If you’ve ever read a forum, then you’ve wasted your time.
“Bought my route last year and I can’t wait to get out of it!”
“The company keeps pushing us to the limit. This route was a huge mistake.”
Blah blah blah…
Good ol’ forums and their infinite wisdom. You’ve probably been trying to search for opinions of people in the hopes of finding unbiased help in determining if FedEx routes ( or routes of any kind for that matter) are right for you. If you’ve been searching hard, you’ve probably even stumbled upon the two biggest sources – BizBuySell and BrownCafe.com forums.
Let’s talk about why these two sources are immense wastes of your time. There are two types of people that gravitate towards posting in each place.
Danger #1: The people that usually have no idea what they’re talking about.
When you look at BizBuySell forums regarding routes that people have purchased, people will inevitably chime in when they have no idea what they’re talking about. Stuff like,”I heard my sister’s brother-in-law’s step child’s friend bought a route and I don’t think they made all that much money.” That statement is barely exaggerating the nonsense I’ve read throughout the years. These peoples lousy opinions are typically easy to spot (and ignore) though. But sometimes the danger is the thoughts they sow, such as little statements like,
“I’ve never owned a route, but sounds like you’re just buying a job!”
If you find yourself reading that and nodding along thinking, “Yeah, good point.” then you’re falling for what I’m afraid a lot of people fall victim to when they don’t have all the info they need.
This type of absurd logic will have to be addressed in another article (or during a consultation).
Anyway, hear me out on this next one – there’s only one thing more dangerous than reading an opinion from an uninformed person, and that’s reading an opinion from an informed person!
Danger #2: The people that usually know exactly what they’re talking about.
These people go to BrownCafe.com. Now, BrownCafe is typically for UPS workers to go moan and groan about making nearly six figures. But in a little corner of the site, there’s a spot for FedEx contractors to moan and groan about everything too! Now granted, we’re all human, and even I have bitched, moaned, kicked and screamed all the way to the bank cashing checks.
These people in BrownCafe usually actually own routes, they know people first hand that own routes, or at least used to own routes.
They’re dangerous to you because it SEEMS like you could trust them!
The danger here is these people want to cry out to be coddled by other people. Like children in a nursery, it’s a competition to cry the loudest – basically exaggerating that little bloody scrape you got on the pavement to make it sound like only a tourniquet is going to save you from all the blood loss. The people in these forums are exaggerating their mishaps to the Nth degree. Granted, on rare occasion, I read something in there that seems like bad stuff is going on for them and they’re not even exaggerating one bit. But they’ve usually gotten themselves into their own mess by making bad business decisions. It’s true, the mess usually isn’t that bad, but not knowing how to hire the right people (amongst other things) and such can definitely make for some miserable times. And when those bad times hit for those people, it’s like a pack of zombies coming to the forums to vent.
Want to know what I did when I worked hard initially, made good business decisions and made a great income with routes?
I’ll give you a multiple choice quiz. Did I:
A) Go home and sit by myself on the computer and log into forums and talk about the awesomeness of routes.
B) Sleep in late, go to the golf course for the whole day, then hang out with my family and friends in the evening and have a great time.
So you take a guess why it seems so bad out there according to forums. This is also why I don’t have a forum, or allow public comments like most blog websites. Those comment posts on sites are common because they help boost Google’s ranking of a site. Comments and forums help the site owner, not you! I’m here to actually help you. And I do this by NOT allowing random potentially unqualified people from coming here and splatting their opinions all over the site and wasting your time.
Imagine that…