In many developed courier markets, including New Zealand, courier drivers - traditionally employees of the company - have opted to become self-employed couriers, operating under either a franchise arrangement or a legally-binding contract to provide courier services to the courier operator.

Courier driver runs or routes can represent very attractive small business opportunities to appropriately selected individuals. New Zealand Post's experience has shown that business options can encompass either contracted owner-drivers and/or franchised courier business models.

In addition to creating the opportunity to reduce costs and increase profits, business models including self-employed couriers, usually result in improved customer service and increased sales as self-employed couriers are highly motivated to sell and positively promote the operator's brand.

In New Zealand, the owner-driver model is applied to both urban services and rural delivery runs.

New Zealand Post's Rural Post business model

New Zealand Post’s Rural Post service is an economic, efficient rural distribution service utilising independent owner-drivers.

Rural New Zealand comprises over 190,000 rural customers for New Zealand Post. This equates to around 10% of the total network, spread across approximately 75% of New Zealand's land area. Rural Post has independent (self-employed) drivers who travel over 23,000 rural roads each day, travelling in excess of 27 million kilometres annually.

Key features of the Rural Post owner-driver model

• A flat operating structure with just 15 New Zealand Post employees based in 8 locations
• Self-managing owner-drivers who are responsible for their own overhead costs
• Non-exclusive owner-driver delivery contracts, enabling individual drivers to also generate income from non-postal activity (e.g. bread, milk, newspaper sales and deliveries etc.)
• Assignable delivery contracts allowing individual owner-drivers to assign their contracts to approved parties and resulting in drivers having a vested interest in contributing to the success of the Rural Post business
• Rural Post is responsible for the final sortation and delivery of product to rural customers.