ODeliver:

The name “ODeliver” may be familiar from seeing the company’s panel vans traversing the island. What many may not know is that the idea for the business was born from a failed business venture. ODeliver co-founder and chief executive officer Jonathan Clayton says he and business partner/co-founder Aaron De Bourg first attempted a health and wellness marketplace which flopped.

He said following that failed business, they made the decision to redirect their business focus on logistics. Clayton tells Express Business: “It was one of those types of things that when people say your successes come from micro-failures, it’s almost like that for us where we tested a marketplace to see if we were solving a real problem there which we weren’t. “Then we transitioned into logistics where we found that there was a huge need for people who wanted to move items, businesses in particular wanting to move items around the country and get deliveries transparently, quickly to their customers.



” He said: “It was then that we had that difficult conversation in my co-founder’s mother’s living room that the business started and we were really contemplating if we should even bother or not as it was a pivot from a micro-failure.” He recalled that one of his strongest drives at that time was that he was newly married with a baby on the way. It took some convincing to get De Bourg on board with the new business venture, he admitted.

But he eventually agreed and ODeliver was created at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2021. “I really wanted him to work alongside myself to build this out together because he is the technical co-founder and I am the CEO so I run everything in terms of the operation of the business and he handles the technology. So, it was very crucial for us to work together to really build this business up,” Clayton says.

He explained that during the pandemic, online business increased and for safety and costing reasons people were seeking out delivery services and this was the market that ODeliver targeted. “We built a company and we built a proprietary platform that now allows businesses to sign up on our platform and enter any amount of shipments (deliveries) that they choose and we now connect those businesses with well over 100 independent drivers that facilitate the deliveries. “What sets us apart first and foremost is our technology; it’s all proprietary built and it’s built based on the needs of the customers in that industry which is what we call e-commerce logistics.

It’s any retailer who wants to sell something online–whether you sell it through Instagram or Facebook–and you just want to use our platform to enter the shipment,” he said. The company’s website also facilitates plug-ins from websites such as Shopify. “If you have a website, it automates the delivery aspect of it.

So, you could be sleeping at night and a customer orders and you don’t have to do anything. All you need to do is wake up the next morning, pack the items and wait for our drivers to come and collect,” Clayton said. “Going back to March 2021 is when we started in Aaron’s mom living room.

We had 600 shipments for that month and now we are doing over 30,000 shipments a month. “We started off servicing just 100 businesses within our first month now we have 8,000 and growing so it’s quite a significant impact with businesses and helping them to reach their customers,” he said. The company has also grown.

“We started with myself and him and we did everything from delivering the packages ourselves and doing all of the grunt work and now we are fortunate enough to hire 40 staff members internally and we have well over 100 drivers that do the fulfilment of the deliveries,” Clayton said. An ecosystem The business is an ecosystem, he said. He explained that during the pandemic, businesses were able to generate revenue to support their families and people who were retrenched from their jobs were able to work as drivers for the company.

Clayton said: “With the use of technology we were able to take the insights we learnt from customers early on and develop on the platform every month. So, every month there were huge changes that we were doing, all geared and focused towards businesses that sell online. “I would like to think that right now that we are probably the number one provider for e-commerce logistics in the country just based on the technology that we use and the volume that we do.

I think right now we are going up to maybe 300,000 shipments just for this year and we are well over 600,000 shipments since we started and we have also close to 400,000 ‘unique customers’ (customers making purchases from online businesses) that we would have touched base with. “This is basically 25 per cent of the nation that we would have serviced.” He also recalled that having established the company in March 2021, it was only after its sixth month in operation that he and his business partner were able to pay themselves.

Prior to that, he said: “We did it with no salaries just off of pure hope and dreams and then we got our first little $5,000 salary which was a huge deal for us and then we were like this business really has a lot of potential, look how quickly it’s growing. Look at how much people we are impacting.” Clayton said he and his partner have received messages from drivers for the company thanking them for the opportunity to put food on their tables for their families after losing their pre-Covid jobs.

Motivated by the rapid growth of the company over four years, the company intends to expand operations to other islands in the region, he added. ODeliver received the SME award for Medium-Sized Business at the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Commerce’s Champions of Business Awards on November 7. Asked his feelings about the award, Clayton said: “That was so mind-blowing to us as we were so focused on trying to build our small business that when we looked at the impact that we had and the Chamber saw that we had, they were gracious enough to honour us with this award.

We were totally taken aback.” He added: “Our team is young; all within their 30s so for us to be even recognised among these big business leaders made us feel motivated and inspired to continue with what we were doing.”.