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Nigel Base started working life on the shop floor with
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a local British Leyland dealer handling Allegros and Austin Maxis before moving into the commercial vehicle world with the National Freight Company, better known today as Excel Logistics.
Starting as a graduate management trainee, he drove fork trucks and ran truck rental operations and workshops, which would provide a basis for his career. In 1988 he joined Scalia "I ran the Enfield operation, Scantrucks, which is now at South Mimms. My first job on the Monday morning was to put a project together to move from Enfield to South Mimms; find the site, set it all up that was a really tough two years," he says. "It was a big project, we had to invest large sums of money to get it right. Sales doubled simply by moving there. I ran it as branch manager for two and half years," Base was then recruited to set up ScaniaS contract hire, leasing and truck rental company at Milton Keynes. "That was the hardest few years of my life, we started with a blank piece of paper. The business grew from nothing to 15,000 vehicles on contract, turning over £60m a year; for three years we doubled in size.
"That was time when everyone was entering into contract hire, everyone wanted to get trucks off the balance sheet, to outsource, that was the start of it. "By 1998, I had a bit of a reputation for handling anything awkward, and one day this tender document for the Ministry of Defence landed on my desk the future cargo vehicle contract.
"Shows you how long it went on MAN was awarded it last year. I spent four years bidding for it, we got down to a shortlist, then the government decided after all these years and this massive.investment by the manufacturers bidding for the contract, that they were going to supply the vehicles. So they had to reopen the contract. Scania decided to pull the plug," he says.
Following his redundancy he worked briefly for Europ Assistance before being hired by Azure Dynamics, a Canadian company that produced electric drive systems.
They appointed Base to set up the UK operation. "I spoke to all the OEMs, the end users, we had a huge marketing campaign to raise awareness of the technology and the company.
"We were close to signing contracts [and launching products]. A new chief executive officer came in [in 2007] and said 'this is unsustainable, we're going to run out of money' and closed down the UK operation," he says.