Living the dream

Steve Hobson travels to South Yorkshire to meet a man who left school with a dream of running a fleet of trucks and with his business partner turned it into reality

Young McGinley knew from a very early age what he wanted to do and he has been lucky – and hard-working – enough to fulfil his dream.

“My dad was a body repairer for Gloystarne Transport, which was born out of British Tissues,” he says. “He was one of those people that you could give a piece of sheet metal to and he turned it into anything you wanted.

“From being six years old, I was really interested and always went to work with my dad on a Sunday to wash the trucks. My grandad asked me ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ Because they were all steelworkers, apart from my dad.

“I said ‘I don’t want to be a steelworker, grandad. I want some trucks. I’m going to have a fleet of trucks’. That was at six years old and it never left me.”

After 10 years learning to be a body repairer, McGinley took a completely different direction and went to become a salesman for the local MAN dealer.

He made his first move into transport management with TAL Eurospecial, a small haulier run by a friend that went bust in 2010.

“I’d got an international CPC – I continued doing qualifications outside school because I didn’t really come away from school with anything – so I did a couple of years working for my pal and that is where I met Chris,” he says. “Chris had a driver recruitment and agency business called Talstaff, which he started back in 2001.

“After finishing with the transport company, Chris said ‘look, we need somebody, come and work alongside me. You know everybody in this area who’s got trucks because you used to sell trucks. We can get to the right people because you’re used to getting people to sign off millions of pounds worth of trucks.’”

So in 2007 McGinley invested £6,000 in the business, which that year turned over £460,000. “Jump forward 15 years and it’s £27m turnover now,” he says. “It’s quite a journey.”

Growth through diversification

Motor Transport has been asked to interview many successful transport firms but when an invitation came to meet one of the founders of Stanton Logistics in Rotherham, South Yorkshire it was hard to turn down.

The message came from Chris McGinley, MD of Stanton Logistics, who set up the business with co-founder Chris Allender. “We are one of the best kept secrets in the industry and are multifaceted in our approach, with complementary other businesses as part of our group. It’s all owned and funded by just the two of us, having been started in 2007 by two Sheffield lads with very little business experience and only hard-working ethics to rely on,” it said. “We’ve suffered marriage breakdowns, mental breakdowns, heart attacks and life-threatening surgery throughout the journey, but we still keep growing and now employ around 500 people in a sustainable business with circa £25m turnover.”

As a hard-working Yorkshire lad from Huddersfield just a few miles up the M1 from Rotherham how could I refuse? We met in March at the firm’s 3-acre site in Thurnscoe on the A635 to the north of Rotherham.

McGinley is from Penistone, not far from Huddersfield and immortalised by Jeremy Clarkson’s rather unflattering mispronunciation in a long-ago Top Gear episode.

He says of his partner: “We’re two very different characters. He’s a bit younger than me, in his mid-40s while I’m 50 this year.

“He’s not very well. We have been through it a bit – he’s had stomach trouble and I had a heart attack when I was 42. I had a virus in my heart – or was it stress? You don’t know.

“Full throttle. That’s how we live.”

That isn’t just Talstaff – since 2007 the company has grown into a group of five businesses, one of which is Stanton Logistics. The holding company 2AM owns the Thurnscoe site as well as a property company, the driver agency, a motor racing team and a house lettings business.

“We paid cash for this site, all funded through the businesses,” says McGinley. “The motor racing team is called McAllen Racing and I’ve got two BMWs that I race in the Compact Cup and a race car transporter.

“Our lettings company, CMA Lettings, owns domestic properties. We’ve even bought houses for our staff. A couple of members of staff wanted rehousing so we said, ‘Go pick a house. We’ll do the numbers and we’ll buy the house for you’.

“We have an ethos within this business of doing things right for people. The business is about people and it’s really important that you respect your staff. They’re the ones doing the hard yards every day.

“It’s my job to make sure that they’re in a safe, comfortable working environment. We don’t always pay the best money, but I like to think we give a lot more than that. The whole business is like a family unit.”

Stanton’s HQ was originally built in 1998 for Gefco, an international 3PL that McGinley previously worked with at the first transport company he ran. Gefco was supplying all the Peugeot-Citroën parts overnight for the North of England from Thurnscoe, so it was a major problem when their haulage contractor went under.

“The guy who ran it rang me and said ‘we’ve got this problem. The haulier has gone bust’,” says McGinley. “He said ‘I need 21 drivers for the day and night shift and I need 11 trucks – and you’ve got 24 hours’.

“Well I just said ‘Of course we can’ and then shut the office door, this office that we’re sat in now, and went ‘Sh*t! OK, we’re going to do this’. Chris started recruiting all the drivers who had just lost their jobs and they all signed up with Talstaff. I got hold of the administrators and got all the trucks.”

Around this time long-established haulier Dodds Transport, which had depots in Sittingbourne and Sheffield, also went into administration soon after it had been sold by founder Jim Dodd.

“I knew Jim quite well and we took on some of his staff,” says McGinley. “One of them is still with us now.

“2010 is when we really started getting serious with our transport. We took on some of his drivers and some curtainsider work that he was doing. At the same time, we got involved with some of the discount supermarkets. They just rocketed in the recession and we jumped on that bandwagon with them. We worked day and night to support their needs in this area.

“We were very successful at it, so we took on Dodds’ site in Sheffield and it gave us a bit of a leg up.”

So where did the name Stanton Logistics come from?

“It’s actually Chris’s middle name,” says McGinley, who doesn’t have one himself. “Originally, when we first started, we were called Truckstaff. We supplied trucks and staff and then we changed the name to Stanton Logistics. It was just a name that I picked.”

Agile operations

Stanton operates from three sites: the Rotherham HQ, which has 30,000sq ft of storage including a mix of yard space covered by a 12,000sq ft canopy and racked warehousing; a smaller site at Newton Aycliffe; and a depot on the iPort at Doncaster. It has recently signed an agreement to operate out of Lidl’s latest UK depot at Luton, which is due to open this month.

The haulier runs about 75 commercial vehicles, mostly Mercedes-Benz now after a spell running DAFs, and is taking delivery of a batch of gas-powered Iveco S-WAYs, mainly for the Lidl contract.

The fleet is predominantly temperature controlled with 38 tractors hauling fridges – mostly from Chereau and Gray & Adams – and 30 pulling curtainsiders, plus