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• Adrian Pulleyn has a simple approach to making money; for the best profits, fmd an area of business where not many other firms are pitching for work and do the job consistently well.
It is a formula which he has used effectively in refrigerated haulage, general tipper work and the carriage of more sensitive loads, from works of art to expensive computers. The result is that Pulleyn Transport, based just off the M4 at Reading, has grown in 15 years from one man and his van to one of the smartest fleets on the road, with 45 trucks.
Pulleyn already operates with EC multilateral permits, which allow a proportion of his trucks to move freely across Europe with international loads. Destinations have included Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Turkey.
Eastern Europe is the big news in haulage at present, Pulleyn believes: "You'll see a lot of markets opening up for the transport of products made, or grown in the East. "Eastern European hauliers generally have not got the reliability we can offer. Some of them still come with a driver and mate who have to repair the truck themselves on the road," he says.
"Eastern Europe has got to be treated totally differently from the rest of the international transport market. It is opening up, but you are still going to have the bureaucracy to deal with. They're not going to throw that away," says Pulleyn.
He has a clear idea of how the market will develop: "It will be like the Middle East all over again. At first, it will be like the Middle East in the early days. Then more and more hauliers, and a lot of idiots, will come into the market. It will definitely get screwed up eventually." Pulleyn says it is important for people to realise that you are available in the market, are serious about it, and that you know what you're doing.
The company has had a pretty good run since it was set up in 1975. Pulleyn, a former driver with Hoveringham Gravel ('really smart lorries, with their red chassis and green cabs'), and was part of the Firestone Formula 1 support effort, selling tyres to the race teams.
In 1975 the company decided to pull out of Grand Prix racing: "I just didn't know what to do," he recalls. "It was such a good lifestyle."
In the event Pulleyn bought himself a 2500 Transit and started on an express parcels routine, doing collection and delivery during the day and driving at night. Unlike many people starting in the business, there was no way he'd have gone straight in with an artic, he says.
He stresses that an essential ingredient for the success of the company is hard work. "It's so difficult to find people who are dedicated. Here, we all work, there's always someone available. Last Sunday night Alan Perry, director for warehousing and packing, was here late. At how many hauliers would you find that? A couple of weeks ago, an urgent load came up for Scotland and we had no drivers available so I got in the truck myself and drove to Edinburgh.
"We are grass roots hauliers," he says. And he has disdain for those who are not, and who think the job can be done nine to five, five days a week. Pulleyn sees a threat to his down-to-earth approach from a new style of management at customers, whose distribution and logistics seem at times to be run by companies with no idea about the realities of transport.
He takes exception to the way tender documents and contracts are drawn up: "They want to know everything. Your profit, your capital cost, your profit on drivers' wages, everything. I won't answer their questions the way they ask them. It has cost us work but we still get some of the business."
The view he takes is that his cost details are none of his customers' business: "If I say I want to buy a computer, I don't start asking how much each bit costs to make."
One of the firm's most successful areas of business has been the storage, packing and movement of sensitive loads: "We're a little unusual for a transport company; we've got a complete in-house operation. One thing we do is the warehousing, haulage and installation of complete recording studios — everything but the electricals — all over Europe," says Perry. He's been in packing for 30 years, the past eight at Pulleyn.
During Commercial Motor's visit, the job in hand was the sort of load which has become a doddle to the company — a 20-tonne, 6in-high Henry Moore bronze statue, bound for Guernica in northern Spain. Fortunately, it breaks down into six pieces and can be carried, with its York stone plinth, in three tilts. "It's worth Z4 million," says Perry. "It's been sitting around at the Morris Singer Foundry in Basingstoke for five years,"
The company has been investing in reefers in recent years, and looking for niches within that market. For example, specifying trailers for hanging meat contracts, when most international firms are more interested in floor-loaded pallet work.
There was a short-lived merger three years ago with Rokold European, owned by well-known Oxfordshire fridge haulier Robin East.
One thing Pulleyn learnt from East was that the philosophy of buying vehicles is not always best. If you write a fridge trailer off over seven years, it can still work out costing you more per week than to rent because the rental giants can buy and borrow money so cheaply. And you've got to be very sure you're still going to want to be in fridge work after seven years, he says.
Pulleyn ran tippers for three years, and made money from them, catching the boom in the market at just the right time. Equally importantly, he got out at just about the right time. He started selling off his eight 8x4s last June when prices were still high, and just before the market started to fall in the South.
"Now people who have held on to their vehicles say they wish they had got out of the business," he says. "It's a hard game. We got out because of what I'd heard — I've got friends in the scrap and demolition trades — and gut feeling. It's very much the same in general transport."
Pulleyn's trucks are immaculate in twotone blue, with bodywork in the streamlined style of Abels and Lynx, whose examples he followed several years ago.
"It's all about image. It's expensive, but you soon recover the extra cost. Also, wherever you are, people detest transport, and these trucks present a better image. Even when I was driving for Hoveringham, it was nice to have a nice truck," says Pulleyn.