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Adrian Chambers
• "An excellent exercise in management" is how Adrian Chambers, managing director of SCA Freight Ltd, describes running a transport business and he applies this particularly to international haulage in which his own company is exclusively involved.
Previously in the building business, Mr Chambers started the SCA haulage operation in the early months of 1966 with one vehicle and a driver. Since then the business has grown till it employs over 200 personnel and more than 100 wholly owned vehicles as well as a number of leased units. It also owns a German and an Italian company and has bonded and storage warehouses.
With very definite ideas of business management, particularly with regard to international road haulage, Mr Chambers is quite dogmatic about the policy and objectives of the company. "We concentrate on what we know we can do well," he says, "and have no hesitation in refusing business that we think we cannot handle."
He feels that to many customers cost is secondary and they want a service on which they can rely implicitly and this, he says, is what SCA sets out to give. With regular services to the Ruhr district of Germany, to Northern Italy as far south as Florence and to the area around Paris, the company maintains strict and constant control over the vehicle and its contents from the time it leaves the London depot till it arrives at its Continental destination where control is taken over by the company's Continental organization.
This, asserts Mr Chambers, is the only way to ensure that the company's customers get what they pay for — regular and utterly reliable service. It certainly seems to pay, for SCA turnover' is currently about £2.2 million.
So confident of the company's ability to "deliver the goods" is he that a next-day delivery on a late-arrival no-pay basis is operated to Paris daily.
Nor are the other facets of management neglected for he also has quite definite views on such management topics as staff relations and the proper employment of capital.
In conversation, he gives the impression that he is totally dedicated to the operation of his company and he will tell you that even the racing venture which he has run for about two years with the 5.7-litre Chevrolet Camaro has been subordinated to publicizing SCA.
What he does not tell you is that he raced a Lotus Elite, himself, in the early Sixties which suggests that he got a lot more fun out of being a patron of a racing venture than
he admits. J.J.