In early January, Anytime Depot of North Little Rock is poised to wrap up a pilot program for its new Anytime Valet kiosk, a last-mile delivery service.
CEO Tony Cassady told Arkansas Business that these kiosks, accessible 24/7, offer customers convenience and protection from the "porch pirates" who might steal their packages. The method is also more efficient, as parcels would be delivered to a single location instead of multiple homes, he said.
"If we hit our targets, in three years, we expect to be close to 150 people on staff," Cassady said. "We expect to be operating in about a dozen different metropolitan markets and have somewhere around 900 Anytime Valet units in operation."
About 35-40 of those jobs would be created here in central Arkansas. And while the company might outgrow its headquarters in North Little Rock, Cassady doesn't plan to move out of the area.
The system works like this:
- People sign up for the service on the Anytime Valet website, choose whether they want to be notified by text message or email when their package is ready for pick up from a kiosk, and receive a unique shipping address to send the package to.
- The package arrives at Anytime Depot at 8000-A Counts Massie Road, where it is sorted with the information included in that unique shipping address. The staff then loads the package into a kiosk, which has a turntable with slots of varying sizes.
- The package is placed inside the kiosk in the smallest slot it can fit. Only one shipment is placed in each slot.
- A customer receives a text message or email alert containing a code that is either entered or scanned into the touchscreen attached to the kiosk where their package resides.
- Once the code is accepted, the turntable inside the kiosk rotates until it detects the door that package is behind and opens it, and the customer picks up their package.
Six kiosks have been set up and tested in North Little Rock, Little Rock and Sherwood over the past year, Cassady said. This was the first holiday season the service was available, and he's waiting a few weeks after Christmas to gauge how people use the kiosks.
"We feel like we've tapped into a real need here," Cassady added, noting that hundreds of people have signed up for the service and Anytime has processed thousands of packages during the pilot program.
The next phase is implementing charges and preparing for rollouts into other metros, he said.
The company is speaking with multifamily properties in metro areas and wants to secure a few agreements before launching in those areas. Cassady said Anytime would like to see its first units going into a new metro area in the third quarter of 2017.
"We're taking this slowly over the next 12 months. We've got to walk before we run, and we feel like we had to crawl first. We feel like, now, we're ready to walk. So we're going to do that," he said.
The company would also like to offer the service in three metros within a year.
Anytime expects to make its money from the end-users and multifamily properties with monthly subscription or per-package fees for receiving packages.
Cassady said a property can choose to pay a monthly fee based on how many apartments or residents it has, or their residents could pay the same as a member of the general public would. Residents would pay $10 a month for unlimited use, or $2 per package. But a property would get a discount, paying $5 a month per resident instead, he explained.
There won't be a fee to send packages, with the exception of those that have pre-paid labels.
The company will package parcels for those customers and shop FedEx, the post office and UPS for the lowest rate available. The sender pays that, but Anytime make its money from the difference between that rate and the lower negotiated volume-based rate that the company is charged.
For the pilot program, the first Anytime Valet kiosk was placed at Anytime Depot's office on Counts Massie Road. Another was placed at the Kum & Go Gas Station on Kiehl Avenue in Sherwood. Those two are available for the general public to use.
The other four in the six-kiosk pilot project were placed at apartment complexes: the Fountaine Bleau North Apartments in North Little Rock, Overbrook Apartment Homes in North Little Rock, Waterford Apartment Homes in Little Rock and Park Avenue Lofts in Little Rock.
Cassady said the company, which employs six, built the kiosks one at a time, tweaking the design along the way based on feedback. Changes included better weatherization, making them "critter-proof" and making them more durable for long-term use, he said.
The team, Cassady said, also expected to make changes to accommodate different package sizes, but the kiosks have been able to handle 97 percent of the packages sent to Anytime Depot. The other 3 percent were too large for the kiosks but were still delivered to customers.
Another change the company is making is adding Saturday service. Anytime had been offering weekday service only.
Cassady also said the design, assembly, production and installation of the kiosks is being done in-house, while he outsources the manufacturing of parts and buys off-the-shelf electronics. Some software development is done in-house too, but an outside contractor and another firm does the majority of that, he said.
Anytime is Cassady's third business. He sold the other two he's owned: Cassady & Co. (an industrial electric distributor formerly known as H.K. Brewer Electric) and HMC Solutions.
He picked up this idea from technology used at HMC Solutions, which built an automated kiosk for the delivery of laundry and dry cleaning. He said a "lightbulb went off" when he overheard someone on his staff talking to a UPS official about last-mile residential package delivery challenges.
The CEO grew up in Nashville, Arkansas, and has a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Arkansas. Although he worked for GE for a short time in its component sales division, Cassady said he soon returned home and his father, another entrepreneur, helped him start the business that would eventually acquire H.K. Brewer and become Cassady & Co.