Businessman: John Simmonds
We sit together in a beautiful 1973 Lotus Elan, a car that we own and maintain together. Once the driver, now the passenger, a fitting metaphor for the changing dynamic of our relationship, my grandad tells me about his life as a businessman. As two people who started their own business nearly 60 years apart, we compare our experiences of running a company.
Our conversation begins whilst cruising through the Staffordshire countryside on a blue-skied Sunday morning. My grandad tells me how brilliant our Lotus Twin Cam engine is and how Colin Chapman (founder of Lotus) was a genius for taking the Ford Cortina bottom-end and reworking the cylinder head to produce a much sportier power unit (a story I’ve heard many times before). “They got nearly 200 brake horse out of it, you know”. I do know, but pretend I don’t. “Really!” I say. This is a sign he’s relaxed and in the mood for a chat, so, spotting the opportunity, I discreetly hit the record button on my phone and begin the interview…
We start at the beginning. My grandad tells me how falling ill at 8 years old and missing a whole year of education made school difficult. “I felt like a bit of a dunce” he said, but by the time he finished at 14, he was back in the top class. He left school and began a workshop apprenticeship at English Electric where he repaired the company’s vehicles. He was offered a job because his father worked at the same firm. “Things were different in those days,” he said “as long as you could read and write and came from a decent family, you had a job.”
At 5pm, on Friday 26th October 1951, he put down his tools and headed home to clean himself up, for the next day he was to marry my grandmother. I asked “Can you remember what her wedding dress was like?" He said, “oh I can’t remember, it was white I think”. I then asked, “Can you remember what vehicle you were working on the day before you got married?”. He replied, “Yes, it was an old 6 wheeler, Thornicroft Coles Crane. Marvellous thing it was.” 63 years later, they are still together, living in the same bungalow they bought together for £1600.
During his 20s he was a mechanic in high demand - repairing vehicles on his drive at evenings and weekends whilst still working a full 40 hour week. The extra work came so thick and fast that he decided to take the plunge to become a founder.
What began as a vehicle maintenance business, slowly grew into a fully-fledged and well respected haulage firm, consisting of 15 lorries delivering goods across the country under the name of Transport Services Rugeley Ltd.
What did your day look like?
“I’d start work at 8am and spend the first hour in the office, scheduling where our lorries were going that day. Then at 9am, I’d head into the workshop to run our repairs business. I’d stop there all day until about 6pm. I worked 7 days a week for 40 years of my life.”
What were you best at?
“Engineering. I liked the garage work more than anything else. I remember a friend blew a hole in the side of his engine. To anyone else it would have been finished, but I patched up the hole and rebuilt the engine. It did another 100 000 miles after I’d finished with it.”
What were your biggest mistakes?
“Not selling myself enough. I never advertised, it was always word of mouth how I got the jobs. I was too bloody honest in business. Sometimes you’ve got to be a bit ruthless and I wasn’t ruthless enough.”
How did you manage people?
“Oh I could manage people alright. Nobody does the job like you want it to be done. Once you accept that and let them get on with the job it’s fine.
If I had to tell someone off, I’d take them into the office and give them a good rollicking out of earshot of everyone else. But I’d try to be fair to everyone. At the end of the day, you’re all important. You have to respect them and they have to respect you.”
Haulage can be a volatile industry. When recession hit in the 1980s, his business was turned upside down overnight. The building trade had been hit very badly and Selcon, his biggest client, were in deep trouble. He received a phone call one morning to say that his services were no longer required rendering half of his fleet motionless. That meant laying off drivers and selling his vehicles.
“I found it lonely at times, as the boss, I didn’t have people to talk to. I had to make all the decisions, sometimes right and sometimes wrong.”
He battled on through difficult times and bounced back up to a fleet of 10 more valuable wagons once the economy started to recover. A decade later, recession hit once again and, this time, he was unable to stay afloat. In 1993 after 35 years of being in business he shut shop and retired.
My grandad was a craftsman who loved his work. He worked 7 days a week for 40 years doing something that he truly loved. He told me, “Success isn’t about having a million pounds in the bank, success is what you’ve done yourself and how you feel about it”.
In a business that grew organically and provided a stable income for his family and his employees, the world of high-growth, high-risk Shoreditch startups that I know, is a million miles away from the world in which he thrived.
How did you view my business?
“Your world is a very different world from mine. You were trying to build a global business, inventing and selling your own product to customers around the world. I don’t know if you’re mad but I always thought you were going to have a job doing it. But having said that, I don’t understand this bloody Twitter and yet someone is making a fortune out of it.”
Yet there are still similarities in starting a business in 1958 and 2013. There is a lot I can learn from a man who held his own for 35 years in a tough industry. He was always fair to his clients and his staff. He delivered (in his case literally) what he promised. He created an environment which he loved and surrounded himself with people that were important to him. These values created a culture of trust and loyalty that lead to low staff turnover, repeat business and long term contracts. These are values that are still as relevant today as they were in 1958.
