If you've ever been overtaken on the M6 by a car with trade plates in the back window, that was probably one of ours. And I'd wager you didn't give it a second thought.
Nobody grows up wanting to be a trade plate driver. It isn't a job with a glossy brochure. But I've come to believe it's one of the most underrated roles in the entire motor trade, and I'll happily argue that with anyone.
Here's what it actually involves. You get up before it's light. You're dropped somewhere you've never been, in weather nobody would choose, and handed the keys to a car that isn't yours and might be worth more than your house. From that moment on you are, as far as the customer is concerned, the entire company. Not the website, not me, not the planning team. You.
You then have to inspect it properly — and I mean properly, not a lap of the vehicle with a phone camera and a shrug. You've got to notice the mark on the nearside rear that was there before you arrived, because if you don't, it becomes yours. You drive it as though someone is watching, because someone usually is. And at the other end you hand it over to a person who has, in a lot of cases, been looking forward to this day for months.
The good ones make it look effortless. They know which service stations to trust, which sites let you in early, which receptionist will take pity and let you charge your phone. They know that a car delivered dirty is a car delivered badly, whatever the paperwork says. They carry their own cloth.
Owen Jackson did our very first movement back in 2014 — a Mazda from Northampton, and I'm fairly sure we lost money on it. Ten-odd years on, the standard he set on that job is still the standard we recruit to.
We're proud of our drivers. They're the business, in the most literal sense possible. Everything the rest of us do is really just an attempt to set them up properly and then get out of their way.
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