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Fresh start

23rd November 1995
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0 ne day back in 1988, after 22 years building up the family haulage business in Shropshire, Derek Marston realised he was lining everybody's pocket except his own.

While his seven vehicles had plenty of work and the drivers were all getting paid regularly, few of the forwarding agents and dockside clearing houses he was working for seemed to be paying him.

"It was almost impossible to get the money. I spent so much time trying to get it, and sort out problems with some of the drivers that I'd had enough," he says.

He could have sold the business or left the vehicles standing while he considered his options, but instead decided on the ultimate sanction: "I wanted to get out of the business altogether. We had a yard full of vehicles and trailers for sale, did all the catalogues our

selves and held the auction on the Saturday, out in the yard:' Apart from a single 40ft trailer, the entire fleet sold for around £100,000 which at the time was a good price. However, if people thought that this was the end of Derek Marston & Son. they were wrong.

"On Monday morning the phone did not stop ringing. I got an owner-driver to pull the trailer for a week, then I hired a vehicle A few months later I bought another unit and were stilt in business today," he says.

Marston is convinced he did the right thing at the time.

"It was a drastic move, yes. But we cleared away a lot of the dead wood. Now we have a proper family business, we work for customers with whom we've established some loyalty and we all pull together."

Ironically perhaps, much of the revenue in the company's second era is originating from dead wood—or more precisely, from timber haulage.

This is either the delivery of logs for the production of chipboard, sawn timber for the production of pre-fabricated buildings or the delivery of finished chipboard products.

A network of timber merchants and factories around the country provide outward and return loads for the Marston vehicles from as far afield as Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall.

Traditional

The business has the traditional family look. Three ERFs are driven by 52-year-old Derek and his sons Brian, 27, and Richard, 23. Wife Beryl controls the administration strings from the depot, which is a smallholding behind the bungalow at Halfway House, near Shrewsbury in Shropshire.

If much of the Marston revenue is drawn from agricultural origins, that's probably because fanning is in the blood.

"I was a farmer's son, but couldn't get a farm of my own so I started lorry driving. In 19661 bought a petrol-driven six-tonner and a livestock haulage business. My first new vehicle was a Seddon. It cost £2,400 and I've still got the receipt," he says.

Marston continued to carry livestock using three four-wheelers until 1979, when it was decided to abandon that side of the business and seek other opportunities.

That meant a move into general haulage and eventually the bitterest of experiences which led to the decision to sell up, first time around.

"There were so many people prepared to take on a lorry before they had the work," he says. "They were left with overheads they had to cover and had to cut the rates to get the work to pay them off."

If that's a story familiar to many hauliers today, they might also agree with his complaint about the larger fleets: "They are killing off the smaller hauliers because they run off such small margins. If they want the extra business they just hire another vehicle at the same low margin. We can't compete with practices like that."

It's for reasons like this that IVIarston prefers to stick with work generated in his more familiar agricultural environment. He says much of his business with farmers is based on trust and loyalty, something you don't often get on the dockside. He's been bitten once by the clearing house hands that were apparently feeding him, and that was enough.

So, Marston provides local farmers with a variety of services. For example, the depot acts as a palletised storage depot for calcified seaweed sourced from Cornwall.

It is used as an organic fertiliser and is supplied as an alternative to the chemically based products that Marston delivers direct to farms from the ICI manufacturing plant at Avonmouth or the Norsk Hydro plant at Immingham. However, at present sugarbeet is dominating his vehicle operations timetable. Like many hauliers around the country at the moment, Marston is involved in the annual sugarbeet run. Lifted sugarbeet roots are being collected from local farms and delivered to various processing plants like the one owned by British Sugar at Alscott near Telford. Marston organises collections each day from nine local farms until the four-month harvesting season ends in February.

"Each farmer is responsible for his own transport arrangements," says Marston. "There are no contracts between us, but I've worked for most of the farmers since the factory was built.

"I'm there at the factory with a load at 6.30 in the morning," he adds, "and each day it's a succession of short trips, with about 40 minutes loading time at each farm. I'll do about five loads in a day.

Distribution

Non-farm work includes distribution of prepacked coal, which will be delivered to a variety of retail outlets such as garden centres as well as some shipping merchants around the country, but more than 90% of revenue is agricultural and forestry based. That first Marston era has left behind principles of financial control to which he now clings like a dog to a bone. For example, leasing vehicles or hire purchase is out of the question: "We had a vehicle once on a fixed interest rate, but we got caught when the variable rate went down. I don't believe in finance houses. The only place to get the money from is from the bank. At least if you treat your bank manager like a good dog, he'll only bite you if you kick him."

Given that the £50,000 overdraft was repaid inside a year. Marston's bank manager might be prepared to absorb the first couple of blows.

However, the present fleet is relatively young and business is such that the local bank manager will need little protection for the forseeable future.

"There's me and the two lads doing the driving and that's enough. If the lads want to expand it later that's fine, but I don't want the aggravation at the moment," he says.

7 by Steve McQueen


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