Page 32 - Commercial Vehicle Engineer - October 2019

PEOPLE
PEOPLE OBITUARY
Derek Beevor 1955-2019
R oad Tech Computer Systems and its various transport management
products, including
Roadrunner and Tachomaster, are familiar names to many
transport managers and eet engineers in the UK, Ireland, Australia and many other parts of the world.
Derek Beevor, who co-founded the company in 1984 and went on to become its sole proprietor and leading light,
died last month aged 64. As chairman
of the £11 million turnover enterprise,
he engineered its transition into an employee ownership trust (EOT) early this year. This was typical Derek: gifting the business, in effect, to his employees. His explanation? That the move was in part an answer to the question of what to do with the company given his prolonged ill-health. But more importantly, it
was also an effective way of dealing
with persistent approaches from asset- strippers masquerading as investors.
One of twins, Derek Anthony Beevor was born on 24 June 1955. His father
left when Derek was 11. His twin brother died of cancer three years later. Two years after that, at the age of 16, he left school abruptly one afternoon when a teacher ridiculed his O-level exam ambitions.
Beevor never returned to formal education. Years later he told the Sunday Times newspaper: “That afternoon I
was gone - mentally scarred for life.” Yet he would become a Visiting Fellow at Cardiff University’s School of Business Management, often piloting himself there in his own Hughes 500 helicopter.
The list of legendary Beevor exploits is long. It includes two tours of duty as a paratrooper in Northern Ireland,
Derek Beevor
getting locked up in a Greek jail for dancing naked on a restaurant table, and creating Tudor Transport, a successful 15-truck operation based in Watford, Hertfordshire.
Roadrunner
In 1984, Tudor Transport became the testbed for a pioneering computerised management system called Roadrunner. Beevor saw this primarily as a solution to the problem of mountains of weekend administration work that was standing between him and his family.
Road Tech was soon going from strength to strength, not least as a result of the answer Beevor had to hand when sceptical hauliers questioned why they should trust him. He was one of them, and Roadrunner had been proven in a real trucking operation.
Beevor was quick to recognise and embrace the business opportunities presented by the rapid growth of the internet. But this was not without its challenges. When a competitor was discovered hiding the word “Roadrunner” and other Road Tech trademarks on its web pages, with the aim of surreptitiously attracting search engine traf c, Beevor went to the High Court. His argument that trademark protection should be
no less applicable on the internet than anywhere else was accepted, and an important legal precedent was set.
Beevor later con ded that defending his employees’ future meant more to
him than winning. Principles mattered to Derek. It was never the money, nor even the court victory. Just being fair and simply not accepting that others should be able to trade off his employees’ hard work was reason enough.
32 OCTOBER 2019 > COMMERCIAL VEHICLE ENGINEER