UPS and Shpping Snakes (a chance at legitimacy)

Go for it Darin. I don't think you need anyone's permission. That would be the best thing to keep this ball rolling. Go ahead and draft a letter. Once we have that, then people can make suggestions to add or delete something.

I also agree and think it would be a good idea for all of us to provide our names, signitures, e-mail addresses to be attached to this letter. A show of solidarity!

Go for it man.

Anything is likely to be beter then what I come up with. So shoot away, and when your done post it up, and we can all go from there.

I figure once I get a draft letter, I will start calling on everyone in the business I can think of. I imagine some people will be leary of signing on, and I dont blame them (sometimes its better not to rock the boat). However I will try my best to get some of the bigger volume shippers to join the cause.

Mickey Hinkle
The Lizard King Reptiles

I also agree and think it would be a good idea for all of us to provide our names, signitures, e-mail addresses to be attached to this letter. A show of solidarity!

I too agree that traditionally this is a really good idea, but I worry that it might prevent senior UPS management from truely comprehending the potential market size.

My presumtion is that even with a lengthy campaign you probably would never even get signatures of even one percent of the people who would potentially use a live herp shipping service provided by UPS. A couple pages of names and signatures attached to a letter might be percieved as a small "grass roots" effort not worth their time. It could potentially limit them from invisioning the actual potential size of the market.

I think a better route would be to let the numbers stand on their own. Figuring out the number of annual registered classified account users on this site as well as kingsnake.com (and others that I may not be aware of) and then factoring a 75% crossover rate would probably come up with a large number that would certainly make UPS management pay attention. You could then provide them with contact info for WebSlave and JeffB to verify the numbers and further enforce the seriousness of this industry and the potential added revenue for UPS.

In the end, it will only be new additional revenue that will get them to say yes, so go as big as you can. Fudging the numbers on the high side is ok, because they will certainly only consider 60% of whatever numbers they are given (this is a standard business practice).

This is just my .02 ... I have a strong background in business development and thought I may be able to help a little. I would love to see this go through. I have some other thoughts on the subject if anyone is interested, but I don't want to wear out my welcome.

Thank you for listening

-Adam

Sorry about the typos, I am a true MS Word junkie and am basically crippled without the little red squiggly lines.

-Adam

I'm not an organizer, but I'm great at following directions. Tell me what I can do to help out, and I'll do my best.

I think Darin is an exceptionally good choice for a level headed voice to write out our proposal.

I also think 8ball has some good points about the numbers of registered users versus the number of signitures we could obtain.

Just my 2 cents. If you need photo's (I have balls and corns and a digi cam) or leg work done, let me know. I make a fine worker bee!

Shoot away with ideas man.

I am a bit torn on the idea of one letter, or a group of letters I think maybe one form letter, with each person sending it, and adding a bit of "personalized" info may be the route to go. Maybe one letter explaining what we as an industry would like from them, and what rules/regulations we would be willing to self impose in the process. Then everyone could add on there own contact info, estimated annual shipments (snake shipments), ect.

This woud do a couple of things. It would show our numbers, and our ability to orginize. Rather then a bunch of rag tag letters, often likely to switch from point to point, this would be a well written "form" letter each of us could send to start.

I think giving the contact info to Jeff B and Rich is a great idea, assuming of course they are willing to let us do so. If nothing else, should they want to stay out of it, we could atleast send links to their web pages, asking them to do a bit of reasearch of their own. Maybe asking them to "surf" the kingsnake classifieds would give them some insight to our size and power.

So everyone shoot away with ideas, Im all ears

Mickey Hinkle
The Lizard King Reptiles

Here are a couple of thoughts right off the top ….

- A bunch of letters is only going to confuse and distract senior management at UPS. How many do you think would actually get sent anyway? 100? 1,000? Those numbers are not significant enough. The people that can make this happen are extremely busy and don’t have the time or the interest to sort thru a pile of letters from individuals. Whether a form letter or some derivative there of, they will simply be turned off. These people care about one thing, their quarterly revenue numbers. Our ability to organize will not impress them, and a pile of letters will never get read by anyone with the ability to make this happen.

- You don’t really need “permission” to supply UPS with contact information for Rich and Jeff. They own highly visible public websites, if I can shoot them an email without permission, UPS can as well. It would be courteous to give them each a heads up, but in the end it is up to them to either help or not if UPS were to contact them. A phone call or email is about all that UPS would probably do to verify facts presented to them. It is unlikely that they will spend man hours doing their own research looking at websites. Everything must be handed to them and factual, and those facts have to be EASILY verifiable.

I think you should look at this thing as a business development relationship between the herp community and UPS. Good for our collective businesses and good for theirs. UPS has a vice president of business development (not necessarily that title, but certainly someone in that role). Business development is worked as a one to one relationship, so you will need a single person (or very small group, 3 – 4) to contact their bus dev vp.
The standard procedure for making this happen is a brief letter requesting a meeting. The letter would explain who you are and who you represent, as well as a summary of what you are proposing (your current internal contacts at UPS will help grease the wheels with this person to get you that meeting). Once the meeting is set, an 8 – 12 slide PowerPoint presentation (these people live and die by PowerPoint) explaining what the benefits to UPS are accompanied by hard numbers. You must show a significant increase to UPS’s bottom line if they are going to go for it. If you can show a 1- 2 percent increase to UPS’s gross, they will not be able to say no. Some of the things that should be highlighted in the presentation are:

- Market size (number of POTENTIAL annual shippers over the next 5 years)
- Average annual shipment size per person (in dollars, err on the high side here)
- Stats on year over year growth of the herp industry
- Safety plan (for UPS employees especially)
- Insurance (they make huge profits with insurance, this angle should be explored and stressed … talk about how the airlines do it)
- Legalities of transporting from state to state, protected species, etc (first thing their lawyers will ask)
- The fact that they will draw new customers from FedEx, Airborne, and the airlines (new customers always gets people excited)
- Acceptable packaging requirements, weather, preventing loss of animals (they will be terrified of the PETA crazies when discussing this internally)

I really think that this is an easy deal to get done if you can show a 1 – 2 percent rev increase. If not, it’s going to be tough. I have not done any financial research on UPS and don’t know where they stand against other carriers or how they are performing, but that will be important. If they are doing well and at the top of the pile it might be easier to go after the company on the bottom first (and certainly mention that you are talking to the other carriers at the meeting, tell the company that your meeting with that you’d be willing to be exclusive with them and not even talk to anyone else if it goes thru).

I have worked and closed bus dev deals with fortune 500 companies and have seen some really shaky stuff get done. With the proper presentation and good revenue increases for UPS this has a strong chance of happening, but you have to speak their language.

Wow, I think I’ve rambled on enough.

Thank you for listening again.

-Adam

Those are all very good ideas Adam! Darin could look at the outline of topics that you have provided and address each of those issues in his cover letter.

Do a search on this topic i had some people posting revenues on one i had started notto far back on the income that caould be made in this area by shipping companies several people had chimed in with what type of revenue & amout of volume they do on a weekly & monthl & yrly basis . it was going to be well over 1/2 a million a yr just basdon the few that did chime in and that wasnt the "BIG BREEDERS" that ship tons a months out so glad to know someone else has the same way of thinking i did lol

UPS earnings where 24.55 billion ending on 09/30/03 so a significant amount of potential revenue increase would have to be demonstrated to get their attention.