About Me

Hi!

I'm Shawn. I've spent 18 years in management and 12 of those in transport, which means I've had roughly 5,000 conversations that began with the words "slight problem with the van."‍ ‍

UK Transport Tools is what happened when I finally admitted that the spreadsheets I'd been quietly building just to do my day to day, were better than most of the things I'd been asked to pay for.‍

The career bit, briefly

I started out in retail management, which is where I learned that no plan survives contact with a Saturday. Six years of that will teach you more about people, stock and firefighting (quite literally) than any qualification.

Then came nearly nine years running transport and operations for a family-run business — around 3,000 deliveries a week, a fleet of 40-odd vans and trucks, and the kind of multi-drop operation where a few pence per mile quietly decides whether a contract is a success or a slow-motion disaster. Family-run means you're never far from the person whose money you're spending, which is an excellent discipline.‍ ‍

After that, four years managing logistics for one of the big players in the waste industry — 67 vehicles, 90+ drivers spread across the country, and a division called "Reactive Services," which is industry code for "the phone is ringing and something needed to be somewhere yesterday." Compliance, budgets, staff engagement, and rolling out the projects that either transform an operation or quietly eat a year's profit: routing systems, vehicle CCTV, trackers, and the first EVs into the fleet.

I've deliberately left the company names out — if you want the full CV, it's all on my LinkedIn. This page is meant to tell you whether we'd get on, not recite my employment history at you

Why these tools exist

Every tool on this site started life solving a real problem in a real operation.

None of them came from a template. They came from sitting at a desk at half six in the evening, long after everyone sensible had gone home, trying to work out whether a route was actually making money — or whether it was cheaper to keep a van that was costing more in repairs than it was earning.

And I've lost count of the times I got this one at 9am on a Monday: "Can you map this out for me quickly? Oh — and I need it by 1pm, it's for a new tender."

Here's the thing that always got me. The proper fleet software is built and priced for companies running hundreds of vehicles. And if it isn't that, it's something you have to download — which the corporate firewall will then cheerfully refuse to approve. So if you're running five vehicles, your options are to pay for something wildly over-specified, or work it out on the back of an envelope and hope.

Nobody should be running a compliance operation on hope.

So I built the tools I wanted, made them work in Excel and Google Sheets so you don't need to install anything or remember another password, and put them here.

How I work

I'll give you a straight answer. If a tool won't help you, I'll tell you. If I can't help you, I'll say that too. If your route is losing money, the calculator says so in plain English and red text — because a nice-looking number that's wrong is worse than no number at all.

No subscriptions, no software, no nonsense. Everything works in what you've already got open.

Small operators come first here. Not as a cut-down version of something built for someone bigger — actually first.

Outside of work‍

When I'm not elbow-deep in fleet data, I'm playing music. Years of gigging and festivals, which is really just logistics with worse parking: getting people, gear and vehicles to the right place at the right time, on a budget that doesn't quite work and a schedule that definitely doesn't.

It's the same job. There's just more screaming.

Say hello‍ ‍

Need a tool, a second opinion, or a transport manager on your licence? [Get in touch] — I answer my own emails.

Based in Oxfordshire. Working with operators across the UK.