Abbey CEO moves to Executive Chairman role
Posted on: 7th October 2022Abbey Logistics Group, the UK’s largest food tanker business has announced that long serving CEO
Steve Granite has stepped down from his role as CEO to take up a new position as Executive
Chairman at the tanker specialist.
Steve Granite
Granite joined the business as a 15-year-old apprentice in 1995 and held various positions including
Finance Director, before being named successor to majority shareholder Stephen Lucy, in 2009 as
Managing Director. During that period, Granite grew revenues from £18m in 2009 to close to £70m
in it’s latest year ending June 2022.
In 2016 he led a management buy-out from the Lucy family, backed by Northedge Capital and has
steered the company to record revenues and profits in recent years. Since 2020, Steve has reduced
his time in Abbey to enable him to focus time on another investment he holds outside of the logistics
sector. This led to the appointment of the existing Group Managing Director, David Patten as a
successor for Granite.
As part of the changes, existing Non-Executive Chairman Julian Maturi will move to a Non-Executive
Director role and Josette Saville will become a statutory Director in her existing role as Sales
Director.
Granite said “Now that we have a robust, experienced, and well-balanced Management team in
place, I’m able to move into this new role as Executive Chairman. Moving forward I will spend more
of my time nurturing the leadership team, being an ambassador for the company, especially in
attracting more young people into the sector and supporting the overall strategic planning and
execution of the business.
Dave and his team have shown over the past two years that they can lead the day to day running of
the business successfully and this is seen in consistent financial and customer service results. I am
proud of what we have achieved at Abbey since taking over as Managing Director in 2009 then CEO
in 2016 and very much look forward to this next chapter in my new role, supporting the Board and
the wider Management team.
For the past few years, the business has been back to profitability and is healthy and ready for
further growth towards £100m sales.”
