To be the best...

What are the top 3 traits or skills every courier must have to excel?

Can you suggest any tips or insights to develop your courier expertise?

No special skills are required to be a Courier Operator other than being able to get from A to B as quickly and safely as possible.

but here are some tid bits for those who are interested.

You must maintain a clean healthy and presentable appearence at all times / day or night and not just your body but that includes your delivery vehicle.
Keep it washed / polished / lights all working correctly / windows spotless at all times. You never know when a potential customer is going to want to inspect your vehicle especially if you are delivering food or health items such as medical prescriptions, etc.

You must be reliable and ready to go during the times you allocate yourself to your customer.

You must have a late model reliable vehicle capable of hauling whatever it is you are planning to haul / small packages / large boxes / furniture / medical prescriptions or whatever..

If you solicit customers on your own you'll need to be prepared to hire outside I/C's to cover routes you are unable to cover.

You'll also need to abide by state courier licensing rules and state insurance coverage regulations keeping in mind that insurance rates are higher when you use your own vehicle for business reasons.

You must be able to read / write clearly / spell words coRReKley (correctly) and operate a gps. Maps are out.. GPS's are in.

I suggest picking up a GPS that is capable handling multiple address entries with Route Optimization options.

The bad news is, operating as a courier with your own vehicle for a Courier Company isn't going to pay you much.

You have to figure at least $.30 cents to $.50 cents per/mile goes to fuel reimbursement / wear and tear / license / registration and insurance depending on what you are using for a vehicle.

Example: On a 100 mile run / 50 out / 50 back you best be getting paid at least $50.00 for FR Fuel Reimbursement / seperate check (Tax Exempt Check) and between $10 and $15 per/hr -- that's working for a local Courier

This Business person will be in business
for time to come,things that has been
stated no other words can and will be closer than this proffessional advise ...
this is very true and great advise for free.... Thanks....

Not sure you were refering to my post but if so, thank you very much for your comments.

Just a couple more ideas for those interested.

In some cases you might find yourself doing courier deliveries from your hometown to a major city not far from your hometown, say 40 or 50 miles away.

Once you have your delivery times established you should contact courier companies in the city you are delivering 'too' / and see if they have anything returning to your hometown. Remember that no one in your delivery city knows you are there daily making deliveries. They have no clue that every day you are done and available for a return run back to your hometown unless you take the time to get on the phone and contact as many courier companies as you can.

Just the yesterday (Sat. June 11th) I received a call from a Boston courier company telling me they had deliveries at their location going to Rhode Island which is where I reside. They called me because they had my information on file, license, reg, insurance coverage, contact numbers, and knew I was in their area delivering 4 to 5 times a week looking for return deliveries.

I immediately got on the phone to a local courier I run for and was able to make a pickup for him just around the corner from my house for delivery to the Boston area.. // Got empty and went in to Boston to pick up 5 deliveries for Rhode Island.

The round trip mileage from my house / back to my house / including pickups and deliveries / start to finish was 160.

I left my house at 11:30am and walked in the door at: 4:30pm = total 5 hrs.
My gross for those 5 hrs was just over $200 because of the fact I was loaded up and loaded back.

Anytime you can make over $1.25 p/mile using a small car you're doing great.

The key is you can't just contact courier companies outside of your hometown and give them your number. You have to go meet them in person so they know who they're dealing with face to face, type of vehicle and so on.

Once More this is great information for
free this kind of info must be added too
ones library... and reveiw from time to time this will keep all courier on their
toes.....