Abington Delivery Cabs Thrive In Untapped Market

Abington’s Chris Heffernan was on vacation in West Palm Beach in Florida when he saw a sticker on the door of the restaurant where he was eating lunch.

The sticker said “delivered by Delivery Dudes.”

Heffernan asked the owner what the sticker referred to and was told that it was a service restaurants employed to deliver food directly to customers.

“When I got home it was all I could think about,” Heffernan said. ”I found out they had services like this in center city, but not here in the suburbs.”

Today, Heffernan has his own delivery business: Food Cab and Booze Cab, started in and serving the Abington area. The success of Food Cab, the first of the two, spawned the next venture.

“After delivering food we got a lot of requests from our customers for alcohol delivery, so we applied for the liquor license and Booze Cab was born.”

The two ventures have grown to employ about 15 part-time drivers throughout the week. Heffernan describes the employees who helped him launch the business as being like family to him.

Building the business has not been easy.

“It seems like every day, week, month brings new challenges,” he says. “One of our biggest challenges is marketing, learning how to reach our target audience about the services we offer. The biggest challenge in the beginning was gaining the restaurants buy-in to be a part of the service, but once we got some momentum it became easier.”

He cited marketing to customers as the hardest part of starting the new business up.

“ There were days that no orders would come in at all. It seemed people couldn’t wrap their head around being able to get more than pizza or Chinese food delivered.”

But Food Cab and Booze Cab overcame those struggles, and Heffernan says they are growing every day. They are working on redesigning their website and developing a mobile app that will simplify the ordering process. They’re also developing the model in other suburban areas and empowering local entrepreneurs, using a “scudo-franchise model,” to build a business of their own.

The owner take a simple pleasure from the work his business does.

“We love working with local restaurants and supporting other small businesses while building our brand.”