Johnathan Bulmer is feeling, as he puts it, fragile. He looks tired, worn out, with dark circles like bruises around his eyes. A broken arm - from a recent skiing trip - has not helped matters and during our interview he frequently stretches his arm out in discomfort. It's also striking, on reading my notes, how many times he uses the word 'torture' to describe his situation - as though recent events and their aftermath have caused him physical pain.
Mind you, there will be many in the transport industry who would see this as just desserts (one haulier later tells me, only half-joking, that the broken arm was actually a botched assassination attempt).
It's hard to find many that think what Bulmer did - buying the assets of his old firm Bulmers Logistics in a pre-pack administration and starting trading again as a new company, Bulmers Transport - was right. I could understand it if criticism was restricted to his competitors in the container haulage sector - after all, they'd be looking to pick up work on the back of the collapse - but comments have mainly come, unbidden, from his contemporaries.
"He shouldn't be here," is perhaps the kindest we've heard, although even this is damning in its brevity.
Uneasy position
Bulmer himself strikes an uneasy position. On the one hand he's contrite, or at least appears to be, and is upset by the mud that's being slung at him. On the other, he's not apologetic about what he did, pointing out the stark choice facing him in January: either let the business close or attempt to rescue something, anything, out of it for staff and creditors alike.
"I'm not saying how wonderful it is and how it's the best thing I've ever done," he says. "I'm feeling fragile. I'm proud of what we did in the past, but I'm not so proud of where we ended up. We tried to look after as many people as we could. But if the doors had closed on 21 January then there would have been no chance to do that 300 people would have been out of work. Some people will say they would have employed them, but not all of them. No one would have got anything - the bank would not have paid the staff."
Bulmer says that seeing "17 years of hard work" disappear was "like torture" and describes the moment he realised the bank was no longer prepared to fund the business as "like a death for me".
Sour grapes
Some of the flak that Bulmer is taking is no doubt prompted by sour grapes. After all, Bulmer was somewhat of a golden boy - the owner of a successful and fast-expanding business who was tipped for the RHA's top job not too long ago. Then it all started to unravel. The recession hit volumes, the company was left with too many assets and too much debt and its bank, which along with leasing firms had fallen over itself to lend in the good times, decided that it wanted its money back.
Bulmer's co-director Andy Spence-Wolrich is adamant that Bulmers Logistics could have survived. "Up until the last moment we were hopeful that we could secure funding. We had a good forecast, but their concern was with the economy rather than what we could do. We forecast a strong position given that we had implemented resource reduction [it cut about 50 jobs just before Christmas]. They had confidence that we were doing what we said we could do. Their concern was with the strength of the economy and future revenue streams."
Spence-Wolrich reiterates that once funding could not be found, the firm's options narrowed to three scenarios: close sell-up or pre-pack. Deloitte approached a number of companies looking to sell the business, he says, but ran out of time because of demands from the lender - Yorkshire Bank - for the sale deadline.
"If we could have sold the business as an on-going trading company and protected the subcontractors entirely then we would have sold it. I'd have taken nothing [for it]. I offered to put more funding in but I needed more from the bank as well," adds Bulmer.
Survival strategy
However, opinions on the firm's capacity to survive vary industry figures had long been predicting Bulmers' demise.
Although Bulmer will admit that a strategy of aggressive growth was borne out to be incorrect, he argues that Bulmers Logistics merely danced to the market's tune. "We didn't see any danger did we? Every year was a repetition of the year before with healthy increases in rates and driver pay - 20% year-on-year for five years. The market played against us - our strategy for growth didn't suit where we ended up," he states.
Bulmer is reluctant to reveal how much Bulmers Transport - effectively himself - paid for Bulmers Logistics' trade and assets, although MT understands it was a nominal sum. What he will say is that the new firm did pick up the wages owed to Bulmers Logistics' staff who were transferred to the new firm under TUPE - £153,000 - plus another £100,000 for redundancies and took over the leases of the majority of Logistics' vehicles as well. "If anyone says we picked it up for a song then that's wrong," he adds.
There's also the issue of the new company's backers: although it's 100% owned by Bulmer, funding has been provided through loans from "good loyal friends", who he won't name.
Business success
Of course, there will be many asking why, if the last business failed, what's to stop this one going the same way? "We have now got a much smaller resource base that we are able to keep 100% productive," says Spence-Wolrich, who points to a SAFED driver training programme that he says will cut fuel consumption by an average of 5% this year, adding £500,000 to the bottom line.
Bulmer adds: "We were always chasing growth, now we have retrenched and are focussing on the pennies. We are identifying every individual cost and attempting to manipulate it down."
No doubt the back-biting and sniping at Bulmer will continue for a while - the inevitable price of what happened perhaps - but he remains unbowed. "I worked my bollocks off to do what we did and all that keeps happening is I keep getting shot at.
"I've got broad shoulders but it does wear you down after a bit, but I won't be beaten. I'll keep fighting. I want to be there in the future - I enjoy the transport industry, it's part of me. We can't change the market or what we have done or where we have been. I just want to plead to people to give it a chance - let me put it right."
For more in-depth interviews with industry figures, visit Roadtransport.com's interviews page.