Selling Time
Page 66
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
UNTIL the elevation of the Ivory Tower, it did not occur to road transport operators that there was something peculiarly difficult about their calling. They considered themselves lucky to be in on the ground floor of an industry that provided them with a good living. Some of them failed to make enough money to stay in business, but that is the natural hazard of any industry. The average operator, who got on with the job and did not talk too much about how much profit he was making, had nothing to complain about.
Nationalization had little effect upon the finances or the activities of the provincial and Scottish road passenger services that were taken over. But for several years the accounts of British Road Services either just balanced or were in the red. An independent operator would have given up the struggle and put his money, or what was left of it, into something else. B.R.S. were of tougher fibre, in addition to which it was not their money. They persevered, and in due course have contrived to show a profit much more regularly.
The independent operator with no intellectual pretensions might say that the prolonged struggle by B.R.S. towards solvency was completely unnecessary, and that the Socialists could have avoided it merely by forgetting about 'nationalization. This is too simple an explanation for the experts in the Ivory Tower. If, although reinforced by most of the leading figures in the long-distance field, they could still barely keep their heads above water, there must be more to the running of a road haulage business than they had supposed.
They have set out to prove it with a number of ingenious arguments, some of them supplied by the experts on the railway side of the fence, who have had much longer practice in thinking up reasons why a transport business should be run at a loss. A favourite argument is the theory that transport operators are selling time, something that vanishes as soon as it is created. The revenue that may be earned on this very day from a seat in a bus, coach or train, or from the space sufficient to hold a ton in a lorry or railway wagon, is lost forever at the stroke of midnight, In fact, every minute when the vehicle is unoccupied is one minute nearer to the bankruptcy court. Even the most perishable of commodities can do better for their owners than this, especially with refrigeration and other benefits of modern science.
Losing Battle
Theorizing along these lines is harmless provided it does not dishearten operators into feeling that they are fighting a long losing battle against time, and that the revenue they earn is fairy gold. Their predicament is not unique. Theatre and cinema owners, for example, know what it is to have empty seats at their disposal, but so far as I know they do not for that reason consider it harder to make Money from their occupation than from anything else.
Most hauliers have little enough time on their hands to worry about, and their instinct is not to complicate things. The skill and experience needed to run a road transport business are abundantly available in B.R.S. They may perhaps be overlaid by the need in a large nationalized concern for managerial and professional qualifications. For other operators the skill lies largely in improvisation.
They may not know from one day to the next what their vehicles will be doing. So much depends upon customers who often do not make up their minds until the last c30 moment. The operator must know where to look for traffic, but his nose for the right job is not a managerial or professional attribute. He would find such an attribute beside the point. The professional man in particular, when he happens to come into the road haulage industry, perhaps more or less by accident to take over the family business, finds that his training and the habits of Mind it has inculcated are not of much use. He has to start at the beginning.
In a large organization, and especially in B.R.S., he would apparently find more scope for his special qualities, but once again they would not help a great deal in getting business. Many of the former independent operators who have made good in B.R.S. may not have been notably successful with their own concerns. They may have had managerial qualities that there was little chance to display in a small undertaking, but that have ample scope in B.R.S.
Winged Chariot However, if a satisfactory method of measurement could be devised, it would probably emerge that B.R.S. are not as efficient as independent operators in the terms that matter, such as the volume of traffic carried per vehicle and the cost per ton. The experts in the Ivory Tower can write mellifluously about ton-miles disappearing like bubbles in the wake of time's winged chariot. This does not make them any more expert in filling the unforgiving ton-mile with 20 cwt. of traffic won; just as caged birds sing the sweetest songs, but are not as well equipped as the vulgar starling to scratch a living.
Some months ago Mr. G. W. Quick Smith, a member of the board of management of B.R.S., set out in a paper to show the advantages of large-scale operations in road haulage, and atif the same time made suggestions for overcoming any disadvantages. The large organization, he said, was able to plan operations so as to achieve economies. It could provide a comprehensive network of services, and they could be regular and frequent. It had a wide range of types and sizes of vehicle and ancillary equipment. It could experiment with new techniques and promote research into operational problems. It could exploit the advantages of mechanization. It could provide facilities for the maintenance of vehicles and the training of staff.
Mr. Quick Smith made the obvious point that the small operator could not do these things on anything like the same scale. What he failed to notice was that the small operator has no need to do so. He provides the services and the types of vehicle that suit his own limited purposes. He experiments within his own limited field, as Mr. R. B. Brittain has done recently with his new van for delivering parcels. He looks after his staff, and sees that they are trained up to what he requires of them, Once B.R.S. have been set up, they require the various features with which Mr. Quick Smith has credited them. In particular, they require the transport expert, with organizing abilities, whom Mr. Quick Smith would like to welcome into the industry. What he calls " advantages " are the inevitable consequences of setting up a giant undertaking. They are no more properly described as advantages than, say, the need for B.R.S. to have large premises for their head office. They would be disadvantages to a small operator aiming to specialize in a narrow field.