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by John Thomason
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jayson koss
Delray’s innovative Delivery Dude looks beyond Atlantic Avenue.
aaron bristol
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don’t mess with the dudes
Delivery Dudes prides itself on customer service, believing that the customer is always right. That said, the company does have a blacklist. “It’s about 40 phone numbers,” Koss says. “If people yell at us and treat us bad … they get put on the blacklist, and they’re stuck with [pizza delivery].” 36
delray beach magazine
escribing the time before he started his own concierge service in Delray Beach, entrepreneur Jayson Koss calls himself, only halfjokingly, a “degenerate.” The offspring of a hippie family, Koss was more interested in wakeboarding than study halls, so he left the University of Central Florida after one semester. He moved to New York, where he worked in his family business, wholesaling men’s clothing. Armed with that business experience, Koss birthed a constellation of random startups, from a nonprofit organization to raise funds after the BP oil spill to a wake-skating company called Oak. Then there was Delray Delivery Dudes, the delivery service launched by Koss and a small coterie of pseudo-slacker buddies in 2009. Delivery Dudes serviced east Delray Beach with food delivery from downtown hot spots—its first three participating restaurants were Brulee, Christina’s and Big Al’s—for a nominal $5-$7 delivery charge. The startup capital was meager—$200 for a wireless credit card terminal, $100 on flyers and a small cost for a simple website design. In the beginning, Delivery Dudes was lucky if it delivered 10 meals a day, and Koss didn’t expect the endeavor to become a lucrative career-breaker. “It was something I knew had value, but I never spent that much time every day working on it,” says Koss, 26. All of that changed at the beginning of 2012. Koss relocated to Delray Beach full-time and began to invest all of his energy, morning to night, on Delivery Dudes. The company’s bumpy start had led to complaining customers, unfriendly drivers and stolen revenue, so Koss fired his entire staff and re-branded Delivery Dudes, focusing on personal service and community involvement. He started doing deliveries himself, and now, he says, he’ll drive down Atlantic Avenue in his 1983 jeep, and “Everyone waves. Everyone knows who I am.” “He’s been focused 100 percent of his time … he is the Dude,” says Michael Silverman,
Koss’ godfather, who helps him run Delivery Dudes. “He is the energy of everything this business is.” The harder Koss worked, the more restaurants agreed to work with him. Lemongrass was the first major restaurant on the Avenue, and more than 30 other restaurants followed suit, including Mellow Mushroom, Bru’s Room and Ziree Thai. Now, Koss says, “There are fewer restaurants that don’t work with us.” He also expanded his service beyond food delivery. His drivers will walk your dogs, pick up and deliver groceries, purchase and wrap gifts and speed them over to a birthday party location. They even programmed an older non-tech-savvy man’s TV. “One of the things I strive to do is separate Delivery Dudes from the other delivery services out there, and it all comes back to the personal service,” Koss says. “Right now, I have a driver going to pick somebody up because he doesn’t have a license. We have great customers that know us and call us, saying, ‘I’m in trouble; I really need to get this done. I don’t know who else to call.’ And I want them to call us. That’s how we’ve gotten our reputation.” It’s a reputation that has spread to other markets. Favoring a franchise model, Delivery Dudes has expanded into Boca Raton, Lake Worth, Wellington, Palm Beach, Deerfield Beach and Fort Lauderdale. Koss is currently in discussions with some friends in Chattanooga, Tenn., to be the first out-of-state Delivery Dudes. But Delray Delivery Dudes, with its thousands of unique customers, will always be the flagship location, run out of a small office above Deck 84, with a million-dollar beachfront view. It’s here that future franchisees will learn the ropes. “They’ll be trained out of Delray,” he says. “Delivery Dudes is going to work in Fort Lauderdale, and it will be bigger than Delray in terms of volume. But Delray Beach is perfect, because it’s just big enough where you can do a lot of business, and just small enough where word gets around really fast. It’s the perfect scenario—the perfect storm of business.” february