Are you still networking in person?

In the last business week, I’ve had friends and new clients come to our office. Because we’re good friends, the assumption is “you’re clean, I’ll shake your hand, touch my face, and be a normal -unworried- human…” Yep, I’m guilty of that too. I kiss and hug people. Dammit. 🙂 I’m really trying to stop this! The point here is that this is not a disease that only affects dirty, homeless people, or a group based on sexual orientation, color, religion, etc. We are all “fair-game” to this virus.

Most of us will come through this virus pandemic unscarred based on the current numbers and percentages, and I’m a bit more confident now that it appear “all” of our Government officials acknowledge that this is serious and not a “partisan power-play”.

Yesterday our President declared this a national emergency. A little late, if you ask my opinion, as the virus has been freely spreading for at least 6 weeks now, according to officials in regards to the nursing home in Seattle that had so many of the initial deaths. But putting the emergency efforts in place, activating FEMA, emergency funding for CDC, etc. are all steps in the right direction. But we must all know that the virus can be anywhere, with anyone, and it is “invisible” so you just don’t know… (please read on – this pertains to all of us…)

So people more and more people don’t want to go to public places. It is AWESOME for Amazon, UPS, and FEDEX, but for “mom and pop”…the MAJORITY of business types across our country, that have businesses that depend on customers showing up and walking through stores, this is a potential death-blow to their business, which is most likely tied to their lives in so many ways…loans secured by their homes and possessions, for example. This can become a truly horrible story akin to the Great Depression for some. I’m worried, and my business works “across the wire” easily. We’re a software development company….we sell “electrons”. But just because I can operate, doesn’t mean I can get paid for my work, if my other customers are in their own personal “desert island” with no people in their stores buying things! This part scares me as much as the actual virus does, but the good news is that there’s some choices to mitigate the problem of empty stores: DELIVERY SERVICES.

A Potential Solution for Brick and Mortar Businesses

It just so happens that my company has created delivery software about 6 years ago for a very dear client, and now business partner, MI Courier Services. They are a courier company that specializes in medical/pharmaceutical deliveries, and we ended up building them a system that saved them 30+ hours a week of back-office work: Routing, Scheduling, Driver Management, Billing, Electronic Signature, etc. and we also built them a customer portal so the customer can actually see on a live map, where there package is.

Talk about timing…

It also just so happens that we have been working very hard on modifications for the last 6 months, so that it could operate in an on-demand fashion, as well as a scheduled, recurring delivery service. (IE. We can do the Delivery Dudes thing as well as the scheduled medicine deliveries!).

The website for this delivery software is https://RouteTrackDeliver.com If your business would like to do their own deliveries, we want to help! We will set you up with our software, and waive the monthly fees while our country is in a state of Emergency.

We must charge a small setup fee to cover the time for training, and of course the hosting and technology, but once setup, there will be no “licensing fees” for now. (And we reserve the right to start billing when appropriate/necessary to keep things running.)

If you are local to the South Florida area, our client and partner, MI Courier Services can help out with the physical deliveries for you as well. They are adding on more drivers now to handle increased volume.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT USING OUR DELIVERY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE, OR CONNECTING WITH A CERTIFIED RTD DELIVERY COMPANY TO DELIVER FOR YOU, PLEASE CONTACT MARK (Mark@PalmBeachSoftware.com) or JULIUS (Julius@PalmBeachSoftware.com) at 561-572-0233