The farce makes for great telly especially as Logan Roy - the patriarch of the family - favours his only daughter. 

Family businesses can have strange dynamics and the show offers a tempting conclusion that you should never work with your family. 

But the truth is that family businesses - at their best - are world beating. They can outperform other businesses because they have high degrees of trust and communication. 

The antidote to the duplicity and shenanigans of Succession ,the tv show , is available for all to see at Earl Transport in Lancashire. 

It’s not uncommon to see curtain-siders with “. & son” after the family name of the haulier. It’s less common to see “ & daughter “ But that’s the position at Earl Transport in Accrington. Peter Hughes started this successful haulage company 43 years ago and his daughter - Rhian was so impressed by her father‘s business acumen that she followed him into the business and Peter’s  personal succession is now secured. But  Peter was farsighted and would not allow his daughter to come straight into the family business even though she sometimes did her school homework in the cab. He wanted her to gain wider business experience before joining the family business and taking it to the next level. Rhian  can now drive every class of hgv but is also no stranger to tv herself. In this edition of BACK AMONGST FRIENDS we  find out how Rhian was taken by Cadbury’s from haulage operator to television ice skating maestro. 

Talking of media this podcast is expertly produced down under. In today’s global village we have our podcasts skilfully edited by Mandy Turner in Australia who can be contacted at www.mandyturner.com.au 

It  was an immediate blockbuster, receiving critical acclaim and was the highest-grossing film released in 1984 . The theme tune was “the heat is on “by Glen Fry and was an up-tempo recording featuring  a steady drumbeat, synthesiser, and guitar, with a repeated saxophone riff framing the lyrical message. 

When the HEAT was ON from former senior traffic commissioner Beverley bell the lawyer of choice  for many operators had to be John Heaton - one of the senior lawyers at Backhouse Jones . John provides a steady drumbeat of advice to the transport industry and BACKS the bus up in this podcast to take us on his BACK to the future journey. 

This week we go BACK and forth  with an old  friend to many transport operators and he explains how he experienced complete darkness whilst driving a hgv through the deserts of Namibia. If you can connect Switzerland with the plains of Africa then you will have guessed that it is Matt Eisenegger  BACKing the truck up on his life’s journey within the commercial road transport industry. 

Matt ‘s surname is not only keeping up with the joneses it’s uniqueness leaves other names in the dust of his desert vehicle. Unlike the common or garden name of our host Matt’s surname is Swiss and came to the east end of london with his great grandfather. His father made the move north having met his mother through a Wallace Arnold coach holiday in Cornwall. 

In this weeks conversation Matt Circles BACK to tell us how he moved  from maintaining trucks to selling them to reporting on them and then publishing the #FORS Magazine. 

His Afrikaner guide  in the sands of #Namibia realised that Matt and his fellow truck journalists visited an area of Africa that nobody had ever previously visited. 

In this podcast we discover  if like Paul Simon’s lyrics “in restless dreams he walked alone” in the silence of the darkness. Thankfully he breaks his silence on how  his vision came silently creeping  to him whilst he was sleeping under a canopy under the stars .....

It means the warmth of a yellow sun in winter. Despite the fact that it is a delightful word for a delightful thing it never quite caught on, and will not be found in any modern dictionary aside from the Oxford English Dictionary. That’s simply the luck of the English language at work and  shows that whilst chance is a fine thing - opportunity is always better and must be grabbed to avoid slipping into  the oblivion of apricity. 

An introduction to This weeks guest  invites  us to travel  BACK to Wyoming in 1883 when  the name and concept of "yellow pages" was introduced when  a printer working on a regular telephone directory ran out of white paper and used yellow paper instead. The rest became history until in due course the internet confined printed directories themselves  to history. 

This  only serves to confirm that fate can be an important in the creation of a business. 

 We might presume that Coldplay: wrote Nobody Said It Was Easy on white paper but  it was their song “Yellow" that exemplifies much of what has made Coldplay so popular. 

Nobody said it was easy to buy a bus company but David Squire did so in 2019 and then fate intervened in 2020 to made it a darn side harder but ever the optimist David has taken Yellow buses BACK into profit and in this podcast he BACK’s the bus up to tell us the story of his journey  and  he is a glimpse of sunshine after the long chill of a Covid winter. 

But what does she know about defending an employment tribunal claim during a Covid lockdown that requires ingenuity and a new set of skills during a virtual hearing. Let’s hazard a guess - that it’s nowhere  near as much as our own Stephanie. In this impromptu podcast Stephanie Walkerdine - a gifted solicitor in the employment team at Backhouse jones - takes a break from her digital court hearing to tell us how a court hearing might in retrospect  be understood BACKwards but must be progressed forwards and for this reason flexibility of thinking can sometimes be as important thorough preparation.