Last mile driver staffing leads

Category B is not a smaller version of CE

Agencies that place long haul CE drivers assume last mile is the same business with smaller vehicles. Almost every commercial assumption changes, and agencies that carry the CE playbook into courier work usually lose money for two quarters before noticing.

The last row is the important one. A CE client is buying a person. A last mile client is buying certainty that tomorrow’s routes have somebody in the van, and will keep buying it every week. That difference changes the pitch, the contract and the account management model.

Who actually buys last mile drivers

Five buyer types, in rough order of how easy they are to win.

Parcel network subcontractors. The small transport companies that run routes for a large parcel network under contract. Numerous, under constant driver pressure, and reachable. They are the volume core of this market.

Food and grocery delivery operators. E-grocery, dark stores and restaurant logistics. Extremely volatile volumes, short planning horizons, and a willingness to decide in days rather than weeks.

Third-party logistics providers. Larger, slower, procurement-driven, and worth pursuing on a longer timeline because the standing allocation is bigger and stickier once won.

Retailers running their own fleet. Furniture, appliances and pharmacy chains that deliver themselves. Less experienced buyers of staffing, so the conversation is more educational and less price-driven.

The parcel networks themselves. National and international carriers. Long procurement cycles, framework agreements, and rarely worth cold approach until the agency has a track record with their subcontractors.

The realistic entry point for most agencies is the first two. They have the same problem every week and the shortest distance between a reply and a trial.

Churn is the product, not the problem

Last mile driver turnover is high everywhere, in every country, for structural reasons. Physically demanding work, low licence barrier, plentiful alternative employment at similar pay, and volumes that expand and contract without warning.

Agencies that pitch against churn are pitching against gravity. Clients have heard it, do not believe it, and have watched three previous suppliers fail to deliver it.

The offer that works accepts churn and sells around it: continuity of coverage rather than continuity of people. A depot manager does not need the same twelve drivers every month. They need twelve vans to leave on time every morning, and an agency that guarantees the shift rather than the individual is selling something it can actually deliver.

This is also why the commercial model matters more than the recruitment model in this segment. The agency that wins is not the one with the best candidates, it is the one that has built a bench deep enough to absorb turnover without the client seeing it.

The depot is the buying unit

A parcel network with forty depots is forty buying decisions, not one. Depot and station managers hold real discretion over agency labour because their performance is measured daily on delivery completion, and a missed route is visible immediately.

That has three consequences for prospecting.

First, target by location rather than by company. A list of employers sorted by name is the wrong shape. A list of depots sorted by catchment is the right one, because the whole question is whether the agency can put people at that address tomorrow.

Second, registered company data will not contain depots. Company registers list the registered office. Depots appear in place data, on carrier location finders, in job advertisements and on maps, and any list built without those sources is missing most of the buyers.

Third, one win at one depot is a reference for the next depot in the same network, and internal recommendation between site managers travels faster than any outbound sequence. The correct sales motion is to win a site, then work outward from it geographically.

How the money works

Three contract structures appear in this market, and only two of them are worth having.

Permanent placement fees barely function here. Tenure is too short, replacement guarantees get invoked constantly, and the administrative cost per placement swallows the fee.

Temporary supply on an hourly margin is the standard model. Margins are thin per hour and the economics depend entirely on utilisation and volume. Profit comes from many drivers working many hours, which means the operational cost of onboarding has to be low or the whole thing inverts.

A standing allocation is the model worth building toward. The client commits to a number of drivers per day or per week, the agency commits to filling it, and both sides stop negotiating individually. Revenue becomes predictable, planning becomes possible, and the relationship stops being transactional.

Sell the third from the first conversation, even when the client starts with a trial of two people. An agency that frames the relationship as coverage from the beginning gets to a standing allocation months earlier than one that starts by quoting an hourly rate.

What moves volume, and when

Parcel volume drives everything, and it is unusually predictable.

The peak runs from November into the first half of January, and staffing for it is decided in September and October. An agency approaching a depot in November is late by two months. The quiet period follows immediately, in February and March, which is exactly when depot managers have time to talk and are reviewing what went wrong during peak. That is the best prospecting window of the year in this segment and the one most agencies waste.

Grocery and food delivery follow a different rhythm, with weather, promotions and local events moving volume week to week. These clients decide fastest and value responsiveness above almost everything else.

The other recurring trigger is a network change: a new depot opening, a route reallocation between subcontractors, or a network changing its contractor mix. Each of those creates an immediate and dated staffing need, and depot openings in particular are announced in advance.

Building the list

The universe for this market is larger than most agencies assume, because it sits mostly in small transport companies rather than in recognisable brands. In our own data, Poland holds 39,156 registered companies classified in transport and logistics, and Lithuania holds 14,474, of which 12,031 employ fewer than ten people.

That size distribution is the whole story. The subcontractor with six vans is the archetypal last mile buyer, and there are thousands of them per country. They are hard to reach through conventional B2B databases, which favour larger companies, and easy to reach through registers combined with place data.

The practical consequence is that this market cannot be bought. Databases sold by the record are built on companies large enough to have been enriched, and a six-van subcontractor in a town of forty thousand people has never been enriched by anyone. Reaching that company means starting from the register, matching it to a physical location, and finding a human being at it. That work is why the segment stays uncontested: it is not hard, it is just not for sale.

Three list sources cover the market. Company registers give the legal entities and their size. Place data gives the depots, warehouses and stations that registers omit. Job advertisements give the companies hiring drivers right now, which is the most immediately actionable segment and the one worth running as a separate weekly campaign.

What the first message should say

Short, local, and about a shift rather than a candidate.

Name the location. A depot manager reads a message that names their town differently from one that names their country. Say how many drivers you can put on the ground there and how quickly, because that is the only question they are actually asking. Skip candidate quality claims entirely, since every competitor makes them and none of them are verifiable at this stage.

Then ask about coverage rather than about a meeting. A question along the lines of how they currently cover Monday peaks or absence gaps gets answered because it is a live problem, and the answer opens the trial.

We build these lists from registers, place data and live job advertisements, run the sending and follow-up, and forward the interested replies. Flat pricing: 3,750 EUR the first month, then 2,850 EUR a month, cancel any time.