Family Values - Bell Truck Sales is ringing (some) changes

Sep 14 2006 By Rebekah Ashby, North East Vision

This convoy's really on a roll. Rebekah Ashby reports on Bell Truck Sales, which is keeping it in the family.

Van and truck dealer Bell Truck Sales is driving £3m into its fourth generation family business in a bid to create 50 jobs over the next two years.

The £40m turnover, North Tyneside company - which is run by the great-granddaughters of the firm's founder - will plough £1.5m into a purpose-built van centre in Stockton, open a truck dealership in Gateshead and two further van showrooms in Birtley and Longbenton.

This is quite an achievement when you consider just 10% to 15% of family businesses make it beyond three generations.

But 23 years ago Yvonne Bell started work as an administrator in her father's business. Now Yvonne and sister Carolyn Bayne have defied statistics and are at the helm of a fourth generation family business and at the top of a male-dominated industry.

The pair, who grew up living and breathing diesel, took the wheel of the £40m Bell Truck Sales seven years ago.

Founded by their great-grandfather Joe Bell, originally as a haulage firm, the company is now a Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicle dealer, which has increased staff numbers from 180 to 200 over the last six months and reported a 15% increase in sales this year.

Yvonne Bell says: "The business has always been my life and as children we hardly saw my dad because he was always out doing business. The home phone was the business number at certain times of the day for call-outs, so we lived and breathed diesel.

"At that time dad was top dog and the board was made up of his peer group, so over the last two years three of the board of directors have retired.

"That was a huge thing for us because all our mentors have gone and we had to try and find people to replace that level of experience.

"We weren't encouraged or discouraged to come into the business. If we wanted to do it we knew we could, but we were never forced into it. For me, I just wanted to come in and see what I could do for it."

The sisters have both worked their way up the company, which has its headquarters in Longbenton and also has sites at Billingham, Birtley and Spennymoor, and never faced any problems because of being the boss's daughters.

Grant Gordon, director general of the Institute of Family Business, said: "For family businesses, the big issue is to ensure that you have leadership in each generation and only one in eight manage to go as far as the third generation - so that gives you some idea of what they have achieved.

"Families can come together in our programmes and the benefit of that is that they get to talk to families and share experiences and best practice."

Professor Nigel Nicholson, a family business expert from London Business School, said: "Family firms tend to be treated as anachronistic oddities by management science and the business media, even though they account for the majority of firms in every economy and a substantial portion of GDP. And these are not just mom and pop enterprises.

"Many of the largest, longest lived and most successful firms the world over retain their identity as family firms. At their best, they generate an unparalleled spirit and cultural coherence.

"The best family firms manage to achieve simultaneously continuity and longevity, confidence and commitment, pragmatism and ethics.

"They do so by mastering a range of major challenges and dilemmas, and the greatest tests come at points of transition. For the family firm, there is nothing more difficult than the question of leadership succession."

And Bell is revving up its growth further after adding a £10m Mitsubishi car dealership to its expanding business.

It snapped up Pearsons Mitsubishi, whose work and paint shop is based opposite Bells' headquarters on Bellway Industrial Estate in Longbenton, in August for an undisclosed sum.

The deal for the Pearsons garage, which took just eight weeks to complete, includes 23 staff and Bell now plans to grow sales and servicing by up to 25% to £12.5m in the next 12 months.