The Tow Show 2026 awards dinner was held on Wednesday 9 September at the Chesford Grange Hotel, as part of the Tow Show at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire. It was a great evening for the UK recovery industry, and for the whole Apex team one award on the night was especially personal.
Apex CTO Chris White was presented with the Recovery Industry Lifetime Achievement Award. It came as a complete surprise to him. It was also a wonderful recognition of the people who work behind the scenes to keep the industry moving.
If you’ve ever taken a job through Apex ANS, raised an invoice in Apex RMS, or had a callout land on a driver’s phone in the middle of the night, Chris’s work is already part of your day. Until now, you just might not have known his name.
Where it all began
Chris co-founded Apex Networks with Steve Williams in 2006. They started out at the Tow Show, in a borrowed corner of someone else’s stand, with little more than a rubberised PDA and a stack of hastily printed booklets. So there was something fitting about Chris being recognised at the same show nearly 20 years later.
From the beginning, Chris understood something that was often missed: recovery operators don’t close, so their software providers shouldn’t either. Breakdowns don’t wait for office hours. When drivers are out at 3am in the rain on the hard shoulder, the systems behind them have to be just as dependable.
That thinking led to his standout achievement. A few years after Apex was founded, Chris built Apex ANS (Automotive Network Services) and led the successful bid to take over the industry’s network from BT. Today, Apex ANS connects the majority of recovery operators across the UK and Ireland to the insurers and breakdown providers they rely on for work, so help reaches stranded drivers faster.
It was this approach that won over Mac Hobbs, who at the time was sceptical that software had anything to offer the recovery industry. Mac became Apex’s first customer. Almost 20 years later, he had the honour of presenting Chris with his lifetime achievement award at Chesford Grange.
Recognition for the work behind the scenes
Recognition like this rarely reaches Chris directly. As the technical half of Apex’s founding team, he has spent the past two decades working largely behind the scenes, and he’s far better known within the company than outside it.
Much of what he’s built is designed to go unnoticed. When a job lands in an operator’s system without a hitch, nobody stops to ask who made it possible. This award gave a name and a face to work that is so often invisible to the industry it serves.
For the whole Apex team, it was a fitting and very personal recognition of everything Chris has contributed over the past 20 years.
Congratulations, Chris, from everyone at Apex.
