Premier Relocation: Removals service to sport stars eyes US expansion
It’s not just footballers, clubs and their agents who cash in on transfers – it’s also boom time for Premier Relocation, the removals service to the stars.
Pop quiz: what do Erling Haaland, Jurgen Klopp and Ronan Keating have in common? Aside from being multi-millionaire celebrities, the answer is they have all used the same removals service which prides itself on being a shipper to the stars – and a whole lot more.
Premier Relocation also counts Alan Shearer, Gareth Bale, Bruno Fernandes, Martin Odegaard, John Terry, Peter Crouch and KSI as clients. The list is only growing, with founder Andy Wells saying workload has expanded to 700 moves a year, earning the company £5m-£6m.
Most of Premier Relocation’s assignments are footballers switching clubs, often at very short notice, but it also serves other high net worth customers.
“There’s no one that moves the volume of players around the world that we do,” Wells tells City PM. “We will have a call from a Premier League club saying ‘we just signed a player, we need him here tomorrow’. There’s not many companies in the world that can work that quickly.
Premier Relocation on call 24/7
“That’s where we differ from all of our competitors. Especially during those times in the transfer windows, we are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ready to go at an instant.”
Since starting the company from a utility room 11 years ago, Wells has built a network that allows Premier Relocation to operate anywhere in the world. In addition to 25-30 staff in the UK, he has offices in Spain and France and affiliated companies just about everywhere else.
It allows the Sussex-based firm to not only move clients furniture but also cars and exotic pets, while Wells has also helped some to arrange private jets, build swimming pools and source high-end electronics through a partnership with home technology provider HiiLife.
“One player wanted to move his goldfish from southern Spain to London,” he says. “We’d never moved goldfish before, but you don’t realise how carefully you need to treat them. The driver had to stop every couple of hours to refill oxygen into the tanks so that they would survive.”
Danish billionaire invests as firm eyes US
Football can be a closed world but Wells got a foot in the door when his son ended up on a boys’ team with the offspring of pros. Terry, Cesc Fabregas and Thierry Henry were early endorsers of Premier Relocation, which now has deals with player unions in football and rugby.
With business booming, Wells is eyeing further expansion. The company is in talks about taking the brand to Italy and Germany and, like many British success stories, there is an ambition to break America, where it has already moved a handful of NBA stars and A-list celebs.
An investment from Danish billionaire Jan Bech Andersen is designed to help with those plans. The shipping magnate and owner of club Brondby has agreed to buy a 10 per cent stake in Premier Relocation and a further 10 per cent next year.
“What he brings to my business is going to be so beneficial,” says Wells, who is reluctant to take the credit for his burgeoning empire. “I want to pay gratitude to every one of the boys and girls that work for me behind the scenes. They make me look good every single day.”