nderneath the Heathrow Airport flightpath and on the western fringe of the London boroughs region is Uxbridgebased Collins Road Services.
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From here, Collins has easy motorway access to almost every part of the country via the M4 the M25, M3, M40 and 11/11. The disadvantage is the inward-bound traffic this generates. The proximity of the airport and access to the capital have a profound effect upon hauliers in the area.
"When we travel into the City of London in the morning, it takes about as long to get there as it takes to send a vehicle up to Birmingham," says director Colin Sturgess, whose son Colin is also a director of the business. "Our compatriots in the north of England enjoy the same level of rates for jobs, but their costs for renting warehousing accommodation can be 50% less. Their profitability at the end of the year always looks far greater Property costs might be expensive but the alternative is to move out of the area and lose the market. However, the danger that cus tomers will move out to save overheads is ever present: "We have lost several customers because they have moved into greenbelt areas where it is cheaper." Sturgess set up the family-run business in 1971.
It now has three other arms: CRS Storage, CRS Contracts and CW Shipping.
Collins Road Services is the haulage side of the business. As a founder-member of Palletline, the company has taken full advantage of the shared user system to amend the size of its fleet and redefine a customer base which at one time extended throughout the South-East.
"Since getting involved with Palletline we've actually sold a third of our fleet because we don't need them," says Sturgess. "We've always specialised in multiple deliveries of pallets and used to have a milk run up the Ml, M6, across the Pennines and back down again. There would always be three or four vehicles involved, often coming back from Nottingham empty. It was ludicrous. With Palletline, we run fully loaded wagon-and-drags up to a central hub and they come back fully loaded." The result is that rather than running all over the country, many of the deliveries are semi-local, making 80% of the £2m-turnover business generated from customers within 20 to 25 miles of Uxbridge.
Barely 50% of its business goes on Collins' vehicles, The company sub-contracts heavily, Using five regular owner-drivers.
The year has started well for CRS Contracts. It is a stand-alone white-goods operation, using 7.5 to 17-tonne gross Ford or AWD trucks and specialising in the delivery of refrigerated ice cream sales units for retailers. The company's biggest contracts are with Nestle and Wall's.
Lifted deliveries
"CRS Contracts has just taken on Devon and Cornwall as additional areas. This has lifted deliveries from 15,000 refrigerated units last year to probably 27,000 this year," he says.
While CRS Storage handles the warehousing side, CW Shipping helps the company make full use of its location and Palletline membership. It loads and unloads vehicles arriving from its French and German partners before distributing much of the distance work through the Palletline system, while handling the local traffic itself through its own vehicles and its dedicated subcontractors.