Bode has Germany’s top driver on board

The achievements of Patrick Jost from Reinfeld, a vocational trainee at Spedition Bode, will be tough to beat. The 22-year-old completed his vocational training to become a professional driver as the best graduate in the country. With a score of 100 points out of a possible 100, there is absolutely no doubt about his standing. And Patrick himself has never been in any doubt about his choice of occupation: “I was convinced from a very young age that I would become a professional driver,” confirms Patrick. The truck was his cradle, so to speak: “There are pictures of my dad changing my nappy in the truck.” His father has 35 years of experience as a truck driver. As a little boy, Patrick was always part of the action – there were summer holidays where he spent the entire time on tour with his father: Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy – “sometimes my mother had to call the school to say I couldn’t come in because my dad and I were stranded somewhere in Spain,” Patrick recalls. Doing well in his final exams was the only thing he had his mind on. He didn’t want to think about any titles. His boss, Kai Bode, informed him that he had completed his apprenticeship as Germany’s best young professional driver. “Patrick simply didn’t miss a trick.” Senior Partner Bode just about goes into raptures when talking about his vocational trainee Patrick Jost. He and his son Marc Philipp, who is also on the management board, place a lot of emphasis on employee satisfaction at their company.

Kai Bode’s grandfather founded the company Reinfelder Spedition in 1949. Mr Bode is the third generation of the family to run the company, and his son Marc Philipp is the fourth. They operate in the field of classical long-haul transport, focussing mainly on Scandinavia and Italy, and are also involved in the warehousing business. 100 of their 280 employees are truck drivers. Almost all of them work in long-haul transport. “The drivers are the front men of our company.” For that reason, Kai Bode and his son attach great importance to employee satisfaction. Consequently, the drivers are able to have a real say as to which truck they drive. But the pursuit of employee satisfaction starts a lot earlier than that. It starts with a vocational training programme that is designed to prepare the next generation of drivers from the very outset for the many and varied challenges that come with the job of driving trucks.

Systematic and cautious are the key terms in this respect: “Drivers are put through their paces very slowly at our company: They start off by getting their driver’s license, then they do activities in the workshop and in the warehouse, drive the pallet jacks and forklift trucks, go on trips in the vans and in the 7.5-tonne vehicles before heading out on their first short-haul transport assignments in trailer units and semitrailer combinations. Only then do our vocational trainees head out on long-haul transport assignments, and when they do, they are often out on the road in pairs with an old hand,” says the senior partner, describing the training concept at Bode. Patrick had heard how good the vocational training is at Bode and that is why he put it on his shortlist. Now he is convinced that the company played a significant role in his success. “Bode had relatively high expectations of us from a fairly early stage,” he says. For example, tree transportation, which takes you to many places you wouldn’t normally want to go to with a truck.

“You get to know your vehicle and its dimensions and learn how far you can take things. They let us get on with it.” “Patrick showed from a very early stage that he had diesel in his blood. In terms of vocational trainees, you could say that he was a bit of an exception,” says Kai Bode, returning the praise to the young driver. He goes on to explain that Patrick is incredibly advanced for his age, and that there are four drivers at the company who, as driver representatives, form the interface between the management and the truckers, and Patrick is already one of them. This is representative of the extent to which he is accepted and appreciated by his elders even at this early stage. “Personally speaking, I very much welcome the fact that we have a young driver with new ideas on board,” says Kai Bode, happily. “Basically, I don’t go to work, I pursue my hobby – honestly, there is nothing about my job that annoys me. I get bored when I’m on holiday and keep popping into Bode to see if there is something for me to do,” explains Patrick, laughing. That being said, there is in actual fact a small drop of bitterness in Patrick’s trucking oasis: The passionate MAN fan has not yet been assigned a permanent truck. Instead, he finds himself jumping from one make to another. But he is confident that this is the next step he will take in his career at Bode. And he is hoping, of course, that his boss will hand him the keys to his truck of choice: “I have always had a strong affinity to MAN. If I could choose my own truck, it would be the new MAN.”

“In principle, our drivers are allowed to choose which vehicle they want to drive. And even when it comes to extras, there is rarely something we won’t get for our employees.”

Patrick has in fact received a little reward for his outstanding work already. And it could hardly be more appropriate that it came from his truck manufacturer of choice, MAN: Christoph Huber, Chairman of the Executive Board of MAN Truck & Bus Deutschland GmbH, gifted the exemplary young driver a five-year membership to Trucker’s World by MAN. At least Patrick will be driving with the club lion at his side for the time being. But there is something he is yet to discover: The Bode family has, of course, been mulling over ways to reward Patrick for his outstanding performance. They also received support from Christoph Huber in this respect, together coming up with the idea of surprising the huge MAN fan with a lion of his own in Munich. And not any old lion, of course: Patrick will be presented with the new MAN TGX Individual Lion S and will probably not know what hit him at the surprise handover. He might think it’s all just a dream, shed tears of joy or completely freak out.

We will not, of course, deny you the opportunity to see how Patrick reacts to this stupendous gift – we will be reporting in detail on the story on our channels. Are you as excited as we are?