Like the old saying goes, as one door closes, another one opens – or alternatively, gets slammed in your face as well (delete as applicable).
That phrase should probably be adapted to something akin to ‘as one door closes, wait long enough and the same door will be painted a different colour and called a personnel entrance, and then reopen’. Usually, it will lead to the same room as before it was rebranded and passed off as an entirely new door.
Everything in this industry goes in cycles. In the not-too-distant past, nobody would buy a family-owned coach company unless said business was in serious financial trouble. Profit margins were often poor, and the turnover needed to drive those earnings was always very high.
Now, sales of coach businesses are more regular than the arrival of service buses. Nearly always, they are purchased by the same small number of groups. It is getting a bit 1984-esque, when there were fictional superstates that had pretend wars against each other to keep the natives from rebelling.
I do not know of a single person who three years ago would have predicted that this would be happening. To continue a literary theme, anyone airing such a view would have been suggested to be placed in Nurse Ratched’s care.
Give it five years, and either there will be very few old-school coach operations left, or the groups currently involved will have had a change of leadership and will be selling them again.
If you wanted to fatten up the family firm for sale 10 years ago, you diversified into local service. It was guaranteed income and work and was easier to recruit drivers for. Win some contracts, become a nuisance to one of the big bus operators, and before you could say ‘tickets please’, it would come knocking to buy you out. That does not tend to happen now.
Not long ago, our local authority decided that home-to-school contracts were too pricey and set up its own bus operation. Like the magic beans in Jack and the Beanstalk, it was convinced that changing its approach like this would make and save a fortune.
Fast forward 18 months. Drivers were all off sick with stress on full pay. The Transport Managers had realised that when a main agent says your vehicle will be ready at 1200hrs, they are not specifying which day.
The company was wound up as quickly and as quietly as possible with huge debts, and we all went back to running the home-to-school routes at increased prices because a couple of the weaker operators had gone bust while the unnamed local authority conducted this experiment.
It was thus with a wry smile that I noticed a couple of councils dipping their toes in the water and coming up with the revolutionary idea of purchasing operators that run their contracts. Time will tell, I suppose.
It appears that I have been around the block enough times to have become very cynical. Wait long enough and, like flared jeans, what was once completely out of favour and laughed at as being dated returns in a shiny new package but is essentially the same thing it was before.
No matter how good you are, you will need a decent slice of luck, or a crystal ball, to buy a business or sell it at the right part of that cycle.
