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No longer in the family way
Page 66
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The tradition of the family motto seems to have ended. Winston Churchill's family motto was the incongruous "faithful but unfortunate". Even more bizarrely, it was in Spanish. If the road transport industry needed a motto! think a suitable candidate would be Experentia Doket— experience teaches.
As with most service industries, road haulage companies need to learn from their experiences, and take that knowledge forward into each new day. Family businesses seem to have mastered the art of passing on received wisdom. In a large organisation there seems so much more scope for making the same mistake twice.
Having always worked in a family business — not my own. always someone else's — I was sorry to learn of yet another family-owned haulage company ceasing to trade. In my experience, most family businesses seem to dispense loyalty — often unrequited— to employees and customers in equal measure.
Working up
For 27 years !served the Woodcock family— David and Pauline: working my way up from traffic clerk to managing director. When David retired,Jess B Woodock & Son ceased trading after 80 years, and I joined another family business.
The industry I joined in 1967 was dominated by family businesses. Woodcock, Harris, Draper and Neale were the pioneers of the industry around East London and Essex —many taking over businesses started by their grandfathers at the end of the First World War.
Today, family businesses such as these are an endangered species, caught in a pincer movement between cost-cutting ownerdrivers and the dubious cost efficiencies of the logistics giants.
This week! submitted an application to change an operating centre on one of our operator's licences.As we do not own the site concerned I obtained a letter from the owners authorising us to park 20 vehicles there.
VOSA (motto:'Moving On' — but not necessarily quickly or with any purpose... where do vehicle identity discs fit into this brave new technological world?) still manages to make the licensing process as difficult as possible.
I suppose this should comfort long-standing licence holders like ourselves,but it makes me wonder what the Latin (or Spanish) is for: To thwart and frustrate.'
Some years ago I submitted an 0-licence application,complete with a letter authorising us to park 'four vehicles' at a new location — instead of 'four vehicles and four trailers'. Crushingly, I swept down the snake and had to throw a six to start again. Experience teaches.
This time I obtained the appropriately worded letter (from a site owner who couldn't see what was wrong with the original) before proceeding back up the ladder towards the granting of my licence.
No sadness
I regret the passing of the family business.The thought of it should make me feel sad,but it doesn't. If experience teaches us one thing in business it is that everything goes in circles.I like to think that family businesses, with their incumbent values, will return to their rightful place— faithful but unfortunate,