Over more than two decades with Stagecoach and then Go-Ahead, Rupert Cox has been obsessed with understanding local markets
In an era of transport showboating fancy-dans, dressing themselves up in their own over-inflated, celebrity-style, personal brands, those who get on with the job, low-key style, sticking around and grafting hard on behalf of the team, are often overlooked. One of my favourites is Rupert Cox, someone I’d known about for many years, but only met properly a couple of years ago. We’re making up for lost time, though, as I’m familiarising myself with his hugely successful career. Rupert and I caught up in Cote Brasserie, in Woking, a couple of weeks ago, as I prised him away from riding his employer’s Salisbury Reds buses.
Rupert’s career began as a graduate trainee in 2001 at Stagecoach in Cambridge, before roles in Chesterfield and Hull. He became commercial manager, West, in 2003, and it was here that his rapid ascent began, making it to commercial director in Yorkshire and managing director, West, in 2014. Delivering market-leading stakeholder partnerships, 99% reliability, and jaw-dropping 50% growth in parts of his network, he was unsurprisingly promoted and, in 2020, was overseeing six Stagecoach subsidiaries as regional director.
In March 2024, Rupert moved to Go-Ahead, initially supporting on bids and tenders before becoming managing director of its East Anglia business (Konect, Hedingham and Chambers), a role that has often been regarded as a poisoned chalice. At Konect, Rupert focused on creating a customer-centric culture and brought Hedingham and Chambers under the Konect brand before the business was sold to Transport Made Simple Group in October. Industry gossip has long focused on whether Go-Ahead might divest its interests in the East Anglia business, and successive top dogs have gradually improved its fortunes, though it took the arrival of Rupert to complete the turnaround, enabling it to be sold. He was rewarded with the role of commercial director for Go Ahead’s bus division – a dream job for someone so fixated with the quirks and granularity of different markets.
As interested as I am in Konect, whenever I met Rupert, my first question would always be to fathom out his latest, ever-changing, complicated commute from his home in Gloucester to Dereham. It’s difficult to imagine how he ever managed to juggle the demands of being the gaffer and dad to a young family. He calls it a “military operation”, made harder because his wife’s work takes her as far afield as Swansea, Penzance, and London, as she (Rachel Geliamassi) is the customer service director for train operator GWR. Another former Stagecoach graduate trainee (six years after Rupert), Rachel, was until 2024, managing director, Stagecoach West. She is already renowned as a breath of fresh air in rail.
Rupert admits pillow talk between Rachel and him is “all things customer service”, but “as we discovered when working well together at Stagecoach, we have different approaches and views which work well”.
He explains: “She’s also super-friendly, bright, positive and open to conversations with people she doesn’t know, whereas I’m more nerdy, geeky and introverted!”
I see a bit of Rupert in me, certainly the nerdy aspect, but we share an obsession with understanding local markets and getting bums on seats. He indicates that he’s been lucky in having worked in such a variety of places, seeing at the outset of his career in Hull how simple stuff like a clean bus, turning up on time when advertised and a friendly driver can grow market share, and then in South Yorkshire when competing fiercely with First and fending off the threat of Quality Contract. Then, in affluent places like Cheltenham, where there was no competition, but you could see if customers might pay a little bit more for something better, and so they did in Stagecoach Gold, with its leather seats.
“Even the feel of our timetable booklet felt posh, something you have to do to market to a car driver”, he recalls, “Alex, it was fascinating, and this is what appeals to me most”.
The challenge of taking a business, such as Konect, with challenges, compelled him. “My role was to be there as a guide, and it felt like folk were relieved a little by this, such that it was really easy early on to talk to people and listen to what was needed,” he says. “There were lots of ideas but less of a plan in terms of how to translate them into results, as they had been in firefighting mode. However, the market, contrary to popular view, had real potential, as you have shown at Great Scenic Journeys – places like Clacton and Walton-on-the-Naze that were undersold and real hidden gems that just needed the spotlight shone on them. With my commercial anorak on, I’d spend lots of time in Clacton, analysing the network, where there were five or six bus routes, each with its own frequency. We did a tidy-up, saved some money by making the network more efficient, and, importantly, made it easier for customers. We got quick wins under our belt, which helps colleagues buy into what you are saying. That’s what you need when you go into a company, so people say, ‘he actually does know what he’s talking about’.”
That’s always motivated me. Nothing more satisfying than seeing busy buses
We talk about my fears about a younger generation growing up where travelling by bus isn’t remotely a lifestyle choice. Rupert is suited to comment on societal changes, having worked through so many époques in bus, but also young enough to relate to youngsters.“Over time, Alex, you can see different eras. Sir Brian [Souter] and Les [Warneford] – where growth was so important. Their view was that cutting costs would take you only so far. Frequencies were uplifted and a ‘let’s just try it’ was adopted. Then, we had scary moments of local authority cutbacks and it being tough. In Sheffield we were fighting competition from First and also fending off the edict of Quality Contracts, whilst creating a multi-operator/stakeholder partnership, trying to influence for initiatives to deal with road congestion and illustrating that it wasn’t just the bus companies’ fault that patronage was falling.
“Now, despite funding in place across the country, my worry is for places that might not have such a positive deal, so we don’t create a ‘haves and have nots’ scenario. Yes, let’s talk about franchising and whether it is right or wrong, but there are many places where that’s not currently in the mix. Yet at the same time, more so perhaps than at any time in my career, there are more instances of local authorities and operators working together to restore patronage. Norfolk is a classic example.”
As we chat about getting bums on seats, I let slip that I had caught an Uber from my home in Shepperton to our meeting. Rupert, like many bus bods, is a fan of Uber and thinks it can co-exist with buses. However, he’s unequivocal in his belief that having a good bus app is a key priority: “Like the Go-Ahead app, you need to get it into more people’s hands and make it easy like Uber, reassuring people they are getting the cheapest fare, quickest route and they’re not playing bus lottery. The fare caps have been good, but where there are more targeted schemes, supported by excellent marketing, we’re seeing more growth.”
Rupert is hot property because he has spent his entire career in two owning groups that have always pushed the imperative to grow and recognised the commercial value of local teams with autonomy to plan and deliver for their local markets. “Go-Ahead has got a strong growth agenda, getting more people on buses and connecting communities – and that’s always motivated me,” he says. “Nothing more satisfying than seeing busy buses.”
He views devolving autonomy to local subsidiaries as a matter of trust. “For years, Stagecoach empowered you to go after growth to do what was best for your local area, innovate and take risks, admitting sometimes things don’t work,” he recalls. “5-10% of your resources were in something new/product/ innovation, and I can see the same in Go-Ahead.
“I’m really interested in what’s happening in Brighton right now, where we have introduced the 1X and. 3X – which are new routes that go further out of the city but get people there quicker by missing stops. In essence, the local team has added faster services to get more volume, and it’s proving popular.”
He is also excited about the potential for night services to rejuvenate the night-time economy, pointing to Translink in Northern Ireland, which has reintroduced night buses.
In seeing the importance of local autonomy, Rupert recognises that it would be unaffordable to have an MD in every town, “but we need local leaders in each one, empowered so that when they go into a meeting in their town and make decisions, rather than report up to someone who has never even been to these places”.
He cites the challenges of Konect, in having lots of small depots but spread an hour or two between each of them, making it difficult as an MD to connect them all in terms of management approach and visibility, albeit he still obsessed about travelling on the network as much as possible: “A nerd like me Alex, loves nothing better than being on buses, watching driver interactions, seeing what tickets customers are buying and their habits and looking at frustrating stuff like us contributing to longer running times, because as an industry we’re not getting people on buses quickly enough because our products and tech need enhancing.”
Our conversation turns to Rupert’s heroes. Whilst Stagecoach legends Les Warneford and Sir Brian Souter are up there, I learn that Paul Lynch and Bob Montgomery jointly hold top spot. ‘Lynchy’ gave him a chance by asking Rupert to redraw the Chesterfield network when “my career was hanging by a thread, a previous MD not having rated me” and has been a guiding hand ever since, whilst “Bob gave me my first MD job, putting trust in me to run a business in my early thirties”.
Rupert is very modest: “I was lucky, right place, right time, but you’ve got to be given that opportunity. That was a fun time, market conditions generally dictated that we wouldn’t be top of the tree in making money, but we’d make sure we led on all the other KPIs.”
His current boss, Martin Dean, managing director, regions at Go-Ahead, is also fast becoming a career hero (as he is mine).
“I’ve been privileged to have worked for some great people who have invested time in my development, and this has always spurred me onto focus on the next generation,” says Rupert. “There’s nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing young managers get opportunities to enhance their CV.”
Smooth talking, soft spoken, pristinely dressed and with poster boy looks, Rupert is an owning group CEO’s dream, but he’s not one of those dull, risk-averse, self-important, scripted corporate clones who are clueless about the markets they serve. It’s been a fascinating breakfast and later on I text him asking him to email me his CV, not to find him a new job, but to check I have my facts straight. He sends it through, and it dawns on me that he’s only just halfway through – for one so young, Rupert’s covered such mileage and it’s exciting to think how much more can happen in the years to come!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
A career focused on unlocking growth
by Passenger Transport on Dec 1, 2025 • 12:39 pm No CommentsOver more than two decades with Stagecoach and then Go-Ahead, Rupert Cox has been obsessed with understanding local markets
In an era of transport showboating fancy-dans, dressing themselves up in their own over-inflated, celebrity-style, personal brands, those who get on with the job, low-key style, sticking around and grafting hard on behalf of the team, are often overlooked. One of my favourites is Rupert Cox, someone I’d known about for many years, but only met properly a couple of years ago. We’re making up for lost time, though, as I’m familiarising myself with his hugely successful career. Rupert and I caught up in Cote Brasserie, in Woking, a couple of weeks ago, as I prised him away from riding his employer’s Salisbury Reds buses.
Rupert’s career began as a graduate trainee in 2001 at Stagecoach in Cambridge, before roles in Chesterfield and Hull. He became commercial manager, West, in 2003, and it was here that his rapid ascent began, making it to commercial director in Yorkshire and managing director, West, in 2014. Delivering market-leading stakeholder partnerships, 99% reliability, and jaw-dropping 50% growth in parts of his network, he was unsurprisingly promoted and, in 2020, was overseeing six Stagecoach subsidiaries as regional director.
In March 2024, Rupert moved to Go-Ahead, initially supporting on bids and tenders before becoming managing director of its East Anglia business (Konect, Hedingham and Chambers), a role that has often been regarded as a poisoned chalice. At Konect, Rupert focused on creating a customer-centric culture and brought Hedingham and Chambers under the Konect brand before the business was sold to Transport Made Simple Group in October. Industry gossip has long focused on whether Go-Ahead might divest its interests in the East Anglia business, and successive top dogs have gradually improved its fortunes, though it took the arrival of Rupert to complete the turnaround, enabling it to be sold. He was rewarded with the role of commercial director for Go Ahead’s bus division – a dream job for someone so fixated with the quirks and granularity of different markets.
As interested as I am in Konect, whenever I met Rupert, my first question would always be to fathom out his latest, ever-changing, complicated commute from his home in Gloucester to Dereham. It’s difficult to imagine how he ever managed to juggle the demands of being the gaffer and dad to a young family. He calls it a “military operation”, made harder because his wife’s work takes her as far afield as Swansea, Penzance, and London, as she (Rachel Geliamassi) is the customer service director for train operator GWR. Another former Stagecoach graduate trainee (six years after Rupert), Rachel, was until 2024, managing director, Stagecoach West. She is already renowned as a breath of fresh air in rail.
Rupert admits pillow talk between Rachel and him is “all things customer service”, but “as we discovered when working well together at Stagecoach, we have different approaches and views which work well”.
He explains: “She’s also super-friendly, bright, positive and open to conversations with people she doesn’t know, whereas I’m more nerdy, geeky and introverted!”
I see a bit of Rupert in me, certainly the nerdy aspect, but we share an obsession with understanding local markets and getting bums on seats. He indicates that he’s been lucky in having worked in such a variety of places, seeing at the outset of his career in Hull how simple stuff like a clean bus, turning up on time when advertised and a friendly driver can grow market share, and then in South Yorkshire when competing fiercely with First and fending off the threat of Quality Contract. Then, in affluent places like Cheltenham, where there was no competition, but you could see if customers might pay a little bit more for something better, and so they did in Stagecoach Gold, with its leather seats.
“Even the feel of our timetable booklet felt posh, something you have to do to market to a car driver”, he recalls, “Alex, it was fascinating, and this is what appeals to me most”.
The challenge of taking a business, such as Konect, with challenges, compelled him. “My role was to be there as a guide, and it felt like folk were relieved a little by this, such that it was really easy early on to talk to people and listen to what was needed,” he says. “There were lots of ideas but less of a plan in terms of how to translate them into results, as they had been in firefighting mode. However, the market, contrary to popular view, had real potential, as you have shown at Great Scenic Journeys – places like Clacton and Walton-on-the-Naze that were undersold and real hidden gems that just needed the spotlight shone on them. With my commercial anorak on, I’d spend lots of time in Clacton, analysing the network, where there were five or six bus routes, each with its own frequency. We did a tidy-up, saved some money by making the network more efficient, and, importantly, made it easier for customers. We got quick wins under our belt, which helps colleagues buy into what you are saying. That’s what you need when you go into a company, so people say, ‘he actually does know what he’s talking about’.”
We talk about my fears about a younger generation growing up where travelling by bus isn’t remotely a lifestyle choice. Rupert is suited to comment on societal changes, having worked through so many époques in bus, but also young enough to relate to youngsters.“Over time, Alex, you can see different eras. Sir Brian [Souter] and Les [Warneford] – where growth was so important. Their view was that cutting costs would take you only so far. Frequencies were uplifted and a ‘let’s just try it’ was adopted. Then, we had scary moments of local authority cutbacks and it being tough. In Sheffield we were fighting competition from First and also fending off the edict of Quality Contracts, whilst creating a multi-operator/stakeholder partnership, trying to influence for initiatives to deal with road congestion and illustrating that it wasn’t just the bus companies’ fault that patronage was falling.
“Now, despite funding in place across the country, my worry is for places that might not have such a positive deal, so we don’t create a ‘haves and have nots’ scenario. Yes, let’s talk about franchising and whether it is right or wrong, but there are many places where that’s not currently in the mix. Yet at the same time, more so perhaps than at any time in my career, there are more instances of local authorities and operators working together to restore patronage. Norfolk is a classic example.”
As we chat about getting bums on seats, I let slip that I had caught an Uber from my home in Shepperton to our meeting. Rupert, like many bus bods, is a fan of Uber and thinks it can co-exist with buses. However, he’s unequivocal in his belief that having a good bus app is a key priority: “Like the Go-Ahead app, you need to get it into more people’s hands and make it easy like Uber, reassuring people they are getting the cheapest fare, quickest route and they’re not playing bus lottery. The fare caps have been good, but where there are more targeted schemes, supported by excellent marketing, we’re seeing more growth.”
Rupert is hot property because he has spent his entire career in two owning groups that have always pushed the imperative to grow and recognised the commercial value of local teams with autonomy to plan and deliver for their local markets. “Go-Ahead has got a strong growth agenda, getting more people on buses and connecting communities – and that’s always motivated me,” he says. “Nothing more satisfying than seeing busy buses.”
He views devolving autonomy to local subsidiaries as a matter of trust. “For years, Stagecoach empowered you to go after growth to do what was best for your local area, innovate and take risks, admitting sometimes things don’t work,” he recalls. “5-10% of your resources were in something new/product/ innovation, and I can see the same in Go-Ahead.
“I’m really interested in what’s happening in Brighton right now, where we have introduced the 1X and. 3X – which are new routes that go further out of the city but get people there quicker by missing stops. In essence, the local team has added faster services to get more volume, and it’s proving popular.”
He is also excited about the potential for night services to rejuvenate the night-time economy, pointing to Translink in Northern Ireland, which has reintroduced night buses.
In seeing the importance of local autonomy, Rupert recognises that it would be unaffordable to have an MD in every town, “but we need local leaders in each one, empowered so that when they go into a meeting in their town and make decisions, rather than report up to someone who has never even been to these places”.
He cites the challenges of Konect, in having lots of small depots but spread an hour or two between each of them, making it difficult as an MD to connect them all in terms of management approach and visibility, albeit he still obsessed about travelling on the network as much as possible: “A nerd like me Alex, loves nothing better than being on buses, watching driver interactions, seeing what tickets customers are buying and their habits and looking at frustrating stuff like us contributing to longer running times, because as an industry we’re not getting people on buses quickly enough because our products and tech need enhancing.”
Our conversation turns to Rupert’s heroes. Whilst Stagecoach legends Les Warneford and Sir Brian Souter are up there, I learn that Paul Lynch and Bob Montgomery jointly hold top spot. ‘Lynchy’ gave him a chance by asking Rupert to redraw the Chesterfield network when “my career was hanging by a thread, a previous MD not having rated me” and has been a guiding hand ever since, whilst “Bob gave me my first MD job, putting trust in me to run a business in my early thirties”.
Rupert is very modest: “I was lucky, right place, right time, but you’ve got to be given that opportunity. That was a fun time, market conditions generally dictated that we wouldn’t be top of the tree in making money, but we’d make sure we led on all the other KPIs.”
His current boss, Martin Dean, managing director, regions at Go-Ahead, is also fast becoming a career hero (as he is mine).
“I’ve been privileged to have worked for some great people who have invested time in my development, and this has always spurred me onto focus on the next generation,” says Rupert. “There’s nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing young managers get opportunities to enhance their CV.”
Smooth talking, soft spoken, pristinely dressed and with poster boy looks, Rupert is an owning group CEO’s dream, but he’s not one of those dull, risk-averse, self-important, scripted corporate clones who are clueless about the markets they serve. It’s been a fascinating breakfast and later on I text him asking him to email me his CV, not to find him a new job, but to check I have my facts straight. He sends it through, and it dawns on me that he’s only just halfway through – for one so young, Rupert’s covered such mileage and it’s exciting to think how much more can happen in the years to come!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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