GERRY JONES TRANSPORT
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G
0 erry Jones had taken the morning off to sign the papers on the new house he was buying so that he could be nearer his work as depot manager at Renwicks Freight, Avonmouth. When he returned to work in the afternoon he was made redundant. When he got home in the evening his wife announced that she was pregnant with their second child.
"I've had better days," says Jones, who by the following Monday was at the bank, clutching his £1.200 payoff and trying to convince them to finance him as a clearing house for bulk wood pulp coming into Newport Docks. "In starting a clearing house from scratch I didn't have any credibility, even though I knew everybody in the industry. What I wanted to do was pay people as they picked loads up. So I had a massive overdraft to start with."
The transport side grew from the lack of subcontractors for local loads. "I had to get a couple of trucks to move the stuff around locally and then I was on the band wagon," he adds.
That was November 1981. Now Gerry Jones Transport Services is a well respected general haulier with a 40strong MAN fleet and a blue-chip client list which includes Hawker Siddley, Pirelli and A Schulman Plastics as well as regular work into the local RDCs of Tesco, Asda and Somerfield.
Two years ago he was invited to join the Transport Association, the "UK hauliers' alliance". "We're able to backload off members and have reciprocal agreements with fuel," Jones explains. "If you get a problem with a vehicle you call out the nearest TA member and vice versa. It works exceptionally well."
His 3.5-acre depot is situated at Cross Keys, 10 minutes from Junction 28 on the M4; it includes a 1,100m2 building and workshops. However, Jones Is In the process of expanding into a six-acre site with a 3,700m2 warehouse just down the road.
"At the moment we're going through the change-of-use process," he says. "As with most bloody councils they don't want hauliers in their area, but this place has been empty for a couple of years so we are hopeful. We're expanding into warehousing but we can't increase the number of vehicles because of the size of our establishment. We want to offer our customers a one-stop shop for warehousing, distribution and shipping."
Gerry Jones Transport is very much a family business. Brothers Mark and David are shareholders and work as operations director and administration director respectively. His other brother, Clive, Is traffic manager. Working as an apprentice with the four fitters is Gerry's son Nathan, who left school two years ago. And his daughter, Naomi, currently studying sports science at Cardiff University, works during the holidays, mainly in the traffic office.
On the international side, Jones travels regularly to Belgium, Holland, Germany and France. At one stage the firm was hauling up 15 Continental loads a week, but that work has suffered at the hands of foreign hauliers. "They can afford to backload cheaper than I can go out with it," he says. Jones believes British hauliers are still being ignored: "We are being dictated to by the government on the fuel...we should be more proactive In what were doing."
Jones is strongly involved in the local community: he is on the board of directors of Newport Rugby Club and through his involvement with the Rotary Club took a truck to Poland In 1989 loaded with medical goods. We went through West Germany and East Germany as it was then," he says, "and when we came back we drove into a united Germany."
As for the future: "The new depot Is going to take a lot of hard work to get off the ground. We intend to keep both sites open. My plan was to retire at 50, but I don't think I'm going to achieve that because I have just two years to go."
His recipe for success in haulage is simple: "We have some very fair customers but they are all very demanding and we pride ourselves in our service. Service is paramount."