Target Fuels is run by co-owners Dan Ferretti and Charles Cornish. We caught up with the pair to ask them a little more about the company and what sets Target Fuels apart.
Who are Target Fuels? Charles Cornish and Dan Ferretti come from quite diverse backgrounds. Charles is from a farming background originally, before working in both the leisure and finance industries. Dan has always been in customer services in one way or another, and the two met at the start of the 2010s. They got along well and Dan ended up helping Charles with his biodiesel business, and from there noted the need for hauliers to have an easier way of ordering fuel. This led to them creating a comparison website, and the company was born!
When and how did Target Fuels begin as a company? The original idea for the company was to act as a kind of ‘Compare the Market’ for fuel companies so hauliers didn’t have to spend so much time calling round for prices every week. There was a website set up shortly before us, but they were dealing only with one particular large company and its offshoots, so we wanted to be more inclusive and let some of the smaller companies have a look in as well. While we were doing this, we were asked more and more if we could supply AdBlue, so we looked into that more, and the rest is history.
What is your proudest moment in business? It’s an ongoing pride that we have got to this point and our business has never really been advertised anywhere – it’s all been word of mouth. It began probably within a five-mile radius of where our yard still is today in Essex. But we have since expanded into Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and London, while also having some other customers even further afield that are serviced by our suppliers. 90% of the customers we started with, we still have today, and they in turn have passed our details on to contacts of theirs. I’d like to think it’s because we have always provided a good service be it over the phone or at their premises.
What sets Target Fuels apart? In a word, service. Our turnaround times can’t be beaten. Often if a customer has noticed they’re out of AdBlue entirely, we can usually be there within 24 hours if needs be. We’ve even been known to turn up on the same day if the order is put in early enough. Also, we are almost unique in that we pump AdBlue into our 1,000l IBC’s on site if there are no forklift facilities, or if the IBC is being kept in an inaccessible location. There aren’t many companies who will pump into anything less than a 2,500l tank.
Tell us something we wouldn’t know about you? The hope is that Target Fuels & Machinery will one day be tri-lingual! Charles has married a Portuguese lady and is currently attempting to learn that language, while Dan is half-Italian and travels to Italy often to indulge his love of Footgolf (if you haven’t heard of it, look it up immediately!) and so is adding to his moderate knowledge of the language already.
