How we built a business out of recession - chapter 31 - back the fuck off
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 31st chapter about CitNOW, the company started from a kitchen table in Winnersh, Berkshire. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s a link to chpt 1. Each chapter is a 5-minute read. It’s an early draft of a book.
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although it was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company, and it has been sold again since.
For entirely different agendas, Quentin was invited to start attending our monthly board meetings for a fee, of course.
They’d already become ridiculous, overpopulated affairs. We’d morphed into too many seats at the table, spending large chunks of the day on departmental reporting. More directors also meant more diluted voting.
I’d certainly been in agreement to include Gordon and Nick when he joined later because of their essential roles. They were key to the business and should feel in some control, on the same journey as the founders.
Alistair would have argued that they were more critical to the business than Donna or I would ever be. It was certainly true in my case, where I felt marginalised with all things marketing. Later, I redefined myself, troubleshooting in the UK, which remained our most important market and returning to new business again.
That said, the marketing glove fitted well. We still needed to behave like a team, and there was work to be done. Aside from being able to write a bit, I also had video production experience. It made me the best qualified to make sales and training content for the company and our clients, with the added bonus of being a sunk cost. I wrote the scripts, directed them, and hired any production staff needed.
As the size of the deals grew, so did the necessary supporting video content. I once spent a week in a faceless warehouse in the Midlands, sworn to secrecy, where we shot new training content for Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR’s) dealers on how to make compelling customer videos. They’d built an entire dealership inside the unmarked warehouse, experimenting with new branding and layouts. By the end of a long week, we all wanted to finish early on the Friday, desperate to see an hour or two of daylight again.
Quentin started quietly enough, wanting to be seen as the impartial observer, but it didn’t take long before he found his voice and began to ask questions. It was, after all, the reason why he was there.
I don’t know how Chris felt during the Quentin period. Unwanted, unloved? He was our long-standing consultant, an ex-senior GM Executive who’d been in attendance for some time. His role was defined as our senior statesman, a wise head to guide us, although we knew he was also there to support Alistair. He’d known him and his father since the Dane County** days.
Chris was well respected, and his industry relationships proved helpful, providing additional work for him and insight for us outside of the board meetings. As these relationships often did, it started with some quick wins, an intro here and there. But Chris had experience elsewhere, and it wasn’t that long before he was helping Alistair try and conquer Europe.
Before Quentin arrived, board meetings could never be described as hostile, but there had been a noticeable concerted shift by Alistair to garner power over time. He seemed to struggle with anyone who disagreed with his view of the world. Hardly surprising when you’re the boss or the boss’s son in the often autocratic world of a car dealership in the 1980’s.
He often took decision-making offline, preferring to divide and conquer through one-to-one meetings. I didn’t like it, but I had to recognise that we had become political.
The biggest debates often centred on software development in Stirling and what should take priority. There were always good reasons why half a dozen projects should be the next in line.
By default, Donna and I had become his main antagonists. Our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different from Alistair’s. We’d worked in various sectors, often for multinationals, and were entirely comfortable with healthy debate, happy to accept other people’s points of view.
Quentin started by asking lots of questions, which were welcome. Less welcome were the lectures that began to appear as he got more comfortable. As the oxygen in the room became scarcer, the board meetings became even more frenetic. The biggest consolation was watching Quentin eat into Alistair’s position, who was becoming decidedly uncomfortable with the whole idea of relinquishing power.
In between the lectures, he did listen, which meant Donna finally got her idea of a Workforce Management Tool (WMT) on the agenda. With her data background and understanding of how to start monetising its value, a potential new revenue source was staring us in the face. It made a lot of sense. We generated a lot of data from individual salespersons and technicians, which could become even more valuable if paired with outcomes, cars and parts sold and customer satisfaction scores.
Quentin liked it, too. Companies which sold data products were more highly valued.
WMT should have been even more welcome as more competitors entered the market. Adding real value in the form of data insights was a good way to protect our pricing model and develop new revenue opportunities.
Alistair finally crossed the line at a two-day meeting near Manchester airport.
Day one was the usual board meeting. It ended with a presentation by him and Chris about how they planned to conquer Germany. BMW had become a real success for us in the UK, so it followed that we should be able to repeat this in their home country.
By this time, we were in the process of hiring two German salespeople and a trainer. They would report directly to Alistair. Chris neatly presented their new sales numbers in a matrix. It was the usual slow start, reaching a very profitable conclusion. I asked what we would do when the sales targets weren’t achieved, only to be told by Alistair that my question was disloyal to the company.
What? No entirely accurate sales forecast has ever been written. Trying to break into a new market would be full of surprises, and underperformance was almost certainly a given.
The following day, the shareholders met without the directors, and Alistair floated the idea of Donna leaving the business. It came from nowhere. He was testing the waters, wondering whether Donna wanted out for some measly payoff. Her answer was very clear; she flatly refused to consider such a preposterous notion.
It made no sense to the business to remove the person who ran operations and was now getting traction with an exciting new data product. Unless of course, you didn’t give a crap about data and were more interested in strengthening your power further.
When asked why, the answer was feeble. Apparently, Quentin felt it would be easier to sell the business without her.
Alistair tried again the next day back in the Wokingham office, where Donna screamed, back the fuck off in his face. The matter was dropped, Quentin’s services no longer required.
No one got what they wanted.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
** Dane County, the family Vauxhall business, sold to Arnold Clark in 2004.
Oh to have been a fly on the wall when Donna shouted :-)