If you build it, they will come
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Young, passionate, technologically savvy, and brought up in haulage: is the EcoHaulage team everything the industry has been crying out for?
Words: Louise Cole / Images: Richard Mann
JUSTIN ROBERTS, MD of freight exchange site EcoHaulage, is only 26 but already owns two companies, both haulage-related. Youth is something they talk about a lot at EcoHaulage. Not only is the exchange young, barely one year old, but the average team member is in their mid-20s and ired up by the possibilities inherent in modern technology.
“We have a young team full of ideas,” says Roberts. “We are conident that we can by-pass the competition.” However, this youthful and technologysavvy team comes with a challenge of its own: “One of our obstacles has been keeping it simple enough [to use] to appeal to the haulage market, while still using the latest technologies,” he says.
A broader market
EcoHaulage has 700 members and is expanding its cloud computing-based platform beyond hauliers to encourage freight forwarders and transport customers into the mix to create a broader market. The site is growing rapidly, not least because it is free to users —and will be, vows Roberts, until he has achieved a dominant stake in the industry.
“We want to capture the whole mar
ket. If everyone used one system, it would be such a powerful tool for the industry. By the time we charge a small subscription fee, we want to be sure that our customers would be getting huge value from hundreds of jobs a month,” he says.
The free use is subsidised by Aberdeen-based Streamline Shipping Group — owned by Roberts senior, which charters vessels and has a 62-strong leet in several depots across Scotland and in Grimsby — and Roberts’ other company EcoAdBlue, distributor and supplier of bulk AdBlue on behalf of Greenchem. EcoAdBlue was the irst company he started, while still working within his father’s outit.
“I grew up in haulage,” he says. “I was lucky enough to have all kinds of roles from tea boy to transport admin and procuring bulk marine fuel.” He was helping to run the Greenchem contract to distribute AdBlue when it occurred to him that the company could do more than transport – it could sell the stuff too. “So I took that on and made it happen,” he says. EcoAdBlue now has 90 customers and is also used to push the EcoHaulage concept.
“I’m a haulage geek,” says Roberts. “I am entirely self-taught about technology. I have a bad attention span for courses because I have always wanted to focus on the things that seemed relevant to making money.”
Nowhere near saturation
There are, however, several well-established freight exchanges already, scrapping among themselves for market share in the UK: so what makes EcoHaulage anything other than late to the party?
The irst thing, says Roberts, is that the UK market is nowhere near saturation. “A lot of transport companies out there are still resistant to the concept of freight exchanges and even with all the competition, the sector hasn’t come close to capturing the UK market. Many of our rivals have moved into Europe, but we don’t want to do that yet. We think there is still a lot of education and work to be done to move people from working from phone and fax to working online in the UK.” The other difference is that the exchange is entirely web-based: there are no downloads, no need for in-house technical support, no applications to install.
And then there’s the ‘eco’ component of the name. The company’s software is linked to DVLA records and estimates a vehicle’s emissions output by registration plate. The site can calculate how much of a vehicle’s emissions are being economi cally utilised through better load ill and eliminating empty running for each journey. “Our hauliers can therefore see the average carbon improvements for their vehicle or their leet on the site. This is a great KPI (key performance indicator) for those pitching to blue-chip customers. It is very popular with our members,” says Roberts.
The website will soon have a section helping hauliers to continue making environmental savings and has attracted support from the Department for Transport.
The site is growing fast: in the two weeks between CM’s irst and second interviews with EcoHaulage, the number of jobs posted daily had risen from 40 to 75 – with 70% of them being
illed. Roberts’ target is to reach 2,000 users by the middle of 2013. “We are growing very fast,” he says. “We get four new users every day.”
Not an auction
Transport customers can post jobs to the site for hauliers to accept, but the process is carried out on a irst-come, irst-served negotiation and not an auction, says Roberts. He says it is valuable to bring jobs to the attention of the haulage community and provides suppliers with a network of transport partners, but bidding is unpopular with operators because it drives rates unsustainably low and so EcoHaulage avoids the practice.
However, there is a full range of services for hauliers, including regional alerts of vehicles or jobs within 50 miles of their current location. The size of user is hard to determine. Roberts says SMEs are often struggling most with costs and therefore the quickest to try freight exchanges to boost optimisation; but blue-chip companies are increasingly coming over to see what value it might offer them.
Owner-drivers also use the site, but Roberts says the challenge for one-man operations is their lack of time to investigate job opportunities.
EcoHaulage has an ambitious agenda and, apparently, the skills to deliver. A recent buyout offer from a large logistics player valued it highly – but the two parties failed to reach agreement. For now, Roberts and his team are masters of their own destiny. We’ll have to see just how far it takes them. n