Burrows Coaches operator profile: From furlough to lifelong dream

After a tough start in the pandemic, Jamie Burrows’ business is fulfilling a long-held ambition for him

As I drive up to Burrows Coaches’ headquarters just outside Blandford Forum, it is hard not to notice the presence of one of the area’s largest operators, Excelsior Coaches, who with sister company Damory are located almost directly across the road.

Excelsior’s fleet and Damory’s buses are out in force as I turn down the lane to Jamie Burrows’ HQ, which turned out to be a plot of land on a farm with shared kitchen and toilet facilities.

There’s a contrast in size between Excelsior/Damory and Burrows Coaches, which operated until last month as a one-man band and has just two vehicles. However, having started as a driver at Damory aged 19, Jamie is realising a lifelong ambition in running as his own operator.

The dream had an unlikely start in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking on his first job in December 2020 on the eve of another lockdown was far from the only obstacle.

It was being on furlough as a driver from North Dorset Travel that made Jamie decide to take the plunge. “It was always something that I’d wanted to do, but it was always at the back of my mind and was never going to happen straight away,” he says. “But I went stir-crazy on furlough. I couldn’t sit at home doing nothing, so I went out and bought an old Dennis Dart. I’d almost hit rock bottom. My personal life was going through a very bad time and the business was my way of coping with it.”

He describes getting the Dart roadworthy as his “lockdown project”. However, after securing the vehicle with an £8,000 personal loan, taking it further was fraught with difficulties as he had no capital behind him as banks weren’t giving out loans to tourism prospects in the pandemic climate.

“I was so fed up of everything being ‘no’ and everything being against me. I just kept on trying every possible opportunity,” he says, adding that he eventually secured enough of a credit limit to gain his O-Licence.

Staying afloat

When Jamie was starting up, he witnessed local operators have their vehicles repossessed, so has operated on the basis of owning his vehicles outright and keeping debts to a minimum.

“I’m quite proud to have a couple of motors in the fleet that are all paid for and there’s nothing on finance,” he says.

It was far from the best economic climate in which to start a coach business, but Jamie adds: “It was very uncertain, but I saw it as everyone else had businesses that were already pre-existing, whereas I had the perfect opportunity to craft my business depending on how the market was led.”

He started with rail-replacement services and then started “shopper” trips — so labelled to get around restrictions which were still in place.

Supporting the local community around Blandford Forum is clearly important to Jamie. “I was using traditional ideas of doing the market-day runs,” he explains. “I was thinking I was supporting the market traders by bringing some people into town at the same time and that was an extra selling point for me.”

Childhood dream

Owning his own company wasn’t the first dream Jamie had realised. As a child, he had an “imaginary bus company”, invented timetables and painted toy buses. His secondary school teachers laughed at him when he said he wanted to be a bus driver.

When he left school, he pestered the local bus company Damory for a job. “I used to just go and sit on the buses and the drivers befriended me. They gave me the support and encouragement to go out and get my licence,” he says. “My eventual boss said, ‘go and get your licence then come back and we’ll see what we can do’, possibly to make me go away. Eventually I took my licence myself and went back to him.”

When it came to starting his business, he remembered those who had supported him. He named his first vehicle ‘Lou’ after his school bus driver who encouraged him to obtain his licence. ‘Maxine’, a 35-seat King Long XMQ6900 was named after a driver at Damory who was similarly encouraging, was in for repair as routeone visited. Lou has been replaced by ‘Linda’ — a PSVAR-compliant Dennis Trident/Plaxton President bus.

The story of how Linda came about represents what Jamie calls his biggest achievement so far. One Friday in January at midday he was offered a school contract to start the next Monday. He accepted, even though he didn’t have the double-decker bus that was a requirement. After some frantic calls, thanks to Odyssey Coach Sales, he went to Newcastle on the Sunday to pick up a suitable vehicle. “I’ve got this thing of say ‘yes’ now and panic later,” he smiles.

“What I said to the school is, because I’m small enough, I can make those snap decisions without having to answer to anyone else. I’d done two years of floating around on rail-replacement work, private hires, day trips, etc, but I’d never had any regular work coming in, so it was either all or nothing.

“You would end up with a bank balance looking really good and you’d be really pleased with yourself and then all, of a sudden, it would go quiet and it would drop down again and you’d go out looking for more work. It was always fluctuating.”

Steady growth

The school contract has enabled Jamie to apply for a second O-Licence disc and take on a part-time driver. He has always relied on semi-retirees or drivers from other operators to fill in when needed.

However, he has no need to relocate. Having moved from the centre of Dorset, “half an hour from a main road”, he now rents a yard from Agri-Comm, a commercial and agricultural maintenance company that services his vehicles as well as lends him use of a kettle. His admin is done from home and he relies heavily on accountants, particularly now he has become an employer.

Having realised his dream, Jamie still has ambitions and has just set up as a limited company, but he wants Burrows Coaches to remain small.

“I’ve had a vision of having a traditional travel shop with the old-fashioned chalkboards and hanging baskets outside and a coffee shop inside,” he says. “It’s the ultimate dream one day, but I think we’re a long way from that.”

He says he is trying to grow steadily without risking taking on work he can’t find drivers to cover.

“Now the school contract has come along with the double-decker, all of a sudden with that has come people requesting double-deck hire and that’s something I’ve never had before,” he says. “Word slowly gets around that you’ve got the right vehicles for their jobs. You get the vehicle and the work follows the vehicle that you’ve got.

“It would be nice to build the company up to a point where it’s financially secure, but I would be wary of getting it too big because I wouldn’t want to lose that friendly feel,” he says. “I like being involved with it and I like the fact that it’s personal to me and it’s got my name on the side of the coach.”

Keeping it friendly and for community has remained a theme for Jamie since those early coach trips to support local market stall owners. For example, his business has just sponsored a set of books on children’s internet safety for a local school he attended as a child.

“I’m never going to take over the world,” he says. “I’m happy as long as the business is going in the right direction and making some money, just slowly evolving, and going in a direction that I like it going in and feeling like I’m in control of it.

“It’s been interesting, it’s not been easy. Some days you walk in and jobs fall into your lap, other things you have to fight for. But the good days outweigh the bad days.”