About us
34 years in road transport, from the cab to company management
I started driving trucks in 1992. Since then I have worked in almost every seat in this industry: behind the wheel, in the traffic office, and at the table where contracts get signed. I now help other transport owners build companies that run without them.
Current role
What I do now
I advise owners of trucking companies, freight brokerages and dispatch operations. Some hire me to find out why their business keeps stalling and to design a better way of running it. Others ask me to stay on and take responsibility for part of the operation as an outside director.
I work remotely with companies anywhere. Most of my clients run between 10 and 50 trucks, or a brokerage of a similar size. I also run my own transport operation, which keeps me close to the daily reality of the job rather than watching it from a distance.
1992: the first truck
Poznań, 1992
I was 25 and had held a category C licence for three months when Transbud gave me my first job. Nobody spotted talent in me. They were short of drivers.
They handed me a Jelcz, a route to a construction site and an older driver who spent two weeks telling me only what I was doing wrong. I learned fast because I had no choice. An engine tells you it is about to break three days before it does, if you listen. Paperwork gets done before you leave, not after you get back. And the man on the loading bay who looks least important usually decides whether you wait forty minutes or four hours.
1996: international routes
TIR carnets and the queue at Świecko
My first international run came in 1996. TIR carnets, customs officers who could hold a trailer over nothing, and queues at the border that ran past twelve hours.
For the next eight years I drove Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. Somewhere in those years I learned the thing that shaped everything after: transport is about the people standing at both ends of the route.
2004: England
Barnsley, 2004
Poland joined the EU on the first of May. I left in August, aged 37, with twelve years of driving behind me and enough English to avoid getting lost.
I joined John Truswell & Sons, a family haulier in Dodworth near Barnsley, founded in the 1940s. Several dozen tractors, old school, a dispatcher who remembered the founder's father.
The first three months humbled me. I was one of the best drivers in the fleet and the one who coped worst, because I understood half of what came through the radio. So I worked at it. A vocabulary list in the cab. BBC radio instead of music. Conversations in truck stops I would normally have walked past. After a year I spoke fluently. After two, the office called me when something needed saving.
Britain taught me more than the language. A contract means what it says. A late delivery is not a circumstance, it is an event you report. You build a reputation over two years and lose it in one afternoon.
2007: into the traffic office
The other side of the phone
By 2007 Truswell employed a dozen Polish drivers and nobody in the traffic office could talk to them. They offered me a desk. I said no. They asked again and I took it.
The first year was hard. A driver thinks about one route. A dispatcher holds forty in his head at once. But I had something nobody else in that room had: I knew exactly what was happening at the other end of the phone. When a driver said he was waiting at the loading bay, I knew whether he was waiting or drinking coffee. When I planned a route, I planned the one I would have wanted.
That is also where I started keeping notes. Not on loads. On people. Who was reliable. Who called back. Who lied once and never admitted it. After three years that notebook was worth more than my car.
2010: contract logistics
Christian Salvesen, and what clients pay for
I moved to a large temperature-controlled operator because the small firm had nothing left to teach me. The scale was different: retail contracts, KPIs, audits, a procedure for everything.
There I saw logistics from an angle no driver ever sees. A client does not pay you to move freight. He pays you for the absence of problems. You win a contract on price and keep it on service. One botched unload in November can cost a year of volume.
I reached traffic manager. For the first time I was responsible not for trucks but for the people managing them.
2015: European operations
Nine years at one of Britain's best known haulage brands
I spent nine years there and moved into a management position in European operations. That is when I stopped being a transport man and became a business man.
I learned to read a P&L, to negotiate with a client who had ten other hauliers queuing, to build a team, and, hardest for me, to let go of control. I got to know the German and Czech markets from the inside and understood why certain things are run out of Ostrava rather than Manchester.
I also saw something that stayed with me. A large company is excellent at scale and useless at exceptions. When a client has an unusual problem, the system has no room for it. The people on the floor know how to fix it, and nobody asks them.
Why I do this
Why I started advising other owners
I started my own company at 59, at an age when most people count the years to retirement. Not out of ambition. I did it because across 34 years I had worked every job in this industry. I sat behind the wheel, I sat in the traffic office, I sat at the negotiating table.
Most people who advise transport companies have done one of those three. I have done all three, in two countries and two languages. When I tell a dispatcher or a driver how to do something, he knows it is not theory from an office.
That is the whole reason this company exists. There is no shortage of consultants who will hand a fleet owner a report. There is a shortage of people who have run the operation themselves and will stay to help fix it.
What I bring
What you get when you work with me
- A read on your operation from someone who has done the jobs in it
- Straight answers about what is working and what is not
- Processes and reporting your team will use instead of a binder on a shelf
- The option for me to stay involved and take responsibility for an agreed part of the operation
- Direct contact with me, not an account manager
Final step
Tell me where your operation is getting stuck
The first conversation is straightforward. You describe where the business keeps returning to you, and I tell you whether this is something advice can fix, something that needs implementing, or something that needs a person to run it.