Earth Class Mail™ describes the next step in the evolution of an industry that in some ways hasn’t seen much fundamental change in how mail is physically distributed since Benjamin Franklin’s day, but with the advent of the Internet is being transformed by a tsunami of simultaneous, new market forces. It is fundamentally about a shift in how postal mail gets delivered: In online form, available anytime, anywhere, and as easily managed as email or voicemail. Online mail is "Earth Class" because it’s global, allowing mail to be delivered to addressees no matter where in the world they are, electronically. And, it is “Earth Class” in the many ways that it helps postal operators and marketers reduce their environmental impact.
Viewing postal mail online was inevitable. From college students, snow birds, and frequent travelers, to companies with far-flung offices and telecommuting employees, people are less likely to be tied to a permanent address, and are used to receiving every other form of communication electronically these days. Even phone service has succumbed to the Internet.
About the Authors
Ken Lynn, PhD, was the son of two United States Post Office employees. Mail was in his blood, so to speak, from a young age. Over a distinguished 25-year career with the USPS Ken rose to the rank of Assistant Postmaster General of Logistics, responsible for the operations of the world’s largest postal service and some 800,000 employees, a quarter million vehicles, and half of the world’s mail volume to move. He is one of the few in these ranks to have earned a PhD, and in many other ways was always an “overachiever.” In his chapter entitled “The Trillion Dollar Postal Industry: Poised for Growth or Doomed to Extinction?”, Ken shares his experience as a “young buck” coming into USPS management with new ideas, and why the half-life of a new idea in a large, staid organization with a vested interest in its own inertia can be no more than a few minutes or hours before someone points out that such change is unlikely to occur.
Ken brings us some information from the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and public market sources about how other posts around the world have successfully made the transition from government agency to privatized corporation, leading in many cases to exceptional productivity enhancements, diversification of revenue streams well beyond what was achievable in their “monopoly days”, and even reduced postage costs and improved delivery times for postal patrons. As a professor at six colleges, Dr. Lynn has a knack for “getting the message across,” and his message to posts is a clear one: “You’d better look at change as a good thing to be driven by your very own organization – not a bad thing to bar at the gates – or you will eventually be disintermediated by overwhelming market forces.”
Cameron Powell, as a business entrepreneur and lawyer, has for many years worked at the intersection of business, law, and public policy. He has deep experience in issues of intellectual property, monopoly, and best business practices, as well as in putting businesses online. Powell – a Harvard Law School Graduate, former adjunct professor and US Department of Justice trial lawyer before he became a business development executive in the Internet sector – dives to the very roots of our attachment to physical paper, and then explores why we nevertheless seem to want every form of communication to go digital.
In a provocative and insightful chapter, he addresses the fundamental question, “Will Postal Mail Eventually Be Delivered on the Internet?” Cameron discusses surveys of consumer behavior relating to mail before drawing more well-founded conclusions from statistics of their actual observable behaviors, taken from Earth Class Mail™ users. Cameron’s first chapter also has a significant section devoted to the environmental impact of the printed mail matter, the postal organization that delivers it, and the corporate organization that intakes it. In his second chapter, “Earth Class Mail: The First True Execution of Online Postal Mail,” he briefly summarizes the workings of the service at the heart of this book.
Natalee Roan was the youngest faculty member in the University of California, Berkeley´s Industrial Psychology department where she designed and taught university classes in statistics, business management, leadership, and organization design. In her later life in the private sector, Natalee gained the distinction of having joined, at the pre-revenue startup stage, not just one, but three major wireless carriers which have become household names: Sprint and Nextel (now merged), and GTE Wireless (now Verizon). Sprint reached annual operating revenues of over $8 billion in just 4 years, where Natalee´s responsibilities included the creation and execution of marketing, sales and distribution programs and training eventually to support 35,000 sales reps at 13,000 points of distribution in consumer and business to business markets.
In her previous marketing roles, Natalee of course used direct mail promotions, but also every other available media, to create such meteoric growth in these legendary companies’ customer bases. In her section on “Untarget Marketing: The Next Major Inflection Point in Direct Marketing,” Natalee explores two revolutionary concepts in direct response marketing. First, by delivering postal advertising through an online service like Earth Class Mail, extensive information can be gathered about what recipients don’t want to receive, and smart marketers will begin to use this to boost their response rates by suppressing specific names and general demographic segments that are patently not interested so that marketing dollars can be focused on prospects who might be interested in their offers. Second, that marketers will soon be able to deliver their direct response materials, in rich-content digital format, directly to online mailboxes, where they will a) be invited by the recipient, b) not be illegal like email advertising, and c) be able to compress weeks-long sales cycles into moments-long, by drawing prospects from initial interest to placing orders in a matter of mouse clicks.
Click here for Natalee Roan’s Blog
Michael D. Miles, P.E. has spent the past 29 years as a mechanical engineer working on everything from aerospace brakes to oscilloscopes, but most relevant to this discussion he designed mail sorters for postal automation giant Siemens. Big ones that were pushing the envelope on throughput, so to speak, hundreds of feet long and with hundreds of mail container bins. As the Chief Technology Officer at Earth Class Mail, Mike got to design mail sorters with millions of mail containers in a single machine – a building-sized machine – breaking the mold of prior thinking that tomorrow’s faster, cheaper mail sorter had to fit in the same general footprint as yesteryear’s. By departing from the classical approach to postal sortation mechanization Mike was able to invent all-new, patent-pending designs that reduced labor costs by some 70%... a true breakthrough in a field which endeavors at best to make single digit enhancements in productivity year-to-year.
Miles’ “MegaSorter” design indeed represents a quantum leap over the first-generation mail sorter technology which has been around since the 60’s. Instead of pinch bands and horizontal conveyor belts that can “bubble sort” mail at speeds that max out at 38,000 per hour, you’ll read about how the MegaSorter can sort multiple mail streams – letters, flats, priority mail, express mail and small parcels – all at once. And sort it all in just 90 minutes, regardless of whether it is handling 200,000 pieces or 20 million pieces at a time. For postal operators, the MegaSorter not only saves billions in labor and BTUs, but allows their customers to enjoy Earth Class Mail features from the entry point of the postal stream rather than from the exit point, creating vast new revenue opportunities while saving vast numbers of labor hours and energy resources.
Chris Kwak went straight to Wall Street, after graduating from Harvard, to practice the craft of covering publicly held enterprise-software companies as an equity research analyst. Like Dr. Lynn, by a relatively young age Chris rose through the ranks to become a senior analyst covering companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce.com, and industries ranging from software, security, IT services, Internet, and video games having worked for prominent investment firms such as Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse First Boston, Bear Stearns, Viking Global Investors and Susquehanna International Group.
The world of Wall Street is much more brutal and swift in dispensing justice to bad corporate decision makers than you’re going to find in the government sector. Stock price is one highly visible way with which investors (and the analysts who cover the stocks) “vote with their wallets” as to whether they believe an enterprise is on the right track for the future or not. Government-owned posts lack this feedback mechanism and so we already see a rapidly widening gap between the fiscal track records of government-owned versus shareholder-owned postal operators. Chris takes a look at the world of posts, now an amalgam of unshackled “liberalized” private or public corporations and government agencies – and hybrids all along the spectrum – and creates an analysis for the reader of why and how the USPS must go public by early in the next decade in order to survive the oncoming tsunami of radical change in technology and consumer behavior. It is a fascinating read from a Darwinian point of view, and any postal operator is sure to glean valuable insights from it.
Ron Wiener is the founder and CEO of Earth Class Mail Corp. If Benjamin Franklin was the father of the modern Post Office, Ron was the unwitting father of the Online Post Office, known as Earth Class Mail™. (Though he claims there is no connection, his oldest son happens to be named “Benjamin.”) As a serial entrepreneur he ran companies with major catalog and direct marketing divisions, large-scaling Internet IT infrastructures, software and hardware engineering teams, and complex manufacturing operations. For Ron, this business was at the confluence of his core competencies and favorite industries.
The idea for Earth Class Mail came to Ron first when he counted up the hours of his week that he spent driving to PO boxes and private mail box retail outlets, homes and offices, just to pick up his mail and see if there was anything important. He soon realized what a significant percentage of his time was being wasted chasing after this last form of communications that wasn’t hanging off his belt or sitting on his desk as a digital medium. Ron realized that the last analog tether that kept him from being “truly mobile” as he flew his Beechcraft Bonanza from place to place, was his postal mail. Everything else was portable: email, voicemail and efax were all instantly accessible wherever he landed, but as someone who needed to check his postal mail daily for legal documents, checks, RFPs and other time-critical items, he felt tethered to multiple mailboxes, forever enslaved to driving a globe-warming circuit between them. The very notion defied his sensibilities as a pilot and a technologist – there had to be a solution!
Earth Class Mail was hatched in Ron’s Venture Mechanics business incubator in Portland, Oregon, where a small engineering team spent the first year working out a means of finding a veritable needle in a haystack – i.e. locating a single letter in what might be a pile of 5 million letters – so that if he were to go online from Geneva and see that he’d received an important letter from his accountant, he’d be able to read it, as a PDF file, within 5 minutes. Rather than laugh off the idea as implausible, future CTO Mike Miles scrapped four inferior material handling automation schemes before finally settling on what is today known as the MegaSorter – a mail sorter with millions, instead of hundreds, of “pockets.” The rest, as they say, is history, and today Earth Class Mail has untethered postal recipients from their mailboxes in over 80 countries, and is being actively evaluated by several national posts as a platform for serving every citizen, and every business in their country, their postal mail online.
For speaking engagements, please contact pr@earthclassmail.com
©2008 Earth Class Mail
About the Authors
