GI IT 8z Dedication is the name of the game
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for owner-driver Polly Jones and her Scunthorpe business-it's a round-the-clock operation, double-shifting a tipper. t is not the way it looks it's the way that you run it. After collecting a "driver of the year" award from the Single ton Birc h quarry, Polly Jones was confident that few of the brownie points earned by her business TruckDrive would have had much to do with the good looks of her vehicles. "I must have one of the oldest lorries in the quarry," she says. "They didn't give me the award for the state of the truck...I'm not what you might call Eddie Stobart material."
However, her present wagon is a step up from the rather shabby Roadtrain she ran previously. This one is an F-registration Leyland Daf 95 artic tipper, with a few more years' life left in it yet While its best years might be behind it, Truck-Drive extracts a level of efficiency that can rarely have been bettered.
"I have a driver who works on the lorry during the daytime and I drive it at night," says Jones. "When there's no night work I hire myself out as a driver—most one-man bands will park it up at 5pm at night and it's standing at the weekend. So I put a driver on my lorry who wants to work the regular hours while I do the unsociable ones. Mind you, I am free to do them because I have no family ties."
All of the driving work is tipper related. "My lorry does mainly lime from a quarry that delivers about 3,000 tonnes a day to the Scunthorpe steel works," she explains. "A lot goes to the sugar beet factories where they use it for purification. When I'm out doing driver hire I'm on tippers as well, so I see what they're doing and I think `right I need to ask about getting some of these return loads'. I suppose they need me and! need them." sentative and people still asked if! could drive this lorry there, or that one somewhere else," she says. "I was doing so much that I started doing driver hire. I ended up employing 10 drivers, all on the books full-time."
As good drivers were becoming increasingly difficult to find, drivers who got themselves other jobs were not replaced. Two years ago, she let the driver side go altogether, apart from herself. She says it makes sense and that, given the right circumstances, other operators could do likewise.
"A lot of drivers use me because they can't usually get a driver for just the one week, or rather, they can find the drivers, but not those who will do it legally—they want cash in hand," says Jones.
Security comes with the realisation that a satisfied owner-driver is very likely to reengage a good replacement for the next holiday period.
Corporate clients Then there are the corporate clients. "One of my customers has about 16 lorries and all the drivers need a month's holiday. That sort of work can take up the whole year," she points out. "On top of that they need extra cover for sickness, or in case anybody falls off a lorry. I provide cover when that happens as well!"
But if work is that consistent, surely there must be scope to add more vehicles and double up on the drivers? "!keep looking at the possibility of having a second lorry," says Jones, "but the problem is that while I can operate one vehicle intensely for 24 hours, adding a second would mean finding a good driver who wants to work nights all the time. Drivers who want to do those hours are almost non-existent. So adding a second lorry would probably only increase efficiency by half as much again because the extra one would be standing every night" It was the ability to provide a round-theclock service, plus the determination to see any job through to the end, which helped put the Truck-Drive name ahead of the 30 or 40 other tipper, tanker and curtainsider drivers who might also have won the award from Singleton-Birch.
"Last winter, and the winter before, we were running out of the quarry 24 hours a day and the loads were not exactly regular," she says. "I would get home at 6pm but the phone would ring again at around midnight, about a load to Bury St Edmonds, for example, that had to go that night I was always on call. I'd get out of bed and! would go. Many hauliers have families and sometimes have other things organised, but not me. It doesn't matter to me whether I'm working days or nights or weekends, as long as I've got the driving hours left."
Ifs when the night work becomes scarce that the driver hire side really comes into its own. However, while it generates income, it also creates additional responsibilities. On one typical driver hire day, Jones recalls, her alarm went off at 4am: "Before I left, I had done my driver's wages and telephoned the details through to the bank. Then I took out the lorry I'd been hired to drive and sorted out my own vehicle with a return load as I drove along. Then I bumped into my driver at the quarry, examined his tyres and got some replacements organised. The lorry I had been driving was parked up at about 5.30pm but! had to go to a local haulier to negotiate some work for my own lorry the following week as our quarry would be closed."
Second call A second call was required to arrange work for the vehicle she'd been driving earlier, to prevent the owner-driver concerned from returning to find a vehicle without a load. It's all part of the service. Then there's the paperwork to do, of course. It's a stressful life if you don't live for the job, but Jones does. Mind you, there is an opportunity that might tempt her to hang up the driving gloves: after 12 years of managing drivers, her own vehicles and those of her customers, she'd like to manage a fleet of tippers.
"A transport manager needs to be experienced, conscientious, efficient, somebody who doesn't watch the clock and somebody who is a bit bossy." she points out. "I'm all of those and I think I could do it given the chance."
Interested parties are welcome to apply to Jones direct—day or night!
by Steve McQueen