you might never go with trucks or planes.
You can stick with the bike messenger delivery method. Some people like the quaintness of it. Maybe that’s part of your brand that you can cultivate.
You’ll need to look at transport options depending on your company’s size and overall business model. You might start doing things one way, but then you need to update as the years pass.
You might grow exponentially if you figure out something the masses love. If you can get some additional funding, you may start with bike or car delivery. You’ll then move to train, plane, truck, or boat delivery once you need that upgrade.
About Carson Derrow
