An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

There has been a high de­mand for an ef­fi­cient and re­li­able de­liv­ery ser­vice as well as a grow­ing trend of at-home shop­ping and it is un­der this ban­ner that oDe­liv­er was born.

The en­ter­prise, which was launched in March 2021 dur­ing the height of COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, is a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny that fo­cus­es on e-com­merce lo­gis­tics, and its vi­sion is to build the in­fra­struc­ture for e-com­merce lo­gis­tics with­in the Caribbean so the next gen­er­a­tion of en­tre­pre­neurs can have ac­cess to mil­lions more cus­tomers.  

So ex­act­ly who is be­hind oDe­liv­er... their names are Jonathan Clay­ton and Aaron de­Bourg are both 35 years old.

Clay­ton said they both went to Fa­ti­ma Col­lege to­geth­er and re­mained friends through uni­ver­si­ty.

He told Busi­ness Guardian on Mon­day that in 2019, de­Bourg and him­self start­ed to ex­plore the pos­si­bil­i­ty of work­ing to­geth­er on a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny.  

“We de­cid­ed to try build­ing a web­site to sell health and well­ness prod­ucts from lo­cal busi­ness­es across Trinidad. That was very dif­fi­cult at the time as it was pre-COVID and not many peo­ple de­mand­ed de­liv­ery like they do to­day.”

Clay­ton al­so said they had a lot of prob­lems deal­ing with ex­ist­ing lo­cal couri­er com­pa­nies to get these prod­ucts de­liv­ered to cus­tomers as they took way too long to de­liv­er, some­times five to sev­en days, and the process to man­age these or­ders was very man­u­al and painstak­ing.  

He ex­plained when the pan­dem­ic struck the duo was forced to cease op­er­a­tions due to poor de­liv­ery ser­vice providers and lit­tle de­mand for health and well­ness prod­ucts. Their on­ly form of in­come was from events, which was forced to shut down.  

One day sit­ting in Aaron’s moth­er’s liv­ing room, a de­feat­ed Jonathan said let’s give this one more try but fo­cus on lo­gis­tics on­ly. Let’s use this pan­dem­ic as a way to help busi­ness­es sur­vive by build­ing a plat­form to help them get their prod­ucts de­liv­ered to their cus­tomers ef­fi­cient­ly.  

“We stopped sell­ing lo­cal busi­ness­es’ prod­ucts and fo­cused on de­liv­er­ing their prod­ucts alone in­stead. We took a day to feel sor­ry for our­selves and went straight to work on build­ing what we now know as oDe­liv­er. Af­ter a year of pro­gram­ming and get­ting the busi­ness ready, we launched oDe­liv­er in March 2021 and we have not looked back since,” Clay­ton re­mem­bered.

He re­vealed that they are both pas­sion­ate about en­tre­pre­neur­ship as the busi­ness part­ners be­lieve many prob­lems with­in the so­ci­ety can be solved through in­no­v­a­tive thinkers will­ing to ex­per­i­ment.  

Client base  

Ques­tioned as to who some of their clients are, de­Bourg said some larg­er brick-and-mor­tar busi­ness­es such as Fran­cis Fash­ions, re­tail ware­house, and Jays Toy Box.  

De Bourg said the com­pa­ny al­so serves some small­er on­line busi­ness­es such as Ja­mars Mar­ket­ing, which sells a va­ri­ety of con­sumer items, Cen­tral Elec­tron­ics which sells small elec­tron­ic items, Up Im­age, fash­ion ac­ces­sories re­tail­er and Lu­lu’s Clos­et which sells fash­ion­able cloth­ing.

“I would say our plat­form pre­dom­i­nant­ly con­sists of small to medi­um-sized busi­ness­es that op­er­ate on­line and are do­ing well,” de­Bourg men­tioned.

Lau­ra Pa­think, own­er of  Lu­lu’s Clos­et/Lu­lu’s Shoes said “For 2 and a half years I have trust­ed oDe­liv­er to de­liv­er my cus­tomers’ pack­ages. To date, this has been one of the best de­ci­sions I have made for my busi­ness. I’m con­stant­ly amazed by the ini­tia­tive oDe­liv­er takes to make the de­liv­ery process as seam­less and quick as pos­si­ble for both mer­chants and cus­tomers. I have rec­om­mend­ed oDe­liv­er to nu­mer­ous col­leagues and would en­cour­age any­one with SME busi­ness­es to utilise their ser­vices.

Per­for­mance of the com­pa­ny  

De­Bourg in­di­cat­ed that in their first month in busi­ness, they did 600 de­liv­er­ies and this month (No­vem­ber) oDe­liv­er are on track to do on av­er­age 25000 de­liv­er­ies.  

“In to­tal, we have com­plet­ed just over 300,000 de­liv­er­ies (306,000 to be ex­act and this can be ver­i­fied through our plat­form). By the end of the year, we ex­pect to hit 350,000 de­liv­er­ies and are on track to do this. We have al­so on­board­ed over 5,000 mer­chants to date which can al­so be ver­i­fied through our plat­form. These sta­tis­tics show Trinidad has a grow­ing ap­petite for con­ve­nience and de­liv­ery with many small busi­ness­es opt­ing to sell on­line and tra­di­tion­al brick and mor­tar busi­ness­es im­ple­ment­ing de­liv­ery as part of their of­fer­ing,” the busi­ness part­ner re­vealed.
He said the de­liv­ery com­pa­ny, whose ware­house is sit­u­at­ed in Ch­agua­nas, has tech­nol­o­gy to man­age the en­tire lo­gis­tics process.  
In ex­plain­ing how the plat­form works, de­Bourg said the process starts when a mer­chant en­ters a re­quest for a ship­ment on the mer­chant por­tal.  
He not­ed that once the or­der is cre­at­ed, a dri­ver is dis­patched to col­lect the item by us­ing the dri­ver por­tal. Then the dri­ver scans the pack­age, and au­to­mat­ed mes­sages are sent to both the cus­tomer and the mer­chant con­firm­ing the trans­ac­tion.
De Bourg out­lined that the pack­age is brought back to oDe­liv­er sort­ing cen­tre where it is scanned in and placed in a zone for de­liv­ery the next day.  
“An overnight team picks and packs the bins and the dri­ver de­liv­ers the pack­ages to the cus­tomer the next day. When this pack­age reach­es the cus­tomer, they can pay via cash, point of sale ter­mi­nal, or dig­i­tal link. Af­ter this is done, our back-end sys­tem man­ages the rest and en­sures that the ship­ment is ac­count­ed for and all pay­ments are re­mit­ted to the mer­chants on time and ac­cu­rate­ly.  
“Our sys­tem is not on­ly ef­fi­cient but it al­so helps mer­chants man­age their ship­ments and pay­ments all in one place. We al­so launched one of the first-ever Ap­pli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming In­ter­faces (API ) in­te­gra­tions for web­sites.

Asked whether the lo­gis­tics com­pa­ny has plans to ex­pand in the re­gion, Clay­ton said “yes” talks are pro­gress­ing and the tech­nol­o­gy is be­ing built to fa­cil­i­tate in­ter-is­land on­line com­merce.  
In fact, he said the plat­form cur­rent­ly of­fers ful­fill­ment to any re­gion­al re­tail busi­ness that would like to get ac­cess to cus­tomers in Trinidad and it can store the items in its ful­fill­ment cen­tre.
“They can en­ter the ship­ment through the mer­chant por­tal and we can de­liv­er it in a day. This sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­ers op­er­a­tional costs for busi­ness­es that want to get ac­cess to a new mar­ket.”

In­vest­ment  

On Fri­day, Agos­ti­ni’s Ltd and Term Fi­nance ac­quired 20 per cent each of oDe­liv­er.

Asked what made oDe­liv­er en­ter this agree­ment, Clay­ton said a year ago the busi­ness part­ners were look­ing at op­tions for a strate­gic part­ner in the busi­ness.  
“We had oth­er po­ten­tial in­vestors but none came close to the val­ue that these two com­pa­nies brought. The Term Fi­nance team is young, ag­ile, and tech­nol­o­gy-fo­cused and Agos­ti­ni’s is a huge lega­cy busi­ness with decades of op­er­a­tional ex­cel­lence. They both have a re­gion­al foot­print and a lot of their ex­ist­ing busi­ness­es can be in­te­grat­ed with the oDe­liv­er core of­fer­ing. We think this is a dream part­ner­ship come true and our gaze is now fo­cused on re­gion­al ex­pan­sion,” he dis­closed.

In terms of growth, de­Bourg said the com­pa­ny has grown month over month since its in­cep­tion.  

“We ex­pect this to con­tin­ue in 2024 as we con­tin­ue to push for ag­gres­sive growth. We have a suite of ser­vices we are go­ing to of­fer in 2024, in­clud­ing pay­ment ser­vices, SME loans, in­stant de­liv­er­ies, large-scale stor­age and ful­fill­ment and much more. We are fo­cused on bring­ing tremen­dous val­ue to every busi­ness in our ecosys­tem,” de­Bourg stat­ed.

As it per­tains to the num­ber of em­ploy­ees, he not­ed that oDe­liv­er pro­vides in­come to over 155 peo­ple.

“We cur­rent­ly have 35 full-time em­ploy­ees and over 120 in­de­pen­dent dri­vers on the ros­ter. We now run a full 24-hour op­er­a­tion to en­sure max­i­mum op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy, which re­quires three shifts dai­ly. Do note the dri­vers are ro­tat­ed dai­ly and based on the de­mand for the pe­ri­od.”