How Far Do You Drive

[purplenova]

Being new i have a ton of questions. One question is, 
How far do you drive to service a machine?

Being small, myself and two others, we currently have 2 locations
with 3 machines between them. They both are about 25 minutes
from my home base. The two businesses are about 3/4 blocks from one another.

We also have a 3rd location, but need to find a
machine and its about 45 minutes out. We had a
machine there but we pulled it to move it closer
and we could always return to the 3rd location since
a machine was previously there.

Realistically we want all our locations really close to our home base, (all three
of us live within 10 minutes of each other) seems to make sense. Closer they are
less time/mileage we rack up.

Is there a "rule of thumb" you all go by or what is your cutoff distance?
Business will accept a machine but, its to far away to be worth it.

How do you decide?

Thanks as always 

[AZVendor]

There's no rule of thumb.  The larger you get, the farther you will be willing to drive.  My 3 routes cris-crossed the Valley of the Sun here with the longest drive one way (to get to the first stop or to end the day from) was 40-45 mins.  When we were doing $7000 a week per route it didn't matter.  What you need to do is work the area close to you really hard to create a compact business model.  It's hard to do as you'll find out.  On the other hand, work hard on the area between where you are based and your farthest stop to build that route.

[AngryChris]

7 hours ago, AZVendor said:

There's no rule of thumb.  The larger you get, the farther you will be willing to drive.  My 3 routes cris-crossed the Valley of the Sun here with the longest drive one way (to get to the first stop or to end the day from) was 40-45 mins.  When we were doing $7000 a week per route it didn't matter.  What you need to do is work the area close to you really hard to create a compact business model.  It's hard to do as you'll find out.  On the other hand, work hard on the area between where you are based and your farthest stop to build that route.

I'm not exactly sure when  you were doing 7k per route, but i'm guessing it's closer to 15k in today's money.. and that means the drivers must have been really getting on it!

[AngryChris]

The trick in vending is to maximize your route efficiency.  It doesn't matter as much how far the farthest stop is from your home base, what  matters is how many stops you can service in one day and how much you can collect.  Some big companies will go several hours away from  home base because the driver will be doing large locations with a LOT of equipment to restock.  Usually for those, I believe some locations allow the vending company to use a closet to store product.  That way, one driver probably with a liftgate can just drive around delivering bulk deliveries to distant locations while another vending employee's only job is to drive to a few locations each day and simply restock the equipment.  I don't know what they are called, but these are huge locations.  The really big companies will even offer cafeteria services where they service "freshly made" food to employees.  The company pays for that vending service.  These are huge locations that you probably will never be able to even get your foot in the door, and that's NO problem because there's so much money to be made elsewhere.

Your goal should be to get as many locations as possible that are in areas where growth is very attainable.  Doing pick up locations that are way out of your way if they aren't near big industrial parks or something where you can easily pickup other nearby locations in the future.  Focus on areas that are very commercial with lots of potential clients.  Places around walmarts are usually bad examples because even though there's a lot of business around them, they are often just lots and lots of retail locations and there is usually fast food everywhere.  Industrial parks are usually zoned as such and you'll find lots of factories and blue collar locations which you want.  My densest area is about 10-15 minutes south of my building and it probably has one of the best potentials for growth.  In fact, that's the area I plan on focusing when I am ready to expand more.
 

[AZVendor]

That was how we did it in the 90's.  We had one location with 50 machines that we just parked a truck at every day. We had another with 12 machines that we parked a truck at 3 times per week.  Then we had this second truck and the third one run all of our other accounts.  With three routes we just added a new account to whatever truck was usually in that area. Each driver ran the same locations, thus the definition of a route.

[purplenova]

Since we are just starting, trying to get an idea of how far is to far.

Thanks for all the input. 

[Vendo Mike]

If you're operating out of the Nova in your picture, I'd keep it to within 1/4 mile for fuel economy purposes.  Although I'm sure you can get a lot of product in that trunk.

[AZVendor]

Junk in the trunk!

[jay22]

i only do gumball machines, but my rule is no more than 1 hour from home.  i do merchandise work all over the place so nowhere i have a machine is really inconvenient for me, and i only visit my locations once every 2 months. i do make sure the further out locations are ones i "know" will be worth it, usually mexican restaurants lol.