When Londoner Mark Redmond started his working life as a rave promoter in the 80s, he couldn’t have guessed he’d end up passionate about the city’s postal system by the age of 56.
But, after taking a job as a Royal Mail postie in a time of desperation – then getting fired – he realised there was money in the game. So much, in fact, that he’s now turning over six-figures from his company The Private Postman.
It all started 30 years ago, when, aged 26, Mark was at the height of his rave and festival work, organizing and marketing events – and loving every minute.
‘I went from doing that, to three months later cycling around London as a courier – it was heartbreaking,’ he tells Metro. ‘The festival work had gone bust.’
As Mark puts it, he did ‘various crap jobs’ for a few years ‘while studying music trying to be bloody Liam or Noel’. Like many people in their 20s, he felt disillusioned by work but stuck for what to do next, exploring creative passions (he was even signed as a singer/songwriter at one point) and wondering what would stick.
‘One day someone said, “Why don’t you go work as a postman? They get home at 12 o’clock and then you can do your music all afternoon”. I thought that was a good idea, so I did that. My most important thing was getting home and doing my music, which Royal Mail let me do.’
It all came to an abrupt end when he was fired from the £16,000-a-year role. Mark had a falling out with a manager, which stemmed from a disagreement over a single failed delivery, but went to a no-win-no-fee lawyer and won in court, where his dismissal was ruled to be unfair.
‘It was quite a redemption,’ he remembers of the trial, especially when the bosses that had fired him had to appear in front of the judge.
With £15,000 in compensation in his pocket, he decided he was done with Royal Mail, but not with the world of post.
His idea, The Private Postman, was born. Learning from his 10-years as a postie and courier, he founded a private leaflet delivery service that could work more efficiently and personally than the big, legacy brands.
‘I got the idea in the bath, so I made some promotion introducing myself as an ex-postie,’ he says.
It began with him walking up and down Kensal Rise in 2009, where his bedsit at the time was, promoting his new company – immediately securing £1,500 worth of work on day one from his first client.
Mark’s unique selling point was to use GPS tracking with leaflet deliveries – something nobody else was doing at the time. It instantly appealed to the trust issues many companies understandably had when handing over tens of thousands of leaflets to distributors with no way of confirming that all deliveries were made correctly.
In the first year, The Private Postman turned over £60,000, and now it makes £850,000 a year delivering over two million leaflets every month, working with Harrods, the NHS and global restaurant chains.
Mark is set on being the ‘best in the business’, and so is now working on a new app to make sure deliveries are happening in the exact correct location and giving businesses even more transparency. His plan for the future is to sell this system to other distribution companies, making the entire industry more efficient and to help scale up his own business.
‘At some point, you’ve got to push away from the side and swim,’ he says.
‘There will be little life rafts along the way, but you’ve got to keep swimming. Running a business is very much like that.’
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