In the town of Daventry, in the heart of the Midlands, there are five factories clustered within a half-mile radius of one another, manufacturing trailers up to 3.5 tonnes in gross weight. This is the centre of Brian James Trailers’ operation, a British, family-run business that has been trading for over 40 years. Their products are used in car transport, machinery transport, construction, and landscaping, as they have been for generations.
“We were established in 1979, by my grandfather,” says Lewis James, the company CEO. “I’m the third generation of the James family to be running the business.”
James’s grandfather came to the UK having emigrated from South Africa with a young family in the mid-1970s and started the business from scratch.
“He started building trailers in the garden and it progressed from there,” James tells us. “He sold the business to my father and my uncle in 1998, and then I took over from my father in 2019.”
Throughout those 44 years, Brian James Trailers have grown organically and consistently to the point where it now has an impressive portfolio of products and a distribution network that spreads all over the world. The company has in the region of 130 distributors, 200 employees, and produces 9,000 trailers a year.
Modular Products
Brian James Trailers’ exceptional growth is partly due to the company’s unique value proposition.
“A lot of the things we do are unique in the trailer industry,” James says. “Generally speaking, it is not the most dynamic industry, so we are ahead of the game in many aspects of what we do.”
While the industry as a whole might not be known for dynamism, Brian James Trailers focuses heavily on innovation and product development. Several commonplace elements of modern trailers started life as unique Brian James innovations.
“We launched enclosed car trailers, we were the first to do that back in the 1990s and now it’s common practice,” James recalls.
As well as introducing new products and ideas, Brian James Trailers is also innovative in the way it carries out its business, following a single consistent stream from the design and concept of the product to the handover of the product to the end user.
“We have a completely configurable, modular product. We split our production into two separate parts, trailers, and optional extras, going through separate factories,” James explains. “One produces a completely standard trailer product, and the dealer stocks it with all the optional extras that the end user can use to configure the final product. That’s unique in the industry.”
Brian James Trailers’ facilities also offer total flexibility over what its customers can order, producing any products in any order with total flexibility. It gives dealers the ability to be far leaner in how much they stock. But more than that, Brian James Trailers funds a large proportion of its dealers’ stock themselves.
“We call it ‘consignment until sold’, giving dealers stock that they don’t have to pay for until they’ve found a customer,” James says. “It gives us a good advantage to grow availability in the market.”
That is combined with continual investment back into the business, building capacity and capabilities and introducing new machinery to become more efficient and increase quality. This includes the recent addition of robotic welding capabilities that can weld entire chassis themselves.
The Right Incentives
But while the robotic capabilities the company is introducing are impressive, the company still relies on skilled workers to do its work, and Brian James Trailers invests in its people as much as its machinery.
“We pay a very fair and competitive basic wage, but then we also have several ways in which employees, predominantly focusing on factory staff, can increase their earnings,” James points out. “If they have good attendance, they’ll be paid a bonus at the end of every month, with additional bonuses for overtime. They have the opportunity to boost their income every month.”
Staff are also given a review every quarter with the opportunity to show management that they deserve a pay increase, so nobody has to wait a year between reviews.
“There are lots of opportunities for progression relatively quickly if you are shown to be the right person performing to the best of their ability,” James says. “On top of that, we have perks and 
benefits, arrangements with local businesses where they can get discounts. We give them all fish and chips every few months, birthday presents, and loyalty presents. Overall, the package of perks and pay opportunities and progression opportunities let us get the best people and make sure everyone is happy and motivated.”
Scope for progression is particularly important to James.
James adds, “When it comes to management staff, we generally favour internal promotions when it comes to filling senior roles. This gives our team lots of scope for progression, especially as we grow the business. Managers are also given additional training to help them take the next steps in their progression.”
Growing Ambition
James is also motivated – his vision for Brian James’s future is growth, as it has been throughout the company’s history. The two main routes towards that growth are an increasing product range and a growing distribution network.
“Growing the distribution network is a process of expanding the dealer network within countries we are already in, it also means going into countries that are new to us,” James says. “A lot of this is export-led.”
The firm has recently set up its first dealers in Finland and Spain while expanding its networks in existing territories. In France, the firm has seven dealers and James has plans to expand that up to between 15 and 20 dealers over the next couple of years. All of this is combined with projects to launch new products into those new markets.
“There are individual strategies in every country, aimed at increasing the number and quality of our distributors,” James says.
The company recently received the Kings Award for International Trade something James is very proud of.
“It underlines our commitment to exporting in recent years,” he says. “It’s also something that will help us gain new business in years to come.”
James is also adamant that this growth will not result in spreading the company too thin or watering down its offering.
“We do all this on the condition that we don’t undermine our premium brand,” he says. “We are not just volume chasers. We are deliberately positioning ourselves as the premium players in all of our markets. Making products cheaper is not our route to growth. Our plan for future growth is built on expanding and improving the distribution network while simultaneously expanding and improving the product portfolio.”
