Retail Transport Services Ltd: The freight firm becoming the “one-stop shop” for clients during the Brexit red-tape era

Director Dave Lewis shares his firm’s journey from setting up in the 1990s to surviving Brexit and continuing to provide a committed client service.

In the world of business, many things change and innovate. Once, people only had meetings in person, and now we have video conferencing software. Once, people sent faxes to communicate; now we send emails.

In the ever-changing business world, there are only a few services that technological innovations haven’t rendered obsolete, and one of those mainstay industries is freight.

Dave Lewis, Director of Coventry-based freight firm, Retail Transport Services Ltd, which arranges transport for freight across the UK, Europe and globally, can attest to the longevity of the industry, as he has been running his firm for around twenty-six years.

“Both my other director and I have worked in the industry since we left school for a few freight companies, both large and small,” he explains. “We then decided to set up on our own in 1999 and have been trading ever since.”

In a UK freight sector known to be highly competitive, the question to ask is how Retail Transport Services stands out. For Lewis and his team, it’s all about close and personal client touchpoints from the start to the end of the client experience.

Providing full-scale client support

“We feel that we bring the personal touch back,” Lewis says. “Our clients are allocated a freight account manager who will work with you all the way from the initial enquiry, through the customs procedures, right through to the delivery of your goods.”

Any business focused on scaling will think about success and what it looks like. For the folks at Retail Transport Services, success is measured via job count and client loyalty.

Lewis and his leadership team are also proud of their recruitment and retention of young talent, who work their way up the business and remain with them for the long term, making the company a great upskiller for talent, too.

Rob Harrison, Business Development Manager – pictured above (right) with Dave Lewis (left) – states: “This will be my seventeenth year at Retail Transport Services. I was taken on as a seventeen-year-old and have worked my way up through the company. I started as an administration assistant, then an operator, and now I lead the business development. If a company can provide you with the right experiences and training, it will then push through to the clients that we deal with, offering them a service I am very proud of. We started in 1999 with four key clients; those clients are still here to this day, so focusing on long-term partnerships is something that we value.”

Recruiting and retaining talent

“Part of our success, I believe, is also giving opportunities to young people who are willing to learn and offering them a long-term future in the business.”

As a result of this policy, just under half of the firm’s staff can say they started at the bottom as young recruits and have prospered in the business.

Lewis has a solid five-year-plan for the business. This includes a steady increase in turnover and volume, and recruiting more operational staff. However, he acknowledges that his firm, like others in the freight world, hasn’t been immune to sector challenges, including the Brexit effect.

Sector challenges – Brexit

In fact, Brexit has been the biggest challenge in the company’s lifetime to date: “Our main challenge since inception has to be Brexit,” he admits.

“This includes the way in which goods moved in and out of Europe, which changed massively. All of our staff were trained and had to learn all about the new customs process, which had never been in place before.”

The fallout from Brexit, he adds, isn’t over, but is part of a long-term adjustment process. “It’s very hard for manufacturers to work through the customs processes; there’s a huge amount of paperwork required and all of the red tape that this has caused. We’re six years in now, and we’re still seeing the same problems, making it so difficult for UK companies to send their goods in and out of Europe. Due to this, there has been a huge dip in freight movements.”

Lewis shares some brighter short-term goals for the business, including a plan to become the “one-stop shop” service for helping customers navigate the red tape of freight movement. With the firm’s excellent customer touchpoints and commitment to upskilling, that plan looks certain to come true.

Now, any business can boast about having exceptional goods to sell or services to offer, but excellent operational staff is core to that promise, which is facilitated by equally excellent leadership. Here, Lewis has learned a few lessons since he started the company in the 1990s. “We have learned to handover a lot more of the day-to-day running of operations to certain key members of staff,” he shares.

“We have never, and never will, take our eye off the ball, but feel that handing responsibility over to those who have proven themselves to be a very positive thing for all concerned.”

The formula, according to Lewis, is simple yet effective: trust your staff who prove themselves, and watch them deliver an excellent service to the customers you rely on to keep the lights on.

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