How does one go from being a truck driver who left school after his Inter Certificate, to owning a freight company with an annual turnover of £25 million and more than 200 employees in Britain and Ireland?
Well, it helps if you have a stomach for risks, according to Tommy Kelly (38), the managing director of Two Way Forwarding - Logistics, an air and road freight delivery company. The north Dubliner founded Two Way in 1988 and today counts Team Aer Lingus, Motorola, Creative Laboratories, IBM and Shorts in Belfast among his clients.
"I basically got into this business by accident," he says. In the mid-1980s he was driving his own truck, he owned another two and he was working for other freight companies. When, McNamara International, a small local haulage company, went into liquidation in 1988, Mr Kelly and two colleagues mounted what he calls a rescue operation - taking over McNamara which also leased its services to other freight companies.
"We found, though, that our exposure was too great and we had very little control over the jobs we took or how we delivered on them. So within a year we decided to form our own freight-forwarding company. We had one Portacabin and a couple of phones so it was a very low-cost base. At that stage the company was developing quite slowly."
At this time the haulage industry was changing, he says. EU customs barriers were coming down and he saw several companies, particularly those relying on revenue earned from customs clearance, go to the wall.
"If I go back to the late-1980s Irish freight companies really were in the business of brokering transportation and sorting out customs clearance rather than specialising in forwarding themselves."
One of the innovative moves Two Way made was to offer this service with door-to-door billing.
"There were no extra charges along the way which was something very few companies were doing. It made life much easier for the client."
He says that being a relatively small operation, Two Way was able to offer flexibility to its clients that the bigger companies could not.
"We never offered an off-the-shelf package. If someone wanted freight in London, then Wales, then Scotland and back to France, we would ask them when they wanted it there, sit down and work out how we'd do it. We wouldn't just turn around and tell them when we would do it, on our terms."
Rather than, as one might expect, focusing his efforts on developing his Irish operation, Mr Kelly entered the British market insisting on the need to own and thus control the infrastructure Two Way could offer to clients. Apart from its centres in Ballyboughal, Co Dublin, Cork, Dublin Airport, Shannon and Belfast the company now has depots in Manchester, Birmingham, London, Bristol, Glasgow, Hull, Hounslow, Heathrow and Rugby. Plans are advanced for further acquisitions in Britain and Ireland in the coming months which, he estimates, will create another 50 jobs here.
In 1995, the company moved into air haulage and formed a partnership with Airborne Express which has 350 depots around the world. Mr Kelly says he expected the air haulage to take about six months to get up and running, after he opened depots in Dublin Airport and Shannon.
"It snowballed," he says, "and was fully operating in about two weeks. I think people in Ireland want global coverage from a freight company but also want a local interface. The partnership with Airborne Express means we offer seamless worldwide coverage."
Being a relatively small company in the early 1990s, he says, allowed Two Way to invest in technology to an extent that other freight companies at that time were not even considering.
"Most of them would have been run manually, with just phones and faxes. We were a growing company and we realised there were so many transactions involved in delivering goods from the manufacturer to the door of the consumer - that it would be very cumbersome without technology. "We didn't have the manpower so we developed our technology in such a way which meant we could be in constant touch with our freight and our customers. I could track down freight, in Japan in 10 minutes if I needed to."
He says customers want answers immediately. To help facilitate this, Two Way ensured that global satellite communications and tracking systems, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), online information and computerised analysis of all freight were part of its operations as soon as they came onto the market.
Mr Kelly spends about half of his time travelling. In the past five weeks he has been in 10 countries including the US, Turkey, Singapore, China and Thailand, monitoring operations at a local level.
Two Way is the biggest Irish freight agent in Asia, and says Mr Kelly, the company is closely monitoring the evolution of markets in the developing world.
The company has grown dramatically, without any outside investment although Mr Kelly insists the growth is controlled expansion. "I would be concerned that a lot of companies are achieving massive growth. Rapid growth can be very dangerous, it can get out of the company's own control and can be difficult to sustain. What is going to happen when there's a lull?
"Also, there is a number of companies which have a large market share in one specific area. We tend to try to spread our risk. We'll carry anything from potatoes to racing pigeons to computer chips to jumping castles for kids.
"Every advance for a small company is a risk. You have to be a risk-taker. I think because I was so young when I flung myself into this I was willing to look at a project and take a risk on it. Also I saw how technology was going to drive this business."
He sees the future of the freight industry worldwide as being dominated by mergers. However, he has no plans to merge or to float Two Way on the stock market.
"We don't need it," he says, adding that the company's £2 million expansion of the European HQ in Ballyboughal, near Swords in north Co Dublin was self-financed.
"We have enough of our own infrastructure and the key issue in the success of Two Way so far has been control of all its own operations. That is how I see it continuing."
