Transcon’s Blake Noble reflects on his first decade as a road transport operator.

The 1st of April 2025 saw me reach my first decade as a road transport operator – the satisfaction of a long- held dream and culmination of a great deal of time and input from incumbent operators keen to help guide my path, shape my entry point, and highlighting to me some of those initial pitfalls and obstacles to look out for (that I naively thought I’d be able to navigate my way around).

But truth be told, even with some heavyweights in my corner, little could’ve prepared me for the baptism of fire that I went though, and that I suspect most new business owners, irrespective of industry or background, typically experience. I recall clearly those early days and feeling as though I’d just bought a new house and moved in, but a residence where the previous tenants were still living there too, as curious about who I was and what was up to as I was equally curious about them!

Taking a step back in time, Transcon, the operation I ended up purchasing from its founding husband-and-wife owners, and an immense 45 years of diligent service, was actually the first road transport business operation I’d seriously looked at purchasing. If I’m totally honest, I’d been a little scared of my initial observations of the business, and it was only after casting my eye over the financials and physical operations of a few others of varying shapes and sizes on the market that I subsequently realised the potential that lay within the business and honed my ambitions of acquiring it accordingly.

In those first two years, I simply couldn’t run fast enough to learn, grow, build and keep everything running as I wanted it to; the reality of having a transport business running seven days a week and the need to always keep those wheels turning was definitely a shock to the system for someone who had emerged from a ‘civilised’ five-day- a-week business in a completely different sector. That seven-day-a-week aspect is something I’d not truly appreciated, and although not unique to transport, is certainly a component that adds some complexity to the business and the need for the plates to always be kept spinning.

The real step change for me came about following a marital separation and a reassessment that I needed to run the business, not the other way round! Structural change quickly ensued and I became laser- focused on the need to try and keep myself as much ‘above’ the business as possible; something that the use of external advisors aided immensely. As much as business ownership is typically about leading a team, it remains one of the loneliest and isolated roles at times to assume – it’s ultimately your two shoulders that take the weight of certain aspects of the business and will always be beyond delegation. I’m not talking about the operational weight, but more so the underlying momentum, culture, direction, and general wellbeing of the organisation and its team. When any of those elements are out of balance, it’s in the operators’ hands to get things back in equilibrium – and fast – all the while keeping the team engaged and aligned.

Another element I think provides an added quirk to the leadership of a transport business, and some more than others, is the mobile nature of the business and, at times, physical dispersal of the team. Not being able to (easily) get an entire team together in a single place, or better yet, stop the wheel turning for half a day as a team off-site, is a challenge that many of us face and that, as a service provider to our customers, is something we must simply work around. In my case that’s been by leveraging technology and utilising weekly 10-minute videos for our entire team to convey the lie of the land: the good, bad, and indifferent of the week behind us and the week ahead of us, but ultimately maintaining a connection with every team member.

As I reflect on the 10 years that have, in some ways, flown by, I’ve found myself having arrived in a place where I truly feel fortunate to have the things to worry about that I do. Where I was once pained by the need to do an insurance claim (don’t get me wrong, I’m never excited by them), I now get that sometimes shit happens. That concern and anxiety of how we’d resource certain pieces of work we were fighting to win has now been replaced by a feeling that necessity truly is the mother of invention and that we’ll always find a way. And when a mechanical issue might emerge with a truck, thinking how lucky am I to even have that fleet of trucks to be worried about in the first instance.

I know that at a mere 10 years in the saddle, I remain in my industry infancy in comparison with many of the trucking industry’s tallest timbers, but the decade milestone has afforded me the opportunity to look back and see just how far the journey has brought me. I can promise you that on 1 April 2015, I never thought I’d operate through the modern world’s first pandemic, nor navigate the depths of the likes of the current economic climate, but here I am to tell the tale, as are a myriad of operators – business owners and their teams – who, day in, day out, keep finding a way to find a way. Make sure you take the time to celebrate the milestones; you’ll never know how far you’ve come until you look at where you began.