Will the Internet turn postmen into plumbers?

It’s yet another example, if anyone needed one, of the effect that the Internet is having on society. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, and a thoroughly nice chap, might not have foreseen that the international network of computers linked together to focus their power on sub-atomic particle research he conceived would one day be the reason you couldn’t see Gerrard and Lampard down the pub on a Saturday evening, but I bet he thought it would be a force to be reckoned with.

It’s had a big effect on business too, with the obvious stuff being company websites replacing brochures and showrooms, electronic files and databases replacing technical literature, and so on. But there’s more to come.

We’re going to have a national postal strike apparently – on the laughable pretext of protecting the Royal Mail service (come on lads, we know it’s about money really). But don’t fret, unless you’re in mail order of small items, this could actually be a real business opportunity.

What do we send in the mail? Contracts? Invoices? Drawings? Let’s stop. Let’s put a halt to the unnecessary consumption of paper and resources, like petrol, in Royal Mail vans driven at 90mph narrowly avoiding motorcyclists on Farringdon Road for instance. Not that I bear a grudge.

Businesses can save a load of money by not posting this stuff, so use the strike as an excuse to get your customers used to electronic delivery of such items. If you mail a thousand invoices a year, that’s £300 more you’ll have in your back pocket by the end of the year. And which of your customers will quibble? Once they realise they’ll never see the physical invoice anyway, and that it’ll forever be stacked in a backlog in a warehouse in Greenford, they’ll be very happy to receive online.

This means they’ll even get it a day or so earlier, can e-mail it around their company, and might even mean they might pay more promptly. Blimey, now wouldn’t that be good?

Of course, the end result of all this, if we, and the rest of business Britain shift ourselves away from Royal Mail services, is that the Royal Mail will be reduced to a Greetings Card delivery organisation, and it’s million or so employees will be reduced to 200,000 or so. But that could be good too, the economic upturn which both main political parties are saying will be just after the election, will produce a skills shortage in Our Great Industry, and all those posties can retrain as plumbers. Hurrah!

Ross Sturley is Principal of Chart Lane (www.chartlane.co.uk) and a committee member for the Chartered Institute of Marketing Construction Industry Group (www.cimcig.org).