
It’s understandable that many people often think that the ‘SW’ in SW Commercials stands for ‘South West’. Its location overlooking the A30 in Cornwall, and its alternative title of Isuzu Truro, would make that a reasonable assumption. However, it’s the initials of owner Scott Williams that really lend their name to this successful Isuzu sales and service centre.
Williams was born into the industry, but officially began his involvement in the commercial vehicle world after leaving school at 16 to work for his father, who was a successful Scania agent, as a mechanic. A short stint on the Isle of Man running a workshop for a haulier was followed by a return to Cornwall, where Williams set up as a fabricator, mostly stretching tractor units and building beavertails, as well as other more general work. The business grew, with both Williams’ father and brother joining the staff roster. Soon one premises became two, before eventually being consolidated into one larger site employing as many as 17 staff. Williams’ reputation as a diligent bodybuilder had meant that a lot of the work was building bodied vehicles for the local Isuzu agent T Harvey & Sons. When the time came for director Paul Harvey to retire, Williams was offered the franchise, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“The [fabrication and workshop] business was already established. I was comfortable, the business had settled, and there were people doing the office work and dealing with things I didn’t have to deal with so much. It took years and years to get to that point – it had probably taken at least 10 years – but then this opportunity came, and I thought that if I don’t do it, I’d regret it,” Williams recounts.
Neale Cox, of the incumbent Isuzu dealer, joined Williams as co-owner and a partnership was formed. A new site was sought out and Williams’ workshop was combined with Cox’s extensive contacts book to create the new dealership.
“You take a chance with everything in life, but Neale is a fantastic salesman. We had the knowledge and experience, and if we weren’t going to do it, someone else would have. I didn’t want it to be a case of looking at it three years down the line and wishing that we’d done it,” Williams adds.
The partnership began in February 2019, but it’s taken many months to get the current site ready, converting it from a Nissan car garage into something suitable for HGVs.
“We had to remove a lot of walls and install two pits. We’ve built an extension at the back for the oil drums and compressors, to keep the workshop tidy and for storage, and installed a rolling road and crane testing area. It’s taken nearly six months to make sure the site was right. I knew what would work for the layout and what wouldn’t work. So, when this place came up, we both agreed, and thought it would be lovely with a showroom. We were right – it looks really nice from the road,” Williams explains.
The addition of a showroom is not all that common for commercial vehicle dealers, but is slowly creeping into dealer standards from a number of manufacturers. For SW it gives it a prominent roadside presence to showcase both the Isuzu brand and the Maxus range of vans and pick-ups – taken on as a franchise in 2021. Importantly, the showroom has not got in the way of the amount of space available, with 3 acres providing ample parking for trucks and even enough space for a dedicated area away from the main building and workshops for crane servicing.
Williams has been a Fassi sales and service agent for more than 20 years, and SW is also a sales agent and a service centre for DEL tail-lifts and Dawbarn roll-over sheeting systems, giving the company a comprehensive offering.
It’s not just greater amounts of space at the new site that have helped SW Commercials; there’s also more logic and order to the layout, with its service department now separated from the main sales area to provide a better customer experience. Likewise with the spare parts room, in which more spares can be kept in stock to support the aftersales business.
“We’re very focused on customer service and aftersales delivery,” explains director Neale Cox, who has been selling Isuzus for 32 years.
“We live in a world where customers need their vehicles pretty quickly, so we do hold a lot of parts to support the brand. We have customers with anything from a 1999 Isuzu Grafter that’s still being used and doing a job right up to the newest generation vehicles. We’re still supporting all of those vehicles, which requires us to have a lot of stock,” he adds
The larger site has not only enabled them to do that, but also given the departments room to breathe. Cox explains that previously they could be talking about an issue with a customer vehicle just feet away from another customer going through the sales process.
“You don’t want to be talking finance to a customer with everyone hearing, and you don’t want to be sorting out a problem when someone’s come in to buy from you,” Cox says.
Despite the extra space, Cox and Williams are content with the volume of business they are doing. The workshops are busy, and the fabrication side of the business is fed by the supply of new vehicle sales coming through from the showroom. “Around 90% of the vehicles we build are for Isuzu,” says Cox. “Our day-in, day-out work is the stuff that’s coming in from [sales of] Isuzus. We’re not doubleshifting in the workshop, and we’ve more or less kept the work volume the same as at the old site.”
Adding capacity comes down to that perpetual problem many dealers and hauliers face when manning their workshops – the availability of technicians. “We could do a lot more, but it’s hard to get the technicians. The problem is that we’ve got no one down here to poach from,” Williams jokes. “We either have to get lucky when people move into the area, or bring on the young ones – which is what we try to do with apprentices in the workshop,” he adds.
Keeping vehicles coming out of the workshop is certainly a key part of what SW Commercials does, with customers as far afield as Ireland and the north of Scotland. Cornwall may be a dead-end on the map and a holiday destination for many, but it certainly hasn’t stopped word getting out about what SW Commercials can do.
“We had a customer come in who was down here on holiday. He’d been trying to get a particular vehicle from his local dealer and not getting anywhere. He told us what he needed, and we were able to get it for him,” Williams says.
Cox adds: “Because we offer a one-stop-shop with chassis, bodywork and crane experience, it means customers don’t have to go all over the place to get what they want. We can keep it all under one roof.”
The long history Williams and Cox both have with the Isuzu models means that they’re not only extremely knowledgeable about the products, but can also call upon a vast wealth of experiences. Both men have specified and built hundreds of Isuzu trucks and can provide a reassuring hand with the specification or fabrication.
“Rather than just giving them a quote and saying that’s what you get, what we do is more personalised. The bespoke nature of their business is something that we can work with and get an understanding of. We can then show them what we’ve done in the past and tailor something specifically for them,” Cox says.
“We bring that attention to detail to the product; the understanding of their requirements in their business and packaging it as one. They’ll also only have one person to deal with throughout, and they can come down and speak with us, and we can make something unique to them. “If they want an extra toolbox, that’s not a problem; if it’s something more complicated that’s also fine. Even if it’s just extras on a driveaway product, we’re still looking to give them something useful rather than just an off-theshelf product,” he adds
SW Commercials might have a shiny new premises, in a new picturesque, prominent location, but with more than 60 years’ experience between them there’s nothing new about this pair’s approach. Cox describes it as “old-fashioned values in a modern world”, while Williams says they simply provide “the right product to the customer”. As a result, they say the majority of their business comes from word of mouth – which is why their customers can quite literally be found from Land’s End to John O’Groats
- This article was previoulsy published in Commercial Motor, to subscribe see the latest Commercial Motor subscription offer