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Originally Posted by thonglife
I see PDC in your resume along with some other telcos. I thought they had DDA doing their initial/secondary distribution? I worked in directories and distribution..the likes of Verizon/Frontier for MANY years in my past life. Those companies you listed are involved in Yellow Pages. So you are saying you delivered phonebooks on initial distribution by contract with these publishers? They don't contract out to companies outside of YPPA for a multitude of reasons. DDA handle a lot of distribution contracts.. and then hires folks off the street to hand deliver the phonebooks on initial.
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DDA has several contracts with the publishers as does PDC. Both of them do about the same thing. Secondary distribution is almost always done by USPS using PVDSs at DDU rates anymore. A significant portion of the initial distribution in some markets is accomplished that way as well and towards the end that is all I would do is mailings. If the book is very small, it goes DSCF and I never got to touch those cause they went from the plant directly to the delivery unit.
The intial distribution is usually outsourced to places like DDA/PDC who hire people off the street to work as independent contractors. YB still does most of theirs directly, except in a few states, they have vendored that out now, the vast majority of my work was done with them. PDC is a bunch of assholes, I did not extend my arrangement with them beyond the initial project.
They contracted to my company as a large crew. At the height of it, I had four rental vans running crews of two each plus my van and my assistant. Ten people, 10K books a day at about $0.40 per book. Thats $4,000 a day. I got my drivers from a staffing agency, the assistants from the local homeless shelters for $50 a day and away it went. Then if I had managed to snag the mailing project, which sometimes paid several thousand dollars itself, I'd go do that while everyone else was out running routes.
Make friends with the distribution people, make yourself useful a couple of times, put a couple of people under you in rental vans and pretty soon you can start negotiating your rate higher than what they publish or offer to anyone else. I have gotten as high as $0.80 a book, the vast majority being about half that, and I can throw 2,000 books in a day easy single handed.
I have not fucked with books for a couple of years now, aside from the occasional mailing project here and there. Sometimes I do recycle runs for YB and warehouse cleanouts of back stock, only because I can double dip. Getting paid to clean out the warehouse, then I turn around and broker the scrap paper to the mills by the truck load. Anymore, I make more money running my other ventures - not worth the hassles of dealing with the YB empire which has gotten hard to deal with these last few years.