Burns delivers the goods
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Tony Burns has driven Ryder through 98 acquisitions this decade already and made it one of the biggest and toughest trucking names in the United States. Why and how does he do it?
• No matter what he plays, Tony Burns is big time. On the Pro-Am golf circuit he appears alongside "names" like Bob Hope and Joe DiMaggio. Back in the office he runs Ryder, the world's biggest truck rental company with 160,000 commercial vehicles on the books.
From the monogrammed shirt to the chauffeured limo, he is every inch an international captain of industry, overseeing a multinational company with a yearly revenue of US $4.6 billion (£2.9 billion at today's rate) and 42,000 employees worldwide.
His cutting edge is well camouflaged but he talks with earnest passion about the Ryder "family" — values he wants to apply through the company.
Brought up on his father's truckstop in the tiny midwest town of Mesquite, Nevada, he learned those homespun business values early. "I don't like going in for new business with deep discounts and then pushing up the price, for instance," he says. "It's not good business practice. We're going to be here tomorrow, and it is tough going back into see that guy tomorrow if you've just upped the price."
Pumping gas
He is a devoted father and a devout Mormon Sunday School teacher. He pumped gas at the family tntckstop to pay his way through university and left with an MBA in 1965 to join the Mobil Corporation as a salesman. His rise has been relentless and fast. Promoted 13 times in nine years at Mobil, Bums was headhunted by Ryder in 1974 to be the company's director of financial planning.
Five short years later he was Ryder's president and nine years after that its chief executive. The chairmanship came his way in 1985.
"In essence," says Burns, "we're just a third party contract provider of equipment to other businesses and consumers." As with every service sector industry, it is the survival of the fittest and Burns wants to keep on growing.
He has been investing US $1 billion a year recently and is determined to stay ahead of the race.
Diversification has taken Ryder into the aviation business where it now leases and maintains jet engines and undercarriages for major international air carriers like British Airways and Cathay Pacific.
We're big in car transporting. . carried six-and-a-half million cars last year," says Bums, matter-of-factly, and his ambitious British team is eyeing the European car transporter market carefully.
"There's no doubt about it," he says, "we're looking at 19% to 20% nett growth over the last few years and we're going to continue at that rate."
Britain is Burns' key to 1992's vision of a United State of Europe and he is ready to pump some money into Britain to start making waves. Longserving Ryder boss Carl Simmons came to the UK in December 1983 and recently took on TNT high-flyer Jim Morris to begin a 1988/89 onslaught for new business.
"We've doubled the size of our business in Britain in the past two or three years," says Burns. "Our yellow One-way truck rental scheme is going well and I can definitely see us expanding on to the Continent. We will move on a selected basis only now, but we want to be the best and the biggest in Europe. We'll be a quality leader and a market share leader."
His global view of Ryder at the moment is that it is time for a polite, post-prandial pause. "We're working hard at digesting our food right now. We've made either 97 or 98 acquisitions since the beginning of the 1980s."
If he is looking around for something to do in the meantime, his marketing men are knocking at the door. He says that he is keen to develop the Ryder image. Golf, it seems, fits the bill. The Doral Ryder Open now offers a top purse in the moneyed world of international golf tournaments of US $234,000 (£130,000).
"I love to play golf," says Burns, "but I don't play enough and I'm not that good." He travels the world constantly and finds leisure time hard to manage. During the summer months, he only got back to his Miami house for dinner seven times. "Yeah, gets tiring," he concedes.
Loyalty and hard work obviously impress him. "I've only been with Ryder 15 years," he says, "and that's nothing, if you look at our top 500 management turnover figures, it is less than 2%."
How does he perceive Britain, and its transport industry: "Well, the economy here is more vigorous than that in the US and we feel good about our investments here. We've addec new branch locations and the concept of privatisation here has now gone much further than it has in the US. The prospects for private sector contract carriage look good an there are opportunities for farsighted management."
He likes to keep his rental trucks for about four years and buy from four main suppliers — Leyland Daf, Scania, Iveco Ford and Mercedes-Benz. He is not afraid of risk, either. The Ryder contract with General Motors could be terminated tomorrow with only 3( days' notice. "We've been doing things that way since 1933." Just-in-time distribution. reckons Burns, is second nature to Ryder.
Business base
Burns' company may not make anything, or sell anything directly, but it still has to work hard — in his words — at "facilitating the business base".
In other words he and his colleagues take on the burden of all the key financial decision: for a customer contracting out its transport operation. When you are talking the sort of fleet
number Ryder talks, that . means very difficult decisions. "You've got to make sure that there aren't too many costs you pay," he says. "You have to negotiate forever now."
He is convinced he was borr into the right business. "I thin', that a truck is beautiful. It has been a part of my life, all of m! life. Don't forget, you're always going to have something to deliver the goods."
1=1 by Geoff Hadwick