S Jones is proud of its new £2.5 million premises
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which combine an ERF dealership with other transport services. But is there a conflict for an outfit which runs its own fleet and does business with competitors?
• When a potential customer took one look at Michael Jones's cluttered truck dealership and announced he was taking his custom elsewhere, Jones decided something had to be done. Jones, chairman of family haulier and ERF distributor S Jones, resolved that selling the right truck was not enough if it was sold in the wrong surroundings.
Last month, the Walsall company opened a £2.5 million outlet which Jones says is modelled on a Mercedes or Porsche car dealership and is probably the plushest ERF franchise in the country. His philosophy is that if a truck distributor cannot give a customer the same service he would get as a motorist, it is not worth being in business.
As well as selling the Sandbach marque, the centre offers contract hire and rental of all makes of truck. It has an HGV driver agency with 50 drivers on its books, and runs HGV and CPC training courses. It also has a breakdown service and a 10-bay workshop doing repairs and contract maintenance for local hauliers and the Army.
RETAIL SIDE
The retail side of S Jones's business, which makes up half the group's £22 million turnover, is run separately from its trucking activities. These are based at its older depot nearby, from which the company has been running commercial vehicles since the First World War. Although the split was made 10 years ago, only now have the two arms been housed on different sites.
"We were desperately short of room at our old depot," says David Hughes, deputy managing director responsible for the new S Jones centre. We have moved everything here except haulage, and what we are trying to offer is a full retail service for anyone who runs trucks.'' Hughes sees no conflict in selling trucks and services to hauliers who might be bidding for the same work as S Jones Transport. He admits, however, that suspicious customers were one reason why the two divisions were split in the 1970s. According to Jones, there have been no cases where a truck customer has been in competition for a haulage contract. If there was, he concedes, the client might "go down the road" to the Scania or Volvo dealer.
Now the two workshops are in different buildings. No S Jones Transport trucks are repaired in the same pits as customers' lorries. Fitters, used to mending their own company's vehicles, have had to be educated to deal with outside clients, Hughes explains, which includes wearing clean, company-badged overalls.
S Jones Transport runs a predominantly ERF fleet of 110 tractive units and 150 tailers. They are bought in-house, but we don't buy ERFs just because we're distributors," insists Hughes. Nevertheless, in-company business accounts for about 10% of the dealer's annual sales of 230 trucks. Outside customers have become more important. When the company started as a dealer in the 1960s, it was selling only 40 vehicles a year.
Hughes hopes the new premises will attract business. 'There were some companies who would not deal with us at our old site, particularly own-account firms. They told us it was congested; they had to fight their way through to get to reception. Well-signposted reception areas were part of our planning with this centre," he says.
The premises, paid for with a bank loan, have separate desks for contract hire and rental, truck sales, parts and the driver agency. Classrooms for CPC and HGV training are upstairs; the company employs seven instructors. Some 8,000 drivers have passed their tests with S Jones, and about 10 go through the CPC course each quarter.
Although all of its agency and many of its own staff drivers have gone through the school, only 1% of pupils come from within the company. It has recently lambasted the Government in a letter for being too lax on standards of HGV training schools. It wants all HGV instructors to be registered and 'cowboy' centres to be outlawed, Half the schools in the country are not up to scratch, says Hughes. "Anyone can set one up if they have an HGV licence, but there is no correlation between teaching and driving. We think all centres should be registered with the RTITB."
Jones, which charges fi(l() for its 10day course which includes classroom work, offers on-going training and claims a 95% pass rate. Even among drivers doing the test for the first time, the success rate is 80%, says Hughes. The company plans to start Hazchem and Hazpak training later this year.
The truck centre was Hughes' brainchild. It was designed by a local architect with a lot of input from Hughes who travelled through the Middle East and the USA for ideas. He admits it is similar to a Kenworth distributorship in Tampa and a Volvo outlet in Saudi. ERF has little say in how its dealerships look, he says.
"Unlike Mercedes, for instance, ERF has little influence. Although it has a strong network in a practical sense, some of them haven't reached the 20th century looks-wise," he claims. Hughes plans to put a greater emphasis on add-on services, like maintenance. This is where the money is, he reckons. "People always need trucks serviced. It is not subject to the whims of the market like truck sales."
Hughes plans to put leaflets crossselling other parts of the group in all the reception areas because, he says, customers waiting for parts or for trucks to be serviced are a captive market. The centre includes a cafeteria for visiting drivers and staff. Twenty-five mechanics and 15 apprentices man the workshop, with five fitters on duty at night.
S Jones' transport operation is split in three. A bulk liquids division does spot hire work for most of the chemicals majors, carrying hazardous loads, mainly to the Continent. A contract distribution arm has deals with Hays (on its Tesco business) and Norfolk line (with 20 vehicles on double shifts running to and from Great Yarmouth). S Jones provides drivers and liveried vehicles over three to five years; the rest of its trucks do general spot hire work. It has another 100-strong contract hire fleet and 40 rental vehicles in its retail division.
The company — which had a Renault truck franchise in Coventry for six years until 1989 — also runs a recovery service, Red Triangle, which has three towing and four roadside assistance vehicles. Its contract with the Ministry of Defence locally means it has been picking up broken-down Army medical trucks, used during the ambulance strike, for repair. LI by Murdo Morrison