Cometh the hour, cometh the man – and Danny Cleasby proved to be exactly the right man in exactly the right place when the pandemic came along to challenge the Durham branch of The Wheel Specialist.

Danny and his team of six turned what could have been a disastrous year for the business into an undeniable success, then capped it by being chosen as the chain’s Overall Best Performing Franchise of 2020.

While previously viable businesses in other sectors had the life crushed out of them by the pandemic and the lockdown restrictions, Danny’s franchise in Durham did more business in 2020 than in 2019 and, in July, saw it surge by an unprecedented 33 per cent.

That rocketing demand meant Danny and his team had to work 15-hour shifts to satisfy it – and the team’s willingness to do that, he says, is what made all that success possible.

“It isn’t just about me,” he says. “Without those people standing alongside me, it simply wouldn’t work. You need people who are committed and want you to be successful as a business.”

Most business owners would love their workforces to be as committed as Danny’s, but the secret to his success – though he’s much too modest to admit it – is his leadership style.

That’s obvious when he’s asked which title he’d like to be called by – Owner, Managing Director, perhaps? – and he says he prefers Manager.

“I’m exactly the same as the rest of the people who work here,” he says, emphatically. “I come in to work and get my hands dirty.

“I’ve always been hands-on. I don’t sit in the office and direct from there. Leadership is about treating people in the right way – it’s not rocket-science.

“If you ask people to do a job that may not be very pleasant but they’ve seen you doing it yourself, they’re happy to do it because they know you were prepared to.”

His leadership made a difference, too, when the business was allowed to reopen after the first lockdown.

Head Office had worked hard on a comprehensive protocol for reopening, with signage and precautions and best practice to follow.

Realising that his colleagues might have fears and apprehensions about returning to the workplace while Coronavirus was still spreading so rapidly, Danny kept them in the loop with text messages, asked them how they felt about returning to work, then arranged it in stages with their full support.

Customers, too, needed to feel safe visiting the TWS premises, so Danny kept the showroom door locked for appointment-only jobs and utilised the new guidance and paperless vehicle check-in system that had just been created by Head Office.

As a former newsagent and supermarket manager, Danny was never afraid of long hours or hard work, but it was his business acumen that paid off when the pandemic first struck and he realised 2020 wasn’t going to be business-as-usual.

Wheel-refurbishment work from the automotive trade was drying up, so Danny refocussed the business on consumers, based on his own intuition and reading of the market.

“People were off work with very little to do,” he recalls. “They couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, and holidays were off.

“They’d passed the time doing DIY or gardening, and in the meantime, their disposable income was mounting up.

“The next thing to do was to clean the car and fix it up, and a lot of people began wondering where they could get their wheels refurbished.”

His hunch and his analysis were right.

“I’ve never known us so busy,” he says. “It was absolutely ridiculous. It was almost obscene how much work was coming to us.

“Business was up 33 per cent in July, so we had to adapt and put in the work, with 15-hour shifts just to get it done.”

Danny bought the franchise after his father was impressed by TWS and encouraged him to take his own Mercedes wheels there.

“When we opened this franchise, so few people were doing wheel refurbishment,” he says, “but everyone and his dog seems to be doing it now.”

It’s his laser focus on standards that has helped Danny’s operation retain its competitive edge, as TWS clients know they’re getting the highest quality of work and finish available, with state-of-the-art machinery and processes.

And he doesn’t have a single regret despite the pandemic year with so many weeks of lockdown.

“Things could have been a lot worse, and everything this year is going reasonably well,” he says. “Winning the trophy for Overall Best Performing Franchise surprised me more than anything.

“But it makes me feel good because of all the hard work that I and my team put into making sure the business survived.”

And that’s why, even though Danny’s name is on the HMG Powder Coatings-sponsored trophy, he feels it also belongs to his team of Luke Hunter, Gavin Attle, Dean Flannagan, Ben Sutherst, Cameron Smith, and Darren Walters.

Typifying his approach and ethos, part of Danny’s prize was a £500 voucher to spend as he wished – which he rejected in favour of something he could split equally among his team.