Mehma Bridgen: Scaling The Fuel Store to £100m

Fuel is the second biggest cost in any fleet business after wages. It powers the lorries that stock supermarket shelves and the vans that deliver parcels to the door, yet the industry that supplies it has changed remarkably little in decades. Mehma Bridgen and her husband Jamie decided to change that anyway.

Bridgen was 22 and working on a covert police operation when Jamie, then a mechanical engineer, decided he could streamline the fuel card industry his own father worked in. She left a police career she was doing well in to support him, and the pair started The Fuel Store with family and external investment behind them, an office and a couple of staff.

A decade on and the Birmingham-based business turns over more than £100m, serving around 9,000 to 10,000 small and medium-sized fleet customers with fuel cards, fleet management tools and its own fraud detection technology.

Bridgen spoke to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast about the discipline that got the business to £100m, the sales psychology that won its first customers by cold call, and the decision to step back and hire her own replacement.

In our interview, you will learn about:

● Why The Fuel Store turned down expansion into insurance, leasing and rebrands along the way

● The sales technique that helped win thousands of fuel card customers by phone

● Why it took six years before the business brought in a board and non-executive directors

● What her time in a covert police unit taught her about leadership

● Her advice for women leading in male-dominated industries

The mandate that kept The Fuel Store in its lane

The Fuel Store's growth from a two-person start-up to a £100m business rests, Bridgen says, on a single discipline: knowing what not to do. “It really is not to go after flashing lights and not to overengineer your process,” she says. “It is a process like anything, getting dressed in the morning, driving your car to work. It's the same thing; it's monotonous.”

That discipline was tested repeatedly as the business grew. The Fuel Store considered moving into leasing and insurance for its customers' vehicles, reasoning that anyone filling up with fuel would eventually need both. It didn't happen. AdBlue was added only once it became a regulatory requirement, not before. A rebrand was floated and shelved.

“‘Not-to-do’ is really important in saying no,” Bridgen says. “It has got to serve your revenue essentially. So if you know how your business model works, if there's anything that diverts traffic away from that, even if it is the attention of your team, or the time of training, those are the things that you know are going to be two years or five years down the line.”

The discipline paid off, but it also means there's plenty left on the table. Around £42bn in commercial fuel spend flows through UK businesses each year, of which roughly £8bn runs through fuel cards. Resellers like The Fuel Store, Bridgen estimates, hold about 2 per cent of that.

Rather than chase international expansion, the plan is to keep taking share at home. “I don't think it's on the cards just yet,” she says. “We're quite happy to stay in our lane, and I think staying in your lane is really important in this industry.”

Hiring her own replacement

For the first six years, Bridgen and Jamie ran The Fuel Store themselves, splitting responsibilities informally and stepping in for each other as needed. “What Jamie couldn't do, I could, and what I couldn't do, Jamie could,” she says. “That's the magic formula.”

It was only once the business had grown rapidly, and its financial complexity with it, that a board and non-executive directors came in.

The bigger step came later. After six to eight months of discussion between the two of them, Mehma and Jamie concluded they had taken the business as far as they could alone. “We almost got a little bit stuck as to how to move forward,” she says.

The solution was to bring in an external chief executive, an outsider to the fuel industry with a background as an ex-banker who had headed up Barclaycard Europe. Jamie moved from chief executive to managing director to support the new hire. Mehma stepped out of her operational role as chief commercial officer entirely.

“We knew we had to do this,” she says. “I think we were both quite sophisticated and mature in handling that.” The business now runs with a full C-suite, CEO, CFO, COO and MD, a level of governance Bridgen contrasts with the earlier, looser culture of the business's first years.

“We had governance and discipline, but we also had a little bit of that fun and flexibility,” she says, recalling office yoga sessions and ice cream in The Fuel Store's pre-COVID days. “Now, as I say, we have a director suite; it's just up the ante a lot.”

From the police to the boardroom

Before The Fuel Store, Bridgen spent four years in the police, including a stint on a covert operation at 22. “It was very high stakes, fast-moving, no room for error,” she says. “I was in proximity to chiefs and very high-ranking police personnel.”

Whatever she learned there about discipline and composure under pressure, she says, has stayed with her ever since: “The police, whether I knew it or not at the time, was everything that I am today.”

It's also shaped how she's approached leading in an industry, fuel and fleet, which remains heavily male. Bridgen says she's rarely found it difficult, having led senior male colleagues for most of her time at The Fuel Store and having worked under predominantly male leadership in the police before that.

Her advice to other women leading businesses is practical rather than abstract: “Sit with posture, use your eye contact, speak less if you need to and don't overcompensate,” she says. “What's different is whether you know what you're bringing to the table or not. That has got to be portrayed properly.”

What can leaders learn?

Build a mandate, and defend it. The Fuel Store turned down leasing, insurance and a rebrand, all plausible extensions, because none of them served the core business. A clear “not-to-do” list is as valuable as a strategy.

Know when you've reached your own ceiling. Bridgen and Jamie ran the business themselves for six years, then spent months deciding to hire a CEO with skills neither of them had. Recognising the cap on what you can personally do is not a failure of leadership, it's a form of it.

In a commodity market, sell the problem before the solution. Price alone won't win a sale when the customer can buy the same product anywhere. Make the cost of inaction felt first.

Stay in your lane, even with room to grow. With roughly 98 per cent of the UK fuel card market still up for grabs, The Fuel Store has chosen depth over international expansion. Discipline about where to compete matters as much as ambition to win.

Listen to the full conversation with Mehma Bridgen on the Business Leader podcast.