A one-stop-shop
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Stockport Truck Centre remains a consistent presence offering trailer rental and sales, and an awful lot besides
Words: Kevin Swallow / Images: Kevin Swallow / Tom Cunningham
Confidence remains low among small to
medium-sized operators, with leet investment hardly a priority. The recession stopped capital outlay and, with lending opportunities restricted, many hauliers turned to rental.
Dave Cross, sales director at Stockport Truck Centre, based on four sites in Cheshire, Merseyside and the Wirral, has witnessed this irst hand. “The rental market is positive at the moment. This year it’s been very stable with utilisation running at 85%.
“With the state of the economy, hauliers are not in a position to commit to capital investment. They run very tight ships and cannot reinvest back into the business, which is a concern,” he says.
Before the nation’s economy hit the buffers, operators were willing to take a calculated risk to invest and expand, now they won’t. “The margins aren’t there. Talking to hauliers the week before the Queen’s Jubilee everything went berserk. Supermarkets were expecting everyone to jump to meet the increased demand, but hauliers could only do what they could and maximise what they had. There was little spare capacity,” says Cross.
Small to medium-sized operators who do invest, primarily go to the used trailer market rather than new, which increases competition for stock, forcing up prices. “People pay a bit more and with some trailers people are paying premiums. It will come to a point where a ive-yearold second-hand trailer isn’t cost-effective,” he says.
It’s dificult to pinpoint at what point buyers start to reconsider new sales, and Cross suggests it could be more than a year away. In the meantime, the company is busy trying to gain a 10% growth in turnover against the past 12 months’ trading, he explains.
Change of approach
Cross joined the company four and half years ago, and his remit was to bring new business and expand the number of customers to spread the risk to the workshop. That was in January 2007, a pre-recession era. Working with a 200-strong rental leet at the time, he says the recession changed the approach. “We looked at what we had to try to maximise work from the existing customer to ring-fence the work.
“We reduced some rates with customers to maintain some work. We lost a lot from the automotive trade and the volumes of customers in building and construction dwindled, but we knuckled down and brought some new business in,” he says.
Key was continuing to ind work for the workshop, and an agreement with local trailer rental company RTF doubled the overall rental leet, putting an additional 200 trailers into the STC workshop. STC acquired the rental company in May 2011 and with added investment in new rolling stock, raised the rental leet to more than 500 trailers, with approximately four of every ive on spot hire, as well as 13 trucks for local customers to hire. “We had mainly curtainsided, skeletal and latbed trailers, and the 200 from RTF included more curtainsided and some reefer trailers,” he says.
Recovery work
Further investment included adding a new, albeit second-hand, 6x2 Foden wrecker to the leet. Before its arrival all recovery work was done by third-party operators.
“We have brought that in-house to help existing customers, and we have the potential to recover the vehicle into the workshop where, in the past, we wouldn’t have had that,” says Cross.
Workshop (see sidebar) and refurbishment play major roles in the business, as does the sales and leasing side of the business. STC remarkets its own rental and contract hire leet, and also buys and sells trailers. “We look at 10to 12-year-old trailers, then take a view on what to do with them. We sell about 150 pieces a year,” he says.
Smaller operators favour older stock that is still operable and comes with an MoT as well as a refurbish, if required, provided by STC. “We are keen on ive-year-old curtainsided trailers to refurbish, whether that’s paint, curtains and/or MoT, and then we sell them. All that goes back into the business.
“There is always something we can offer to a customer: maintenance, repair and refurbishment, digital tachograph and diagnostics, trailer rental, leasing and sales, parts and a Vosa ATF test lane.” n
HYDE HOME TO THE FIRST PURPOSE-BUILT ATF
In August 2010 Stockport Truck Centre opened the first purpose-built Vosa authorised testing facility (ATF) in the country (CM 4 August 2011). The Hydebase centre cost £500,000 to build and effectively replaced the now-closed Vosa test station down the road in Bredbury.
At the time it solved a bottleneck in the business because trailers unable to secure test slots backed up in the workshop. It paved the way for more than 150 ATF stations across the UK.