We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Car website. However, if you would like to, you can change your cookies at any time
The start point for the best source of fleet information |
"Latterly, in the last five years, I was responsible for the combined business that was HBOS and Lloyds TSB in commercial banking. I did many of the same sort of broad activities that Rick Francis was driving with Lex Autolease - integrating two businesses; I was doing the same with banking teams," Porter explains. "The relevance sort of read across into this role - our customer bases were clearly quite common in terms of the contracts. They were SMEs, mid-markets and corporates, so I'm very familiar with working with this customer base."
As he suggests, Lex itself has been no stranger to its own bout of consolidation, and there was a thorough rework of its business when Lex, which was part of HBOS, and Autolease, owned by Lloyds TSB, merged in 2008/2009, after which it shed some of its less profitable business.
"We're well through that now," Porter continues. "We're about 18 months out of it. During that period you could paraphrase the strategy as 'manage for value', so there were contracts that both Lex and Autolease had that weren't that profitable, weren't long-term relationships, that were quite transactional in their nature - and actually we're a relationship business and we want customers for the long term.
"The business made a deliberate choice of downsizing its operations, so if you look back and look at the size of our fleet pre-integration and look at it again post-integration, it's smaller, but it was a deliberate choice."
The upshot of that is that Lex has muscled itself into the kind of position it wants, and is now touting for more business. In fact, look at the figures of BusinessCar's latest BC50 rundown of the top 50 leasing companies in the UK on pages 17-19, and you'll see that the firm has taken on around 5000 more vehicles in the last 12 months. Between 2011 and 2012, it shed roughly 12,000 vehicles, so the figures are testament to the fact that it's in better shape on the whole.
Porter adds: "It brought us to a place 18 months ago where that part of the combined businesses strategy had delivered. We'd integrated the colleagues, we'd integrated the customers and the business was performing well.
"A manage-for-value strategy typically gets you to a place where your cost structure is right and you can consider going back out and winning the sort of customers that you want - long-term relationship customers."
BusinessCar magazine ©2019
Business Car Magazine © 2020 | Business Car is part of NS Media Group.
