Meet Mike Bowden: Our Head of Strategic Development & Partnerships

United Kingdom 15.08.25

If you’ve ever met Mike Bowden, you’ll know three things:

He’s been in logistics for his whole career.
He brings an infectious energy to every event.
He has a talent for showcasing the spirit of our industry.

As our head of strategic development & partnerships, Mike brings over three decades of industry experience to the table – providing a valuable bridge between our suppliers, our community, our customers, and our people so that we can continue to deliver excellence.

In this article, Mike shares some background on the career that shaped him, his ethos on what makes a good strategic partnership, and his insights on what’s ahead in an industry which is #NeverStandingStill.

In this article, Mark shares some of his background, insights, and expectations for the energy industry in the UK.

You’ve been in the industry for over 30 years. How did you start?

I fell into this industry. After sixth form I spent a summer as a ‘dock runner’ at a small forwarder. I enjoyed it, showed interest and was given a desk job after a few weeks.

From there, it clicked for me. I started with customs clearances for Ro/Ro arrivals and exports, covering general goods and specialised products like plants – which had additional phytosanitary processes. This is before digitalisation.

I was absorbed by the industry, so I decided to delay university and stay with the forwarder. Before long, I was working with ocean freight shipments, processing documentation, and arranging haulage.

I was eager to understand international trade and its processes from start to finish, so I took on pricing, invoicing, and all those auxiliary functions around the job so that I knew how it all worked.

How did you progress from there?

After a few years, I was lured by promotion and a new challenge working with a liner agent within a container haulage company. They were the UK agents for an Italian shipping company and I was asked to run the import department – listing manifests, releasing cargo, arranging haulage, and controlling equipment.

This was a fantastic opportunity for me because I was only 23 at the time, yet I was managing a team of seven people and enjoying it.

Thereafter, I was asked to help with the transport department, and after a while I was seconded to help manage that side of the business as well.

The hours were long, but it was very rewarding, and my previous experience paid dividends. I learnt a lot about how to manage people, motivate them, and create a successful team. Hard work, yet rewarding and fun.

What kickstarted your commercial career?

The liner business was sold to Evergreen. So, after a chat, my MD said he saw me as a commercial asset, then proposed a more people-focused role – working with driver recruitment, driver insurance, and selling haulage services to new clients.

I really enjoyed the recruitment and sales side of it but was less interested in the insurance part.

When I was 28, I went to join the world-renowned shipping line OOCL. There, I had a fantastic mentor, Sharon, who really took me under her wing. This was an eye opening new commercial role within a highly organised machine and was massively enjoyable.

Not long afterwards I was offered another step up with Jardine Logistics in their London office. I spent five and a half years with them under Alan McTaggart, another fantastic mentor of mine who was always about “What can we do better?”. I travelled throughout China & Southeast Asia, learning lots and making new friends.

Personal circumstances changed a few times, so I moved on to several different roles, settling with a newer forwarding company just after I had children, so completely the other end of the scale – a start up; a small but positive team culture, and just an exciting time building something from the ground up with a fantastic group of people.

Unfortunately, the business didn’t survive the credit crunch around 2008, and I went to work with Agility. From there to DSV for five very enjoyable years, Hellmann, and a few others. By this time, I’d worked for businesses big and small, in nearly every function within the industry. Moving on was always on good terms and always to progress.

What brought you to Cory Brothers?

Throughout everything, my hobby has always been photography. Having an early mid-life crisis, I decided I wanted a break from logistics, instead selling my services as a photographer / marketeer. I was prepared to work hard, prepared to travel, and believed I had the skill, confidence & resiliency for it.

Originally, I did weddings and events, but competition was fierce and there are a lot of other talented photographers, so I decided to focus on commercial photography and the logistics industry – knowing how it all ticks and how to present what prospects want to see and read.

My business built into more of a brand / marketing consultancy, and I originally began working with Cory Brothers as a fractional marketing manager for a few days a week.

We had a really great start and the contract went from weeks to months, and then I took a full-time role. I immersed myself into the task: re-developing our brand, growing a new audience; establishing an online presence and recruiting a marketing team so that we could better showcase all the amazing work we do.

Over time, my knowledge and expertise has been called on to assist with other functions within the business – helping broker large tenders to some of our bigger accounts commercially, and working with suppliers to help us win business on key lanes.

Following the acquisition by Vertom and the two marketing departments also coming together, I was asked to lean into the strategic development & partnerships role where my experience and skills were needed.

What makes strategic partnerships so important?

The industry evolves fast and it takes more than simply comparing quotes – especially at Cory Brothers’ level where we have international shipping resources and are depended on for large projects and a high volume of services.

For us to do our work effectively, it takes excellent collaboration.

I think the advancements with digitalisation and AI have made things quicker, more visible, more reliable, but we also cannot change that we are a service-based industry and that personal contact, engagement, understanding, and relationships are key.

This means having partnerships with everyone involved, not just a supplier-customer relationship. We depend on those inside Cory Brothers, VertomCory, the wider Vertom Group, our suppliers, and our customers to make our operation a success, and that requires close communication.

One thing I liked about Cory Brothers when I joined, and still do now, is that these values of mine are shared by those across the team.

Our MD, Peter, has been here for 25 years, started as a junior and worked his way up, knows the business inside out, and yet openly encourages anyone within the business to challenge him if they have an alternative point of view.

It’s that transparent and egoless communication that allows partnerships to thrive and for results to follow, and it’s my role to build and maintain those partnerships across the business where there is mutual value in doing so. In this respect, I act as both the bridge and the overseer so that everyone involved has what they need to do their job well.

How do you see the logistics industry changing and the importance of partnerships in the future?

I mentioned digitalisation and AI. Massive advancements for the whole world; unlocking efficiency, accuracy, visibility and although we’re just getting started, we must remain open yet cautious. As we have seen before, reliance on AI must be tempered to ensure our human connection. Partnerships will remain vital to the logistics industry as will human trust in one-another. The logistics industry is never standing still and that helps to keep it interesting, rewarding and fun.

As I said, we are a service-based industry and it is the people that make it work well. It is always those businesses which value human connection and provide a human service that will do better. You can automate some of the more basic functions and apply processes to individual shipments, but you need real expertise and trust to execute niche, project logistics or to setup a service at scale.

In my opinion, partnerships are becoming even more important, not less, as supply chains and technology become more complex.

One of those complications that the industry is facing now is sustainability. It is the rock and the hard place that is presenting a very mainline challenge to us at the moment: cost and practicality vs ethics and image.

We are being asked by new and existing clients to provide information on our green initiatives – what we are doing to improve sustainability and qualify our efforts to reduce their supply chain’s carbon footprint.

Of course, there are cost and transit time considerations to go with the options because green logistics is still embryonic. The deployment of non-fossil fuel vessels is still under 0.5% of the global fleet, and there are limitations for inland transport options.

It’s our job as our clients’ freight partners to help balance it all and either plan ahead or find a compromise somewhere – and we can’t do that without relying on our own partners to work on solutions.

What is one of your ethoses when it comes to creating partnerships?

One of the best things I have ever been told applies to suppliers, colleagues, or direct reports – anyone you rely on – and it’s this:

‘You are here because we trust you and you are empowered to go and do what you think is right because we back you.’

The reason this is powerful is because people need the space to get results, and people also feel more motivated to get results when they feel trusted to do so.

We work with very competent people, so we don’t need to babysit them or throw a negative shadow over the project whilst they do it. Trust is rewarded with a positive outcome because they have had the space to create it.

The other side of that is knowing that they are acting in a way that they see as best. If something goes wrong, a risk doesn’t pay off, or for whatever reason the result doesn’t come, we work together to find a solution and avoid making the same mistake twice. Things go wrong, and it’s essential that we catch each other when they do.

That’s what a team is, and that’s what this industry is built on.