WRECKS TO RICHES
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Hutton of Glasgow is a truck surgery offering everything from body repairs to rebuilds, servicing to signwriting. It is also an agent for several manufacturers, including Steyr and Van Hool. • Commercial vehicle repair and rebuild firm Colin Hutton Group offers a do-it-all, 24-hour service to the haulage industry, which includes cab and chassis straightening, signwriting, servicing and bodywork.
This month it will start selling trucks, after winning the central Scotland franchise from new-to-the-UK Steyr. It is already an agent for French trailer-maker Trailor and is also negotiating to sell Van Flool coaches.
The Glasgow-based company was founded 12 years ago by husband and wife Colin and Doreen Hutton as Curtrainer, a mobile repair operation for curtain-sided trailers run from a garage at their Renfrewshire home.
Colin Hutton had just left a tarpaulin manufacturer after 15 years in sales. Because they could not get planning permission to expand, in 1980 they bought a run-down factory in the Maryhill area of the city, behind the Partick Thistle football ground.
Today, the firm repairs or refines 150 vehicles a week, employs 53 fitters, painters, mechanics and welders and turns over £1.4 million a year. The original 1,860m2 factory is now 5,570m2 and this will shortly be extended by 1,3900 for a Steyr service workshop and more space
for the paint shop. With business growing at, Hutton claims, 25% a year, room is running out, and he wants to expand by buying the factory next door.
Hutton's customers include the large trailer rental companies, Strathclyde Buses, Curries of Dumfries, Coca-Cola Shweppes, and Scottish and Newcastle brewers — also every Frans Maas driver coming through Scotland to pick up at IBM in Greenock; these are routine checks: if the trailer is imperfect, IBM sends the truck away empty. It is also service and repair agent for the curtainsider manufacturer Boalloy and has been painting a Walter Alexander monorail carriage ordered by Disneyland.
hiAINIZNANCE
Three years ago the company introduced a 24-hour maintenance operation for hauliers, who can put their trucks in at night and collect them the next day. It still runs its mobile curtainsider repair service with four vans, driven by HGV Class One drivers and equipped with generatorpowered welding sets. Two tractive units are used to pull in damaged trailers for repair or annual vehicle test. It runs a rescue operation with another Glasgow company, Ashfield Recovery.
It has a full parts operation, two storemen taking charge of £45,000 worth of stock which includes roof skins, flooring and steel panels. A roofless panel van sits in the trailer shop — its driver having misjudged the height of a bridge. "Don't photo that," warns Hutton, "the owners don't like people thinking they have accidents."
Freelance signwriters paint hauliers' names on the side of trailers. Across the yard, bashed ERF, Leyland Daf and Bedford cabs sit engine-less, chassis-less and roof-less. Forklift trucks are used to manoeuvre the hulks on and off their bodies.
Doreen and Colin Hutton are directors of the company, which went limited in 1985; sales director Robin Stewart is a third. There are workshop and bodyshop managers and the Huttons' son David, 21, also works in sales.
Stewart will take charge of Steyr marketing, and hopes to sell 20 in the first year. He admits that with a truck new to the UK, he will have to work hard and probably not make money on initial orders. "Steyr understands the situation," he says. "It's not like selling Iveco Fords when you're expected to go out and sell hundreds."
Hutton approached Steyr, knowing it was looking for established firms at which to locate its dealerships. He wanted the franchise for the whole of Scotland, but another distributor, in the north of Scotland, still has to be appointed.
Hutton's talks with Belgian bus and coach builder Van Hool have been going on this month. Any franchise, however, will not include Van Hool trailers as it would clash with the Trailor business.
Hutton's bodybuilding is restricted to specialist height and length alterations, taking bodies off old rigids and fixing them on new ones, and fitting side and back doors. It cannot compete with production line bodybuilding. "We call ourselves bodybuilders, but we don't go out looking for work," he says. Although it has a regular customer base, it has no fixed repair or servicing contracts, but it is negotiating for one with a major haulier.
Hutton rarely advertises. He relies on word-of-mouth recommendations and reputation, and at the moment is working at near capacity. He is proud that he has never had to sack a worker through lack of work.
"We're expanding, but we only expand using our own money," he says. "Eventually we'll reach a point where we'll have to consolidate." He may relocate the Steyr site and the old empty factory next door looks tempting, but it will have to be bulldozed. His buildings are not the smartest in the world ("We are not in a business which demands palatial premises"). Aside from the location, the yard is littered with old chassis and muddy puddles. A sign admits: "We are not perfect, but we do care."
Although rates are not cheap, he owns the land, and rent for a new site on an industrial estate would be too expensive.
The business has grown from customers asking for extra services. Hauliers having a curtain repaired in the early days asked if they could have the odd bump mended. "I could never turn anyone away," says Doreen Hutton, who is west of Scotland secretary of the Vehicle and Body Repairers Association.
ON THE STREETS
Four bodybuilders and welders were taken on when they moved to Glasgow. "We had to expand," she says, remembering how trucks were mended on the street outside their house. "I was tired of getting woken on Sunday with someone working outside."
At first, their office was a mobile building inside the workshop. One half was the staff tea room. There were no toilets and workers had to nip down to the local pub when things got uncomfortable. "It was probably strictly illegal," she says.
Now the company has built a rest-room with TV and showers for drivers waiting for their trucks, and is looking to open a street-front reception area when the Steyr franchise comes on stream. Hutton also runs a two-tier discount card scheme for regular customers, offering cut-price parts to hauliers (the gold card) and gifts like anoraks for drivers (the silver card and truckers club).
Hutton says his is one of few repair centres offering everything from bodybuilding to livery painting. Although it will be servicing and parts agent for Steyr, this part of the operation will be kept separate, and work is going on to renovate a "glory hole" shed next to the paintshop, which at the moment is used as a junk store.
0 by Murdo Morrison