The trend towards greater transparency and unbundling of fleet activities is a key reason behind BT Fleet’s growth.

Its core customer base has increased from 10 major corporates to 13 and one of those, a major security business operating 3,000 vehicles, has seen the van-dominated BT Fleet move into premium car fleet management.

BT Fleet’s 64 workshops, including huge hub operations in Birmingham, Crayford (Kent), Enfield, Glasgow, Maidstone and Manchester, were fundamental to winning this account.

Last year, the company brought its own premium company car fleet of 2,000 vehicles in-house and that experience gave it the confidence to offer the service to other fleets.

The workshop network is a unique selling point. Bowen says it enables the company to guarantee SMR costs.

“We know the costs on labour rates and parts prices because we can map them in our workshops,” he says.

“And with our work on productivity, we can offer very competitive labour rates. We can therefore guarantee charges for customers over a 12-month period.”

The company invested £2m-£3m last year in diagnostics equipment and staff training as well as increasing automation – such as online service bookings – which has enabled its network to throughput more work and subsequently reduce its labour rate by around 10%.

For a fleet with several thousand vehicles, this could result in six-digit savings on SMR.

“We can do all this because the £20 million increase in revenue over two years creates cash and BT ploughs profits back into the business,” Bowen says.

“It’s about us sharing our savings with our customers.”

Growth has not all been about winning corporate contracts; the SME sector has added around £3 million in revenue.

Consequently, the company’s reliance on large corporates has reduced slightly in line with its strategy.

Last year, its 10 core customers accounted for 95% of business; this year, 13 core customers account for 90%.

“We are de-risking our big contracts by increasing our run-rates with the smaller businesses,” Bowen explains. He intends to reduce the proportion further, to 80-85%.

To achieve this, Bowen is targeting another “two or three” big corporate customers, worth 10,000 vehicles, and 150-200 smaller companies by mid-2013 – all on fleet management.

“We’ve gone through a year of trying different things and introducing new products and services, but fleet management remains our biggest opportunity for growth,” he says.