The trend towards outsourcing instead of having a dedicated fleet manager is a “retrograde step”, according to Peter Cakebread, managing director of Marshall Leasing, and recently appointed chairman of the BVRLA.

“I do believe – particularly if you’ve got a reasonable size of fleet – having a fleet manager is a good investment,” he says. “The fleet manager will make sure that you get good value from your providers.

“I think it’s difficult to replicate that by outsourcing despite the fact a number of people have and despite the fact we perform that service to a number of our clients. I still personally believe in fleet managers.”

But what if the company has someone managing the relationship with the outsourced provider to keep it on its toes?

“There needs to be an interface,” Cakebread agrees. “The problem is when the individual is not fully cognisant of what it going on. The interface might not work as efficiently as it would otherwise.”

During the 23 years that Cakebread has worked in leasing he has found it is no longer just the finance and HR departments taking an interest in the fleet.

“We’re talking to a far broader range of people,” he says. “There is an increase in fleet being dealt with by the procurement operation and they will tend to be price driven.”

The pressure to cut costs is also meaning that fleets are continuing to shrink.

“Companies are looking at every layer of cost and if it’s not required they are taking it out,” says Cakebread.

From a leasing company’s perspective that means it has to “continually canvass new business”.

“We find that to standstill you have to grow your customer base,” Cakebread says.

Marshall Leasing targets fleets of 25 to 1,000 vehicles and has a number of customers in the 75-200 vehicle range.  Its customer base is almost entirely private sector.

“Inevitably you end up with fleets that are smaller than 25 vehicles, and some of those are very valued clients, but effectively we are going for a broader range,” Cakebread says.

“We are currently growing at an annualised rate of 10% and that’s in line with our experience over the past three to four years and is where we expect and want to be.”

He wouldn’t rule out acquisition opportunities.

Marshall Leasing acquired Gates Contract Hire five years ago and if a similar opportunity came up Cakebread would be interested.

But he is determined that growth must not come at the expense of customer service.

“Our prime consideration is that we don’t want to grow so quickly that we can’t maintain our service levels,” he says.

“We don’t want to outstrip our ability to resource.”

Marshall Leasing prides itself on its customer service having won ‘Fleet Services Company of the Year’ at the 2010 ACFO Awards and been runner-up last year.

“We focus very heavily on providing a personal service and that’s something that can be more difficult for larger players to develop,” says Cakebread.

“We’ve got fewer tiers of management so you would tend to get a quicker response to certain types of enquiry and more of a willingness to adapt to the client need potentially.”

Being a long-established family business also makes a difference in Cakebread’s view.

“That family ethos is still apparent across the business,” he says.

“I think it makes a difference that Marshall Leasing has been very stable and producing a consistency for the past 20 odd years.

"Many of the staff have been with the business for that kind of period which gives a level of experience of our customers’ needs and how to deal with any aspect of the business that is quite rare.

“I think we’re more customer focused than others and that’s our intent. We go into everything thinking, ‘is this going to make our customer experience a better one or not?’”

That can mean Marshall Leasing isn’t at the forefront of bringing products to market.

It spent a long time developing its salary sacrifice product which it began offering to clients this year.

“We have a tendency to over-engineer our products because we don’t want to take any product to market unless we’re absolutely sure that there aren’t any bugs in it and it doesn’t contain any risk for our client base.

"We’ve done that with salary sacrifice,” says Cakebread.

Marshall Leasing deals directly with clients rather than via a broker arm.

He believes that brokers “do a very good job for a certain area of the market place” but if a fleet manager uses a broker it will be dealing with a number of suppliers.

“If you’re looking for a common supplier so that everything is treated consistently, and so you can potentially tap into things like excess mileage pooling arrangements, then it’s arguable that a broker isn’t the way to go,” he says.

“And obviously a broker can only go so far in terms of sorting things out for you so if you have some issues with the vehicles further down the track the broker will in turn have to go to whichever leasing company they’re using to get those resolved.

"Whereas if you’re dealing with that leasing company there’s one less link in the chain.”

Being part of a franchised dealer group gives Marshall Leasing a different relationship with manufacturers.

It buys the majority of its vehicles from its dealerships and sells a significant proportion of its used vehicles back to the franchised network.

“It’s important to us as a medium-sized player to be part of a large organisation because it gives us a financial stability that we might otherwise not have,” Cakebread adds.

Funding is “a little easier” than it was a year ago for small and medium sized leasing companies.

“It was an issue and there are now more funders available  in the market place so that has eased but it is always difficult for small and medium sized players to keep in line with what the large players are doing.

"That’s not something that affected us because of our strong parentage,” he says.

In his new role as chairman, Cakebread believes the BVRLA has a key part to play in helping small and medium-sized leasing companies keep abreast of industry changes.

“The market is changing continually as is customer requirement, quite apart from the legal and tax framework changing continually,” he says.

“Companies within the industry have to evolve quite rapidly.

"The BVRLA can be of great assistance in that evolution, particularly for the smaller and medium-sized players who don’t have the resources to look at developments in the way larger players would.

"As I come from a small medium sized player I will be pushing that point quite strongly.”

Despite having served on various committees within the BVRLA, the appointment was a surprise to Cakebread.

“I’d always, perhaps wrongly, assumed the chairman was likely to come from one of the larger leasing companies,” he says.

“It’s a once in a life time opportunity and it’s an opportunity to give something back to the industry.”

Career timeline

1980: Joined the Heron Corporation on its graduate trainee programme. “It placed me at Heron Fleets, a contract hire subsidiary, for a few months and then forgot about me and left me there,” says Cakebread. “It was a good grounding because I did pretty much every job from administration through to sales and sale management.”

1988: Set up Norfolk Finance with Steve Landau, the former managing director of Herondrive (formerly Heron Fleets), after Herondrive was taken over by Cowie Interleasing. “It was the classic ‘starting a business from your front room’,” says Cakebread.

1990: Approached by Marshall Leasing to become managing director. “At the time Marshall had a very small contract hire fleet of about 300 vehicles and quite a significant Motability presence,” says Cakebread. “There were a number of companies, including ourselves, who were managing maintenance and residual value risk on behalf of Motability for a variety of manufacturers.”

Today, Cakebread oversees a risk fleet of close to 6,000 vehicles but is no longer involved in Motability after management was brought back in-house.

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