Mazzer2:
TiredAndEmotional:
Mazzer2:
There is an interview in the business section of todays Times with Alex Laffey the chief executive of Eddie Stobart Logistics, in amongst all the usual corporate guff was one eye catching statement.
‘There is an issue with facilities and the company has invested in more than 200 overnight truck stops, with secure and decent facilities.’
This statement raises a few questions:
Aside from MSA’s are there 200 truck stops in the UK?
If there are, does anyone know where they are?
With so much available parking why do Stobart’s lorries fill all the laybys on the A5 around Rugby getting their
curtains slashed?
Seems to me he is just taking advantage of speaking to a journalist who has no idea about UK haulage and so lets him say anything he wants
Are you able to paste the article here?
No sorry beyond my technical capabilities other than it’s on page 53 and by a journalist called Robert Lea
Here it is 
It takes some time to get from Gateshead to Cheshire, particularly if the M62 is in a foul mood. For Alex Laffey it has taken four decades, mainly because he had a stop-off at Tesco on the way.
Mr Laffey, 56, a son of the post-industrial northeast, left arguably the most important job in British logistics, running Tesco’s distribution network, three springs ago to climb into the cab at probably the country’s most high-profile fleet of trucks. Eddie Stobart Logistics, based south of Warrington, had demerged out of the diversifying Stobart Group in 2014. The new controlling shareholder, Dbay, an Isle of Man private equity firm, had taken the opportunity to remove the chief executive William Stobart, son of the original Eddie and brother of Edward, who, from the 1970s, had developed the business into a nationwide haulier.
Mr Laffey jumped at the chance to replace him. He was coming to the end of the road at Tesco, the last of the generation led by Sir Terry Leahy, who had transformed the business into the dominant force in grocery. He saw in Eddie Stobart a business on a journey to better things.
Eddie Stobart is not only the 2,500 lorries bearing the female names given them by the fan club and staff members. Best known for its work with retailers, most notably Tesco, it also serves the manufacturing, industrial and bulks businesses, shifting Heineken lager and Esso petrol. In consumer goods it does the whole logistics of warehousing and delivering for the likes of Coca-Cola, Irn-Bru, Evian and Nescafé.
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In ecommerce, the force that is transforming the industry, it works closely with Amazon. It has acquired iForce, which does the back-office and warehouse end of online shopping for the likes of John Lewis, Dunelm, Screwfix and Fortnum & Mason, everything bar the low-margin, last-mile white van delivery.
The four areas together are important, Mr Laffey says, “because they all move at different times and that is what makes us different to our competitors. We are pay as you go. We provide a green Eddie Stobart truck to our customers and they pay us when they use it and when they don’t someone else is using it.”
The idea is that a Stobart lorry is on the move carrying orders for different customers and is networked to deliver and then pick up new orders nationwide. With about 50,000 movements a week, business has picked up 12 per cent in the past year and revenues to be reported this month should come in at £618 million.
It is the potential to take the top line to £1 billion pretty quickly that attracted Mr Laffey. He identifies businesses that Eddie Stobart could join up with, as it did in the recent part-acquisition of Speedy Freight, which delivers emergency goods for, say, a fashion chain needing to get goods to Milan or BAE Systems sourcing a crucial spare part.
In 1970s Gateshead, the sort of industries that employed his father as an armature winder were not open to Mr Laffey. Leaving school at 16 “because frankly I had to go and earn some money”, he was picked up by Laws Stores, the ■■■■ of the northeast when it came to supermarkets. As a management trainee, he found himself flung into running shops in his late teens: “It was character-building. I loved it.”
When Laws moved to centralise its distribution, the 23-year-old was put in charge. During the great consolidation of the 1980s, Laws was taken over by William Low, a Scottish chain. Mr Laffey moved north to Carnoustie on the Scottish east coast, where he fell under the tutelage of James Millar, a famed retailer, “fiery but straight, tough but always fair, a great guy”.
When, in turn, William Low fell to Tesco a decade later, Mr Laffey rose to run Tesco’s logistics in Britain and the Far East. Although never a lorry driver himself, his job was to provide the distribution solutions demanded by Sir Terry. That informed his skillset: set out the strategy and vision and then “socialise and mobilise” the leadership team and workforce to make it happen. His view on why Tesco has slipped? “In my last few years maybe we weren’t reinventing ourselves, maybe too many people left at the same time.”
He has no problem getting people to work for Eddie Stobart, where the average driver’s age is 37. He is hiring dozens of people a year at 21 and older drivers can be migrated into warehouse and ecommerce work if they wish. The gender balance, however, is poor: less than 5 per cent of his recruits are female. “We don’t have as many ladies coming in as we’d like. If ladies choose not to work in this environment, then it’s hard for us to convince them. The issue is the facilities.” He said that the company had invested in more than 200 overnight truck stops, secure with decent facilities.
The environment is another pressing subject and trucking is the last redoubt of the diesel engine. Euro 6-standard engines may be the cleanest in history and his lorries may be aerodynamically designed with drivers trained to get the best mile-per-gallon performance, but Eddie Stobart, like the rest of the industry, will have to go electric. “You might get a full electric truck in three years.”
Then there is the elephant in the trailer. He is in charge of one of the superbrands of British commerce and yet he is not. The words “Eddie Stobart” are owned by Stobart Group, its former parent, and the present licensing arrangement ends in 2020. Mr Laffey’s options are to continue paying £3 million a year to use the brand; to pay £15 million to use the brand in perpetuity; to pay £50 million to gain exclusive control; or to take the nuclear option and give up the brand. With its 2,500-strong fleet of Scanias and Volvos replaced every three years, he could migrate to a new brand — maybe iForce — by the early 2020s at no cost at all
Mr Laffey professes to be “passionate about the brand, its culture and its ethics. We know how important the name is to our customers and are conscious our investors have a view. You might say I would be mad to get rid of the brand, but the commercial considerations have to be right and shareholders expect me to do the right thing.”
