When the mayor of the grocery store (called “Uncle Q” by his family of clients) partners with a marketing maven, their power to cultivate relationships and provide phenomenal service creates magic. After decades working in airlines, Quentin Moultrie swapped flights for food in 2015 and began his grocery delivery journey with Shipt. And after two decades in Human Resources (HR), Maggie jumped to Shipt and their friendship and partnership blossomed.
“I used to do Shipt and jokingly called Q my mentor because he’s like the mayor of the grocery store, everybody knows him,” Maggie says, “He helped me out a lot when I was getting started and when he discovered Dumpling, I started helping him with my business experience.”
While at Shipt, Quentin built quality relationships, but began wondering if instead of working for “the big guys” he could run his own small business exactly how he likes to work with his families: high-touch service, ability to purchase from multiple stores for a single order, quality branding, and picking up little extras he knew his families adored.
“If I can do that going through another company, why not be able to do it on my own? I had a regular Shipt customer who asked me if I’d heard about Dumpling so I looked into it and saw it was the platform I could use to start my own small business,” Quentin explains, “When I first came over, I saw the potential to make more right out the gate; [at first] I wasn’t making as much, but the potential for making more was there.”
They both decided to switch from Shipt and grow their partnership with Maggie leveraging her biz and marketing knowledge to help Quentin set up his LLC and ramp up his business, QDelivery Service. From car magnets to share the brand while Quentin was out on deliveries to t-shirts to identify his grocery delivery business when he was in store picking up orders, this power duo spread the word about the new business and began helping their family of clients make the switch to their new platform: Dumpling.
Growing a High-Touch Small Business With a Family-First Attitude
Quentin started putting in the sweat equity to grow his small business immediately. “I put a lot into it and that’s the only way, in my opinion, to grow your own businesses is to put a lot of work and time into it,” explains Quentin, “And Maggie helps me understand more work-life balance and realize that you gotta have at least one day off a week.”
Together, the duo moved a majority of his current customers to Dumpling and out of his current customers, 20 percent are still from his time with Shipt and 35 percent are repeat customers. “It’s been amazing because luckily he’s been doing this for so long that he knows his folks even by just looking at the street address,” says Maggie.
That’s why switching to the small business format that Dumpling provides made sense. All the trust he built from the idea that he’d shop exactly like his families would to his family-first mentality to his higher levels of communication and service coincided with Dumpling’s attitude of partnership and small business growth.
“With Shipt, it’s such a bigger entity to where they see them as customers and I didn’t want that type of feeling starting my own business,” says Quentin, “I wanted to let my families know that you’re going to get an extra personal touch, and if you have questions or any concerns, you’re able to come straight to me, there’s no middleman, and I’m the person able to rectify things.”
With Dumpling, Quentin can reach out to his family of customers with in-app messaging and let them know when out-of-stock or favorite items are available or help with any concerns. This also shows his customers he’s paying attention to their specific needs and helps to increase his volume of orders.
“One key selling point that was huge was the no price markups, and that’s one thing that I use when I’m trying to convert any new customer from Shipt or other services,” explains Quentin, “It’s in-store pricing, no matter what sales there are like BOGOs or whatever sales are going on, they’re going to get those sales and everything.”
The other piece that drew Maggie and Quentin to Dumpling was their idea of being family and being closely connected to their customer base, which resonated with exactly how they wanted to run Quentin’s small business. “A new customer transitioning over from one of the big guys, like Shipt or Instacart, wants to know they’re making the right decision,” explains Maggie, and the deals they were able to offer through Dumpling helped smooth the transition, too.
Delivering Success Grassroots Style
Unlike with Shipt, Quentin and Maggie found that they could go to multiple stores for a single customer, beef up referral bonuses to set a good foundation, leverage Dumpling’s email campaigns for continuous marketing, and set specific goals to expand in new ways.
“Why don’t we try expanding beyond residential customers and focus on small businesses like local restaurants, for example, or with COVID and being vaccinated as major concerns, we started targeting local assisted living facilities,” says Maggie, “They seem to really appreciate having the same shopper from a health standpoint so the initial goals were bringing customers over, then increasing repeat customers, then increasing ticket price per order by adding a different variety of customers to our base.”
Because they’ve seen a higher ticket per order with Dumpling, they also work on setting mini goals, like increasing volume of orders, for Quentin so he sees business progress, but can manage work-life balance.
“The business insights and referring to them daily helps keep us motivated and set a plan for the next day and having that at our fingertips as business owners is key,” explains Maggie, “With Dumpling giving us the ability to do our own pricing and set different categories for different types of pricing that’s really awesome, too.”
Quentin and Maggie also found they were more productive with the Dumpling app, shopping list, categories, discounts and deals, referrals, self-adjust tickets, multi-store trips, in-app messaging, and coaching sessions.
Because Quentin maintains his customers-are-family attitude, he spends time sitting down for coffee with clients as if he’s a member of the family and “it’s really a family feel and that’s how I’ve always wanted to run a business and Dumpling has given me that opportunity to do that,” says Quentin.
His families call him Uncle Q, adds Maggie, and little kids come to greet him, give him gifts, and the relationships go well beyond delivering groceries. “When I was delivering groceries, I didn’t have the relationships that he has, and I would always say, ‘How do you do this?’ But loving what you do really builds that with the customers and he has a really good base of customers now.”